the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

discursive security 213widening literatures from the 1980s that had mainly focused on the economicand environmental sectors. In Western Europe, increased integrationwithin the EU made ‘European integration’ a threat to nationalconstituencies fearing the loss of political sovereignty as well as culturalautonomy, and immigration was also presented as a threat to nationalidentity. ‘Societal security’ was defined as ‘the ability of a society to persistin its essential character under changing conditions and possible oractual threats’ (Wæver et al., 1993: 23). While the state was the referentobject for political, military, environmental and economic security, it was‘society’ that constituted the referent object for societal security (Wæveret al., 1993: 26). This opened up for the study of ‘identity security’ andpointed to cases where state and societies did not align, for instance whennational minorities were threatened by ‘their’ state, or where the state, orother political actors, mobilised society to confront internal or externalthreats.The Copenhagen School explicitly constituted this as a middle positionbetween traditionalist state-centrism on the one hand and equally traditionalPeace Research’s and Critical Security Studies’ calls for ‘individual’or ‘global security’ on the other. ‘Societal security’ limited the possiblereferent object to two collective units, state and society, and excluded theindividual and the global. According to Wæver, ‘it seems reasonable to beconservative along this [referent object] axis, accepting that “security” isinfluenced in important ways by dynamics at the level of individuals andthe global system, but not by propagating unclear terms such as individualsecurity and global security’ (Wæver, 1995: 49; McSweeney, 1996, 1998;Buzan and Wæver, 1997).Societal security theory made reference to ‘possible or actual threats’and was still to some extent linked to an objective definition of security,although the emphasis on how political actors pointed to identityas being threatened had a Constructivist element to it. This ambiguitywas later resolved in favour of a discursive conception of security in thatthe ‘securitisation’ approach, developed by Wæver, made the definitionof security dependent on its successful construction in discourse. Securitisationtheory has three main roots: one in speech act theory, one in aSchmittian understanding of security and exceptional politics, and one intraditionalist security debates (Williams, 2003; Huysmans, 2006b: 124–144). Combining these three, the general concept of ‘security’ is drawnfrom its constitution within national security discourse, which implies anemphasis on authority, the confronting – and construction – of threatsand enemies, an ability to make decisions and the adoption of emergency