Despite a growing interest in the role of emotions in world politics, the relationship between emotion and securitization remains unclear. This article shows that persistent, if sporadic, references to fear and emotion in securitization studies remain largely untheorized and fall outside conventional linguistic and sociological ontologies. The tendency to discuss emotion but deny it ontological status has left securitization theory incoherent. This article offers a theoretical reconstruction of securitization where emotion, specifically collective fears, serve as the locus of an audience's judgment for the practice of securitization. Yet rather than simply accepting that fear facilitates securitizing moves, the article draws on appraisal theory from psychology to argue that collective fear appraisals are often fragile cultural constructs. The generation of these emotional appraisals is often constrained by the limited symbolic resources of the local security imaginary and how agents contest and employ these resources. When the capacity to generate collective fears is constrained, so too is the practice of securitization. An empirical discussion of threat images in US foreign policy is used to explore these constraints. The tendency for securitizing moves to be interpreted as comic underscores the precariousness of social practices seeking to elicit particular collective emotions.
AbstractMotivated by the neglect of uncertainty and perverse consequences in constructivist studies of security, this article pursues a reconceptualization of the security dilemma. Approaching the dilemma as a “logic of self-limitation” constituted by choice, uncertainty, and tragedy, the article explores how this logic can be transposed to the constructivist context of securitization theory. The resulting “securitization dilemma” draws renewed attention to the unintended character of social life, highlights how the choice to engage in practices of threat construction are shaped by uncertainty, and shows how the failure to recognize these limitations can have tragic consequences. While the argument aims to broaden the empirical focus of securitization studies to include perverse and unintended consequences, it also looks to engage with the literature's distinctive ethical claim over how speaking security is never a neutral act. Political actors may well be responsible for the security claims they make, but we need to recognize that this responsibility includes the effects of security claims that actors anticipate, as well as those they do not.
Why does realist political advocacy for a more limited national security agenda fail? For nearly two decades, realists in general and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in particular have publicly lamented an endemic problem of threat inflation in America, culminating in the unnecessary 2003 Iraq War. This article argues that understanding the failure of realist advocacy requires appreciating its roots in the model of the marketplace of ideas, an ironically liberal model of discourse that downplays questions of power. As a corrective, I argue that securitization theory and its framing of security debates as discursive, competitive and ultimately power-laden processes offers substantive insights into understanding realism's anaemic interventions. Focusing specifically on the advocacy of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in their opposition to the 2003 Iraq War, I examine how powerful processes involving social identity and collective emotion came to be turned against realists by their neoconservative interlocutors. In the final section, I suggest that a common research agenda among realism and securitization scholarship is needed to explore their joint interest in the statecraft of threat construction in order to produce practical, politically relevant knowledge.
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