This is the twelfth contribution to our securitization forum. Clifford Bob is professor of political science and Raymond J. Kelley Endowed Chair in International Relations at Duquesne University. His books include The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics (Cambridge, 2012) and The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (Cambridge, 2005).

Illuminating as this forum has been, it has tip-toed around one uncomfortable but potentially significant reason that securitization theory has failed to be taken up by the American IR academy. It runs counter to dominant political and social incentives that we all face. These keep many American scholars within a narrow range of opinion, most of it tracking closely the conventional wisdom of political and military power-holders. Securitization theory, whether or not there is strong evidence to support it, challenges this conventional wisdom. It therefore holds little appeal to most IR scholars. There are also strong material factors keeping many scholars from testing or adopting securitization theory. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

This is the tenth contribution in our securitization forum.  Clara Eroukhmanoff is a PhD candidate at the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. She recently published an article in Critical Studies on Terrorism on “The remote securitisation of Islam in the US post-9/11: euphemisation, metaphors and the “logic of expected consequences” in counter-radicalisation discourse.”

The scholarly impact of securitisation theory (ST) cannot be overstated in Europe. I would argue that this differs from US scholarship if and when scholars situate ST within the linguistic turn. As Oren and Solomon observe in this forum, linguistic approaches in the US are either ignored, or misunderstood. I suggest that if scholars wish to approach ST in this way, their agency needs to be re-established. Continue reading

This is the eighth contribution in our securitization forum. Juha A. Vuori is acting Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki in Finland. <plug> He would like you to order his Critical Security and Chinese Politics (Routledge, 2014) for your library. </plug>

As we can see from the citation counts put forth by Jarrod and Eric, securitization as a keyword or notion has become very enticing, even to the degree that it is used in articles to do things without any references to the securitization studies literature. There seems to be something self-explanatory in the term as such, which may partly explain some of the confusion in the critical literature on it. Other alternative terms that engage similar phenomena, such as security framing or threat politics, do not appear to have the same appeal as the notion of securitization. Intuitively, securitization is about how security comes about.

While how security comes about is an important part of how and why security is studied within securitization studies (which has outgrown securitization theory by now), it is important to note how the theory of securitization goes beyond describing the social mechanisms and causalities involved in the social construction of security. This is the crux of my post. Continue reading

This is the seventh contribution in our forum on securitization theory in the U.S. John Owen is Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and, during the Fall of 2015, a Senior Guest Scholar at the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Free University of Berlin.  He is author of The Clash of Ideas in World Politics (Princeton).

I hesitated before agreeing to write this entry, because although I view the Copenhagen School with sympathy and admiration, I neither belong to that school nor have a sure command of its literature. Being an increasingly senior academic, however, I cannot allow a little ignorance deter me from pronouncing on the topic at hand: Why has securitization theory been received so poorly in the United States?

My strong sense is that the reason is related to the indifference with which American IR views much constructivist scholarship in general. Indeed, there are two related reasons. On our side of the Atlantic, it appears that securitization theory is just another form of critical theory, and it is not at all clear that securitization scholars are interested in causal explanation. These appearances may bear little relation to reality, but, as securitization theorists should appreciate, that does not make them any less powerful. Let me take the two reasons in turn. Continue reading

This is the sixth contribution in our forum on securitization theory in the U.S. Monika Barthwal-Datta is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Australia. Her research focuses on critical approaches to security, food security, and the international politics of South Asia. 

It’s quite simple, I’m told. Securitization Theory doesn’t sell in North America.

Why? Because it’s not a ‘central’ IR theory.

I know this is not an earth-shattering revelation, and that it is actually widely accepted within the discipline that in the US, most people who study and ‘do’ IR prefer to stick to the mainstream theories. Still, it was quite sobering and ultimately insightful to be at the receiving end of this bias. Continue reading

This is the fourth contribution in our forum on securitization theory in the U.S.  Ido Oren is associate professor and chair of the department of political science at the University of Florida and can be reached at oren@ufl.edu. Ty Solomon is Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and can be reached at ty.solomon@glasgow.ac.uk.

Eric Van Rythoven and Jarrod Hayes ask the timely question of why securitization theory has gained so little traction in American IR. They suggest that we should be puzzled by the absence of securitization theory from American IR given the high citation counts for the theory’s seminal works, its growing attractiveness to scholars in other disciplines, and the thirst for a power-oriented constructivism as an alternative to the liberal idealism that pervades American constructivist scholarship. We wish to make two inter-related points regarding the politics of securitization theory. First, somewhat in contrast to Eric and Jarrod, we argue that the absence of securitization theory from American IR should hardly be puzzling given the embeddedness of American IR in American political science, which is dominated by a neopositivist orthodoxy. Second, we want to sharpen Eric and Jarrod’s characterization of the geography of securitization theory. We suggest that the divide is not merely between the US and Europe, but that securitization theory has begun to take root wherever IR enjoys greater autonomy from political science, and/or wherever political science is not strongly attached to neopositivism, including Australia and Canada. Continue reading

This is the second contribution in our forum on securitization theory in the U.S.  Stacie E. Goddard is the Jane Bishop ’51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College.  Her book, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.  Ronald R. Krebs is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He is the author most recently of Narrative and the Making of US National Security.

We want to thank the editors of this forum, as well as the Duck of Minerva, for inviting us to this discussion. As Jarrod and Eric note in their introduction, securitization theory is, if not dominant in European IR, then pretty close: one of us recently taught a week-long graduate seminar in Europe, and it was all the students seemed to know about IR theory. But it has barely penetrated the American academy, and deep, explicit engagement with securitization confines one to the margins—as a reviewer of one of our draft book manuscripts once warned, in urging that the relevant paragraphs be excised. We often speak of the transatlantic divide in the scholarly study of international relations: nowhere is it more starkly apparent than when it comes to securitization. This is puzzling not only because the regional difference in the research programs’ relative influence is astonishing, but because scholars of securitization are clearly on to something quite important and because there would seem to be obvious affinities to, or at least large points of intersection with, mainstream constructivism. Continue reading