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

By Thierry Balzacq. 2005

1,138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02366c7de87083680bb6cca2ffa7257319efc9f2

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Citations in the corpus

Digital Disaster, Cyber Security, and the Copenhagen School (2009, background): “…of security discourse (Erikson 1999; Williams 2003; Huysmans 2006), the consequences of speech act epistemology (Hansen 2000; Bigo 2002; Balzacq 2005), the Western-centric status of security (Bubandt 2005; Kent 2006; Wilkinson 2007), and the importance of the media and visual…”
Securitization as a causal mechanism (2011, background): “Not so surprisingly, such automatism is then empirically faulted or found contradictory to the underlying assumptions of the theory (Balzacq, 2005).”
Understanding attitudes toward energy security: Results of a cross-national survey (2013, background): “The literature on securitization theory in international relations highlights the importance of analyzing security as the result of a political process in which social structures as well as individual preferences play an important role (Buzan, 1998; Stritzel, 2007; Balzacq, 2005).”
Extraordinary or ordinary emergency measures: what, and who, defines the ‘success’ of securitization? (2016, background): “As proponents of the sociological strand of securitization theory (notably Balzacq 2005 and Stritzel 2007) have convincingly argued, however, the idea that the audience has to sanction the speech act throws doubt onto the performative power of language.”
Securitization and Risk at the EU Border: The Origins of FRONTEX (2009, neutral): “The approach has spawned a cottage industry of incisive critiques, which include questions about the ‘audience’ of such discursive moves (Balzacq, 2005; Higashino, 2004), the securitizing authority and capacity of the speakers (Williams, 2003), whether securitizing moves can take silent or…”
WHO decides on the exception? Securitization and emergency governance in global health (2014, background): “…research programmes on the widening of security speech.1 Scholars have scrutinized, for example, the construction of threats through speech acts (Balzacq, 2005; Salter, 2008) as well as by other means, such as visual representations (Hansen, 2011; Williams, 2003) or seemingly banal bureaucratic…”
Agents without agency: Assessing the role of the audience in securitization theory (2016, background): “Thierry Balzacq (2005, 2011a), in a central alteration to securitization theory, seeks to do so by questioning the linguistic underpinnings of the original securitization framework and arguing that the emergence and dissolution of security threats extends beyond the illocutionary speech act and…”