Alex Kreidenweis – European Approaches to IR – 8 May, 2013

Introduction

Colloquially Copenhagen is a city, while to security scholars it connotes a distinctive

variant within critical approaches to security. This paper will blend the colloquial and the

scholarly by approaching the Copenhagen School as more city than school. What follows is

a grand, if less than comprehensive, tour of Copenhagen from foundations to suburbs. I

begin at the city square, famously erected by Ole Waever, paying close attention to efforts

which have sought to rejuvenate it as a central forum of security scholarship. The paper

then traces its way through some of the prominent, messy, and vibrant neighborhoods,

each with their distinctive tension or theme. I then look to politics within Copenhagen as

illustrative of the politics into which all security studies, critical or otherwise, is inhered. In

the end I play realtor and prospective buyer by cogitating on some points at which one

might stake a claim in the city, while perhaps leaving an indelible mark on its architecture.

Center City

With little doubt Copenhagen’s chief architect has been Ole Waever. Leveling the

ground upon which he might begin building, Waever unmoored security from its elsewise

“realist”, “state-centric” or “national” ontological berths. Such a heterodox act enabled a

careful assessment of the fundamental, and fundamentally unsettled, nature of what

security “is” and more prolifically what it “does”. Yet Waever viewed security itself is a

means to ulterior end; in the post-Maastricht Europe, flesh was being added to EU bones

and the “state of the state” was shifting. The hitherto sacrosanctity of state sovereignty and

clearly demarcated political identities appeared to be in flux (Waever, 104).

Having (in)famously abjured the notion of objectively constituted threats, the

relevant questions became how can something be conceived as a security issue, what is it

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about security that makes clear political distinctions to other sorts of issues, and how does

one know a security issue when one sees it? (Waever, 106). The answers, according to

Waever, are to be mined out of the discursive processes by which security is constructed.

Nothing is a security issue, nothing is threatened or defended, and politics as usual prevails,

until someone makes a security issue. That is, there is no security prior to intentional

securitizations. Here the foundations come to be laid.

In theoretical terms, the foundational architecture laid by Waever is parsimoniously

elegant. Securitization is a solely discursive process in which agents seek to move issues

into the realm of security and threat through speech acts. Inherently self-referential, the

process neither measures nor weighs an issue against others to assess the measure or

weight of its existence. Instead, securitizing discourses constitute the sense of a palpable

threat and the meanings of apposite responses. Through their securitizing moves, an agent

demarcates a referent group whose very existence is placed into question by an extant

threat. That the threat be posed as existential is crucial, for it is only when so cast that a

threat might authorize a break with politics as normal. To securitize, then, is to enter into

the realm of exceptional politics (Waever, 107).

Parsimonious perhaps, yet securitization theory carried profound implications for

the study of security. Securitization highlighted a path by which issues beyond militarized

ones might be constituted as matters of security. By taking a flexible view of referents,

Waever’s securitization theory is also bound up in considerations of political communities

and identities which might be made, altered, or unmade through different securitizing

moves. This might be accomplished at, or towards at the level of states but also sub- or

supra-state levels. In this way securitization theory clearly evinced a mechanism which

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allowed analysts to meaningfully speak about “security from what” and “security for

whom”. In mid-1990s Europe, and indeed within the UN system’s burgeoning tryst with

human security, two more salient questions were perhaps wont to be found.

The political landscape at the dawn of a post-Cold War world was no less vital to

early explications of securitization theory. Waever and his contemporaries saw actors

speaking capably not from or about the security of the state as such. The ambit of actors

putatively capable of “speaking security” had expanded to a degree that security no longer

began or ended with the state. As a consequence, it seemed too conservative a position to

assume that the referent objects, in whose name securitizing moves are made, were solely

states. Thus, the entire project upon which Waever toiled was to wipe away the erstwhile

orthodoxies of security studies in which the lone avatars were billiard ball states. The map

was to be repopulated anew by reflexively asking, “…who today is able to establish itself

with a self-referential gesture of security as a survival-demanding unit?” (Waever, 110).

The number of actors nudged into place upon Waever’s securitization blueprint was

originally quite small. Nations, states, and Europe were the only actors which could

meaningfully be spoken of as securitized, though with a number of politicized actors toeing

the securitization line. In any case, the end of the Cold War had reconstituted the

relationships between political identities to great effect upon security politics. Under the

rubric of security, political identities were cast, recast, reified, or shifted. In Western

Europe state and nation were actively decoupled as states shifted some governmental

functions towards the EU. The supra-state lurch of some governmental functions coincided

with European nationalities’ increasing insecurity complexes due to the receding capability

of nations to rely upon sovereign states to unilaterally intervene against socio-cultural

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threats. Meanwhile Eastern Europeans were busy grafting together states and nations to

invidious effect. The bloody Yugoslavian split was a case in point; "where state and nation

do not fit, there will be competing claims over territory, and conflicts over 'minorities',

borders, etc.” (Waever, 114).

From East to West, the invocation of security bound political communities. From

Waever’s view, identity and security are inextricable; cultures or identities not cast in

security’s light will be extirpated. Yet in binding a referent community, securitizations bind

the identity of the “other” who threatens to raze or subsume. It is not enough to say that

amorphous trends such as globalization suffice for existential threats. “Western culture” or

“Americanization” are more evocatively specific.

