the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

discursive security 217possible to a much larger extent. Constituting something as a securityproblem might be a problematic or even dangerous strategy in that itgrants privilege to official leaders and legitimises the suspension of civiland liberal rights (see also Deudney, 1990, for a similar point). But, criticsargue, desecuritisation may not be normatively desirable if it merelyillustrates the repression of an issue (Huysmans, 1998b; Aradau, 2004b,2006; Alker, 2006; Behnke, 2006; Elbe, 2006; Taureck, 2006; Floyd, 2007).It is crucial, therefore, that desecuritisation is contextualised and that itis replaced by the possibility of politicisation, rather than mere silence.Another set of articles have responded to these issues by deepening thelinguistic foundations of securitisation theory (Balzacq, 2005; Stritzel,2007; McDonald, 2008; Vuori, 2008), its attention to media and ‘visualsecuritisation’ (Williams, 2003: 527; Möller, 2007; Hansen, forthcoming),or by exploring the role of ‘violisations’ that take security from the speechact to acts of physical violence (Neumann, 1998).A related critique has come from Bigo (2002: 73) and Huysmans (2006b:5), who argue that the conceptualisation of securitisation through discoursesof drama and emergency misses the bureaucratic routines and the‘effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional’, for instancethe concrete everyday practices undertaken by the police and groups of‘security professionals’ patrolling the border. Drawing on Foucault andBourdieu, Bigo’s conceptualisation of security is, like the CopenhagenSchool’s, discursive, but with more explicit links to Poststructuralismand an emphasis on the importance of the institutionalisation of thefield of security. Networks of surveillance and data-mining help to createa ‘security state’ where everybody is under electronic surveillance, andBigo emphasises the way in which governments and their bureaucracieshave managed to gain control over the political process at the expense ofparliaments and oppositional political actors (Bigo, 2002).Finally, as noted above, the Copenhagen School rests on a Schmittianunderstanding of security as danger and the exceptional characterof security politics (Huysmans, 1998b; Williams, 2003). Since this is aparticular set of political and normative assumptions, rather than objective,empirical facts, this in turn leads the Copenhagen School to confronta similar set of questions to those which have been asked of bothRealism and Poststructuralism: what are the implications of this conceptionof security and state identity? Does the state rely upon enemiesto maintain identity/control over its population? How may this logicbe changed, and what would a post-Schmittian security scenario looklike?