The concept of “securitization” was developed by the Copenhagen School to analyze the process whereby powerful actors such as governments identify a particular phenomenon as an existential threat and legitimize the use of extraordinary measures to combat it. The concept of securitization challenges the traditional understanding of security as something objectively given, highlighting how specific issues are constructed as matters of urgent and existential threat and how this leads to extreme and potentially excessive responses that take place beyond the constraints and control of the legal and political system. The Copenhagen School thus provides a theoretical framework for critically analyzing and challenging the political dynamics that facilitate and legitimize the rise of emergency measures across the world today. 

On the concept of “security”

The Copenhagen School refers to the members of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, most notably Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, who formulated the concept of securitization in response to a series of debates about the meaning of “security” in the 1990s. The concept had traditionally been conceived in military terms, as a matter of the state’s capacity to defend itself against external threats to its survival. However, a new generation of scholars emerged and sought to expand the concept to include a much wider range of issues including human rights, poverty, the environment, etc. Members of the Copenhagen School were critical of their efforts, arguing that the concept of security inadvertently centered the state and could lead to excessive and escalating responses that operated outside of the constraints of the legal and political system and may result in unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences.^[1] A classic example of the potentially unforeseeable and uncontrollable effects, is what is known as “the security dilemma“ in international politics, where one state takes action to increase its security in a given area, but other states cannot know whether it is acting in a defensive or offensive capacity and are impelled to take precautionary measures, producing an overall decrease in security for everyone involved.^[2]

In Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde’s seminal 1998 book Security: A New Framework for Analysis, they insisted on maintaining the traditional definition of security as pertaining to matters of survival or, rather, the construction and perception of particular issues as an urgent matter of life and death across one of five sectors: the military sector, the environmental sector, the economic sector, the societal sector, and the political sector.^[3] In contrast to traditional accounts, they shifted the focus from security issues, to the processes of “securitization” whereby issues were constructed as matters of security. More specifically, the concept of securitization denoted speech acts that construct specific phenomena as an immediate and existential threat, which legitimates the deployment of emergency measures.^[4]

The concept of “speech act” can be traced back to John Langshaw Austin’s argument that language is not merely descriptive, but also performative: speech not only describe the world but can also change it. He provided the examples of saying “I do” in a wedding ceremony or naming a ship, both of which are speech acts, that perform an action that immediately impacts and changes the world.^[5] The Copenhagen School, similarly, insisted that it was the act of identifying something as an existential threat that constructed it as a security issue. Consider for instance how many more people die from traffic accidents than terrorist attacks annually. Nonetheless, the former is accepted as a given, whereas the latter has been securitized at least since September 11, 2001, identified as the primary threat to most societies, and used to legitimize the suspension of civil rights, large-scale surveillance programs, and continued warfare across the planet.

Politics and security

The concept of securitization depends on an underlying typology of different issues’ political salience at a given point in time. They can be classified as non-political, political, and securitized and the temporal dimension is important insofar as issues’ political salience may change over time through acts of de-/politicization and de-/securitization. Non-political issues exist outside of the interest and purview of most political actors and the public, but they may become politicized through significant developments and/or public, political, and media attention, that makes them “a part of public policy, requiring government decision and resource allocations or, more rarely, some other form of communal governance.”^[6]Here it is important to note that such political issues are addressed within the normal framework, rules, and procedures of the legal and political system and, typically, subject to public debate and contestation. Such political issue may in turn be securitized, that is, framed as an urgent and existential threat, which places them outside of the scope of existing political norms and procedures. Securitization can thus be understood “as the move that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics.”^[7]

Defining “securitization”

Securitization is defined as a speech act whereby a securitizing actor constructs an issue as an immediate and existential threat to a referent object, which must be accepted by a relevant audience in order to legitimate the use of emergency measures. This basic definition must be explained and the constituent parts outlined in more detail. I have already outlined the concept of speech act, which describes how words can have an effect in the world that impacts and changes it. In the case of securitization, this refers to the identification of something as an existential threat that must be immediately confronted using emergency measures in order to avoid annihilation.

The securitizing actor is defined as “actors who securitize issues by declaring something, a referent object, existentially threatened.”^[8] It is usually an individual or a group in a position of power and authority, such as a minister, the government. or other members of the political, military, or economic elites, whose assertions that a given phenomenon constitutes an existential threat can be presumed to carry a certain weight and will in all likelihood be accepted by the intended audience and thus legitimize the implementation of emergency measures.^[9]

The referent object denotes “things that are seen to be existentially threatened and that have a legitimate claim to survival.”^[10] The referent object is often the state (including government, society, and territory), but it can differ from sector to sector. In politics it might be sovereignty, the specific form of government, or the dominant ideology, in the economic sector it might be the economy as a whole or a specific industry or trade, in the societal sphere it is typically collective identities such as the nation or religious community, and in the environmental sector it could range from the planetary climate, to local ecosystems or even particular local species, which are deemed imperative to save from whatever threat that they are said to be facing.^[11]

