Securitization

In brief

For most of the twentieth century, the study of security asked a substantive question: what genuinely threatens a state, and how should it respond? Realists answered in terms of military power and the anarchic struggle among states. In the mid 1990s a group of scholars in Copenhagen, above all Ole Waever and Barry Buzan, proposed a different question. Security, they argued, is not a condition you can measure. It is something you do. When an actor with standing stands up and says "this is an existential threat, we must act now or the referent we care about will not survive," and when a relevant audience accepts that claim, the issue has been "securitized." It leaves the domain of normal, deliberative, rule bound politics and enters a domain of urgency and exception where extraordinary measures such as censorship, surveillance, detention, and war become sayable and doable. The threat may be real or fabricated. What the theory studies is the move itself: who makes it, in what words, before whom, and with what effect.

The full treatment

The problem it answers

By the end of the Cold War the concept of security was being stretched in every direction. Analysts spoke of environmental security, economic security, food security, identity security, societal security. If everything could be a security issue, the concept threatened to mean nothing. The traditionalists wanted to keep security tied to organized violence and the state, to preserve its analytic edge. The wideners wanted to admit new threats that plainly mattered to survival, from famine to ecological collapse. Waever's insight cut between them. Instead of arguing about which things are "really" security issues, ask what makes something a security issue in the first place. His answer: not the nature of the threat, but the successful invocation of survival and emergency. This reframing let the concept widen without dissolving, because it supplied a precise test for when an issue has actually crossed the line.

How the move works

Waever borrowed from the philosopher J. L. Austin, whose 1962 book How to Do Things with Words showed that some utterances are not descriptions but actions. Saying "I promise" does not report a promise; it makes one. Securitization is that kind of utterance. To label an issue a security threat is to perform an act that, if it succeeds, changes the political rules that apply to it.

The Copenhagen School lays out the move in parts. There is a referent object, the thing said to be existentially threatened: the state, the nation, an ethnic group, the climate, a way of life. There is a securitizing actor, the one who makes the claim, usually a government, a leader, or an official, but potentially a movement or a media voice. There is the audience, the public or the elite whose acceptance is required. And there is the grammar of the act: the invocation of an existential threat, of a point of no return, and of the necessity of measures outside the ordinary rules. Crucially, the speech act is not enough on its own. Securitization succeeds only when the audience accepts it. A leader who cries emergency and is ignored has merely attempted securitization. When acceptance follows, a political community grants the actor a right to break free of procedures it would otherwise insist on.

The three degrees of political treatment

The theory situates security on a spectrum. An issue can be nonpoliticized, meaning the state does not deal with it and it is not a matter of public debate. It can be politicized, meaning it is part of normal policy, handled through standard procedures, budgets, and argument. Or it can be securitized, meaning it is framed as an existential threat requiring emergency action beyond the normal rules. The distinctive claim is that securitization is a failure of normal politics as much as a response to danger. It signals that an issue has been removed from the give and take of ordinary deliberation. Waever therefore treated it with suspicion, not celebration. His preferred outcome was often desecuritization: moving an issue back down into normal politics where it can be argued about without the license of exception.

The example that anchors it

The clearest illustration is the response to catastrophic attack. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, terrorism was securitized across Western democracies. Leaders framed it as an existential threat to the nation and to civilization itself. Audiences, frightened and grieving, accepted the framing. What followed was precisely the extraordinary politics the theory predicts: indefinite detention, expanded surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and two wars, measures that in normal politics would have faced far higher barriers. The theory does not claim the threat was unreal. It claims that calling it a security threat, and having that call accepted, is what unlocked the exceptional powers. The same grammar recurs with migration framed as an invasion, with a rival power framed as an existential menace, and, more hopefully, in attempts to securitize climate change so that it too commands emergency resources.

