Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SECURITY AND SECURITIZATION
Table 1.3 Causes of death in the world in 2001 (%)
Disease 91
Miscellaneous accidents 4.1
Road traffic accidents 2.1
Suicide 1.5
Homicide 0.9
‘Collective violence’ 0.4
Natural disasters 0.05
Source: WHO (2002b).
politically avoidable (see Chapter 4). Also, while some accidents may be unavoidable
and, to a certain extent, ‘natural’, this is, in fact, a pretty small proportion even for
‘natural disasters’ (see Chapter 9).
‘Collective violence’ subsumes wars and all ‘organized’ killings including
international war, civil war, political massacres (e.g. genocide), non-state violence
(terrorism) and gang crime. Of these categories, international war is by far the
smallest cause of fatalities. It is an indication of how the study of security in
International Relations has become skewed over time that the issue most associated
with the discipline is a comparatively minor threat to most people in the world. Of all
of the security threats considered in this book the average citizen of the world is least
threatened by military action from another state or a foreign non-state actor. Threats
are invariably close to home and familiar. This is exemplified by the fact that more
people kill themselves each year than are killed in both homicides and ‘collective
violence’ combined. Suicide is not considered in this study since it is a voluntary
death, but this is an area the WHO have recently increased research into since there
are clearly underlying reasons why people, in increased numbers, take their own
lives.
Security ‘wideners’, including some Realists, accept that non-military issues
can become ‘securitized’ and hence be privileged with ‘national security’ status. The
issues securitized in this way, however, are arbitrarily defined. The tendency has
been, on the one hand, to select non-military issues that military forces can help deal
with, such as fighting drugs barons abroad or assisting in civil emergency operations.
On the other hand, ‘securitization’ has sometimes been granted to external nonmilitary
problems on the basis that they have domestic military repercussions. Issues
such as AIDS or environmental degradation in distant countries may destabilize
regional balances of power and trigger military conflict that the onlooking government
may be drawn into or be affected by in some capacity. Hence, with widening,
the logic of national interest and prioritizing high politics is not really challenged. It
is more of a refinement of the way in which external threats are calculated and a case
of allowing ‘low politics’ to rise to prominence in the absence of major ‘high politics’
threats. Military defence is still being prioritized and security being defined as a very
specific noun rather than as an adjective.
The Copenhagen School approach takes a step forward from this in using the
methodology of the ‘speech act’ to define when an issue becomes a security issue.
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