It is here that Waever displays an affinity for a Derridian conception of political

identity. Because political identities are constituted through securitization, that is to say

that identity can only be produced by speaking through the dialogic filter of security, it

becomes possible to see that identity is never fully secure. As Waever demands, "one does

not speak of something that is unproblematic", thus security is constituted by the want for

something it does not have, namely security (Waever, 115). The Derridian paradox

emerges precisely in the recognition that security is a denotation of what one is in relation

to what one needs. To need protection is to need that which will affirm identity, but in

attaining protection the identity is necessarily not what it was before – namely, secure.

This may well highlight that states are no longer the only denizens of the pernicious

field of security politics, and yet states are certainly not to be forgotten. Within Waever’s

seminal framework, the ultima ratio meaning of state security is what it perhaps always

had been: sovereignty. Understood as the range of issues a state claims sole control over,

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and the spatially bound, uncontested ability to set public law, it is possible to work through

the putative impasse of state versus EU sovereignty. The trickiness of this dichotomy was

bound up in the rhetoric that claimed European states “transferred sovereignty” to the EU.

This can be categorically rejected, Waever argued, as states retain full sovereignty, the

question is over what they retained sovereign authority. Simply stated, the emergence of

the EU heralded a renegotiation of over what domains states could claim legitimate and

uncontested control (Waever, 116). Thus it is argued that questioning whether states or

the EU had more or less sovereignty was to indulge a false dichotomy. Instead EU-

members are seen as actively engaging in the development of a supranational entity with

the inchoate potentiality to undermine state sovereignty. This is an important claim

precisely because it, unlike so many analyses, holds that the EU has not yet and is not

necessarily the death knell of state sovereignty (Waever, 116).

At the time of Waever’s writing, the “European project” had gained enough

momentum that it could be spoken of within the rubric of security. European integration is

curiously linked with the totalizing project of European security. Fearing its own balance-

of-power past, a distinctly European identity harping "European traditions", seemed to be

slowly imbricating itself over the heterogeneous political identities of Europe. Europe as a

political entity is simultaneously constituted and securitized against the specter of the

balance-of-power past (Waever, 122). What is so curious about this development is that

the referent is not EU institutions but the notion of European integration set against the

existential threat of fragmentation heralding a return to Europe’s macabre past.

Indirectly assessing city planning ten years on, Didier Bigo concurred with Waever

in important ways. Specifically, Bigo ascribes to the notion that state-centric views of

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security are outmoded; security is a fundamentally dialogic process; and the empirics of

European security politics are illustrative of the unsettled nature of security. Yet the

landscape had been shifting underfoot - Copenhagen was in need of revitalization lest it

sink into the sand. Though not explicit in his intention to revitalize securtization theory,

Bigo is certainly directing matters from Copenhagen’s city square. To these ends two

matters are driven to the fore; first Bigo sets to disabusing claims that 9/11/01 was a

historical rupture which fundamentally altered what security meant and what it meant to

“practice security”. The second move is to engage with the occlusion of a formerly hard

dichotomy of external and internal security. Thus “spaces,” and “practices” of security help

update city infrastructure.

Bigo posits that the fusion of the formerly autonomous internal and external

security spheres had collapsed into homogeneity as a result of reapplied bipolarity. Since

the end of the Cold War, Western states had systemically “othered” the third world. This

“othering” painted the third world as a great morass of insecurity born of ethnic conflict,

arms and drug trafficking, and political instability. Worse, the third world purportedly

externalizes its problems via irregular migration. In response, the West had simply

resurrected the logic of bipolarity. 9/11 critically reified perceptions within the West that

a highly unstable third world machinates to violently interject into Western society

through terrorism, now coded as acts of war and crime. The omnibus war launched by

resurrected bipolarity had become distinctly clandestine, information-based, and

comfortable within an exceptional moment permissive of executive authority (Bigo, 387).

Following Waever, a central question is not simply "what" is securitized, but "who"

is securitizing (Bigo, 394). Contra Waever, Bigo avers that security professionals enunciate

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threats pursuant to "inter-agency" rivalry (Bigo, 391). This is a critical point; who is

enunciating is irreducible from political ambitions - speaking of a threat is done to privilege

the role of one's agency in the transnational security mélange. An interwoven mélange of

police, intelligence officers, armed services, specialized military units, think-tanks, and

private security companies are those which are most actively enunciating contemporary

threats (Bigo, 387 - 388). These security professionals, in word and in deed, are animated

by logics internal to their Bourdieusian field and thereby transcendent of national or

political affiliation (Bigo, 389). Especially within the EU system, security actors across

states seem now more analogous to one another than to other citizens of their bounded

states (Bigo, 396). Further still, their commonalities are driven by the transnational use of

similar information technologies of security management (Bigo, 394).

The defining debates between security professionals in the post-Cold War, raised to

prominence by 9/11, pits two axes of professionals against one another. Along one axis are

security professionals who believe that globalized threats, stemming primarily from the

nucleic Al-Qaeda, can only be combatted through, "a permanent state of exception allowing

less judicial control…" engendered in a universal information network (Bigo, 388). The

parallel axis is drawn by professionals who prefer to bolster security at the borders, the

better to protect the homeland. That this debate has gained such traction within and

beyond governments has served as facilitating conditions for the occlusion of internal and

external spheres of security.

An additionally crucial aspect of Bigo's analysis is to point out that the notion of

starkly dichotomized roles for police and militaries is a product of political liberalism.

