STATE, IDENTITY AND SECURITY: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

From the very dawn of human civilisation till today the primordial instinct of all living organisms and human beings for self preservation and survival has remained paramount. The evolution of man’s gradual passage into various organisations starting from family, groups and finally into state has been imperatively goaded by the inescapable proclivity for preservation of the self. This is as true for human beings as for all institutions and states. Self entails identity - a distinguishable competitive existential and ideational element that inspires a person to occupy a covetous position exacting respect, dignity, status and recognition of one’s superiority from others in terms of glory, power and wealth. As individuals vie for this for carving out a respectable niche, the states similarly in the global scene in realistic parlance strive for dominance and superiority in terms of material and military power. This search for identity and self preservation has been the principal cause of competition, conflict and war among the states in the absence of a government of governments at the international level.

Preservation of identity and survival is the main task of security through the instrumentality of power. In Hobbesian paradigm, power, status and dignity of a state 

Narottam Gaan, Ph. D, D. Lit is Professor and Head, Department of Political Science and Human Rights,

Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, India. His email address is: narottam_gaan@yahoo.com.
©Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies (BIISS), 2016.

need to be preserved and perpetuated. Accordingly, what is secured comes under the label of security. More power and security is required to secure what is already secured.

In case of individuals, the very feeling of inadequacy of preservation of self, survival and identity by self help impelled them in their voyage to land ultimately in the state. The identity of the individuals per se the people has become synonymous with the identity of the state. The security of the state is the security of the people. This is found resonated in a popular adage in Britain: “when the king or queen of Britain sleeps nicely in Buckingham palace in the night, the people of Britain sleep safely with their windows and doors open.” The identity - creation and reinforcement of a psychological space coincides and merges with the territorial space that is the state. This is the dominant theme in the realism and neo-realism literature on security studies which focuses on the centrality of state as referent object of security 

The problem is that the new developments and changes in global scene in the post realism period have challenged the outsized significance of state as the centre of security studies in view of demystification of the belief that the state’s overpowering and unrivalled military strength has not been successful in providing security to the individual human beings. With feminist movements, rise of religious groups and ethnic upsurges, migration of people, environmental crisis and climate change, the psychological space merging with state gets separated and a yawning gap erupted between the two spaces. The focus is no longer on the state rather on individual human being leading to human security i.e., to address the non-traditional, non-state centric spaces that were not considered important earlier or in realist and neo-realist schools of thought on security analysis. This is the thread that the critical security studies select to weave their widening approaches to security in defiance of dominant realist and neo-realist paradigms.

The paper is an attempt to understand security critically from both realism and neo-realism paradigms and critical security theories as well, but with their limitations. It challenges their analysis focusing on individual as the main referent subject of security without marginalising the state. The paper ends with the question mark as to what is alternative to state. It has made a content analysis of the literatures available on contemporary security studies.

“Security” is derived from the Latin word Securitas, which is a variation of securas, meaning, “without care.” When a human being or a person moves, acts, thinks or expresses or does something without care or fearlessly without being affected by or in absence of the perturbation of limitation exerted upon by any other or any source, or condition it means that person is established in security or perched in a “carefree situation”. In other words, security is not an imagery of a hermitically sealed or insulated situation which does not recognise the existence of similar or dissimilar stereotypes of that person. The very word “security” implies the existence of similar or dissimilar which implants or is likely to engender a sense of fear that the “carefree” situation is in danger of being vitiated. Conceptualised further, the very existence of similar or dissimilar stereotypes is what defines, constitutes or adds meaning to the very word “security”. The similar or dissimilar stereotypes are termed as the other in order to define a situation as having threatened or very likely to threaten the very existence of the self or the actor in terms of its survival and identity. 

“Carefree situation” means wherein that person lives or hopes to live without being perturbed by forces inside or outside that threatens or decimates his/her physical existence as human being. Thus, what comes to be included within the very conceptual understanding of security is that person’s existence in physical, mental, intellectual, moral and spiritual realm without similar threats. Security means the very act of distancing away spatially the other to a position where the danger of threat looks slender or absent. The very subjective imperative of an individual to perpetuate living as a human being without fears of extinction distinguished from others’ similar survival instinct is what comes within the ambit of security and to live distinguishably and in a dignified way from that of others is what is called identity. This quest for security is to secure identity that ultimately culminates in a state. These two aspects of security can be said as “identity concerns” of persons or human beings. Identity and security are embedded epistemologically in the same conceptual edifice. Negatively speaking, security means the outstripping of the forces both inside and outside that are likely to interfere into the carefree situation. Positively understood, security implies the “creation of a carefree situation” where the individuals as person/human beings flourish or find their best selves. This ‘being of individual/state’ needs emphatically the perpetuation of the physical existence in maintenance of that environment where it looks relatively dignified, distinguishable and ethnocentric which is entwined with it as identity concerns. These two functions of ‘security’ are very much concerned with the protection of identity of individual/human persons (the former) and flourishing of that identity (the latter).
 

