Desecuritisation as the supplement to securitisation

If there has been scepticism as to the political status of desecuritisation, the concept of securitisation has been widely recognised as political. Huysmans, Williams, and Behnke hold more specifically, that Schmitt's understanding of the Political lies at the core of the Copenhagen School's definition of ‘security’ as the sovereign authority's ability to legitimate the use of emergency measures in the face of exceptional threats. ‘Security’ is thus a speech act with particular political implications. Schmitt held that a community is unable to exist without a distinction between friend and enemy, and that making decisions on that distinction may require ‘a strong, dictatorial political leadership’.Footnote ¹⁷ Schmitt's decisionism was, moreover, formulated against, what he saw as liberalism's formalism, rationalism, and technical view of the political. This in turn echoes the status of the security speech act within the Copenhagen School as a decision and thus as radically ‘unfounded’.Footnote ¹⁸ As the mobilisation of the security speech act is always a choice, it is, holds Williams, always ‘explicitly political’.Footnote ¹⁹

There are strong affinities between Schmitt's the Political and the logic of securitisation, but the Copenhagen School also holds, that the Political is not identical to politics as such: ‘In terms of Schmitt versus Habermas, politics cannot be reduced to the friend-enemy distinction.’ Wæver has also made clear, that while his conceptualisation of security draws on Schmitt, his understanding of politics follows Arendt in its stress on inter-action, plurality and constellations of decisions.Footnote ²⁰ As Patricia Owens further explains, ‘The ultimate expression of Arendt's idea of politics is not Schmitt's struggle to the death between enemies. It is the ability to appear before plural equals and to debate and act to build a common world … When individuals come together to debate and to act they create this political realm between them.’Footnote ²¹ There is also an affinity between Arendt's understanding of the political and Williams's observation that the influence of Schmitt on securitisation theory is reigned in by the need for security speech acts to be accepted by an audience, which in turn opens for dialogue and the ‘transformation of security perceptions both within and between states.’Footnote ²²

Having established that the concept of securitisation has strong affinities with Schmitt's concept of the Political, let us return to the concept of desecuritisation. The fact that we have ‘securitisation theory’, rather than ‘desecuritisation theory’, illustrates that ‘securitisation’ has a (seemingly) superior status. Desecuritisation is derivative of securitisation semantically (modified through ‘de’), and in terms of the political modality, the concept identifies: desecuritisation happens ‘away from’ or ‘out off’ securitisation. Moreover, there is a theoretical inferiority attached to desecuritisation in that it lacks securitisation's grounding in popular language. One cannot desecuritise through speech acts such as, ‘I hereby declare this issue to no longer be a threat’, as this would be invoking the language and logic of security.Footnote ²³ Desecuritisation happens as a result of speech acts, but there is not, strictly speaking, ‘a’ desecurity speech act.Footnote ²⁴

Yet, the fact that the terms were coined together through Wæver's 1995 article on ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’ indicates, that ‘securitization’ was invented in tandem with ‘its’ opposite concept. As Derrida famously argued, all signs are constituted through hierarchical juxtapositions to something they are not, but some signs enter into particularly striking hierarchical pairs, as one term is seen as the real, original, or essence, and the other as the supplement.Footnote ²⁵ The supplement is derivative of and inferior to the privileged ‘real’, but the supplement is at the same time, ‘that which is required to complete or fill up some existing lack’.Footnote ²⁶ An often used example is that of the ‘supplement’ to a lexicon: the supplement is unthinkable without ‘the real lexicon’, but ‘the real lexicon’ is also incomplete without ‘its’ supplement. In Christopher Norris's account of Derrida's logic of supplementarity, the ‘apparently derivative or secondary term takes on the crucial role in determining an entire structure of assumptions.’Footnote ²⁷ Taking the idea of supplementarity to securitisation theory, in the same way as the lexicon is incomplete without its supplement, securitisation relies upon desecuritisation.Footnote ²⁸ Not only does this invert the superiority-inferiority relation between the two terms, it also shows the political status of both. First, if securitisation is about the fundamental distinctions that found human life, there is no way that decisions about leaving this logic through desecuritisation would not be political, too. Second, were there only securitisations, there would be only hyper-politicisation and no ‘normal politics’ for securitisation to separate itself from.Footnote ²⁹ Securitisation needs, in other words, the desecuritised as its constitutive, and equally political, outside for it to achieve analytical and political meaning.

