Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
(Lynn-Jones and Miller 1995). Although viewed as unwelcome by traditionalists, such
as Walt and Mearsheimer, this widening of security did not undermine the Realist
logic of conventional Security Studies. The focus was still on the state system
and seeing relationships between states governed by power. Widening was simply
extending the range of factors that affect state power beyond the confines of military
and trade affairs.
An argument for a more profound widening of security than tacking on some
non-military issues to the range of threats to states emerged through the 1990s in a
new approach that came to be characterized as the ‘Copenhagen School’. Buzan
trailblazed this approach in the early 1990s (Buzan 1991) but it crystallized later
in the decade, when he teamed up with Waever and De Wilde in producing the
groundbreaking work on Security.
Threats and vulnerabilities can arise in many different areas, military and
non-military, but to count as security issues they have to meet strictly defined
criteria that distinguish them from the normal run of the merely political. They
have to be staged as existential threats to a referent object by a securitizing
actor who thereby generates endorsement of emergency measures beyond
rules that would otherwise bind.
(Buzan et al. 1998: 5)
This framework of analysis represented a significant shift from the traditionalist,
‘narrow’ conception of security since it not only brought non-military issues into
focus but argued that issues can be considered matters of security even if they are
not threatening states. A key influence on this was the largely unforeseen revival in
nationalism being played out in the post-Cold War landscape of Eastern Europe,
particularly in Yugoslavia. The fact that conflict and the disintegration of a state
occurred not as a result of a state security dilemma but because of internal societal
security dilemmas prompted an attempt to incorporate sub-state groups into security
analysis.
The deepening of security
Going beyond the Copenhagen School in extending the domain of Security Studies
is the ‘deepening’ approach led by Pluralists and Social Constructivists. Deepeners
embrace the concept of ‘human security’ and argue that the chief referent object of
security should not be the state or certain sub-state groups, such as stateless nations,
but the individual people of which these institutions/groups are comprised. Falk, for
example, considers that security ought to be defined as ‘the negation of insecurity
as it is specifically experienced by individuals and groups in concrete situations (Falk
1995: 147). This is a significant leap from widening which, as Falk describes; ‘still
conceives of security largely from the heights of elite assessment, at best allowing
the select advisor to deliver a more enlightened message to the ear of the prince’
(Falk 1995: 146).
The root of the problem with the traditional approaches to security politics
is what Wyn-Jones describes as the ‘fetishization of the state’ (Wyn-Jones 1999:
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