Identity and security are conceptually embedded. “Identity” in the first category implies differentiation (physical, biological, intellectual, psychological and moral) from other similar or dissimilar (other human beings, women, plants, trees, animals and insects). It is both descriptive and explanatory to justify the grounds on which the person wants to be specifically demarcated from others and needs special treatment on dichotomies like superior/inferior, self/other, civilised/uncivilised, developed/underdeveloped, white/black, order/chaos etc. This understanding of identity is premised on a Newtonian/Cartesian view of the Universe as divided, fragmented, separated and disjunctive parts and whole divide. As self atomised possessive self sufficing individual, the self is set against the non-self as the other the potential threat to existence or identity within the non-similar/dissimilar – plants, trees, animals, insects and the entire ‘nature’. The entire ‘concept of security’ as couched in traditional orthodoxy has been built on this divisive and dichotomist view constituting the foundation of realism/neo-realism in national and international politics. The hierarchical political and economic system within a state differentiating between public and private and the international system differentiating between rich/ poor, developed/developing, north/south, white/black has been built on this issue of differentiation/sequestration by the issue of survival and identity. Protection of this differentiated identity has been defined as the concept of security. This logic of differentiation has been buttressed strongly by argumentation through the endowment of reason, superior knowledge or through the use of force (military means). Hence, comes in the use of power i.e., power of knowledge or mastery over others through scientific and technological means and power of military. The most advanced and civilised nation is one who has mastered the nature, technological and scientific knowledge, gadgets and ingenuity for subduing others, through the exercise of power. Thus, redefining identity in these terms through power has been the mainstream security parlance today 

Identity in the second category implies identification. Given the Hobbesian portrayal of human nature as self-sufficing, self atomised individual drawn on Newtonian/Cartesian metaphor of particles independently of and unrelated to the whole, identity is essentially the self aggrandising individuality – a bundle of desires, and cravings for a living that is commodious, inordinate and exorbitant at the expense of other human beings and non-human entities. Here identity was the external – the development of the materialistic world for its own luxuries and commodious living. A commodious, extravagant, inordinate and exorbitant life pattern was the identity that was the keystone of development – the capitalist liberal market economy reducing the entire world not only to a market place but a hunting ground for dollar driven predators. Thus, security entwined with identity and western concept of development, has been the facilitator to create that “carefree situation” where the predator by virtue of differentiation mentioned above enjoys the best self through superimposing a feeling of an “ethnocentric ego identity” over and above all others by means of power. Globalisation, in other words has been synonymous with the western defined security to facilitate the penetration of this ‘ethnocentric ego’ into other spheres through lifting of borders by the use of power (knowledge and military).

Here identity is with the external objectified world, just a Newtonian conglomeration of independent and autonomous particles concerned with not raising the self over the biblical sin but horizontally mingling with the sheaths of desires and cravings on which the western concept of development has been built. All the individuals/nation states are on a competition to define development on this linear thinking of sameness and flattened world, without seeking identity with any other non-linear category that may be obtained from their own cultures or civilisations.

Within a geographically defined and territorially bound space the supposed assumption on which all the individuals are flattened homogeneously to the sameness of identity has been the mystical representation of what is called state. Security means, thus, to protect this flattened sameness of individuals identified with the state. To cite the basket metaphor where in all the things remain as separate entity but the basket remains the shield against any eventuality. Similarly, the state is the conglomeration of this flattened sameness of individuals and acts as the shield against any eventuality that may cause the loss of their identity. Thus, the individuals aggregated together in the basket state constitute “the people”. State and People are assured to be in unity. Like a shepherd providing a sense of identity and security to its flock, the state provides the most effective means of expressing a particular people’s sense of identity and uniqueness by differentiating it from others and satisfying what Benedict Anderson has evocatively referred to as its “metaphysical.”1 The security of state is synonymous with the security of the people.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was epochal in that it homogenised all the varieties and diversities of heterogeneous people into an abstract and mythical political entity known as state. The supposed identity of people anchored with state as nationalism was the powerful hegemonic identity which closed the discovery of all possibilities of spawning or resurrection of all other equally powerful rival identities ranging from religion and ethnicity to gender and profession that are not anchored or only weakly anchored in territory, and therefore, sovereignty. Identities deeply embedded in psychological space were assumed to be merged with political space christened as state. But the Westphalia convention defining state as boundary making and spatial distancing assured that the political space is congruent with the psychological space. This assumed congruence between the political space and psychological space till today has emboldened the state with the raison d etre both to wrest obligation from people and legitimacy to rule and become the principal referent object of security and identity. 

Identities demarcate psychological rather than territorial space that is the way in which identities and loyalties are distributed. As a result, the political space can be reconceptualised in terms of psychological distance or the degree of dissimilarity between cognitive frameworks or ways of looking at, assigning meaning to and 

1

 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London:
Verso, 1983 

coping with the world.2 Where psychological distance is great, the likelihood of misperception and understanding and, therefore, conflict is high and the prospect for forming and sustaining a moral community is low. The state as the principal referent object of security and identity is thus challenged and revisited. The more the dissonance and incongruence between these two spaces, the more is the erosion of unifying power of citizenship and potency of sovereign symbols.

For most of the past four hundred years, security has been intimately associated with the state. This is so because security is the script according to which the political is institutionalised/performed in the state. To argue that neo-realism is statist is hardly a new insight. It has long meant protection from organised violence caused by armed foreigners. Since 1648, territorially based states have been defined as the dominant organising principle for separating “us from them”; security’s identification with state is not surprising. Throughout history, it was competition and struggle among different claimants that swayed decisively in favour of consolidation of the state’s military capabilities along with its bureaucratisation over all those that accelerated the process of perpetuation of the state and cemented people’s identity with the latter. As its monopolistic use of violence capability both offensive and defensive was legitimised the state became not only the chief provider of security, but became its chief interpreter, for much of history, “security” simply meant what the states said it meant. The ‘being of the state’ in terms of survival and identity evolved in this way historically into an ethnocentric, superior and hegemonic institution legitimised in people’s identity and security has resulted in today what is called a ‘state of being’. In identity and security of the state itself the people find theirs. Hence, the state of being always is on a perpetual and constant move to attain that ‘being of state’. The people is held as mere passive onlooker and unmoved and in contrast, the state moves and searches for identity and security through the means of power.