The public sphere and the friend-enemy distinction

Another way to interrogate the political status of desecuritisation is to ask how the concept ‘reworks’ the two components that make up security politics, that is, the public sphere and the friend/enemy distinction. Let us first clarify what kind of space desecuritisation refers to. The definition of desecuritisation as the ‘shifting of issues out of emergency mode and into the normal bargaining processes of the public sphere’ suggests a move from the securitised to the politicised (‘meaning the issue is part of public policy, requiring government decision and resource allocations or, more rarely, some other form of communal governance’), rather than to the non-politicised (‘meaning the state does not deal with it and it is not in any other way made an issue of public debate and decision’).Footnote ³⁰ A move that takes us from securitisation to politicisation is different from one that takes us to non-politicisation, and given that the Copenhagen School defines desecuritisation as the movement of issues ‘into the ordinary public sphere’, it might be best to delimit desecuritisation to the former move.Footnote ³¹

Desecuritisation thus creates or restores a genuine public sphere, where humans can, in an Arendtian fashion, ‘debate and act to build a common world’.Footnote ³² Securitisations are, to be clear, also a mode of ‘bargaining’ in that securitising actors need to convince their audiences that emergency measures are required and suspensions of normal rules and rights thus legitimate. This, according to Williams, shows a Habermasian commitment to communicative action and discourse ethics within securitisation theory.Footnote ³³ Yet, the acceptance of the securitising speech act is also a bargaining ‘out of’ the political sphere which radically transforms it. This makes an audience's acceptance of a securitisation a leap of faith, in that the suspension of normal political rules can prevent issues from becoming part of the public domain. Securitisation implies a right to prevent information from reaching the public sphere and ‘the public’ might thus be unable to mobilise in favour of desecuritisations, it would have wanted to, had it had the information in question. Thus while Williams is right to identify a communicative rationality and a dynamic of persuasion in the securitising move, it is simultaneously a move that challenges – or even eradicates – a Habermasian assumption of what politics should be, namely that ‘participants in a discourse are open to being persuaded by the better argument and that relationships of power and social hierarchies recede in the background’.Footnote ³⁴ The extent to which an audience retains a capacity to revoke its accept of a securitisation and take it back into the politicised thus becomes a crucial issue.

Securitisations, which have become institutionalised to such an extent that they no longer are in need of explicit articulations to justify their status, pose a particular challenge for desecuritisation attempts.Footnote ³⁵ Viewed through the concept of the public sphere, the absence of speech acts seems to make them less susceptible to ‘being taken back’ through desecuritisation. Yet, whether this is seen as a political-normative problem is a different question. Institutionalised securitisations might rely upon repression and violence or they might be the product of repeated audience acceptances atrophying into a set of institutionalised practices. The potential of securitisations to become embodied within unproblematised institutions establishes a complex relationship between what we might call ‘institutionally sanctioned practices’ and public discourse. The Copenhagen School does not assume, that there is ‘a rather simple one-way flow’ between public discourse and policy practice, as Christina Boswell suggests, but sees the political sphere as a dynamic space where actors seek to justify their policies and destabilise those of their opponents.Footnote ³⁶ Situations where it looks as if ‘administrative agencies may adopt securitarian practices without a prior green light from political discourse’ are thus to be analysed either as indications of ‘prior green light’ having been given to such an extent that they are no longer needed.Footnote ³⁷ Or, if no light is indeed discernable, such practices are susceptible to being brought to the public attention in which case political actors, who are formally responsible, confront the choice to lend their legitimacy – and political capital – to the securitisations upon which those practices are based or curtail such practices so that the audience no longer sees them as securitising. As Roxanne Lynn Doty's study of border vigilantes on the US-Mexican border illustrates, security practices can be carried out by non-state actors ‘in diverse and amorphous ways, long before officials or elites utter securitizing speech acts’.Footnote ³⁸ The point is that securitising actors are held accountable for their securitisations in different ways depending on their status vis-á-vis formal political institutions and that ‘political actors’ constitute – or avoid responsibility for – the practices of ‘their’ administrators or citizens through dynamic processes.

The reinvigoration of the public sphere, that desecuritisation implies, facilitates the engagement of a wider range of actors than if an issue is constituted as one of securitisation. But a desecuritising move might not ‘only’ expand the number and kind of agents, but transform the identities and interests of Self and Others.Footnote ³⁹ Desecuritisation requires a loosing of the friend-enemy distinction possibly to the point of a whole-scale transformation where ‘the enemy’ shreds its identity, as was the case with the Soviet Union as the Cold War ended. Another possibility is a less fundamental or sudden reconstitution of identities that may facilitate change over time. Wæver's conception of politics as one of interrelations implies, that the process of desecuritisation is itself one of shifting interrelatedness: it transforms not only who the self and its enemy are, but what they are. Desecuritisation is, in short, performative: it must instantiate the non-threatening identity of the Other for desecuritisation to be possible.Footnote ⁴⁰ Desecuritisation is not, in other words, a linguistic or political two-step procedure where first ‘we’ have to agree that X is no longer threatening and then, ‘we’ agree to stop speaking security.