Their separation is neither certain nor natural given that both institutions deal in the same

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currencies, namely applied coercion and (in)security. Tracing the genealogy of history

shows that the internal remit of police was only introduced to European society with the

emergence of political liberalism. Under the restraining tendencies of liberalism, police

become "an instrument to battle the real enemy of the population: crime" (Bigo, 392).

Concomitantly the military began a slow retrenchment from internal security matters.

Joakim Berndtsson and Maria Stern, similar to Bigo, look to spatial dimensions of

security. Where Bigo finds the erasure of internal and external in the shifting remits of

security professionals, Berndtsson and Stern pose the public/private distinction as a more

productive analytical marker of erratic security roles. This public/private distinction

remains arguably extant, unlike Bigo’s internal/external collapse, but the boundaries it

draws are repeatedly contested and renegotiated at particular spatial locations. By

confronting this problematique, Berndtsson and Stern are able to take deeper

considerations to task, such as “how, and by whom, security is produced and governed

remain central and controversial questions…" (Berndtsson & Stern, 411). Their revision,

small but prodigious, is to add “places" into Bigo’s colonnade of “spaces,” and “practices”.

Looking to Sweden’s Arlanda airport, a heterogeneous assemblage of public and

private security actors comes into focus. Each actor is "governed by competing,

intersecting, and coinciding security logics or rationalities (Berdtsson & Stern, 409). At

Arlanda, the inter-bureaucratic games teased out by Bigo have become frustrated through

the commodification of security provision within Western liberal democracies. The major

transformation of note is the addition of private security companies (PSCs) into the “what”

and “who” debates driving the unsettled meanings of security (Berndtsson & Stern, 411).

At Arlanda public/private markers starkly divides the discursive and practical meanings of

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security, as well as the forms of power actors can exercise based on their location in

regards to that distinction (Berndtsson & Stern quoting Abrahamsen & Williams, 411). In

light of their dynamic interchanges, it becomes important to ask how various security

actors along the public/private continuum understand their work, how they interpret

national and international security directives, and how the increasing role of privatized

security agents has knotted up new political tensions.

Strikingly, security assemblages themselves attempt to attach meaning to the "what"

and "who" of security by positioning public/private as ontologically separate categories.

What is so mystifying is that these actors’ own practices calls into question the veracity of

an ontological distinction between public and private. Illustrative of the point, a PSC

spokesperson suggests that the legitimacy of private entities in security provision was

unproblematic for democratic governance so long as PSCs did not challenge the state's

rightful monopoly over the use of violence (Berndtsson & Stern, 414). Tellingly, these

notions inhere with PSC views that there are aspects of security provision in which

corporate efficiency trumps public bureaucratic impotence (Berndtsson & Stern, 415).

Alternatively, public actors such as the police assert a distinctly principal-agent view of the

relationship between public and private security actors. Here PSCs are viewed as ancillary

to the work of police, with the latter defining the appropriate roles for the former

(Berndtsson & Stern, 416).

The locus of debate surround security governance is whether PSCs undermine

democratic oversight. That the consideration here focuses on a matter so crucial as

security renders the issue in an alarming fashion. Arlanda Airport thereby can be seen as a

zone of indistinction between public and private, national and international, or at the very

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least a zone where the limitations of political imaginaries fail to grasp the complex and

dynamic interplays defining security (Berndtsson & Stern, 417). What is of vital

importance is that Arlanda constitutes the spatial nexus between the public dictums of the

EU and various national capitals on the one hand, and the privatized technologies and

practices which engender them on the other (Berndtsson & Stern, 418).

Problematically, the assemblage at Arlanda is governed by imbricated and at times

diametric governance bodies and logics which confuse public/private boundaries and

whom is controlling at the site of security provision. For example the meaning of "police

supervision" requisite to defining and controlling the operational latitude of private

security companies is not at all clear; different interpretations are forwarded by private

security companies, police, and regulatory bodies (Berndtsson & Stern, 419 - 420). Further

confounding any clear articulation of "what" security is and "who" is to provide it are the

bureaucratic wrangling engaged in by state agencies reminiscent of Bigo's bureaucratic

games (Berndtsson & Stern, 421). In effect, the meaning of security is what security actors

choose within the spatial and temporal boundaries of instantaneous interactions

(Berndtsson & Stern, 420).

Berndtsson & Stern's findings have important implications for the confidence to be

placed in a parsimonious theory of securitization. In short, for Waever, and to a lesser

extent Bigo, the discursive meaning of security is determined by securitizing moves

undertaken by agents speaking on behalf of larger imagined communities or in line with

bureaucratic interests. Though Berndtsson & Stern do not necessarily countermand these

notions, they do cast doubt on whether the enunciated meanings of security are so clearly

translated when security is manifested through practice. Instead there appears a

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problematic disjuncture between security speech and security practice - raising the

important epistemological question of whether it is more fruitful to determine the meaning

of security from Habermasian discourse or Bourdieusian practice. What it certainly calls

into question is any theory of securitization which leaves aside zones of security. Airports,

detention centers, and military checkpoints are sites wherein security assemblages actively

give meaning to security. The variegated milieus of security agents, regulations, and

bureaucratic interests functional at these sites may point to different answers of "who"

does security, or indeed "what" security is, based on the particular location.

Embedded in Copenhagen or Beyond It?

Waever, Bigo, Berdtsson and Stern have helped envision, set, and reinforce

Copenhagen’s city square. While the constructive efforts were more explicit for Waever,

the common discursive and practical conceptions of security central to Bigo, Berndtsson,

and Stern’s work shows them within the same square, augmenting the same infrastructure.

