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Identity, are key. Ultimately, this analysis attempts to bridge national security culture and securitization in a two-step process, integrating interconceptionalization of culture (such as through intertextuality) and intersubjectivity of securitization in a reductionist approach to international security.
Summary and Keywords
Since it was launched in the mid-1990s, the concept of securitization has consistently been in vogue, at least among European scholars of world politics and security studies. The idea of viewing security as intersubjective, where anyone or anything can be a threat if constructed as such, is both an appealing and useful conceptualization when analyzing security issues beyond the traditional, realist, state-centric view of security being equal to military issues. However, the precise aspects that make securitization appealing have also limited its broader impact on security studies or foreign policy analysis (FPA), as these fields often adhere to the assumption of threats being actor-based and external. Nevertheless, several studies demonstrate that both the theoretical assumptions of securitization theory and prior empirical applications of these assumptions are useful when analyzing different policy and security issues, and the concept can be applied to a broad range of issue areas, contexts, and actors. In order to capture the applicability of securitization theory to the study of foreign policy, this article will set out to describe and review the central assumptions of securitization theory and the different conceptual developments that have taken place since its inception. I thereafter proceed to outline different issue areas to which securitization has been employed, focusing on both domestic and external military and nonmilitary threats. This review of prior works demonstrates that although many studies are not self-proclaimed analyses of foreign policy, they capture important dynamics of the internal-external security nexus that epitomizes politics in the globalized era. The article concludes with a discussion of the added value that a securitization framework can bring to FPA.
Keywords: Securitization, foreign policy, Copenhagen School, international relations, threat constructions, security
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Why do some events take precedence over others in terms of being viewed as security issues? This article argues that in order to answer this question it is necessary to move beyond the assumption that threat images are self-evident. Rather, a distinction should be made between the contextual conditions that may lay the foundation for a threat image and the subjective problem formulation by actors. In addition, in order to analyze how, why, and when an actor constructs a threat image and initiates a so-called securitization process, a broad conceptual and analytical framework should be employed. This article suggests a framework that incorporates ideas and identity at the international and domestic levels, and the internalization processes of the central decision-making unit performing the securitization. The article argues that while the diffusion of ideas by entrepreneurs forms an important basis for the threat constructions of national decision-makers, it is necessary to take the role of national and domestic identities into account in order to explain why some idea diffusion processes succeed while other do not. Identity serves as a catalyst or gate-keeper of idea diffusion. The internalization of the decision-making unit, finally, is a central mechanism that highlights the process between the explanatory factors and the outcome (securitization). By including these three concepts into the analysis, this article takes a holistic approach that can be employed to analyze different kinds of actor-based and non-actor-based threat images.
Keywords constructivism, ideas, identities, internalization, securitization, threat perception
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Author biography
Roxanna Sjöstedt is assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Her previous publications have covered the topics of threat construction, identity, and securitization in Estonia, the United States, and Russia and appeared in Journal of Peace Research, Security Dialogue, and Foreign Policy Analysis.