Securitisation Theory and Its Application in Migration

1
Securitisation Theory and Its Application in
Migration

• Tasneem Siddqui
• Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit
  (RMMRU)
• Migration and Remittance Non-Traditional Issues
  in Asian Security DiscourseBRAC CDM,
  Rajendrapur, Dhaka22-23 August, 2008

2
Defining Traditional Security

• Traditional security discourse dominated by
  realist understanding of international politics
• It is about geo-politics, deterrence, power
  balancing and military strategy
• The state and its defence from external military
  attacks is the exclusive focus of security
  policy
• The state as only referent of security.
• Security confined to deliberate threats
  (primarily of a military nature) to physical
  security of state.

3
What is Non-Traditional Security (NTS)?

• Post cold war era, reduced justification for huge
  expenditure for ensuring state security
• Security analysts started boarding the arena of
  security discourse titled it Non-Traditional
  Security
• It focuses primarily on non-military challenges
  to security
• NTS incorporates the state as a primary referent
  object of security but also moves beyond it by
  including other referent objects like human
  collectivities

4
Issues

• Economic security
• Environmental degradation
• HIV-AIDS and other diseases
• Ethnic conflicts
• Arms smuggling
• Sea piracy
• Undocumented migration
• Organised crime (sea piracy, human and drug
  trafficking)
• Religious conflicts

5
What do these NTS issues have in common?

• They are all trans-national in character and
  defined in political and socio-economic terms and
  not in military terms.
• Not new security concerns but intensified and
  spread by forces of globalization

6
What is securitization?

• Copenhagen School A new framework for analysis,
  (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde)
• Securitization Representation of an issue as an
  Existential Threat by a speech act in which the
  sheer utterance of threat constitutes the
  Action that establishes something as a security
  Issue and hence
• justifies all actions outside the normal bounds
  of politics to deal with it.

7
Who and How

• Who are securitizing actors?
• Governments, political elites, military, and
  civil societythose actors who securitize an
  issue by articulating the existence of threat(s)
  to the survival of specific referent objects
• How do they securitize?
• Through speech act
• How is a process of securitization completed?
• Securitizing actors use the language of security
  (speech act) to convince a specific audience of
  the existential nature of the threat. The act of
  securitization is complete once the relevant
  audience is convinced of the existential threat
  to the referent object

8
Limitations of the Copenhagen School

• While the Copenhagen School tells us who
  securitizes and how securitization takes place,
  it does not address the question of why
  securitization occurs.
• The Copenhagen Schools notion of securitization
  is based on European history and culture, and
  tends to be Euro-centric in its approach.
• It does not pay much attention to the unintended
  consequences of these processes.

9
Desecuritization

• Bringing Securitized Issues Back into the Realm
  of Normal Politics.
• To desecuritize an issue is to remove it from
  the realm of the politics of survival and thus to
  render it amenable to more cooperative forms of
  behavior. (Richard Wyn Jones)