“The concept of state presupposes the concept of the Political.”3 Statehood is a political phenomenon and product and thus cannot be considered unproblematic. If state is delivered by the process of carving out “the specifically political distinction on which political actions and purposes are based is the distinction between Friend and Enemy.”4 The Enemy is simply the “other”, the “alien”, the “outsider” which defines the boundaries of a community. Statehood is based on the definition and delineation of such community - a state is always a state of or for some community. Political order created by state as security product is based on a violent decision about the distinction between Friend and Enemy, Inside(r) and Outside(r). The Political is thus an 

2

 Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time and the Politics of Memory”, in Jonathan Boyarin (ed.), Remapping Memory:
The Politics of Time Space, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 3
 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005.
4
 Ibid. 

inherently agonistic concept constantly involving explicit or implicit decisions about the line between us and them. It can be argued against Schmitt that his realist analysis of state is too aggressive and bellicose for reducing politics to a conflict to the death between political entities. In his realist analysis, he reiterates that states are caught up in an anarchical state of war’ in which the absence of any kind of order pits one against the other in eternal antagonism. But the reality is different; except some incidents of conflict, the relationship between and among states have been peaceful. This has been more so in a world of interdependence. This argument would point out that in some parts of the world the logic of enmity has been transcended and while states still incorporate different identities, this difference can no longer be described in terms of hostility or conflict. In a rejoinder to this criticism, Behnke points out, “It makes too much out of it, since the friend – enemy distinction is not supposed to describe the empirical reality of states’ relations. War between states appears as only the ultimate possibility in a broad spectrum of political choices and strategies. It delineates as minimal condition against which international politics has to be conducted, but it does not determine the forms and modes of politics as such.”5  

Thus, the act of distinguishing between friend and enemy by state in order to be constitutive act at the ontological not empirical level is to be understood as agonistic not antagonistic. For Schmitt, the identification of the enemy, of another political entity involves the recognition of equality between these entities. The other is not a foe or an adversary that has to be vanquished, converted or annihilated. As an enemy, the other is to be treated as equal and while war is always a possibility between enemies, this war is always circumscribed, regulated and part of an overall order. “In order to be political, in order to constitute the units of the international system, the distinction between friend and enemy must establish order rather than chaos.” 6

The West reinforced by Newtonian and Cartesian logic of difference, separateness and individualised particles tends to think that whatever exists outside self can be considered as the other positioned in situation of being a threat to the self. The protection, preservation and flourishing of self in contrast to ‘the other’ is what is defined by security. The international system built on this western view has resulted in the division of the world into self atomised, individualised egoistic self perpetuating sovereign states set against each other on a ‘self vs. the other’, friend – enemy modes. Competitive arms race both nuclear and conventional between and among states was considered as requirements of security, an investment in the elevation of ego to be fortified against similar egos through power. 

5
 Andreas Behnke, “Re-cognizing Europe , NATO and the Problem of Securing identities” in Adrian Hyde Price
and Lisbeth Aggestam (eds.), New Perspectives on Security and Identity in Europe, London: Macmillan, 2000. 6
 Andreas Behnke, “Postmodernizing Security”, paper presented at the European Consortium for Political
Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions, Mannheim, on 26-31 March 2011. 

If this be the universalised view, on which security is premised to protect, preserve and flourish the “carefree space” and the claimants to this huge task happens to be the state – sovereigns in a pluralistic setting by virtue of its being legitimate, recognised and political through relations of power, then it is bound to differentiate itself from others and turn this difference into enmity. For a state to compromise on its identity would mean its death. 

What is glared from the above is that security is more than a goal or a policy of pre-established states versus pre-established threats. Security precedes states. Security is first of all about the very designation and delineation of state and, therefore, its enemies. Security, in other words, produces the state as an institutionalised community in opposition to other states. Security politics are, thus, not simply about the protections of ontologically unproblematic entities, rather one should think of them as the reiterative performance of statehood.7 In James Der Derian’s words: “We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, on a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it.”8 He continues by tracing this ontotheology to a central commitment within Western Philosophy, the notion of a centre as a site from which the forces of authority, order and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos and difference.9

Western philosophy and the service routed in Judeo-Christian tradition begin with the premise that the universe is inherently an agglomeration of atomic entities or separate building blocks always in chaos without bringing in order and unity. So, chaos is seen as a ceaseless threat both psychological and social – something to be overcome by control or elimination. Psychologically, it drives the ego to become all powerful and controlling. It, thus, creates a hegemonic impulse over those who are different to constitute the ‘other’. The other that is to be reinvented or discovered is not from within but from an outside centre. In the international system, it is the centre of power enjoyed by the hegemonic power America to impose upon the world its own defined concept of order through military power. Within a determined and territorially bound political space, it is the sovereign state from which the order and identity flow and in the anarchic international system, it is from those who have the uncontested supremacy and hegemony flow order and stability. That is why the search for such order has been the main foundation of security on a view of the international system being composed of states which are situated in a friend / enemy, inside / outside and self versus the other syndrome.  

7

 Synthia Weber, “Performative States”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 27, No.1,
1998.
8
 James Der Derian, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard” in Ronnie D. Lipschutz
(ed.), On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 9 Ibid.

From the above analysis, it can be garnered that security as a set of practices that mediates between friend and enemy becomes constitutive and performative in the production of statehood. This distinction is the very one that is established by and establishes sovereignty. In Schmitt’s words, “Sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. Only this definition can do justice to sovereignty as a luminal concept.”10 Sovereignty, thus, bestows a shell like nature to statehood: within we find those who belong in this place, outside we find those who cannot be allowed in.11 Thus, the modern concept of security is predicted upon the possibility of drawing the line between inside and outside, friend and enemy in an unambiguous fashion. Its task is to policing this line of differentiation in order to eliminate any kind of ambiguity that the ambiguity about decision, about friend and enemy might engender.12 Security, state and sovereignty are together embedded in the traditional western security ontotheology. Coasted to this tradition, the contemporary national and international security discourses tend to define security as the preservation and stabilisation of boundaries and identities through the identification of otherness as threat and danger.13

Reason leads to truths and truth is singular, clear, fully apparent, completely explicable and demonstratable free of ambiguity. Those who do not reason in this way or do not reach the same conclusions are a threat, for they invite chaos and confusion. They are the other. These non-westerners are believed to be irrational and whatever explanations they offer for their beliefs, rituals and customs are dismissed as such. This belief in the superiority of western reassuring is related to the control of epistemologies based on categories of knowledge which in turn reflect the West’s own peculiar history. It has had the effect of producing exclusion and simplistic binary categories of true/false, good/evil, self/other, and so on.14 

“The state created ex nihilo, was an artificial ordering of individual parts, not bound together by cohesion, as an organic community, but united by fear.”15 Security thus understood in western parlance in binary categories is mainly against the other which does not conform to what is in the West thought as based on reason and order. In the international system, the other is inferior and irrational and must be subdued by fear and hegemonic exercise of power.

