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Securitization as political theory: The politics of the extraordinary Michael C Williams University of Ottawa

I Is securitization a theory? A method? A concept? A philosophy? Or all of these? Much in the ongoing debates over the strengths and weaknesses of the Copenhagen School and the diverse literatures it has given rise to depend on how one answers these questions. At one level, these debates can only be to the good: greater precision on what different analysts or approaches mean by securitization, and how they seek to apply it, provides important correctives to existing research as well as opening new avenues of inquiry. As the Introduction to this Forum shows, and Thierry Balzacq’s contribution argues in more detail, enhanced methodological rigor, elaboration of analytic techniques, and greater clarity about questions of context and fields of practice are positive developments in the further development of this vibrant area of research.1 In this brief contribution, however, I would like to suggest that valuable as this process is, greater empirical breadth, sociological depth, and methodological precision confront crucial limitations because at its core (in its ‘essence’, if one likes) securitization is incapable of being fully captured by empirical social science. This is part of securitization theory’s sometimes frustrating ambiguity, but it is also a crucial part of its fertility and insight. As a perspective that is philosophical and in a very flexible sense sociological, securitization is above all political. It points to the protean potential that is a defining characteristic of politics in itself. This aspect is not a ‘philosophical’ perspective entirely divorced from sociological concerns. On the contrary, it provides a specific vision of the importance of the sociology of securitization which transcends questions of method alone and accentuates the place of securitization as an aspect of political theory as much as a contribution to social science. In part, these questions can be explored by returning to themes developed around the oft-cited and controversial question of whether securitization is defined by a politics of emergency and exception.2 These debates have tended to focus rather one-sidedly on the relationship between securitization theory and Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of the concept of the political as an exceptional decision defined within the friend–enemy distinction, and with the question of whether and to what extent the Copenhagen School’s definition of security is derived from, or identical to, Schmitt’s concept of the political.3 Yet, the issues raised by these questions can move beyond the friend–enemy distinction. Cast more widely – and perhaps more creatively – they alert us to the relationship between securitization and what Andreas Kalyvas has called ‘the politics of the extraordinary’.4

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If securitization is viewed within the wider lens of the politics of the extraordinary, instead of the narrower view of enmity, emergency, or exceptionality that has tended to dominate, it opens up a range of key issues that cross the philosophical/sociological divide. While debates over the connection between securitization and the politics of exception have (understandably) consistently been cast in a negative light, a focus on the politics of the extraordinary highlights the creative nature of securitization, as well as its strength in linking philosophical and sociological concerns within security politics.

II What is the politics of the extraordinary? From one side, it is familiar within securitization theory as the declaration of existential threat and (if successful) the generation of the capacity to break free of the rules of ‘normal’ politics. In the debates over securitization theory, this has often become identified (usually negatively) with ‘Schmittian’ exeptionalism, decisionism, and the declaration of a divide between friend and enemy. Yet, as the controversies over whether securitization can also be positive show, a purely negative view of securitization cannot capture the range of issues involved.5 Focusing instead on the possibility of positive securitization brings into view a second type of extraordinary politics, that which see it as calling into action what Sieyès famously called the ‘constituent power’ of a political order.6 Placing the question of the constituent power at the center of concern shifts the gravity of securitization theory. While exceptional politics within a friend/enemy logic produces or reproduces an exclusionary order, extraordinary politics stresses also the possibility of securitization as a process of openness and self-determination with democratic potential. In Kalyvas’ evocative formulation, within a democratic vision of extraordinary politics ‘there is an intensification of popular mobilization, an extensive consensus’ which ‘describes the extraordinary reactivation of the constituent power of the people and the self-assertion of a democratic sovereign’.7 The positive potential of securitization theory is thus the corollary of its potential for closure, allowing for not only a normative reaction of expansion of concern in the name of more ‘positive’ forms of security but also a more foundational – if always fraught – reevaluation of the political order itself in ways that can be inclusive and reformative as well as violently exclusionary. This potential of securitization theory has been noted on a number of occasions8 in connection with ‘acts of founding’, such as revolutionary moments, which are foundational in the sense of ‘higher’ law-making: they express the ‘constituent power’, the will of the people in the broadest sense.9 Mobilized in the construction of a new political order, this constituent power becomes latent in ‘normal’ politics: it retreats – and must necessarily do so – in order for stability to be secured, and normality to prevail over the vicissitudes of permanent revolution. Ordinary politics thus becomes dominated by the more narrow and mundane competition of diverse interests and elite political management. As Kalyvas nicely puts it (linking the arguments of Bruce Ackerman10 with Schmitt), ordinary politics is: characterized by widespread pluralism and political fragmentation, devoid of any collective project that could unify the popular sovereign around some concrete fundamental issues. This fragmentation explains and justifies the predominance of relations of bargaining, negotiation, and compromise among organized interests, driven by their narrow, particular interests.11