The view afforded from the square of empirical security landscapes, particularly European

ones, has become something of an attraction for European security scholars. Many have

passed through the city square, leaving behind balustrades, finials, and arcades. Steffano

Guizzini, for example, attempts to show how securitization is a “non-positivistic” causal

mechanism (Guizzini, 329). Luca Mavelli grapples with the securitization of Islam and its

implication for “…secular regimes for thinking security” (Mavelli, 159). Jocelyn Vaughn has

considered whether securitizing moves can name and persuade more than a single referent

(Vaughn 2009).

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Yet the square, for all its grandiose embellishments, does not a city make. To get a

better sense of the city’s life, we must range into the neighborhoods. Keeping limitations in

mind, time and space allow for a visit of three.

One of the more unruly neighborhoods within the Copenhagen Schools view of

securitization actively brawls over the notion of "self-referential" speech acts. A strict

reading of self-referential might suggest that a securitizing speech act is not embedded

within a particular context, but rather shapes its own context in the process of being

uttered. Alternatively this runs the risk of forsaking any potential for a speech act to be

shaped and rendered meaningful by dint of emergence within a particular context. Central

to this tension is the role played by an audience, or referent of securitizing moves. If

security moves are strictly self-referential, then the reaction of the audience itself is

irrelevant; the act is sufficient to contextualize an issue as existentially threatening and

constitute the referent which is so threatened. If the consequences of any speech act is

undecided prior to its mediation within broader social contexts, then the speech act is

inextricable from the pre-constituted context into which it is uttered.

As a primary contender in these debates, Thierry Balzacq has faulted the

Copenhagen School for conflating illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. By this

argument Copenhagen theorists presume illocutionary speech acts, the act of posing

something as an existential threat, stand as the entire conception of securitization. In so

doing perlocutionary acts are left aside, or more simply the societal effects of a securitizing

move. From Balzacq’s view the Copenhagen School has taken an internalist analytical

perspective in which"...the words of the securitizing actor need to resonate with the context

within which his/her actions are collocated" (Balzacq, 182). Additionally, securitization is

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accused of delving too far into the post-structuralist camp such that it cannot conceive of

the "brute facts" of a security landscape. Tanks commanded by ones enemies are, after all,

threatening irrespective of whether agents choose to recognize them as such (Balzacq,

181).

Holger Stritzel is largely in concurrence with Balzacq's reading of the Copenhagen

School. Early articulations of securitization theory are held to be internalist insofar as their

underlying assumptions are that by invoking an issue in the name of security, an utterance

carries constitutive capacity. Specifically, the content of a speech act gains subjectivity

through utterance, a subjectivity which produces both the meaning of security and the

knowledge of its contents (Stritzel, 361). The clear influences of Judith Butler and Jacques

Derrida have thus veiled Copenhagen’s view of a world rife with extra-discursive material

dangers. What is more, Stritzel believes the internalist position does not require an

enabling context for speech acts to successfully achieve securitization; the act itself is

constitutive of both the speaker and their ostensible authority to "speak security". The

actors and contexts relevant within securitization, by this view, are constituted in the wake

of discourse (Stritzel, 361).

Later specifications by Ole Waever and Barry Buzan, which bifurcate securitizing

actors and skeptical-or-acquiescent audiences, fares no better empirically. How does such

a theory account for multiple relevant audiences? Relatedly, the theory might be rendered

impotent in non-democratic contexts wherein the iron gauntlet of dictatorial rule obviates

the perlucutionary effects of a securitizing move (Stritzel, 363). Similar to Balzacq,

Stritzel's answer to internalist deficiencies is to further specify the contextual factors which

grant a securitizing actor and the contents of their speech acts intersubjective significance

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(Stritzel, 367). Specifically, Stritzel believes securitization must be attentive to the

congruence between securitizing speech acts and extant social discourses; the greater the

degree of congruence, "the easier it is for [securitizing actors] to establish their preferred

individual text as a dominant narrative for a larger collective" (Stritzel, 370). Thus,

securitization is best understood by a triadic relationship between "the performative force

of articulated threat texts", the contextual embeddedness of securitizing moves vis-a-vis

extant discourse, and the social capital of the securitizing actor (Stritzel, 370). In essence

what Stritzel argues for is a more strongly post-structuralist positioning of securitization

theory than Balzacq suggests, but with the commonality that pre-existing contexts matter

in regards to the success or failure of securitizing moves.

Lene Hansen charges into this tumult by accusing both Balzacq and Stritzel of an

undiscerning analysis of Buzan and Waever's ontological and epistemological claims.

Ontologically speaking, Hansen argues that Buzan and Waever cannot find an anchor for

the "what is" question of security beyond discourse. That is to say that security concerns

are never quite the "brute facts" which Balzacq is anxious about missing. Balzacq’s and

Stritzel’s epistemological misread demands that audiences are shorn of relevance within

Buzan and Waever's internalist position. Buzan and Waever’s true epistemological claim,

argues Hansen, is that security's contents can only be known through intersubjective

discursive processes (Hansen, 360).

Deeper still, Hansen believes that one cannot simultaneously claim that the

Copenhagen School casts its lot with post-structuralists and speak meaningfully about

externalist and internalist positions. The very notion of an externalist position casts oil

into the post-structualist waters; at root the externalist position adduced by Stritzel

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contends that there is a contextual universe which discourse may or may not recognize.

