The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context

TLDR

Securitization theory claims that framing security creates a threatening state, relying on speech‑act rules, but it ignores contextual factors and sincerity constraints. The author argues that the speech‑act view is insufficient for real‑world security practices and proposes three corrective assumptions. The corrective framework rests on three assumptions: securitization is audience‑centered, context‑dependent, and power‑laden. Applying these assumptions yields a set of tractable variables that help researchers analyze how language manufactures threats.

Abstract

The prime claim of the theory of securitization is that the articulation of security produces a specific threatening state of affairs. Within this theory, power is derived from the use of ‘appropriate’ words in conformity with established rules governing speech acts. I argue, however, that a speech act view of security does not provide adequate grounding upon which to examine security practices in ‘real situations’. For instance, many security utterances counter the ‘rule of sincerity’ and, the intrinsic power attributed to ‘security’ overlooks the objective context in which security agents are situated. As a corrective, I put forward three basic assumptions — (i) that an effective securitization is audience-centered; (ii) that securitization is context-dependent; (iii) that an effective securitization is power-laden. The insights gleaned from the investigation of these assumptions are progressively integrated into the pragmatic act of security, the value of which is to provide researchers in the field with a tractable number of variables to investigate in order to gain a better understanding of the linguistic manufacture of threats.