Since the Copenhagen School of Thought incorporated daily life concerns in securitization, experts mostly focus on the public sector. It essentially places an emphasis on dangers that go beyond conventional ways and offers constructivist practical methods to decide if a problem is a security concern or not. Instead of being objective and external, security challenges are “decided by actors, inter-subjective, and socially produced.” Therefore, according to academics, security is a rhetorical act; no threat exists, but the top class has declared the situation a national emergency.
A scale for determining the status of topics, ranging from non-politicized to securitized, was provided by securitizing theory, which contrasted security and securitization with conventional politics and politicization. Although de-securitization is touted as “the best long-term solution,” securitization is not completely disregarded. This theory questions whether a security is always a good thing because of the unfavorable impacts of securitization.
The sectorial elements of security are first discussed in Barry Buzan’s book “People, States, and Fear.” Every sector has security dynamics, according to Buzan, and when referent objects perceive existential dangers, security worries are raised. The five primary sectors each have a varied security dynamic depending on the referent object. Government is often the securitizing player in the military sector with the authority to use force, while pressure groups inside the military are occasionally the securitizing actors. Both internal and external threats exist. For instance, due to the danger to territorial integrity during the Cold War, NATO played a significant role in ensuring military security.
Threats are concentrated in the environmental sector at all scales, including local, global, regional, and ecosystem. However, the emphasis is mainly on the global level since the economic sector contains a wide range of referent objects, from individuals, governments, and classes to international marketplaces. The securitizing actors are diverse and active at many levels, too. Threats to social security arise when the identity of the community and society is in jeopardy. Any challenge to state sovereignty in the political sphere (apart from a military one). Barry Buzan asserts that due to the political component of any security concern, this sector primarily intersects with all other sectors.
Regarding securitization in practice, the initial securitization was suggested by two US congressmen, Richard Pombo, and Duncan Hunter, in a letter to President George W. Bush on June 17, 2005, requesting the president to take measures to safeguard National Security. According to the letter, the proposed purchase of US Energy Company Unocal by China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) may raise concerns among Americans about jobs, energy output, and energy security. It also emphasized the effect on American interests, particularly the danger posed by the Chinese government’s quest for global energy since energy directly affects national security.
This led to certain top American actors protesting against the CNOOC proposal, with the main goal being to take steps to assess the CNOOC deal. Eventually, it also cautions about the potential consequences and demands action to indicate that the bid should be considered a “non-commercial transaction with other motives and purposes,” and that the US government’s intervention must be seriously taken into account if it affects US national security. At the conclusion of the resolution, it was stated that Unocal had accepted the deal, which would “pose a direct threat to the national security of the United States,” so reinforcing the threat’s existence.
The securitization hypothesis, like all theories, has some drawbacks and is open to many modifications and criticisms. It has been critiqued for missing a normative purpose since it doesn’t explain why the securitization in the Unocal instance was good or bad or if it was better to de-securitization. The securitization theory asserts that securitization is a political decision, which eliminates the possibility of a normative purpose in analysis. Another criticism of securitization theory is that it emphasizes language and speech above other non-verbal security expressions and ignores the reality that language is only one means of meaning transmission, leaving out both physical acts and visual representations. Another drawback of the securitization hypothesis is how it interprets speech acts.
Another criticism of securitization theory is that it does not place enough attention on the audience. It is also unclear how to define the audience and who is and is not included in it. Last but not least, according to divers from the Copenhagen School, confirmation bias also affects securitization theory. But for security’s key approaches, securitization theory is extremely crucial. Even though it has a lot of shortcomings, it may still be used to determine if a problem is one of security or not.