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Yet, in this vision, the constituent power remains capable of mobilization. At such junctures, ‘the people’ – the constituent power of the political order – can emerge from repose. The politics of the extraordinary, and a democratic politics of the extraordinary in particular, are thus marked by times when the: formal procedural rules that regulate normal institutionalized politics are supplemented by or subordinated to informal, extraconstitutional forms of participation that strive to narrow the distance between rulers and ruled, active and passive citizens, representatives and represented. Extraordinary politics aims either at core constitutional matters or at central social imaginary significations, cultural meanings, and economic issues, with the goal of transforming the basic structures of society and resignifying social reality. To put it in more general terms, the democratic politics of the extraordinary refers to those infrequent and unusual moments when the citizenry, overflowing the formal borders of institutionalized politics, reflectively aims at the modification of the central political, symbolic, and constitutional principles and at the redefinition of the content and ends of a community.12

The resemblances between securitization theory and the politics of the extraordinary seem clear. Securitization theory, too, stresses how securitization can mobilize audiences outside formal political structures, no matter how restrictive these possibilities may appear – and often are. The Copenhagen School also draws attention to the protean nature of securitization, for, however, fixed or sedimented structures may be, one of the most striking aspects of security is its ability to challenge these structures and practices, as well as to reinforce them. While recognizing that not all securitizing acts are equally powerful in a given context (and certainly far from inimical to a wide range of sociological means of grasping them), securitization theory nonetheless holds fast to the idea that security can in principle be enunciated from anywhere and can potentially bring into existence a group that comes to see itself as a group through this process of representation – what, in a different context, Pierre Bourdieu called a process of ‘social magic’ or the ‘Mystery of the Ministry’. The state or other dominant social actors are doubtless usually more capable of successfully undertaking this project, and we can often identify sociologically the structural and discursive conditions that make certain securitizing acts more likely to succeed than others. Yet, there remains an indeterminacy and unpredictability at the core of this process that renders any attempt to reduce securitization to prevailing processes inevitably partial. Here, we confront a key dilemma for the sociology of securitization. It is simply impossible – not only sociologically, but existentially – to grasp definitively its myriad potentialities. The constituent power is not a fixed entity – ethically, spatially, or temporally. Nor is there any fixed or exclusive position, discourse, or procedure through which it can be evoked and mobilized. As revolutionary movements demonstrate perhaps most clearly, the politics of the extraordinary can emerge from unexpected sources and through surprising processes that overturn, disrupt, or challenge prevailing structures and practices. One of the merits of the Copenhagen School is that it alerts us to the negative as well as the positive aspects of this potential. Securitization often (perhaps even usually) expands the gap between rulers and ruled in a democratic sense by concentrating decision and action in the hands of state executives, even if it may narrow it via an intensified emotional identification between the people and the polity. Here, security becomes in