Yet amongst the foundational postulates of post-structuralist enterprises is that context is

always internal to discourse - the idea of an "external reality" holds intellectual purchase

owing to its discursive constitution. To suggest otherwise would rob discourse of

constitutive power. At most discourse would be capable of signifying, more or less

accurately, "brute facts" (Hansen, 360).

What Hansen suggests instead is a strengthening of post-structuralist foundations

by the Copenhagen School. First, securitization could be specified through attention to the

discursive content that attempts to mark "...a given event, case or process…" as a security

threat. Of interest here are the discursive markers which link the signifier "security" to

exceptional politics (Hansen, 362). To illustrate the point, Hansen turns focus to how the

"Mohammed cartoon crisis" was securitized in reference to the "clash of civilizations"

macro-discourse (Hansen, 364). A second specification might contemplate the unstable

and contested regimes of knowledge that signify a totalizing set of relations allowing for

securitization to occur (Hansen, 363). In short, what is knowable about the threat and how

is it made knowable? In regards to the Mohammed cartoons, debates swarmed over

whether the cartoons themselves were offensive, or whether it was in the act of

interpretation or constitution of the cartoons by Muslim subjects that manifested the

offense and subsequent securitization (Hansen, 366). Hansen's third suggestion is to

interpolate a Foucauldian notion of "structural modality" into securitization analysis, which

suggests that securitizing moves are less decisive than often assumed in regards to the

referent communities they bind and thereby how security is to be pursued. In regards to

the Mohammed cartoons, there was an undecidability about whether the threat posed was

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towards liberal notions of free speech or Muslims as a bound religious community (Hansen

2011, 367).

Normativity

Sinners and the virtuous are the denizens of the second neighborhood. Here one’s

daily tasks are set to attaching approbation or opprobrium to those who securitize, as

much as those who study it. One might certainly be excused for missing the normative

trusses buried deep in early articulations of securitization theory for its “sterner stuff”. Yet

there has always been a muted normativity – a faint tone, but there all the same.

Securitizing discourses seem to present no opportunity for constructive political dialogue.

One cannot dialogue with the “other” for their very existence constitutes an existential

threat – the exceptional moment itself forecloses all possibility of pacific resolution.

Waever himself has always been aware of the mutual exclusivity of securitizations and

politics, “for politics to emerge…we need to eliminate the logic of war, which in its extended

sense…means to stop using the security act amongst ourselves. In war we do not have to

discuss with the other, we can eliminate him” (Waever, 127).

In more explicit ways, Bigo’s palpable concern for democracy was born by the

construction of apocalyptic security narratives. Within the exceptional moment

crystallized by virtue of such narratives, the "protection of the weakest against injustice,

exploitation, and marginalisation" as the core element of security is endangered (Bigo,

402). The normative implications of securitization also transpose onto those who “speak

and write” it. As Jef Huysmans reminds, "...speaking and writing about security is never

innocent" (Huysmans, 43). Scholars of security, by virtue of their very object of study,

engage in an ethico-normative endeavor. By mobilizing knowledges about "what security

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is" or "who is capable of security" and "how securitization is possible", security scholars are

inhered to the Foucauldian political technologies which manage security politics. By

necessity, speaking and writing security introduces scholarly knowledge into the contested,

political spaces of the academy where success can sway scholarly discourses on the

foundational questions of security. Knowledge also has a slippery quality which can

squeeze it beyond the erudite confines of the academy and into the realm of policy.

Scholars, as much as policymakers, can be securitizing actors (Floyd 2007, 10).

A reflexive question wrought by these thorny realities is how one might judge the

ethical implications of a securitizing move. To this effect, Rita Floyd has advocated for a

normatively informed theory of securitization. As a base matter, Floyd has stated that

securitizations may be evaluated as positive or negative. Adopting a consequentialist

approach allows for such evaluations based on whether securitizations, understood as

politicization in the extreme, produce more positive outcomes than "mere politicizations"

would have (Floyd, 338).

In this way security scholars may find a path out of the normative dilemma of

speaking and writing security. By assessing the relative desirability of some

securitizations, scholars may "...encourage some securitizations and renounce others…"

(Floyd 2007, 339). It is here as well that Floyd attempts to link Copenhagen and

Aberystwyth; if Copenhagen allows analysts to see securitizing moves clearly, then

Aberystwyth encourages them to critically engage with policymakers (Floyd 2007, 339).

Elsewhere Floyd has evinced impactful arguments in favor of evaluative procedures

which can parse out the justice of a securitization. To do so Floyd fuses Copenhagen’s logic

with just war doctrine. In doing so she arrives at three core criteria of judgment: first, the

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securitization must take as its object an extant and existential threat. Second, the referent

of security must be "...conducive to human well-being defined as the satisfaction of human

needs" (Floyd, 428). Finally, responses to a threat must at once be proportionate to the

threat and responders must be seen as acting on virtuous motives. Building from these

criteria requires some finagling of Copenhagen’s foundations; securitizations, according to

Floyd, are successful when speech acts cause relevant action by either securitizing agents

or their proxies. One must therefore not only talk the talk of securitization, one must also

then walk it (Floyd 2011, 428). What Floyd gains with this modification is the ability to

discern the sincerity of a securitizing move. Simply stated, if a securitizing move lacks

sincerity then the speech act will not portend a relevant shift in action or policy (Floyd

2011, 429). Additionally, the notion of sincerity alleviates security analysts, scholars

among them, of moral culpability. It is not the speech act itself that suffices for

securitization, but the actions of those who are persuaded by such moves.