Then security is premised on the sovereign decision between friend and enemy. What constitutes and justifies the state is the security very act of drawing  

10 Carl Schmitt, op. cit. 11 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity Press: 1991. 12 Ibid. 13 Andreas Behnke, “The Enemy Inside: The Western Involvement with Bosnia and the Problem of Securing

Identities”, Alternatives, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1998; David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and
the Politics of Identity, Revised Edition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998; Iver B. Neumann,
Uses of the other, “The East” in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 14 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press, 1990. 15 Ibid.

the line between and among nations on binary categories. Then security reads to be seemed in order to keep state perpetuating in the hearts and minds of people.16

From a realist/neorealist perspective, security, state and people are ontologically in unity. Hence, the psychological space in the cognitive templates of human mind for identity consider with the territorially bounded political space known as the state. Hence, the people as a unit is assumed as homogenous not in the sense of forming an organic community but in the sense of being a conglomeration of ingredient, self sufficing and autonomous particles individually.

But in case of incongruence between the psychological space and the political space with the proliferation of heterodox articulations of various loyalties and identities that transgress the sovereign boundaries of the political, the assured unity is busted and challenges the conceptual understanding of security in terms of unity. In the traditional sense, the survival of the state depends to a large extent on its ability to end such rise of subversive tendencies within inside and to preserve its traditional identity against the proliferation of otherness. Walt admonishes against expanding the concept into new avenues and against giving in to the temptations of post modern prolixity.17 In post modern times, however, the transversal flows of people, culture, information, commodities and patterns of interaction proliferate, this conventional notion of security becomes problematic and gets challenged. 

Security of states has come to dominate the conventional understanding of the meaning of security because other forms of political community have been rendered almost unthinkable. The realists' fixation with the state is itself a normative preference. As Reus-Smit has argued that many realists implicitly think of the state as an idealised political community wherein “security can be reduced to a minimal conception of state survival which is seen as synonymous with aggregate individual security.”18

Ole Waever’s concept of ‘securitization – desecuritization’ can be understood as a response to the contemporary problems that have warped our understanding of security in conventional parlance. Waever argues that security should be understood as a speech act, through which certain phenomena, actors, or events are designated as threats to the states and security of the state. In other words, “security refers to those cases where a threat or development is designated is incompatible with the state’s sovereignty which leads to a test of will and force thereby testing whether the 

16 Joseph Strayer quoted in Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and

Algeria, Israel and the West Bank, Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 38. 17 Stephen M. Walt, “The Renaissance of Security Studies”, International Studies Quarterly, 1991, p. 221. 18 Christian Reus-Smit, “Realist and Resistance Utopias: Community, Security and Political Action in the New
Europe”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 21, 1992, p. 17.

state is a sovereign state.”19 After all, “the ability to fend off a challenge is the criterion for establishing oneself as a sovereign unit, forcing the others to recognize one’s sovereignty and thereby gaining identity.”20

What is the defining characterisation of the sovereign is to designate the unusual or exceptional as threat and to label actors as enemies. Apart from this constitutive act, the performative part of the sovereign is to recourse to all means including the use of violence in order to thwart, expel or defeat the enemy. Security is always itself a violent interaction not a pacific state of affairs. Since security issues always invoke the sovereign to exercise exceptional means, securitised issues are removed from the play of equal political actors, rather, the point of securitisation is to expel issues and actors from the political realm.21 As threats and dangers they are to be relegated to the outside of the political community. The idea of securitisation describes processes “in which the socially and politically successful ‘speech act’ of labeling an issue a ‘security issue’ removes it from the realm of normal day to day politics, casting it as an existential threat calling for and justifying extreme measures.”22 

The processes can have different ‘referent objects’, depending on whether they belong to an economic, environmental, political, military or societal spheres or sectors. Thus, the act of defining security according to Copenhagen School is contingent upon a speech act, assuming that the articulation of security is a crucial form of security action. As Waever puts it, “by uttering ‘security’ a state representative moves a particular development into a specific area and then claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.”23 The defining textual feature of securitisation is, therefore, a specific security rhetoric which is characterised by survival, priority of action and urgency,24 a claim to a mode of exceptionality that is contained in the definition of security.