One should keep in mind that speech itself is not transparent or devoid of power and that ‘the security speech act is not defined by uttering the word security’.Footnote ⁴¹ Securitising actors may reconstitute an issue such that it avoids the high-pitched nodes of radical, barbaric, blood-thirsty Others, while still situating it within a modality of securitisation. To give an example, immigration discourse might be couched in ‘civilised’ terms where ‘immigrants’ are not ‘threats’, but for instance ‘better helped in their own environments’. Yet, the institutional structures and ways in which anti-immigrant control is practiced might reveal a much more ‘securitised’ political terrain. Such cases of ‘strategic self-moderation’ raise the question why securitising actors appropriate this form of discourse rather than a more linguistically overt securitisation. One answer would be, that there are certain ‘civilising tropes’, that the audience in question is less likely to rebel against – or at least securitisation actors believe this to be the case.Footnote ⁴² If we read the status of the public sphere in the light of Wæver's post-structuralist writings, particularly of the late 1980s, we might further add, that subjects are not given prior to their entrance into the public sphere, but that they are constituted in discourse. This implies that the ability of politicisation to transform relations between Selves and Others is not only a matter of dialogue and persuasion in a Habermasian sense, but of questioning the very subject constructions that are on offer. For instance, debates over how ‘Europe’ can dialogue with ‘its Muslims’ presuppose, that there is a Muslim subject and that individuals want to be recognised as such, rather than through other forms of subjectivity.

Desecuritisation as responsibility

A different way that desecuritisation reveals its political status is through the emphasis on responsibility and choice in decisions related to desecuritisation. Wæver states a preference for desecuritisation on the grounds, that it ‘would be more effective than securitizing problems’, yet, one should be hesitant to conclude, as does Huysmans, that ‘effective’ equals an understanding of desecuritisation as technical, managerial, and instrumental.Footnote ⁴³ ‘Effective’ could be instrumental, but it might also refer to what is ‘effective’ in terms of pursuing a political-normative project. For one thing, the Danish word effektiv has the connotation not only of efficiency, but of something being enabling. Wæver is, moreover, adamant that ‘we’ are responsible for our securitisations and desecuritisations, and he calls for a morally committed form of agency.Footnote ⁴⁴ The intensity with which ‘our responsibility’ is invoked is for instance supported by Wæver's description of his own words as ‘alarmist’.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘We’ – academics, politicians, citizens, all who speak – must actively work through security to get to desecuritisation.Footnote ⁴⁶

The reconstitution of the friend-enemy distinction, that desecuritisation entails, also imply that while desecuritisation is ceteris paribus the preferred long term option, the Copenhagen School refrains from an embrace of ‘universal desecuritization’, that sees desecuritisation as ‘the preferable ethico-political strategy for scholars and societal actors, regardless of time and space’.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Wæver puts it, although ‘our reply’ is usually to aim for desecuritisation, ‘occasionally the underlying pessimism regarding the prospects for orderliness and compatibility among human aspirations will point to scenarios sufficiently worrisome that responsibility will entail securitisation in order to block the worst’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Wæver's insistence on there being instances, where we would indeed want to securitise, also leads him to criticise ‘hard-core post-structuralists’, who seek to open up, avoid making choices, and who recommends ‘living dangerously’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The responsibility for ‘closing down’ the political domain that securitisation entails raises the question, whether a move from the securitised to the depoliticised might ever be desirable. Considering that desecuritisations take place around threats that have been explicitly articulated, the likelihood of these ‘disappearing’ from the securitised directly into the depoliticised is probably quite small. Yet, as Floyd's analysis of the Bush Administration's move of defence environmental issues from the securitised to the depoliticised shows, it is not impossible.Footnote ⁵⁰ As actors securitise and politicise can they also depoliticise in ways that facilitate the long term goal of a political bargaining sphere? One might think of this as a possibility, when an issue has been so deeply securitised, that locating it within the politicised brings so much attention that it risks slipping back into the securitised. Depoliticisation might in such cases appeal as ‘strategic time-out’. The dynamics surrounding securitisation of diseases such as HIV/AIDS might illustrate this situation.Footnote ⁵¹ Assume we have a securitisation of those afflicted by HIV/AIDS followed by a medical-technological break-through, where an affordable cure is introduced. This, in turn, facilitates a constitution of ‘disease management’ as a technical-bureaucratic issue. Not only might one argue that the ‘security problem’ of the decease has been ‘solved’ such that it no longer has to be the subject of lengthy public debates, one might see this as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ that protects the funding allocated to disease management by not making it the subject of political debates, debates that might then move HIV/AIDS back into the modality of the securitised.Footnote ⁵²