A distinction that matters

Securitization is not the same as the older idea of the security dilemma, where two states, each arming for defense, frighten each other into a spiral. That is a structural trap among states who both genuinely feel unsafe. Securitization is about the discursive act of naming a threat within a political community, and it can be entirely manufactured or self serving. Nor is it the realist claim that threats are objective features of the balance of power. It is closer to constructivism: threats are made real through shared understandings, and language is not a mirror of danger but an instrument that helps constitute it.

Lineage

Securitization is a child of the constructivist turn in international relations, which insisted that the objects of world politics, including states, interests, and threats, are socially constructed rather than simply given. Its philosophical engine is the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and John Searle. Its sensitivity to how language and framing generate the authority to govern owes a debt to Michel Foucault and to broader critical theory, which taught that power operates through what a society is willing to say and treat as normal. Ole Waever coined the term in a 1995 essay, and the theory reached its systematic form in the 1998 book Security: A New Framework for Analysis, written with Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde. The label "Copenhagen School" comes from the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, where much of the work was done. Later scholars, notably Thierry Balzacq and the sociological "Paris School" around Didier Bigo, extended and revised it.

The strongest case for it

The theory's power is that it turns a stale definitional quarrel into an empirical program. Instead of legislating what security "really" is, it directs attention to a real and consequential political operation: the moment an issue is lifted above normal debate. This is not academic. The move from politicized to securitized is exactly where democracies suspend their own safeguards, where emergency powers are claimed, where the burden of proof shifts and dissent becomes disloyalty. By making that move visible and nameable, the theory equips citizens and analysts to ask the right question: not "is this a threat?" but "who is declaring it, and what are they thereby permitted to do?" It also carries a built in ethical caution. Because securitization means bypassing normal politics, Waever treated it as something to be limited, and championed desecuritization as the healthier default. Few theories in the field combine analytic sharpness with such a clear normative warning.

The strongest case against it

Serious critics have pressed the theory from several sides. Thierry Balzacq argued in 2005 that the Copenhagen School over privileges the speech act and the single decisive utterance, when in practice securitization is a gradual, context dependent process shaped by audiences, tools, and institutional settings. Threats are often established through routine bureaucratic practice, through watchlists, risk profiling, and border technology, rather than through any dramatic declaration, a point developed by Didier Bigo and the Paris School, who locate security in the everyday work of professionals rather than in the words of leaders.

From feminist and postcolonial scholarship, Lene Hansen argued in her 2000 essay on "the little mermaid's silent security dilemma" that the theory assumes a speaker with the standing and safety to speak, and so is blind to those who cannot. The people most existentially endangered, such as women trapped in domestic violence and silenced minorities, are often precisely those unable to voice a security claim at all. A theory built on successful speech acts overlooks security that can never be spoken.

Others question the sharp line between "normal" and "exceptional" politics, arguing it reflects a stable Western liberal order and travels poorly to states where emergency is the ordinary condition of rule. And some worry the theory is quietly conservative: by treating securitization as a suspicious move to be reversed through desecuritization, it may counsel returning genuine emergencies, such as a pandemic or a climate crisis, to the slow machinery of normal politics that is failing to address them.

Where it stands now

Securitization is one of the most cited and taught frameworks in critical security studies, and among the most durable products of European international relations theory. Its vocabulary of referent object, securitizing actor, audience, and desecuritization is now standard. The debates it opened remain active: over whether the audience or the speaker is decisive, over whether the theory can capture non Western and non liberal politics, over how images and practices as well as words do securitizing work, and over the ethics of when, if ever, treating something as a security emergency is justified. It has not resolved these questions. But it permanently changed the discipline's first question about security, from what threatens us to who gets to say so, and with what power that saying confers.

Test yourself

Think of an issue currently described as a threat to national survival in your own country. Who is making that claim, and to whom? What ordinary rules, whether of debate, of law, or of proof, does treating it as a security emergency allow to be set aside? And would you rather it were handled as an emergency beyond argument, or dragged back into the slow, contestable business of normal politics?