What emerged out of Waever’s analysis of traditional concept of security centering on the idea of national survival is this conceptualisation of distinct modes. In Waever’s concept, the realist meaning of security thus continues to exist as a rhetorical claim as a distinct field of practice that distinguishes (accordingly to realism) security from other fields. Speaking ‘security’ successfully, therefore, incorporates an issue into this particular realm of exceptionality with all the consequences this may have. Applying John L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances”,25 Waever argues  

19 Ole Waever, “Societal Security: The Concept” in Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre

Lamaitre, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe. London: Pinter: 1993, p. 6. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Michael C Williams, “Modernity, Identity and Security: A Comment on the Copenhagen Controversy”,
Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1998, p. 435. 23 Ole Waever, “Securitization and Desecuritization” in Ronnie D. Lipschutz, (ed.), On Security, op. cit. 24 Ibid. Also see, Ole Waever, “Securitization: Taking Stock of a Research Programme in Security Studies”,
Unpublished Manuscript, 2003, p. 10. 25 John L. Austin, How to do things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

that the very ‘utterance of security’ is more than just saying or describing something but the performing of an action. Performative utterances do not just describe but face the potential to create a new reality. Similarly, for the Copenhagen School the modes of exceptionality of dealing with an issue in a new way traversing beyond the traditional true/false dichotomy, the performative utterances have the potential to let an audience tolerates violation of rules that would otherwise have been obeyed.26

Drawing insights from Derrida27 and Butler28, Waever stresses on the always political and indeterminate nature of the speech act related to its context. Acknowledging their analysis, Waever argues, “A speech act is interesting because it holds the insurrecting potential to break the ordinary, to establish meaning that’s not already in the context. It reworks and produces a context by the performative success of the act.”29 

Thus, striking a concordant note with Schmitt, Arendt, Butler and Derrida, Waever argues that a speech act has an indeterminate force of its own that is not related to features of an existing context. The Copenhagen School characterised by three elements: the speech act, the securitising actor and the audience, has not clearly spelt out the exact relationship between the actor and audience. It is clear that the Copenhagen School regards securitisation as an inter-subjective act of a securitising actor acting towards a significant audience. “Thus rather than reducing threat assessments to a single actor, most often the state, the Copenhagen School splits the actor into two elements: the securitising actor performing a securitising move by uttering a security speech act, and the relevant audience accepting or refusing this move. With that a certain threat is no longer simply assessed but its interpretation and representation is negotiated between an actor and relevant audience.”30 In the above analysis, the question is whether the audience is synonymous with the homogenous people. Where the audience is diverse and several and having different identities for social security, then which audience is persuaded to accept the security move. The implications of these several audience on the security move remain problematic to be addressed. If security move is inter subjectively held which implies voluntarily held as opposed to aspects of coercion, repression and silence, then the problems remain.31 The answer to the question whether the audience is a manufactured one  

26 Ole Waever, 1998, op. cit. 27 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”, Limited Inc., Evanston Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988,

pp. 162-254.
28 Judith Butler, “Performativity’s Social Magic”, in Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (eds.), The
Social and Political Body, New York: Guilford Press, 1996, pp. 29-47. 29 Ole Waever, “EU as a Security Actor: Reflections from a Pessimistic Constructivist on Post Sovereignty
Orders”, in Morton Kelstrup and Michael C. Williams (eds.), International Relations Theory and Politics
of European Integration, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 286; Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde,
Security: A New Framework of Analysis, London: Lynne Rienner, 1998, p. 46. 30 Holger Stritzel, “Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond” European Journal of
International Relations, Vol. 13, 2007, p. 361. 31 Lene Hansen, “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the
Copenhagen School”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2000, pp. 285-306. 

has not been spelt out. What is the role of mass media, elites and dominant groups in manufacturing audience? Is the speaker-audience model most appropriate for nondemocratic authoritarian regimes? When Waever refuses to cling to the traditional sender-receiver view of communication32 and reposes faith in the speaker-audience model, had this can be reconciled with the Deridarian and Schimittian elements?

The Copenhagen School has focused on the ‘speech act’ ignoring the context of such acts, failing to specify how audiences, the specific local audience, sociological conditions and choice of policy tools affect the likely outcome and motivation of securitising moves. Critical security studies has attacked the Copenhagen School for reifying the wrong notion of security that does not, for them, answer the security needs of most of the world population33 while all these are fundamental issues for the Copenhagen School, none of them challenges the basic account of security hinging on emergency and existential threats.34 Julia Trombetta explores how securitisation of climate change has come in a new guise.35 For her, securitisation is a process of contextualising real meaning production rather than carbon-copying a singular and conventional logic of security into reality. Waever and Buzan continuously fluctuate between the terms process and speech act/utterances as if both were synonymous. The act is at the same time defined as an intersubjective process of constructing a threat and as just an utterance itself. “It can be argued that (the decision to act) performativity of security utterances as opposed to the social process of securitisation, involving (preexisting) actors, audience (s) and (contexts), are so different that they form two rather autonomous centre of gravity.” 36 

If securitisation is defined in opposition to normal politics, as a politics of exception or abnormal politicisation,37 unmaking it implies a retrieval of the conditions of normal politics; desecuritisation means bringing issues back to the “normal haggling of politics.”38 It can be seen as an attempt at retrieving the normality of politics. Huysmans39 has defined desecuritisation as “unmaking politics which identifies the community on the basic of the expectations of hostility. The discursive construction of security frames normal politics as a political spec tale of alternative discourses. The discursive construction of security allows for its parallel discursive deconstruction and 

32 Ole Waever, “Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: New Schools” in Security Theory and Their Origins Between

Core and Periphery, paper presented at the 45th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association,
Montreal, Canada, on17- 20 March 2004.
33 Ken Booth, “Security and Emancipation”, Review of International Relations, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1991, pp. 313-326. 34 Corry Olaf, “Securitization and ‘Riskification: Second-order Security and the Politics of Climate Change”,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, p. 241. 35 Maria Julia Trombetta, “Environmental Security and Climate Change: Analyzing the Discourse”, Cambridge
Review of International Affairs, Vol. 21, No.4, 2008, pp. 585-602. 36 Holger Stritzel, op. cit. 37 Alker Hayward, “Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project” in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security
Studies and World Politics, London: Lynne Rienner: 2005. 38 Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, Jaap de Wilde, 1998, op. cit. 39 Jef Huysmans, “The Question of the Limit: Desecuritization and the Aesthetics of Horror in Political
Realism”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1998.

normality appears as contested process of construction / deconstruction. There exist tensions between discursive construction and the meaning of exceptional politics which need to be analysed.

