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Performative securitization: from conditions of success to conditions of possibility

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Abstract

This piece develops a performative take on securitization theory. It argues that rather than seeing authority as a prerequisite for speaking security, we need to zoom in on how speaking security can be used to claim authority. Such acts of claiming authority are crucial to understand the current political struggles to redefine security. In order to do so, I make two claims taking securitization theory further, an iterative claim and a performative claim. One, following Derrida, we must open up what can be said about security, enabling an analysis of how the security logic is not only used, but also challenged and changed. Two, following Butler, we must open up who can speak security, seeing how speaking security can be used to take authority, rather than seeing authority as a precondition for speaking security.

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Notes

  1. The idea of securitization was developed by Ole Wæver. In its best-known form, it has been made part of a larger framework also including sectors and regional security complex theory. The larger combined theory, now invariably termed the Copenhagen School, was developed by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde and laid out in the book Security: A New Framework for Analysis in 1998. Here, I engage only with securitization theory seen as distinct from the broader theoretical framework of the Copenhagen School.

  2. I use the terminology of two centres of gravity, ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’, as helpfully identified by Holger Stritzel to distinguish the poststructuralist and the sociological aspects of the theory and their further development in second generation securitization analyses. See Stritzel (2007: 359) and Buzan et al. (1998: 31, 46–47).

  3. Derrida’s critique in Signature Event Context was followed by a fierce controversy with Searle’s more stringent interpretation of Austin (Derrida 1977/1988b). A more direct route from Austin to Searle in securitization analysis can also be taken and has been, quite successfully, e.g. Vuori, (2008) and Balzacq (2005). In these analyses, securitization is analysed as dependent on the conventionality of the speech act for its success.

  4. See, for instance, the recent volume by Balzacq (2015). For notable exceptions see Hansen (2011b) and Oren and Solomon (2015).

  5. For a contextual explanation of the importance of governance in shaping the security field see Hameiri and Jones (2013).

  6. This point resembles Wæver's elaboration of the theory’s quality as a ‘model that can be held against empirical instances to assess structural similarity’, arguing that ‘It is the very attempt at analysis through the concept of securitization that establishes what is distinct in new practices that do not immediately conform to normal patterns’ (Wæver 2011: 470).

  7. ‘The external aspect of a speech act has two main conditions. One is the social capital of the enunciator, the securitizing actor, who must be in a position of authority’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 33).

  8. See Saugmann Andersen (2017) for a convincing middle ground.

  9. For a discussion about whether recourse to extraordinary emergency measures is, or should be, decisive of ‘successful’ securitization, see Huysmans (2011), Salter (2011), Williams (2011), Roe (2012), Trombetta (2008), Balzacq (2015), Floyd (2016: 677).

  10. Here, I follow the first underdeveloped centre of gravity that Holger Stritzel (2007) identifies in his identification of two centres of gravity in the theory.

  11. This reading lies close to the claim that ‘a speech act is interesting exactly because it holds the insurrecting potential to break the ordinary, to establish meaning that is not already in the context – it reworks or produces a context by the performative success of the act’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 46), but is at odds with the Bourdieusian understanding of field in the theory (ibid.: 25, 31–33, 46–47).

  12. See also Lupovici (2014), Balzacq (2011).

  13. Lene Hansen (2011b) has developed an account of the theory that highlights the structuring power of discourse and how securitizations are embedded in larger discursive structures. Here I wish to highlight the political power embedded in the act of security and how the security speech acts can work to challenge or sustain current power patterns, but the present approach is not methodologically incompatible with Hansen’s approach. Something similar is developed in Howell’s (2014) analysis of medicine as a strategy of security.

  14. The case of the 2011 Libya intervention and its aftermath is quite telling in this regard (Adler-Nissen and Pouliot 2014).

  15. As Weber (1998: 82) notes, there is a difference between performance as ‘a singular or deliberate “act” with a definite beginning and end’, and performativity ‘as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’. This difference, though, should not be overemphasized as the recent edition on International Relations and Performance by Edkins and Kear (2013) demonstrates. Weber’s authorship also demonstrates that she is in no way guilty of this.

  16. As Debrix (2002: 204) notes some analytical strategies point to normative principles and want to re-erect the salience of rules and norms of social activity, while others are performative in character.

  17. Hansen (2011a: 279) provides a convincing performative take on practices revealing how ‘routine’ practices are in fact taking place on a terrain that is much more contested and unstable than it appears.

  18. According to Huysmans, securitization's conception of the act implies an elitist vision of politics, because in the original conceptualization of the theory the rupture that a securitization brings about as a move into the unexpected and the unknown is embedded within the authority of the sovereign: ‘Exceptionalist acts are not ephemeral disruptions but key events that put the existing order in the balance; they posit politics as moments with decisional gravity – sovereign moments.’ (Huysmans 2011: 375) See also Saugmann Andersen (2017). Huysmans criticizes Butler for ‘devolving the sovereign power to decide arbitrarily to the many professionals who implement policies, including immigration officials, border guards and private security personnel’ (Huysmans 2011: 380). Yet, the point of Butler's ‘petty sovereigns’ who enact the sovereign power to decide arbitrarily is not to place a decisionist epistemology in the hands of these people, but to analyse how they embody sovereignty by acting security in an iterative and performative manner (Butler 2004: 56).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Advanced Security Studies (CAST), University of Copenhagen, for their support and advice through the process. Most particularly Ole Wæver for being a huge inspiration for my work and for his generous comments on this piece at various stages. Ulrik Pram Gad, Martin Holbraad, Trine Villumsen Berling and Karen Lund Petersen deserve special thanks for their contributions to and engagement with the arguments of the article. Lene Hansen deserves much praise for providing plenty and timely advice in the process of publication. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their precise, thorough and useful comments.

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    Lise Philipsen

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Philipsen, L. Performative securitization: from conditions of success to conditions of possibility. J Int Relat Dev 23, 139–163 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0130-8

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