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

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…