Emancipation plays a central role in the security studies of the critical school. The attempt to relate security strategies to the process of human emancipation is central to all the unambiguously critical security studies approaches. Both defines emancipation as “the freeing of the people from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do.”40 This remains problematic in that it does not directly address the problem of resolving conflicting claims to emancipation and maximising the freedom of one person of a group without simultaneously constraining that of others. The state level definition of security threat can conflict with that of the individual or the very definition of what constitutes a security threat which privileges the decisive few may clash with what an individual human being considers as threat. Emancipation as an objective as such has the ability to transcend the borders of state, nation, race, sex or others. Booth has argued that emancipation should take precedence over concerns with power and order as it produces true security. Security is distinguished from order and power and redefined as inclusive of all individuals and even all those who have been hollowed out of the traditional purview of security. Emancipation is normative engagement with normal politics the normative separation of security from power and order is problematic, as it accounts neither for the transformation of normality nor for the political effects of security.41 

Many felt the need to reformulate the concept of emancipation in relation to normality. In a Foucault inspired approach, normality is the result of exclusions and forms of disciplinary and bio political regulation of populations.42 Security is, therefore, not simply exceptional but has constitutive effects upon the normal. Normality is simultaneously a field of struggle, where techno logics for constituting subjects and ordering of the social come up against the intransigence of political agency and resistance of political subjects. The question remains ragging had emancipatory moves remained away from and independently of power operations.43 Security is the exact opposite and negation of insecurity. Security is defined conditions what is considered 

40 Ken Booth, op. cit. 41 Richard Wyn Jones, “On Emancipation: Necessity, Capacity and Concrete Utopias” and Alker Hayward,

“Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project”, in Ken Booth, (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World
Politics, London: Lynne Rienner, 2005. 42 Stefan Elbe, “AIDS, Security, Biopolitics”, International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2005, pp. 403-419; Jef
Huysmans, “A Foucaultian View on Spill Over: Freedom and Security in the EU”, Journal of International
Relations and Development, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2004, pp. 294-318. 43 Benjamin J Muller, “(Dis)qualified bodies: Securitization, Citizenship and Identity Management”, Citizenship
Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2004, pp. 279-294. 

as insecurity. If security defines what is insecurity, then it entails an engagement, struggle and competition among various individuals, opposing dominant social groups, professionals and agencies for placing their respective perception and notion of order to be securitised. Thus, security becomes political and the very act of policing the insecurity turns out to be a mode of redrawing the lines of fear and security at both the individual and collective level.44

The most difficult problematic to be tacked is the emergence and consolidation of professional network of security agencies that try to impose and monopolies the truth about danger and risk through the power knowledge nexus. The Paris school treats security as a technique of government and investigates the intentions behind the use of power games. Instead of focusing on speech acts, it emphasises practices, audiences and contexts that enable and constrain the production of specific forms of governmentality.45 In same it can be said that the Paris School emphasised that the field of security is determined not only by the sovereign power to kill but also by the discursive ability to produce an image of the enemy with which the audience identifies.46

The process of securitisation / desecuritisation involves the question of the widening of the field of security. The widening aspect is reflected in the post Buzan extension of the concept to embrace the environment, economic, societal and political. The focus is no more on the state but has been diversified away to the level, situation and conditions which appear to threaten an individual human being

The widening of the security agenda to include everything, when justified by a concern to free people from fear and threat might turn into what it is called ‘security trap.’47 It refers both to the non-intentional dimension of the consequences of widening and to the fact that these consequences might clash with the underlying intention. It means by securitising more issues and securitising them more one cannot feel established in a situation of security free from threat and fear. No doubt, the very process of one issue being securitised assures a specific form of politicisation but the way security is to be provided becomes the concern of professionals. As warned by many scholars, one risks having the social issues securitised for oneself by more established security professionals.48 

44 Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity, London: Routledge, 2006. 45 Hierry Balzacq, “The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context”, European Journal of

International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2005, pp. 171-201; Philippe Bonditti, “From Territorial Space to Networks: A
Foucaldian Approach to the Implementation of Biometry”, Alternatives, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2004, pp. 465-482. 46 C.A.S.E Collective, “Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto”, Security Dialogue,
Vol. 37, No. 4, December 2006, p. 457.
47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 

“In other words, even when widening the security agenda with the explicit intention of demilitarizing international security, the signifier security might on the contrary subordinate these issues to governmental security agencies, thus foreclosing the range of political options available to deal with the issues. Even if securitization is a political process it might legitimate practices that depoliticize the approach to the securitized issues by giving preference to coercive approaches.”49

Thus, in this way securitising more and more issues falls into the security trap. If securitisation is a discursive strategy of deflecting away from the state-centric approaches to security, by widening, it means bringing the state back into the centre of gravity. Bigo has pointed out that “the securitisation of social issues raises the issue of protection by securitising the audience, which the security discourses address. Insecuritisation will translate into a social demand for the intervention of coercive state and its agencies through reassurance discourses and protection techniques.”50 In other words, the processes of securitisation and of insecuritisation are inseparable. This means that one is confronted with a security dilemma: the more one tries to securitise social phenomena in order to ensure security, the more one creates intentionally or unintentionally a feeling of insecurity. Suppose, a street is filled with military personnel in order to prevent terrorist attacks as a policy of reassurance to the public, the result is it might create a feeling of anxiety in public.51 The logical consequence is “the politics of maximal security are also politics of maximal anxiety.”52

The concept of security arises only when something happens beyond the borders of what constitutes normalcy being disturbed. That implies the question of exceptionalism built into the security system. What happens within the order, or established norms, founds the base of legitimacy of a political system. Within the established norms and nuances what cannot be challenged and dealt with can be said as creating the situation of exceptionalism demanding exceptional response or measure thus putting legitimacy into question. The situation of exceptionalism is invoked to justify and mobilise an array of violent and illiberal practices. The critical approaches to security have conversed upon the concept of exceptionalism as a means of contesting and analysing the transformation of normalcy into exceptionalism. 