The danger of constituting something as a technical-nonpoliticised issue is, however, that it – like securitisation – implies a move out of the political bargaining sphere and an institutionalisation of contestable political decisions and priorities. How we assess the potentials of non-politicisation thus depends on whether we see public deliberation – and restitution – as the (only) way to ameliorate conflicts. A case that shows the complexities of this issue is that of post-World War II Yugoslavia, where atrocities committed by Serbian and Croatian forces during the war were repressed until they were securitised in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the claims that older conflicts were ‘frozen’ during the Cold War should be treated with caution – as this presupposes essential identities just waiting to resume ‘their’ true form – the silencing of intra-Yugoslav massacres did provide securitising actors with an apt material around which to rally an audience.Footnote ⁵³ Hence what in securitisation terms can be characterised as a move from securitisations during World War II to a depoliticisation of Croat-Serbian relations/atrocities during the Cold War might in the long run have facilitated the return of mutual securitisations.

The choice between securitisation and desecuritisation must – considering the political status that both concepts have – be inherently political. As a consequence, we cannot derive decisions on whether to (de)securitise from any objective status that threats might have. Nor should we, holds Wæver, assume that we could identify a set of universal principles, that would give us the answer to whether securitising, say the environment, terrorism, or immigration is a good or a bad thing.Footnote ⁵⁴ A truly universal set of (de)securitising directions would, as all universalisms, be both depoliticising and inherently particularistic, as no ‘universalism’ can exist without spatial or temporal exceptions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Drawing on Arendt and Morgenthau, Wæver calls instead for seeing the political situation as ‘always unique and concrete, a field of forces, a situation demanding a choice, a choice that has consequences’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This accentuates the demand for personal responsibility, as politics is essentially unpredictable and ‘can never be reduced to meta-questions’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the absence of meta-answers one has to ‘make ultimately unfounded ethical and political choices’ in a world of ‘unsolvable real-world dilemma’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The political history of desecuritisation

The fourth and final element in the recovery of the political status of desecuritisation consists of a reading of the historical context within which desecuritisation was and has been developed. Interestingly, in the numerous discussions of securitisation theory, few pay much attention to the way in which securitisation theory was developed in the shadow of the Cold War.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is puzzling given that securitisation theory has been developed – and presented – through continuous engagement with contemporary events.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet, as Wæver writes in 1995, it was in fact ‘European security between 1960 and 1990, the period of change and détente, which provided the framework for developing the speech act interpretation of security’.Footnote ⁶¹ Wæver's key concern – and the reason for inventing the concept of desecuritisation – was to find a way in which East European social movements and dissidents could modify their societies without triggering ‘security responses’ from ‘their’ elites.Footnote ⁶² The use of concepts ‘other than security’ such as ‘détente’ and ‘human rights’ within the Helsinki/CSCE process were part of a desecuritising discourse, where Western states and non-state actors worked to reassure Eastern elites, that transformations could occur without generating ‘insecurity’. Theorising détente was thus part of a political project, that strove ‘to open up domestic space for more political struggle’, and this clearly made desecuritisation more than an analytical or technical concept.Footnote ⁶³ As is evident from the footnotes in ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, the formulation of the political position that ‘desecuritization’ encapsulated was not a free-standing incident, but the culmination of years of politically engaged writings, usually from a deconstructivist-post-structuralist position.Footnote ⁶⁴

Going back to these writings of the late 1980s, the view of détente as capable of generating a full-scale transformation of the Cold War is less optimistic than ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’ might perhaps lead one to expect. Wæver held, that ‘The East-West conflict is not a conflict to be solved’, but to be managed through the development of a non-violent conflict culture.Footnote ⁶⁵ Change was only possible, if both parties considered their position recognised by the adversary. ‘A dynamic process is only possible when the actors concerned engage in a certain amount of mutual stabilization and assurance … Political change is only possible in an atmosphere of détente. And détente is only possible when the fundamental structure is stable.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Wæver observed that he could be criticised for being ‘socially status quo oriented by wanting (both sides) to respect the “security interests” of the power holders on the other side’, although his call for change through stabilisation did not endorse either of the political establishments.Footnote ⁶⁷ Rather, given that the Cold War was an unsolvable conflict – at least for the foreseeable future – détente was the only strategy through which relations could be eased.Footnote ⁶⁸ Although the terms securitisation and desecuritisation are not yet used, security is identified as a speech act,Footnote ⁶⁹ and one might see the genesis of desecuritisation – as a concept and a political preference – in Wæver's definition of the long term goal as to channel