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many ways the antithesis of politics in the sense of contestation that, in this Forum and elsewhere, Wæver has associated with Arendt. These issues are at the heart of an intrinsic ambivalence about whether to securitize an issue or not – a decision which the Copenhagen School, and Wæver in particular, has generally responded to by counseling caution. But caution is not exclusion: securitization theory is an overtly political theory precisely in its admonition that actors should weigh consciously the possible consequences of ‘security’ actions, and that taking and ascribing responsibility for these decisions and actions is crucial. A clear sense of complex social causality is vital in these judgments, but it is alone insufficient to address challenges that are political in this much deeper sense. It is also possible to glimpse further dimensions of the nature of the constituent power and the politics of the extraordinary beneath debates over method. Although the issues are too wide-ranging to be covered in any detail here, they can usefully be opened up by turning to an issue which has preoccupied much recent sociological research in securitization, and which often held to directly challenge or even undermine its more ‘classical’ formulations. This concerns the strict divide that the Copenhagen School proposes between ‘normal politics’ and ‘security’ practices. As numerous analyses (including Patomäki’s in this Forum) have demonstrated, such a clear divide cannot seem to capture the social reality of security practices concerned with the politics of ‘unease’ or the increasing salience of risk technologies, which rarely conform to so stark a logic and so categorical a divide. But while these insights challenge views of securitization that place it within a political philosophy of the norm and the exception, they also raise questions which go well beyond the confines of empirical sociology and method per se, and in fact cut to the core of some of the most difficult political issues involved in the sociology of securitization. Simply put, the question is how to think through the implications of whether (or not) there is a connection between the realm of normal politics and that of security, and of the position and role of the constituent power in relation to both. If, as early forms of securitization theory seem to imply, security and normal politics are completely distinct realms, then securitization theory seems fated to reproduce those understandings of the constituent power that view it as completely outside normal politics – as, for instance, either substantialist (as a given, such as Sieyes ‘nation’ or some iterations of Schmitt’s Volk), or as purely empty and unconstrained (a protean space of possibility sometimes linked to formulations of Derrida, a norm-less exception again often tied to still other versions of Schmitt, and sometimes to various formulations of ‘agonistic’ democracy).13 Philosophically and politically, neither of these positions stands up to scrutiny. Each ultimately succumbs to logics of authoritarianism or arbitrariness, or to a retreat into evasiveness that undermines their political insight as much as it reflects their conceptual inadequacies. Sociologically, however, the interesting question involves the processes through which these concepts and visions of security (or ‘the political’) gain social purchase and render the politics of the extraordinary into one-sided and often violent practices. To be critically informed, such an enquiry must be both philosophical and sociological, falling prey neither to claims about the ‘philosophically’ necessary or essential nature of security as a founding moment inescapably tied to exception as enmity, nor to claims about the sociological inevitability of exclusionary and violent social and political practices

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that actually reflect their spurious conceptual foundations more than any social or political ‘necessity’. Here, a sociology of securitization has intriguing predecessors and inspirations in figures such as Otto Kirchheimer, and particularly Franz Neumann, who sought to explain the social conditions and political strategies under which logics of extremity and exception, or of neutralized domination via de-formalized law and administration which were their dialectical counterparts, came to prevail and how, by being recognized, they might be countered.14 From another direction, there are those philosophic traditions which stress the importance of not separating normal and extraordinary politics, and which seek to provide conceptual and sociological insights for understanding how the extraordinary can be connected to normal politics without either falling prey to unconstrained understandings of each (the decisionistic exceptionalism or de-politicized neutralization of ‘normal’ politics, for instance). This takes current debates in securitization in interesting and potentially important directions. In a recent contribution, for example, Ole Wæver has clarified his position by arguing that for him, securitization theory involves a ‘Schmittian’ understanding of security as exceptionality and emergency with an ‘Arendtian’ understanding of politics.15 This is a typically insightful formulation; yet, it can be pushed even further by noting that one of Arendt’s key concerns was to attempt to demonstrate how exceptional and normal politics could be brought into relation with each other – and that for her it was vital to understand how extraordinary politics could function positively within democratic politics without falling into violent exceptionalism.16 The lineages represented by Neumann, Arendt, and others attune us to the fact that by following sociologically a ‘philosophically’ derived view of securitization that defines it as emergency/exception/enmity, and as the antithesis of normal politics, we may be blinding ourselves not only to crucial issues of judgment concerning the question of the constitutive power in political life but also to the sociological structures and political practices that seek both to activate and limit the creative potentiality of security. For example, much has been written, with great insight and well-taken concern, about the contemporary imbrication of security logics into normal politics, and important sociological work has drawn attention to the processes through which this can take place. But revealingly little attention has been focused upon the opposite possibility – on the ways that ‘political’ logics can operate positively within ‘security’, and vice versa. This is not a simple oversight. It emerges from the ways in which sociology of securitization has been constructed upon a specific philosophic view of securitization as enmity/exception that limits our vision of the politics of the extraordinary. As I have argued elsewhere, this has also been connected to too easy an acceptance of a Schmittian critique of liberal democracy and has too often led to a failure to undertake a serious-enough engagement with liberal–democratic politics.17 Sociological and philosophical approaches to security have much to learn from each other. I do not mean this in the obvious sense that one develops meta-theory and the other empirical theory. Instead, the connections between the philosophic and the sociological are essential in allowing securitization theory to explore and confront some of the most important and difficult issues opened up by its agenda. The politics of the extraordinary provides one potentially fertile direction for philosophical and sociological research beyond unnecessary divides between ‘internalist’ and ‘contextualist’ theories of