49 Christian Olsson, “Military Interventions and the Concept of the Political: Bringing the Political Back into

the Interactions between External Forces and Local Societies” in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala, (eds.),
Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (in) Security Games, Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2006, pp. 165-204; Barry Buzan,
Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 50 Bigo Didier, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease”, Alternatives,
Vol. 27, No. 1, 2002, pp. 63-92.
51 Emmanuel Pierre Guittet, “Military Activities Inside the National Territory: The Case of France”, in Didier
Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds.), Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes, Paris: L’ Harmattan: 2006, pp. 137-
165.
52 C.A.S.E, op. cit. 

Schmitt’s53 declaration that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, can be said as endowing the political authorities with exceptional prerogatives to deal with security threats. The ‘exception’ is a situation of radical danger and contingency for which no prior law, procedure or anticipated response is adequate. It is a perilous moment that exceeds the limits of precedent, knowledge, legislation and expected predictability. To claim that the ‘exception’ brings about a fundamental existential necessity for unlimited, unconstrained exceptional sovereign decision implies the imperatives of performative logic of security that Schmitt insists on. Exceptionalism for Schmitt is not simply an appendage to normal politics but a legitimisation of a political authority which has the capacity to constitute new political and legal orders.

The advent of exceptional situation entails a priori objective imperatives prompting the sovereign to declare it as exceptional and argue for unlimited, unconstrained, exceptional sovereign power. Here the focus is on what constitutes exceptional objectively. But in Schmitt’s analysis, the focus is more on sovereign exceptionalism meaning it is the sovereign to decide what exceptional situation is. That means exceptionalism from the very beginning is entangled in an authoritarian decisionist politics that declares what are exceptional situations that enjoin upon the sovereign to invoke legitimate authority to contentious policies and practices. Exceptionalism may be a convenient cloak to cover up the invidious design on the part of the sovereign to invoke legitimate authority to illegitimate and perilous measures.  

What remains problematic is how do exceptions and exceptional situations come to be considered as exceptional? How are practices of exceptionalism and claims about exceptions authorised? The securitisation theory is an attempt54 to understand how policy matters declare conditions of exceptional threat in order to legitimate the practices of exceptionalism. If securitisation theory entails a speech act or democratically deliberated and arrived at decisions regarding what constitutes ‘exceptional’ and invokes sovereign exceptionalism, no where “security matters” are slipped away from the elites who represent state to decide on behalf of the latter what constitutes a security threat. These elitists’ views and concepts of security driven by their discursive logic and strategies are reinforced by the securitisation theory and add credence to Schmitt’s logic.

On the other hand, Bigo55 argues that by focusing instead on the security professionals who manage ‘unease’ within a society on a daily basis, exceptional security practices can be better understood in the context of ongoing processes of technocratic, bureaucratic and market driven routinisation and normalisation.  

If securitisation theory focuses on speech act and argumentation in the discursive field, then claims about what constitutes “exceptional situation” demanding 

53 Carl Schmitt, op. cit. 54 Ole Waever, 1998, op. cit. 55 Bigo Didier, op. cit. 

exceptional treatment can be subject to a process of argument, application of reasons, presentation of evidences and commitment to convincing others of the validity of one’s position. These claims then remain open to the emancipatory possibility of a communicative ethics that may “avoid the excesses of a decisionist account of securitization.”56

The neo-realist theory and critical security theory are seemingly disparate approaches to security studies. From a paradigmatic perspective, these theories are putatively separated by incommensurable foundational concepts. Yet, all of these identify dynamics of collective mobilisation as the crux of power politics. Neo- realism involves two actors on a friend-enemy dichotomy pulling resources to rectify a perceived security deficit. Securitisation involves a process in which construction of a referent object as an existential threat induces individuals and social groups to orient their behaviour towards specific ends. It rejects the realist privileging of state as the referent object of security and threats and use of force as the subject of security.

In realism and neo-realism, the main referent object of security is the state and it is synonymous with the security of the people on a priori assumption that once the state is secured all the rest remain secured. As the referent object of security, state can be both a guardian angel and global gangster.57 The security that a state has in a particular time is always not in a state of being but in a state of becoming with addition of more arms and ammunitions as it feels always inadequate in the context of the other thinking and doing the same way. The decisionist unit remains with the state. 

The Copenhagen school, the other widening schools and critical theorists challenging the premise of realism and neo-realism focus on the process by which an issue becomes an issue of security threats. The process of securitisation is more akin to being called as democratisation of security by which the consensus is reached through speech act and arguments about whether an issue be securitised. Though the decisionist unit remains with the state, it is through a speech act that an issue is securitised. Thus, the centre of gravity of security is discursively deflected away from the state to various nodal points where the referent object of security is located. This discursive shifting away from state means to acknowledge the fact that the sources of security threats are no longer the state and bust the myth that security of state is the security of the people. State is no longer the end and its military wherewithal are not the solution to all multifarious non-state centric sources of security threats. 

56 Michael C Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics”, International

Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 4, 2003, p. 522. 57 N. Wheeler, “Guardian Angel or Global Gangster: The Ethical Claims of International Society Revisited”,
Political Studies, Vol. 44, 1996. 

An alternative possible referent is that of society as adduced by Waever. To him, society “is about identity, the self conception of communities and those individuals who identify themselves as members of a particular community.”58 The advantage of operating with this perspective is that it allows a separate conception of society to operate in conjunction with that of the state. This impelled Waever to develop idea of societal security as distinct from state security. But this perspective has also limitations because in a divergent society people having multifarious identities in terms of religion, gender, culture and ethnicity often clashing with each other.

