Securitization Revisited

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.Chapter 6 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