The international security literature has recently observed the growing "securitization" of issues outside the traditional concern with interstate military conflict. However, this literature offers only limited explanations of this tendency, and largely neglects to explain how the new security issues are actually governed in practice, despite apparent "securitization" leading to divergent outcomes across time and space. We argue that the rise of non-traditional security should be conceptualized not simply as the discursive identification of new threats but as part of a deep-seated historical transformation in the scale of state institutions and activities, notably the rise of regulatory forms of statehood and the relativization of scales of governance. The most salient feature of the politics of non-traditional security lies in key actors' efforts to rescale the governance of particular issues from the national level to a variety of new spatial and territorial arenas and, in so doing, transform state apparatuses. The governance that actually emerges in practice can be understood as an outcome of conflicts between these actors and those resisting their rescaling attempts. The argument is illustrated with a case study of environmental security governance in Southeast Asia.
Acknowledgements:We are grateful for the useful feedback on earlier versions of this paper provided by International Studies Quarterly editor William R. Thompson and two anonymous reviewers, as well as Kanishka Jayasuriya, Jason Sharman, Bryan Mabee,Stephen Gill, and Fredrik Söderbaum. The responsibility for the final version is with the authors. We are particularly grateful to Kelly Gerard and Audriane Sani for their Final version appears in International Studies Quarterly, 57, no. 3 (2013): 462-473 2 excellent research assistance. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge funding for this project provided by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant for the project "Securitisation and the Governance of Non-Traditional Security in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific" (DP110100425), as well as by the Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom.
IntroductionIn recent decades, "non-traditional" security (NTS) challenges increasingly occupied scholars, security practitioners and ordinary people around the world, a trend reinforced by 9/11 and other high-profile terrorist attacks (see White House 2002; UN 2004). Traditionally, security threats were viewed through the prism of state survival and conceived mainly in terms of inter-state military conflict. More recently, security has come to also be associated with a wide-range of non-traditional, mostly trans-national issues, including terrorism, environmental degradation and climate change, infectious disease, transnational crime, and illegal migration.1 These are thought to traverse national borders or operate beyond the scope of conventional state action; they are not necessarily seen to directly threaten the state's very existence, but challenge its real or...