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securitization. Perhaps most importantly, it may supply inspiration for thinking about the politics of securitization and about the politics of the sociology of securitization. As the examples of Neumann and Arendt show, the sociology of securitization need not – and, perhaps, ethically cannot – be neutral. The philosophic and the sociological are in this vision connected, and sociological concerns are at least partially reconfigured in a fuller political theory of securitization. Notes   1. See, for instance, the contributions to Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), and those to the Special Issue on ‘The Politics of Securitization’, Security Dialogue, August–October 2011.   2. See particularly Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2006).   3. My own contribution to this discussion (and to its one-sidedness) can be found in Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization in International Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47(4), December 2003, pp. 511–31.   4. Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).  5. For diverse discussions in a very wide literature, see Claudia Aradau, ‘Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and Emancipation’, Journal of International Relations and Development 7(4), December 2004, pp. 388–413, and Rita Floyd, Security and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 43–60, 174–87.   6. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, edited and translated by Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 2003), pp. 92–161.  7. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, pp. 164–65.   8. See, for instance, Aradau, ‘Security and the Democratic Scene’; CASE Collective, ‘Europe, Knowledge, Politics – Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. Collective Responds’, Security Dialogue, 38(4), November 2007, pp. 559–76; Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), September 2007, pp. 367–70.  9. For instance, Bonnie Honig, ‘Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic’, American Political Science Review, March 1991, pp. 97– 114. As in most of International Relations (IR), interest in these trajectories has often been confined to ‘post-structural’ readings of securitization, drawing largely on Derrida; but as intimated below, the lineages are much wider and – arguably – much more intriguing than this relatively constrained reading allows. 10. See Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and We The People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The linkages between these issues and IR theory is developed further in Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams, ‘Reviving the Rhetoric of Realism’, in Security Studies (forthcoming). Interestingly, a rare mention in IR is in the liberal theory proposed by John Ikenberry, although he does not pursue them; see his Liberal Leviathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 13–4. 11. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, p. 164. 12. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, p. 7. Kalyvas argues, not uncontroversially, that such an understanding can also be found in Schmitt’s thinking. 13. On the first of these options, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in D. Carlson, D. Cornell and M. Rosenfeld (eds) Deconstruction and the

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International Relations 29(1) Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67; as Stefano Guzzini notes, Derrida’s thinking played a role in very early formulations of securitization theory, and this is a legacy that remains to be resolved; see Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–November 2011, pp. 329–41. On agonistic democratic versions, different examples include Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 31–45; and Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Some of the key texts here have been collected as The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William Scheuerman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). Perhaps the most sustained sociology is Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942); an excellent discussion is William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For a somewhat different view on their significance for securitization theory, see Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization’, pp. 357–83. Both Kirchheimer and Neumann are, of course, generally associated with the Frankfurt School, which is in turn often connected to forms of Critical Security Studies that are usually seen as standing in opposition to securitization theory. Pursuing these paths demonstrates yet again the missed opportunities for engagement that might be retrieved from beneath these often misconstrued and by now sterile oppositions. Ole Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’, Security Dialogue 42, 2011, pp. 465–80. For an exploration, see Ferenc Feher, ‘Freedom and the “Social Question”’ (Hannah Arendt’s Theory of the French Revolution), Philosophy and Social Criticism, 12(1), April 1987, pp. 1–30. Although she does not explicitly place it in this context, this seems to me one of the key themes at work in Vibeke Schou Tjalve, ‘Designing (De)security: European Exceptionalism, Atlantic Republicanism and the “Public Sphere”’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August– October 2011, pp. 441–52. Michael C. Williams, ‘Securitization and the Liberalism of Fear’, Security Dialogue 42(4– 5), August–October 2011, pp. 453–63; see also Nomi Claire Lazar, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For an important treatment, see Jef Huysmans, ‘Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 3(3), December 2004, pp. 321–41.