Securitization Revisited Contemporary Applications and Insights

This book seeks to interrogate how contemporary policy issues become ‘securitized’ and, furthermore, what the implications of this process are. A generation after the introduction of the concept of securitization to the security studies field, this book engages with how securitization and desecuritization ‘works’ within and across a wide range of security domains including terrorism and counter-terrorism, climate change, sexual and gender-based violence, inter-state and intra-state conflict, identity, and memory in various geographic and social contexts. Blending theory and application, the contributors to this volume – drawn from different disciplinary, ontological, and geographic ‘spaces’ – orient their investigations around three common analytical objectives: revealing deficiencies in and through application(s) of securitization; considering securitization through speech-acts and discourse as well as other mechanisms; and exposing latent orthodoxies embedded in securitization research. The volume demonstrates the dynamic and elastic quality of securitization and desecuritization as concepts that bear explanatory fruit when applied across a wide range of security issues, actors, and audiences. It also reveals the deficiencies in restricting securitization research to an overly narrow set of issues, actors, and mechanisms. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of critical security studies, international security, and International Relations. Chapter6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license https://www.routledge.com/Securitization-Revisited-Contemporary-Applications-and-Insights/Butler/p/book/9780367150372

PART I: THEORETICAL INSIGHTS Introduction: Revisiting Securitization: The ‘Constructivist Turn’ in Security Studies Michael J. Butler and Zena Wolf 1. Assessing Securitization Theory: Theoretical Discussions and Empirical Developments Roxanna Sjöstedt 2. Regional Security Complex Theory: Reflections and Reformulations Jaroslaw Jarzabek PART II: SECURITIZATION IN APPLICATION 3. Counter-Terrorism as a Technology of Securitization: Approaching the Moroccan Case Blanca Camps-Febrer 4. When Advocacy Securitizes: Non-state Actors and the Circulation of Narratives around Sexualized Violence in Conflict Natalie Florea Hudson and Alexandra Cosima Budabin 5. Securitizing the Environment: Climate Change as First-Order Threat Mark A. Boyer and Neil Oculi PART III: MECHANISMS OF DESECURITIZATION 6. Conflict Management Redux: Desecuritizing Intractable Conflicts Siniša Vukovic 7. Beyond the Speech Act: Contact, Desecuritization, and Peacebuilding in Cyprus Katerina Antoniou 8. The Role of Memory in the De-securitization of Inter-Societal Conflicts Valérie Rosoux Conclusion: Securitization, Revisited: Revealed Insights, Future Directions Michael J. Butler

Michael J. Butler is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Leir Luxembourg Program at Clark University. His publications include Deconstructing the Responsibility to Protect (Routledge, forthcoming), Selling a ‘Just’ War: Framing, Legitimacy, and U.S. Military Intervention (Palgrave, 2012), and International Conflict Management (Routledge, 2009).