To the likely chagrin of those sympathetic of Lene Hansen's arguments in favor of

further post-structuralization, Floyd has bound just securitizations to a materialist reading

of threat. This is perhaps unsurprising given the overarching aim of identifying universal

principles capable of evaluating normative concepts as weighty as justice. To wit, if threats

are purely discursive then how can one determine whether securitizing agents act in the

interests of a larger collective or simply by the ulterior dictates of Habermasian strategic

rationality?

Unmaking Securitization

Abutting the second neighborhood lies a third. Similar yet distinct, the pith of the

“desecuritization” adjacency is a normative preference away from securitization. As

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Christopher Browning and Matt McDonald argue, the main thrust of the Copenhagen

School’s critical engagement with its own theory has been to extrapolate out what means

might make desecuritization possible (Browning & McDonald, 11). As noted, the

exceptional chasms opened by securitization may prove second to none in the ability to

elevate issues to the top of a political agenda, but at those heights the prevailing logics close

down deliberation and public oversight.

Paul Roe shows that the Schmittian exception lurks in the largely unregulated

politics invoked by securitization. What Schmitt comes to signify for the logic of

securitization is the abrogation of normal, deliberative, democratic procedures to the

advantage of an unchecked sovereign (Roe, 252). Relatedly, the questionable effectiveness

of securitization to resolve political issues in a positive manner suggests that some issues

may be better handled within the boundaries of normal politics (Roe, 253).

The Gordian Knot here becomes “what kind of politics we want” (Tjalve, 442).

Vibeke Tjalve reads the Copenhagen School as systemically indecisive about the normative

importance of including attentive publics. This indecisiveness stems from two causes; first,

the enduring neoliberal notion of sovereign states is bound up in the ideal of “transparency

and deliberation”. In short, a populace can engage in open deliberation only in the

presence of institutional bulwarks of civil society (Tjalve, 443). The second reason

emerges from the European political experiences which inform securitization theory, most

prominent among them pernicious dalliances with fractious, xenophobic, and hyper-

nationalist politics, particularly during the inter-war years. One cannot easily forget the

antipathies born of inter-war politics which ended in total war and genocide (Tjalve, 444).

The way forward, Tjalve argues, is to endorse a politics of contestation in which easy slides

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towards a given securitizing move are difficult. American republicanism is held up as

exemplary of the potential – in what Americans presently regards as political gridlock and

impotence, Tjalve sees a steadier normative foundation for Copenhagen (Tjalve, 448).

Similarly, Claudia Aradau finds unsatisfactory the Copenhagen School’s indecision

on the matter of preference for securitization or desecuritization. Rather than historically

rooted, she believes that Waever and Buzan in particular show a trepidation towards

normative theorizing, preferring instead to retain desecuritization as an analytical concept.

Aradau pushes for a “politics of emancipation” capable of overturning the institutional

knowledges which legitimize securitizing moves (Aradau, 406). An emancipatory lever is

presented by the universalizing principles of democratic governance under which citizens

are rights-bearers. Liberal rights are thereby presented as the foundations of resistance

against the Schmittian exception invoked by securitizations.

What Copenhagen Cannot See

For all that the Copenhagen School has offered the study of security; it remains

short of a panacea. Standing within the city square, or traversing its intellectually

stimulating precincts tucks away from sight the various “whos” and “whats” that lean in on

the city walls.

Admittance into Copenhagen requires one be able to speak, or at least to be spoken

about. To this end, Lene Hansen has poignantly shown the limitations of placing too much

stock in speech-act theory. In simple terms, the Copenhagen School presumes that

subjectivity can only be constituted when speech is possible - to pose something as

threatened necessitates it to be spoken about in such terms. By contesting the ontological

foundations of security as bound to materialism, the Copenhagen School had adroitly been

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able to explain the broadening scope of security politics. Yet, Hansen argues that the over-

reliance on speech cannot account for the mute, or those who cannot speak with requisite

volume.

Much of this incapacity is due to the specification of the theory - foremost in

reaction to scholarly jibes that securitization theory opened itself up to an infinite egress of

potentially securitized issues. Copenhagen effectively guarded against these prods by

bifurcating international security from societal security, with the former being the rightful

province of security studies. What distinguishes these two realms is that issues of the

former are discursively framed as existential threats to an entire social collective, whereas

the latter focuses on threats emanating from within a social collective towards its

individual members (Hansen 2000, 290).

Gender therefore becomes a dimension of security politics that Copehagen cannot

see or, more appropriately, hear. It is deaf, for instance, to the honor killings of Pakistani

women, killings based on victims’ gendered identities. Copenhagen fails to hear that these

women are killed due to their purported transgressions of sacrosanct gender norms

(Hansen 2000, 291). Women are sequestered in silence as enunciating their common

existential threat will only exacerbate their precarious position. A raped Pakistani woman

cannot speak for fear that it will lead to her death upon the altar of patriarchal honor

(Hansen 2000, 294).

An alternative problem arises from the necessity of securitizing moves to name an

independently constituted security referent (Hansen 2000, 298). For women to be

securitized under this logic, gender must be isolated from nationality, religion, or ideology.