Emergency measures denote the particular actions, policies, and/or means employed to address an urgent and existential threat to the referent object, which, given the extraordinary nature of this threat cannot be addressed according to normal rules and procedures. The particular measures adopted to face the threat depend on the process of securitization, the threat that it constructs, and the referent object in question. For instance, it would seem obvious that the imposition of tariffs and a military invasion legitimates very different types of response. Overall, processes of securitization are defined by the use of exceptional measures:

the special nature of security threats justifies the use of extraordinary measures to handle them. The invocation of security has been the key to legitimizing the use of force, but more generally, it has opened the way for the state to mobilize, or to take special powers, to handle existential threats […] claiming a right to use whatever means are necessary to block a threatening development.^[12]

Finally, it is also important to note that the securitizing actor’s speech acts are not automatically successful. They must first manage to convince a relevant audience, which can be the public or fellow political, economic, or military elites, that their presentation of the situation is correct, that a referent object faces to a clear and present danger, which warrants the implementation of extraordinary measures to stop it. It is only when the relevant audience accepts the existence of such an existential threat and the necessity of the proposed countermeasures that societies are ready to go to war, suspend the rule of law and civil rights, etc. The Copenhagen School therefore differentiates the immediate attempt to securitize an issue, a so-called “securitizing moves,” from successful securitizations, which refer to securitizing moves that are accepted by the relevant audience, establishing a common intersubjective understanding of an immediate and existential threat that necessitates the deployment of emergency measures.^[13]

Controversies

The Copenhagen School is not without its detractors. There have been numerous challenges from mainstream approaches, which, in various ways, suggest that they do not take threats to national security seriously enough. However, there have also been criticisms from other quarters. Some critics have questioned the school’s normative commitment to desecuritization, suggesting that some issues, such as the on-going planetary climate crisis, are so dire that they should in fact be securitized, so that we might mobilize the necessary resources to respond to it.^[14] Lene Hansen, who also works within the tradition of the Copenhagen School, has criticized the absence of systematic consideration of gender dynamics in its initial formulations and suggested that the focus on the speech acts of powerful actors potentially contributes to the silencing of those who are most exposed to gendered insecurity.^[15] More recently – and controversially – Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit have accused the Copenhagen School of “civilisationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack racism,” although these charges have been vehemently contested by members of the Copenhagen School.^[16]These critics and the debates that they have provoked, in various ways, suggest new and interesting directions for future research and developments of securitization theory.

Conclusion

The Copenhagen School’s securitization theory offers a critical theoretical framework to analyze how particular issues are constructed as urgent and existential threats, thereby justifying the use of emergency measures. This perspective challenges the traditional concept and logic of security and highlights the performative nature of security discourses. By focusing on the processes through which specific issues are securitized, the theory reveals the contingencies and political dynamics that enable certain actors to seemingly transcend the restrictions of the normal legal and political system. The Copenhagen School thus provides critical tools to analyze and challenge the dynamics of securitization in contemporary societies.

^[1] Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998), p. 1; Ole Wæver, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–87.

In this way, it can also be conceived as an inverted and critical take on Carl Schmitt’s normative doctrine of decisionism. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

^[2] The classical formulation is found in John Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics2, no. 2 (1950), pp. 171–201.

^[3] Buzan, et al., Security, pp. 21, vii.

^[4] Buzan, et al., Security, pp. 23–26.

^[5] John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 1–6, 52, 174, 5.

^[6] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 23.

^[7] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 23.

^[8] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 36

^[9] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 41.

^[10] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 36.

^[11] Buzan, et al., Security, pp. 22–23.

^[12] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 21.

^[13] Buzan, et al., Security, p. 25; see also Thierry Balzacq, “A Theory of Securitization: Origins, Core Assumptions, and Variants,” in Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–30.

^[14] See for instance Michael Albert, “Climate Emergency and Securitization Politics: Towards a Climate Politics of the Extraordinary,” Globalizations 20, no. 4 (2022), pp. 533–47.

^[15] Lene Hansen, “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000), pp. 285–306.

^[16] Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit, “Is Securitization Theory Racist? Civilizationism, Methodological Whiteness, and Antiblack Thought in the Copenhagen School,” Security Dialogue 51, no. 1 (2019), pp. 3–22; Lene Hansen, “Are ‘Core’ Feminist Critiques of Securitization Theory Racist? A Reply to Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit,” Security Dialogue 51, no. 4 (2020), pp. 378–85; Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan, “Racism and Responsibility – The Critical Limits of Deepfake Methodology in Security Studies: A Reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit,” Security Dialogue 51, no. 4 (2020), pp. 386–94.ity—The Critical Limits of Deepfake Methodology in Security Studies: A Reply to Howell and Richter-Montpetit. Security Dialogue, 51(4), 386–394.