In the light of the debates over whether desecuritisation has political sting, it is worth stressing, that Wæver saw his analysis as linked to him being a ‘peace activist’ and ‘a kind of security expert in Denmark’, and that he called for ‘a higher tolerance of criticism and politics’, when debating East-West security arrangements.Footnote ⁷¹

In hindsight, it is easy to fault Wæver for his failure to predict the end of the Cold War – although in this, of course, he was far from alone – and for the conservatism of some of his predictions: it would be highly negative for détente, if countries unilaterally left their alliances and governments should not directly support oppositional forces on the opposite side.Footnote ⁷² Yet, it is important to acknowledge that conservative or not, this was a highly political analysis based on the capacity of a conceptual shift to generate – or at least support – qualitative improvements in global (in)security. Although the concept of desecuritisation is not yet invoked, it is present in the analysis as Wæver couples the desirability of a move away from security and into the realm of politics to ‘détente’. ‘Détente’, moreover, is both a term through which political and academic debate is generated, and a process that describes relations between the two blocks. Comparing ‘détente’ to later examples of desecuritisation, it might be said to retain some element of ‘security’ insofar as it is a concept/process through which long term ‘non-security’ might eventually be attained. Détente opens up space for politics, both within and between the two blocks, but the fact that the conflict still looms in the background implies, that (re)securitisations remain a possibility. If one day, conflict completely disappears, so would, one assumes, the concept of détente. And so it did.

After the Cold War, as desecuritisation comes into its own as a concept, it is applied by Wæver to new contexts and conflict constellations while the concept retains its political status. First, the idea that conflict is avoided, not by great powers agreeing on one definition of ‘Europe’, but through different, yet compatible, ‘Europes’, entails an ethos of recognition similar to that of détente: it is through accommodating others' visions of themselves rather than enforcing one's own, that one avoids securitisations.Footnote ⁷³ Second, the use of desecuritisation to capture how the EU encouraged prospective East European member countries to solve cross-border minority problems without resorting to force or high pitched security discourse echoes a similar political-normative preference for peaceful conflict resolution.Footnote ⁷⁴ And third, the invocation of Europe's past as ‘the Other’ – and with that a securitisation of the possibility that intra-European conflicts might return – is an example of a ‘responsible securitization’, that preempts ‘numerous instances of local securitization that could lead to security dilemmas and escalations, violence and mutual vilification’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The possibility of desecuritisation being applied to different contexts and dynamics is further heightened by the way in which desecuritisation has been applied by scholars beyond Copenhagen, applications to which we now turn.

Applying desecuritisation: four political forms

In the light of the recovery of the political and normative substance of desecuritisation above, the second part of the article now turns to how desecuritisation has been constituted through empirical applications. I suggest, more specifically, that one can identify four forms of desecuritisation each of which invoking different understandings of the public sphere and the status of the amity-enmity distinction. The elaboration of each form starts with a presentation of analysis that deploys it, then the particular political dynamic that come with this form of desecuritisation is discussed before the specific political and normative questions that arise within this form of desecuritisation are brought up.

The four forms of desecuritisation can be applied at three different levels. First, they can be used to characterise the ontological, political positions, that theories adopt. At this level the four forms of desecuritisation constitute deeply held normative-political views about the ontological status of security, politics, community, authority, and so on, and as such they describe not only what has happened in the past or the present, but what is possible and might become. This implies further, that the forms cannot meaningfully be tested against the empirical. The deliberation of the four forms of desecuritisation at this deeper normative-political level underscores, that the goal of this article is not to arbitrate between them, or to decide, for instance, whether a Schmittian understanding of desecuritisation as replacement is superior to a Habermasian one, but rather to sort out what positions are adopted and how they differ. Second, the four forms of desecuritisation might be used analytically to identify the trajectory of a given instance or case of desecuritisation. Third, the four forms of desecuritisation each generate more specific political and normative questions. The four forms are ideal types, which means that individual security theorists might articulate understandings of (security) politics at level one which does not fit completely into one of the four forms. Or, empirical analysis of specific cases at level two may combine two or more of the four forms. Yet, given that the typology is drawn from the debates over and applications of securitisation theory, my claim is that we are unlikely to find – at least at the moment – instances of desecuritisation, which cannot be analysed through these four forms of desecuritisation.