Yet in the example of honor killings, it is precisely the intersection of gender with other

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identities such as religion and culture that are the source of existential threat (Hansen

2000, 299). Hansen believes that broadening analytical focus to incorporate nonverbal

communication would help sharpen Copenhagen's hearing. On the one hand, if women

cannot vocalize security then perhaps their bodies are capable of speaking it. The

insecurity inflicted upon a gendered Pakistani body may speak to collective insecurity even

when texts and dialogues are silent (Hansen 2000, 305).

Megan MacKenzie has trenchantly shown further gendered deafness within the

Copenhagen School. Desecurization in particular is shown to be an unequal and power-

bound process, even when invoked in the name of democracy. MacKenzie trains focus on

the slide from civil conflict to post-conflict reconstruction in the Democratic Republic of

Congo in order to show the unequal impacts of purposively re-entering “normal politics”. It

is at this historical juncture, “…that issues understood as traditional security concerns,

including disarmament, unemployed men, and male soldiers have been given significant

attention…matters relating to women, including sexual violence and female soldiers,

continue to be categorized as domestic, social, or private matters” (MacKenzie, 259).

A further pocket of deafness is exhibited by the inability to hear how

desecuritization parses out who is an enduring security concern along gendered premises.

For instance, “the DDR program in Sierra Leone effectively (re)constructed female soldiers

as “wives,” camp followers,” or “sex slaves” in order to desecuritize them and to distinguish

them from securitized male soldier subjects” (MacKenzie, 243 – my emphasis). What is

more, development NGOs and international organizations contributed to the gender-

spliced process of desecuritization (Mackenzie, 259). Thus securitization theory leaves

Copenhagen’s builders and visitors twice confounded. In the first instance the Copenhagen

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School will be dumbstruck to the reality that both men and women have fought and killed,

yet (de)securitization cleanly divides security from domestic concerns based on gender. To

realize that the very organizations struggling to desecuritize DRC towards pluralistic

democracy willfully engaged in exclusionary politics is to be dumbfounded yet again.

Securitizing Moves & Academic Politics

With little doubt, the Copenhagen School now constitutes an enormously popular

locale for security scholars. By some counts its “citizens” included somewhere in realm of

83 conference papers and journal articles between 1996 and 2009 and perhaps as many

workshops, panels, and roundtables (Gad & Peterson, 316). It also stands as one of the

most developed metropolises of security studies beyond its trans-Atlantic counterparts.

Little surprise then that its foremost theorist, Ole Waever, would have reason to reflect on

the differences between American and European security architectures. In a 2004

conference paper, Waever offers predictable lamentations about their differences. Citizens

of security studies, it appears, do not travel; Europeans yawn or chuckle at the positivist

predilections of their American counterparts. Europeans critically and publicly engage

with the role of security in political life, while Americans either toil away in ivory towers or

push for relevance to Washington. Americans’ architectures are built with the monies of

"supersized" funding institutions, while Europeans draw from more meagerly sized

funding sources (Waever 2004). Waever, chief architect of the Copenhagen framework,

had effectively blueprinted security studies, even across its European metropolises, as

fractious, balkanized and disinclined to intra-disciplinary dialogue.

To the easel stepped twenty five, mostly junior, security scholars. Labeling

themselves the "CASE collective" they undertook the outwardly ambitious project of

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revitalizing European Critical Security Studies (CSS) and lending some modicum of

coherency to its otherwise disparate dialogues. By offering up a unified research agenda

CASE purported to promote collegial dialogue while suppressing individualistic

competitive tendencies (CASE, 444).

Much of this blueprint delineates an old schema on new paper. The debates named,

neighborhoods drawn, and citizens sketched are reminiscent of what has already been

visited in this paper. For example, how scholars are to grapple with the normative

implications of studying security logics without increasing the ambit of security

practitioners? (CASE, 461) How to renew the critical dimensions of peace research such

that it might offer trenchant counterpoint to militarized interventions in the name of

peace? How to critique a neocolonial redolent fusion of security and development? (CASE,

463)

With a final reflexive flourish, CASE denoted what might be properly called “critical”

about CSS. The turn of phrase “theoretical relevance and relevance of theory” well captures

the intent. Critical scholarship, at minimum, obliges one to "...generate and study

academically original questions…" Critical engagements with politics are a second

requisite, mostly by enabling multiple views of a security landscape or to promote

circumspect policy discourses (CASE, 474).

A superficial assessment of the CASE collective’s blueprint of the future may adjudge

it as just that - an admirable attempt to envision unity across the obscurant and isolated

metropolises of CSS. Christine Sylvester reminds that CASE is as political as that which it

studies. The inspirational touchstone of CASE's unified blueprint after all, is an

unpublished paper by Ole Waever - a fact tucked into the "eccentric space" of a footnote

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(Sylvester, 548). Without reading the disclaimers then, CASE draws a rather political

sketch. The initial strokes trace the people who have shaped CSS; the erstwhile architects

of Aberystwyth, Copenhagen and Paris (though it remains unclear that Paris is a school or

simply Didier Bigo). CASE's knock-on arrogation is to pen itself as the inheritors of the CSS

architecture and so set to rendering prototypes of key debates in which the field,

constituted not subtly by themselves, will engage (Sylvester, 549).

From process to completed prototype, CASE is bound to the political as much as it is

capable of studying it. Leaning on the walls of the new prototype, side-by-side with

women, are now scholars, many of them feminists. Only glancing references to other

schools of thought, or more imposingly "ists", are offered. Neighborhoods not sketched are

deferred to the future, thus appropriating artistic license in deciding what will be sketched,

who will be sketched, and when they are to be sketched. There is no attempt at even

minimalist depictions of unnamed scholars, camps, or debates; they are relegated without

any proper citation (Sylvester, 550).