A further possibility is accepting individual as the ultimate security referent. Using the individual as the security referent in this way is complicated by the complex variety of identities and needs that individuals can possess, though there may be a virtue simply in multiplying the potential number of security referents beyond the state. The referent will vary according to the particular issue that needs to be securitised. But it is the state that remains as the means by which security is to be provided to individuals at various levels.  

For a number of critics of the traditional security approach and Copenhagen school, the state is the problem rather than part of solution in many security issues. If the state is considered as the means and the referent object of security remains the individuals for their emancipation then it sounds illogical to privilege the security of the means. Because in many cases the sources of security threats being the non-state sources, state as the means fail to meet these new non-traditional security threats.

State as the principal referent object of security is based on the assumption that it represents the idealised form of community. The critical international theory “challenges the state role as the sole constructor of identity and invites rethinking the nature and limits of moral and political community under changing global conditions.”59 The state as moral being and socially binding force is territorially bound and remains confined to the binaries-inclusion/exclusion, insider/outsider. The critical theory approach to extend the idea of moral and political community beyond the frontiers of state echoing Karl Deutsch’s concept of security community and Booth’s interest in it as central to human emancipation runs counter to the conventional understanding of state as central to security. But recent proponents of security community approach have very convincingly recognised the central place of the state in such theorising.60 

Can this Westphalian definition of security be a reliable guide to rethink security in a post modernised and globalised world? There has been growing transverse flow of people due to displacement and migration from country to 

58 Ole Waever, 1998, op. cit. pp. 66-67. 59 Richard Devetek, “Critical Theory” in Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater (eds.), Theories of International

Relations, London: Macmillan, 1996, p.168. 60 Emmanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “Security Communities in Theoretical Perspective”, in Emmanuel
Adler and Michael Barnett (eds.), Security Communities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 14.

country creating a strange situation of articulation of differences within societies that no longer adhere to ruling or hegemonic discourses of identity.61 In this age of globalisation, what has been the most spectacular phenomenon is the burgeoning proliferation of intercourse, interconnections and interdependence at various levels including trade, commerce, business, culture, climate change and health issues among states, individuals and non-governmental organisations. Security in this context must refer to safeguarding the coexistence and intercourse of strangers, rather than the separation of friends from enemies. What emerges significant here is that in the present world, security is not about creation of the wedge between ‘self and the other’ and protection of friends from enemies but protection and promotion of highways of connections between them. It enables political conduct not by delineating an inside from an outside, but by enabling the transversal flows across, indeed the transgression of boundaries. Here constructivism appears significant. Inter- subjective exchange of ideas, convergence of interests on a preferred course of action and interactions and communications redefine security not solely in militaristic tones shifting the focus from anarchic international system to international society. 

To perform all functions to provide security to all individuals at various levels on divergent issues and to address multifarious identity issues require a too centralised state. As one authority states, “In short, the state is too central to the large scale business of human life to be ignored or put aside, whether for ideological or idealistic reasons.”62 For example, on the issues of climate change the states are playing a leading and missionary role for sustaining the earth and survival of humanity. No state however, powerful may be, has not shown any sign of shirking its responsibility. In the conceptualisation of human security, while the focus of security has been shifted from state to individual, the responsibility of state has increased multifold not purely in military terms but in terms of development, ensuring human rights and fulfilling basic human needs. 

There has been a mélange of literature and research on security contesting the traditional approach to security centering on state. With human beings becoming profusely vulnerable to a plethora of threats not only from state but from other non-state sources, the state centric approach in all cases has not been effective and successful and even has proved its inadequacy. This has led to rethinking of security from a critical theory perspective. It holds that the concept of state security does not necessarily encompass security for the people. The Copenhagen school, on the other hand, has shown how invoking the concept of security is a discursive process that erases all rules of normal politics. This alternative insight puts a special kind of responsibility on people doing security, since invoking the word starts a process beyond democratic politics.63 All these have generated a great debate on 

61 Zygmunt Bauman, op. cit. 62 Olav F. Knudsen, “Post - Copenhagen Security Studies: Desecuritizing Securitization”, Security Dialogue,

Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 363.
63 Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, 1998, op. cit. 

the location of referent object of security suggesting a shift from state to individual or societal level. All these arguments are well put forth and reasoned but yet there has not been a shred of evidence of shift of focus from state to individual. On the contrary, within the compass of the state, authority and responsibility are included in all those threats to which the individuals have been vulnerable. The understanding and conceptualisation of security seems to be constrained by the inability of all these non-traditional schools to consider alternative forms of community other than the state. In the words of Walker, “The security of states dominates our understanding of what security can be and who it can be for, not because conflict between states is inevitable, but because other forms of political community have been rendered almost unthinkable. The claims of states to such a monopoly of legitimate authority in a particular territory have succeeded in marginalizing and even erasing other expressions of political identity-other answers to questions about how we are.”64

What non-traditional security and widening of security analysis does distancing away from national territorial bound security is that it marks a spatial turn with focus on non-national spaces of security which cover for example, climate change, cyber space, terrorism, spread of pathogens etc.65 Such spaces have become objects of security securing the security of the individual though the implications of this remain largely under theorised in security studies. That does not in any way denude the state, its interests and practices of its immense significance, all of which very much constitute the kernel and gravamen of global security concerns and analysis. It does, however, more significantly, entail that the fetishisation and reification of national/ state as the only space in which security practices and discourses are formed. It implies identifying and theorising non-national spaces of security and analysing how these interact with state practices and with each other. What it needs is the securitisation of these spaces. This opens new vistas of research in future on security studies.  

64 R. B. J. Walker, “Security, Sovereignty and the Challenges of World Politics”, Alternatives, Vol. XV, No.1, 1990, p. 6. 65 Fiona B Adamson, “Spaces of Global Security: Beyond Methodological Nationalism”, Journal of Global Security

Studies, Vol. 1, Issue. 1, 2016, pp. 19-35.