This is the eleventh contribution to our securitization forum. Can E. Mutlu is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Bilkent University. His research interests are located at the intersection of technology, security, and political sociology of global mobility regimes with a particular focus on practices, technologies, and materialities of border security and mobility. His recent research appears in Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Social Theory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, the Review of International Studies, Millennium Journal of International Studies. He is the co-editor of Critical Methods in Security Studies: An Introduction. He writes for the Disorder of Things blog as a regular contributor.
When Jarrod Hayes and Eric Van Rythoven approached us to answer a set of questions on related to the “why Securitization Theory has had so little traction in the United States, and why it has been so valued elsewhere,” I was unsure what I was supposed to say. I believe that while these are thought-provoking questions, they are a bit confusing.
Before I get into unpacking my point, I want to start my contribution with a preface: I do not believe “American IR” is a monolithic entity. I know so many “American” scholars who tend to see the value in pluralism and theoretical work beyond modeling and causal/correlation arguments à la econometrics. I also know a lot of “European” scholars who tend to think that continental theory is “stargazing.” These debates play out in a multitude of ways in peripheral places like Turkey, where I live and work at the moment, and in Canada where I lived and studied most of my adult life. With that preface, I want to make it clear that I am not trying to generalize the diversity that exists in IR scholarship on security studies around the world. There is, however, a mainstream in both Europe and the US, and these mainstream approaches to security tend to differ greatly. The difference is especially visible in hybrid places like Canada where there is more pluralism in teaching and research. This is all to say it is difficult to make an argument based on geographies of theory. Instead, I want to look at the geopolitics of Securitization Theory, and try to make sense of the puzzle posed by the editors of this forum.
With that preface, I want to give my answer to these questions here, and unpack it further below: Securitization Theory is not considered a theory in the sense of word as it is used in contemporary mainstream American IR due to its epistemology, this is why it does not have traction. It does not present a (generalizable, quantifiable, and measureable) model for explaining social phenomena. Its common methodology of discourse analysis is too subjective when viewed from that mainstream perspective. Rather it represents a theory, in the traditionally European sense of the word. Securitization Theory, to use a much-used quotation from Foucault, makes facile gestures difficult. This is why I believe, it is quiet understandable that Securitization Theory has very little to no traction in American IR. American IR tends to make – and I know this is a blunt generalization – difficult gestures facile, through abstraction. The tiny bit of traction in American IR that Securitization Theory seems to get only appears when the theory is used within more prominent frameworks such as foreign policy analysis or political psychology, and/or when it uses content analysis.
Securitization Theory’s lack of popularity in American IR is due to its function – i.e. what it intends to achieve and what it ignores – and its method – discourse analysis over content analysis. Securitization Theory does not explain us why issues come to be related to security. Instead what it offers us is an insight into the process of how issues come to be related to security. I believe the answer to Hayes and Van Rythoven’s questions lies in this significant difference. This difference is not purely conceptual; instead it rests in the epistemological foundations of what different epistemic communities consider doing “theory.”
To that end, while I understand the question and curiosity behind the decision to create such a forum, I find it rather confusing that the introductory piece does not seriously engage with the methodological/epistemological elements behind the absence of Securitization Theory in American IR, instead featuring bibliometrics data so prominently. A prominent reason to discuss for the apparent absence of Securitization Theory in the US could be the fact that it relies heavily on discourse analysis. Discourse analysis does not seem “scientific” enough for mainstream American IR; instead content analysis seems to be the method of choice for textual analysis. Discourse analysis seems too subjective for our American colleagues. Whereas content analysis with its reproducibility through coding, content analysis seems more “scientific.” While it maybe true that Securitization Theory pose policy relevance in some issues such as health or state policies of remembrance, it does not subscribe to the hard data fetishism that seems to appeal to a majority of American IR and Political Science scholars. Securitization Theory does not present causality or correlation. In other words, securitization theory does not explain when, or why issues get “securitized.” This seems to be the reason why Securitization Theory’s is not a “theory” suitable for American IR scholars.
Furthermore, I believe the answer to the question posed by the editors of this forum cannot be found in bibliometrics. Number of mentions, citations, or attributions does not provide an insight into the appeal, or traction, of Securitization Theory in American IR. To understand the issue, we must look at the way in which IR theory and methodology curriculums are established in undergraduate and graduate curriculums. We must try to understand the biases that are generated by these preferences, which in return produce or reinforce what we call the mainstream IR. The main difference between Europe and the US is not one of policy relevance vs. non-policy relevance. Instead the main difference is epistemology and what we consider to be science; high quality publications are relevant. Securitization Theory finds traction in places where scholars tend to explain how security issues emerge, rather than why or when they emerge.
What we are witnessing in this forum is a geopolitical debate as to why Securitization Theory is popular in one part of the world and not the other. I believe the answer is not about empirics, or policy-relevance, but one of methods and epistemology. Geopolitics, for one, is not static; things can change, they can move. Yet, the attempt to make Securitization Theory popular in the US is, in my opinion, a futile one that would require the epistemological axis of the theory to be shifted to the middle of the Atlantic and be based on a positivist-constructivist axis. I am skeptical of the politics behind such theoretical geo-politics.
As I have followed this conversation all week, I have found myself thinking about a couple of things:
Political science is perhaps better integrated in Europe with legal studies than it is in the United States. Some of the securitization conversation is actually from a critical legal perspective, where individuals are asking how it is that legal institutions and legislation appear to be used AGAINST citizens as often as they are used to protect the rights of citizens. The ‘spaces of exception’ conversation, for example, in The Netherlands, is specifically about the designation of places as ‘places of heightened security risk’ where different laws and processes for criminal procedure apply. Many of these concerns about things like transparency, surveillance and migration policy are perhaps at base legal questions which happen to be political,rather than political questions which happen to be legal.
In addition, in Europe, writing on securitization is coming not only from political scientists but also from legal scholars and often people in the field of criminology and policing. The conversation in England and the Netherlands, the countries I know the best, is often very interdisciplinary in nature. . Securitization is a concern of geographers, philosophers and others.
I wonder to what degree the problem we have in America is less about an orientation towards a question and more about institutions which exist for us to ask these questions and about our own training.
I’m also a bit confused as to why you keep insisting that securitization theory is a subset of IR theory (or that it should be), since in my mind, much of the best writing actually seems to fit better within comparative politics. A lot of what is being written is actually case studies about how securitization is occurring in specific sectors — housing; policing; criminality, etc.
It is certainly true that interpretive methods, such as discourse analysis, are often viewed as “unscientific” and subjective in the American academy. However, I do think you are a being a bit rigid about securitization theory’s applicability. After all, the choice is not between story-telling on the one hand and “hard data fetishism” on the other (see Patrick Jackson’s 2 x 2 in COI). There is no real reason to suppose that securitization theory cannot explain why or when issues become securitized. In fact, by definition we know when an issue becomes securitized–when the word “security” is invoked and accepted, no?
Securitization theory’s great contribution is that it “cynically unmasks its issue of concern” (Vuori, this forum). It brings to our attention the socially (and linguistically) constructed nature of security, and it helps us make sense of the weight of security claims. Why does it have to stop there? Thinking about causal mechanisms does not compromise securitization theory’s ontological inclinations because we can look at causal mechanisms themselves as heuristic devices. We can also create knowledge that is explanatory, even if we recognize that it is reflexive and not generalizable. Moreover, this distinction between why and how (explanation v. understanding) is real, though perhaps overstated.