A relative newcomer in the field of security studies, securitization theory has grown into a vibrant research program. It has now generated core concepts, assumptions, theories, and exemplary case studies across a wide range of areas, including the environment, global health, migration, defense, and cyber security. The contrast with realist and liberal theories is stark. While realist and liberal approaches to security regard threats as material, objective phenomena, securitization studies focus on the definitions of threats, the conditions under which such definitions become influential, and the ways in which they affect social relations, institutional distribution of powers, and the rule of law.

Security in Translation wants to explicate how threat images constructed elsewhere enroll another national setting into securitization discourses and practices. The argument proceeds in two parts. The first discusses the development of securitization through images of “first” and “second” generations. It ends up with a chapter on translation, as a distinctive voice within the second generation. Put simply, the difference is this: The first generation accorded too much power to the speech act, while the second generation situates discourses within a broader family of factors that shape the transformation of some social problems into security issues (e.g., context, culture, history, etc.).

What energizes the book is the claim that the second generation of securitization theory provides more insights into the sources of national policies toward threats construction. However, the problem with a temporal account of how securitization theory is organized is that it lumps together researchers with very different theoretical, epistemological, and methodological commitments. Some scholars associated with the second generation, such as Juha Vuori (“Illocutionary Logic and Strands of Securitization,” European Journal of International Relations 14 [December 2008]: 65–99), essentially amplify the Copenhagen school’s view rather than challenge it. The second part of the book compares back-to-back the securitization of organized crime and rogue states in the United States and, subsequently, in Germany. Although this structure might be judged linear, it works well and enables readers to follow the main argument quite smoothly.

One striking feature of contemporary world politics is that most threats do not have a national origin. The image they convey and the policies they call for usually emanate from a different national realm. In short, security threats and their images travel, and they do so more or less successfully. The purpose of the book is to account for this process, emphasizing, as it were, conditions under which the transplant of security threat operates and achieves its impact. Securitization, according to the author, therefore requires a more sophisticated examination of how security threats travel, because this reveals the importance of domestic factors, including institutional and cultural features, as well as historical memories, in shaping a state’s security preferences.

Specifically, Holger Stritzel inquires into the “translation” of U.S. security discourses on “organized crime” and “rogue states” in Germany. The selection of cases allows him to compare and assess differential effects of “mechanisms” of translation. In one case, that of organized crime, translation was successful; in another, rogue states, it was not. The puzzle, then, is why. Stritzel finds the answer in the following factors. First, the German context was more sensitive to the organized crime narrative because it strongly resonated with the ambient pop-cultural references to the Mafia. Thus, organized crime could spread more effectively to Germany as it could easily hook up to local cultural materials associated with organized crime. Second, in contrast to the rogue states discourse, elites were able to tap into the “elusiveness” (p. 114) of the organized crime metaphor in order to present it as a distinct threat to Germany’s security. Finally, while elites appealed to the urgency of dealing with organized crime, they were not able to outwit local resistances to the use of such rhetoric in the rogue state case. Hence, the failure of securitizing rogue states in Germany.

Stritzel significantly advances our understanding of the work of cultural contextual factors in the securitization of problems. He shows not only why context matters but also which specific features of a locale decisively change the fate of a securitizing move. But the analytical purchase of the book goes beyond the confines of security studies. Processes at work, for instance, could be found operating in different topics. For instance, those working on the evolution of the “precautionary principle” or the “global war on terror” would probably recognize the potency of some of the processes identified by Security in Translation. The local “text,” as poststructuralists like to call it, plays a crucial role in the circulation of foreign narratives or images of security threats. The author convincingly argues that in addition to power discrepancies among elites of a given state, once-neglected factors such as popular culture, domestic institutional arrangements, and national memories have to be factored in.

The book is therefore better defined as a detailed study of two attempts to securitize a public problem by delving into processes of translation. However, to comparatively uncover the travails of translation in order to rejuvenate securitization raises two problems. First, translation brings in its train other contiguous and well-established concepts, such as convergence, diffusion, and transfer. Take convergence. It is concerned with the type of question that troubles Stritzel, namely: the degree of similarity between policies of different locales (Catharina Holzinger and Christoph Knill, “Causes and Conditions of Cross-National Policy Convergence,” Journal of European Public Policy 12 [October 2005]: 775–96). There are both empirical work and conceptual framework of convergence that discuss the relations among these concepts and the empirical implications of adopting one concept instead of another (Witold J. Henisz, Bennet A. Zelner, and Mauro F. Guillén, “The Worldwide Diffusion of Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reform, 1977–1999,” American Sociological Review 70 [December 2005]: 871–97). I believe that a confrontation of such analyzes with Stritzel’s is potentially rewarding.

Second, the book presents different processes that it singles out under the name of “mechanisms.” This is not without problems, however. Mechanism has a very specific, though debated, meaning in the social sciences (Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolt for the Social Sciences, 1989). Domestic elements or pop culture are not mechanisms, nor are they even processes. This means that Security in Translation is primarily a book on factors that shape translation, not on “mechanisms” that explain outcomes of translation. It succeeds clearly on the former, not on the latter.

Third, most scholars of securitization studies bemoan the lack of engagement with traditional security studies. Stritzel proposes to gauge his approach vis-à-vis realist, social constructivist, and pluralist perspectives. Yet this is done in passing and toward the end of the book. This is better than nothing, of course. Realists, based mainly in the United States, never compare their results with what securitization, an approach regarded as too European, has to offer. Perhaps, for this very reason, scholars who are persuaded that securitization possesses a superior analytical leverage have more interest, if not responsibility, in showing what realists or liberals miss when they overlook securitization theory’s insights. After Stritzel’s book, scholars would have to confront that question head-on, less for the stake of healing tensions than for the necessity of consolidating their research results.

Security in Translation is a reader-friendly text that will appeal to both critical and traditional security scholars. By drawing upon the concept of “translation,” the book proposes an original approach as to how and why some security problems move from one context to another. It could have done more, for instance, in terms of explaining how its insights compare to what the literature on diffusion teaches us. And some would find the claims on “mechanisms” a bit wanting. Yet the theoretical discussion is vivid and the empirical sections, which accord a central importance to discourse analysis, is very well crafted. The result is a book that goes beyond most of the familiar ideas of securitization theories.