CASE’s response bristles at being so sternly assessed. Sylvester is charged with

having wrongly interpreted their intentions, which were illustrative rather than exhaustive

(CASE 2007, 565). Besides, CASE demands, the feminist writings Sylvester lays as

accusations look to the intersections of gender and war, which is to say something other

than gender and security. As a final aside, it is claimed that some feminists are too

sanguine about militarized interventions to critically engage them. Far better then, that IR

feminists bring into line the misinformed critical scholars in their own ranks than snipe at

CASE’s research program (CASE 2007, 567).

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The irony is that CASE comes to look very much like a securitizing actor. Without

synergizing Paris, Aberystwyth and Copenhagen, their argument tacitly suggests that CSS

will no longer constitute a recognizable field of academic inquiry. Sylvester even muses

that IR feminists, thoroughly if silently eschewed by CASE, may be the object of passive

derision because they are "threatening to the critical traditions some are endeavoring to

establish…" (Sylvester, 554). They are the threatening “others” against which CSS must

guard.

In the denouement, CASE finds itself not a successfully securitizing actor, but yet

another emergent IR camp balkanized to the rest of the field. It muddles through solutions

teased out in broader CSS literatures without engaging that literature headlong. It cannot

do so by virtue of the walls it has drawn into the blueprint. The women and IR feminists

once leaning on CASE’s walls proved transient squatters - they have largely struck out in

search of more hospitable locales. What is left for CASE is to speak to its neighbors with no

possibility of welcoming strangers, nor to travel outwards to visit other cities.

Perhaps this acrimonious altercation casts in clearest relief the inability to

distinguish between politics and scholarship. There is a research of the political and the

political within research. The political moment inherent in research is not solely met by

scholars stepping down from gilded towers, entering into a fracas of securitizing moves,

speech acts, and perlocutionary effects in order to hold up a mirror of reflexivity. The

instant before stepping out of the tower, when one has stated to their peers what they

intend to do, and ever so often, what their colleagues ought to be doing as well. The

moment before an architect puts pen to page, staring into the infinite possibility of empty

canvas, when intentions coalesce and the imminent picture emerges in one’s mind. These

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are no less political moments, exceptional in their own right. They are reason enough to

turn the mirror of reflexivity towards ourselves, for to do elsewise is to risk the silence and

deafness we as critical scholars often rail against.

Copenhagen Inspired Homebuilding

Touring Copenhagen can be an inspiring experience. One begins to ponder the

wisdom of “buying in” to a suburb, or renting space within the city square. More ambitious

seekers might consider contributing to the Copenhagen architecture, to leave some lasting

accentuation which enables others to more keenly and critically see, hear, and experience

international security landscapes. To be certain there are spaces to be bought or rented,

and architectural adornments left to be envisioned and constructed. I will briefly hazard

the role of realtor and architect to show but a few such potentialities.

A finer pen might be taken to Copenhagen’s structural logic so as to further

reinforce its bulging urban sprawl. One might think to the likely role of affect in processes,

speeches, and practices of security. The moral crusades against human trafficking and

child soldiers are equally illustrative here. Both are spoken through discursive filters of

security – one an indiscriminate threat to women and children, the other an

unconscionable and existential threat to youthful innocence. What motivates action,

sometimes preternatural action, is a politicized mixture of empathy and moral outrage.

One might also rent space in Copenhagen and invite Giorgio Agamben for an

extended visit. As Bigo’s work in particular hints at, the exceptional politics authorized by

a global war on terrorism seems to have stuck the exception as the new rule. Agamben

might muse, from a Copenhagen condo, how securitizing moves in the West play out in

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drone strikes upon naked lives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, sometimes the wrong naked

lives.

Given Carl Schmitt’s resurgent popularity in European spheres of security studies,

an invitation in his direction would hardly seem amiss. Indeed, Schmitt’s exception seems

to subtly pervade Copenhagen from square to suburb. Yet, interactions with Schmitt have

hardly played themselves out in Copenhagen. The exception born of securitization is not as

unmediated as it might seem. The 2013 Boston Bombings reminded that exceptional

moments are frequently racialized and xenophobic instances which put a sovereign to

searching for brown bodies. The Schmittian exception is also technologized; in the

unregulated politics that followed the bombings, cell phone services were cut, an

impromptu manhunt occurred across social media websites, and thermal imaging

technology finally apprehended Dzokhar Tsarnaev. Dzokhar’s glowing red body, tucked

into the belly of a boat, splashed onto millions of TVs throughout the US, seemed something

of an unintentional instantiation of the efficacy of the sovereign exception.

Thank You For Visiting

Copenhagen – an IR camp that became a city. Arguable proof that IR’s proclivity for

recurrent, discipline (re)defining debates are not quite the idle or futile affairs they may

outwardly appear. Like most any city its problems are palpable, within and beyond the city

walls. In that way it is also a reminder that the whole endeavor of security studies is

encapsulated within the political; attempts to create distance between scholars and

security practitioners will prove ultimately unprofitable. Yet there is undoubtedly

something attractive about the city square, something alluring about Copenhagen’s

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vivacious neighborhoods. Meandering through it, guided or otherwise, can jog scholarly

inspiration. It is worth a visit, even if one does not become a permanent resident.

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