It is cautious, however, to point out that though the speech act makes up a substantial part of securitization, it is not in itself securitization. The act of simply speaking security alone is not a successful case of securitization but rather is classified as a securitizing move or a political move. Buzan et al argue that securitizing actors securitize an issue through persuasion as a matter of “security through illocutionary speech acts”, by means of reciprocal interaction with an audience.
Otherwise put, the audience holds a great amount of power as the members of the audience are ultimately entrusted to decide whether a securitizing move succeeds or fails. Granting the audience this power lends a sense of normative utility to the securitization framework. An innate strength in the securitization paradigm is that it acts as a viable process through which agents can start and stop speaking security in an effort to mandate action or inaction depending on the circumstance.
The utility that can be harnessed from the securitization construct can aid in setting up a framework for legitimacy contingent in the audience-speaker relationship. Consequently, the legitimacy evoked fundamentally rests on the pillar of consent, a powerful strength of securitization. Consent has the ability to create a bond of concordant trust between the audience and the speaker by opening important pathways of communication.
This channel aids an audience receiving extensive knowledge about the security issue in an effort to empower them, whereby they can discern potential positive and negative impacts of the securitizing move on other agents in the international system. This empowerment can transcend from solely the state to other referent objects, thus legitimizing the voices of sub-state, transstate and non-state actors. As states become subjected to everevolving unforeseen, volatile, diffuse threats that arise from global networks of non-state actors in domains as diverse as communication, finance, technology and transport”, it will be critical to be clear as to what agency will have the power to respond, especially as the nature of these hazards become “more difficult to measure, locate, monitor and contain. ” Adnan Menderes observes that, “a broader security agenda requires us to look at the activities of agents other than the state [… ] instead of restricting the analysis to the state’s agency. ” While securitization opens the stage for audiences to speak freely, there are limitations to its scope of influence.
For example, there may be instances when an audience is silenced. Silence is a phenomenon unfortunately not explained by the fieldwork of critical studies, nor does the CS take it into account. This shortcoming potentially renders the entire framework problematically narrow. In her article, “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Secret Dilemma”, Lene Hansen attempts to highlight these flaws in the CS’ speech act framework. She stresses that voice and body are extremely important constructs of subjectivity but that when ‘security as silence’ descends, the construction of subjectivity can fundamentally endanger the actor.
This silence occurs “when insecurity cannot be voiced, when raising something as a security problem is impossible or might even aggravate the threat being faced. ” Hansen provides the example of honour killings of women for allegedly having brought dishonor upon their families taking place in Pakistan to primarily showcase instances of international security that do not fall in line with the delineation argued by the CS. In this case, the honour killings in Pakistan cannot be strictly seen as a security issue because doing so would increase the threat to these women.
As Hansen explains “by discursively acknowledging the rape, the woman in question runs a risk of being penalized herself. ” Another limitation or criticism of CS centers on this issue of the utterers of the speech acts. The entire CS argument rests on the speech act of the dominant actors, typically the political leaders. The downfall is that this apparent monopoly encourages the notion that securitization is only happening when there are verbal interventions of those who are institutionally deemed legitimate to speak on behalf of a particular political or social community.
This shortcoming is evident in the Pakistan example. The state, the deemed legitimate entity according to the international system, refuses to protect the women’s security. Other possible legitimate speech act actors, such as non-governmental organizations also fail to act in the Pakistan situation since they argue that the state, Pakistan, should be held internationally responsible for not complying with human rights conventions to which it is signatory.
Though, for the CS the audience is a centerpiece of the process, it is clear that in some contexts it is far from obvious who has the rightful claim to be identified as the speech act performer. Moreover, as in the Pakistan problem it is not definite who exactly the audience is. Is it the women themselves trying to speak out about the atrocities committed against them? Is it the international community that witnesses these barbaric acts? Is it the non-governmental organization whose mandate on the face of it appears misdirected?
And more importantly, if both the political and apolitical actors remain apathetic, who is effectively able to protect these women if their own voices are silenced? Securitization therefore cannot effectively combat these silences and the lack of clarity in the claim of being the audience. Securitizing actors only have a chance at being protected if their audience is acknowledged. Without a mechanism to determine which actors get to perform a speech act, how qualified they have to be to act, and who gets priority over another, securitization risks not being effective.
Moreover, there is a risk of competing or intra-audience disagreements. What happens if an audience only accepts part of the securitizing move but rejects another? This situation, Paul Roe points out, occurred at the time when Britain had to make a decision as to whether or not to join the Iraq War back in 2003. He claimed that while “audiences might come to accept the ‘frame’, they may also decide to reject its implications. The securitization methodology is ill equipped to deal with audience tensions.
The audience’s deliberation can occur when the securitizing actor presents a speech act that may marginalize, undermine or disregard other groups in society, thus raising the uneasy realization that securitization for one actor or issue may inevitably have to occur at the hindrance of another. This outcome is problematic since we run the risk of tipping into a ‘zero sum game’, thereby showing we are unable to deviate from our realist preconception of security as stressed by traditional security studies scholars.
Fathoming which actors merit security and how much of it they do is inherently difficult and can obstruct the flow of the securitization archetype. In conclusion, securitization provides a useful framework for analyzing how an issue gets securitized. However, the framework suffers from lacunae that compromise its effectiveness. Perhaps a way forward would be to assess normatively the moral legitimacy of referent objects and securitizing actors as they seek to strategically practice security as a means of addressing an ever-increasing and complicated international security agenda.
