On securitisation in non-democratic contexts - Part The First

If, as a politician, you really want to get something done quickly you have three options:

• throw money at the problem (if you have it),
• convince others through reasoned argument and persuasive langauge (if you have the time), or
  
• call it a security issue to shut everyone up and get a large slice of the treasury in the process
  

Traditionally, it was seen as poor form and 'just not English cricket' to push the security button unless the issue involved guns, bombs or communists. However, the popularity of option three is gaining in today's post-911 environment/age of terror/. African refugees and economic migrants have been caught in a tightening of 'Fortress Europe', and the ostensibly humanitarian US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) was justified largely on security grounds (PDF Ahoy!).

The academic, and very ugly, term for the process of choosing and then enacting this final option is: 'securitisation'. Securitisation theory, a product of the Copenhagen School, delves into the way that issues become 'securitised' and has been a rich vein of research for many a tweed-bearer for almost a decade. The, largely European, contingent of scholars has focused primarily on the emergence of 'new' security threats: such as illegal immigration, terrorism and pandemic diseases.

The research has essentially focused upon the types of language (or as some have pointed out the types of multimedia) that governments, groups and individuals use to successfully make the argument that something they value (like their money, culture or health) is under threat from something else (be that Al Gore, migrants or iced VoVos). In order to be successful in this rhetorical game, you need; an ability to speak, to be listened to, and to have an audience which is receptive to your arguments. If you are successful in convincing your audience, then you will have put issue beyond 'normal' politics and into the rarefied expanse of security politics - where you will have carte blanche in your quest to neutralise the threat. In explaining, for example, the security rhetoric surrounding the responses to illegal immigration in the liberal, democratic and developed states of Europe - successful this have been.

However, because IR theorists are an especially pedantic bunch of individuals, there have been a number of critiques of this glittering example of a theory. One particularly salient point, especially when you travel outside the sandstone gates of European universities, is that securitisation theory only works to explain the security dynamics in democratic states (see the wonderfully named 'The Copenhagen School on Tour in Kyrgyzstan'). For despots options one and two look pretty attractive - if only because they already control the cash, and they can have dissenters sent away to rake sand rather than needing to persuade them. Why do you need to make something a security issue when you already have the power to deal with it directly? Why bother to try and convince people of something when you can just nail an official proclamation to the nearest counter-revolutionary and be done with it? In other words, why bother with option three when options one and two aren't a problem?

This is where Finnish political scientists and their illocutionary logic's come in. For those of you (which means me; since I'm the only one reading) who feel the urge for some speech act theorising - stay tuned! I'll be sharpening my dissection kit, and hopefully answering these rhetorically posed questions, in Part Le Deux.