Securitization is considered to be one of the biggest financial innovations of the last century. It is also regarded as both a catalyst and a solution to the 2008 financial crisis. Once a popular method of financing the mortgage and consumer credit markets, aspects of the global securitization market are now struggling to revive. In this paper, I discuss the role that ethics played in securitization prior to the 2008 financial crisis and find that it is not (...) an obvious story of moral failures, but rather that it lies in more subtle elements of the financial system. The ethics uncertainty role in the securitization story is one of flawed incentives and the shifting of responsibility for handling risk. The role of securitization and the ethics of risk transfer have rarely been discussed explicitly in the literature. The historical origins of securitization and lessons learned from previous flawed uses of the process are also provided. I also detail the various global institutional reform proposals that have taken place. Moving forward, it is crucial to understand the causes, consequences, and ethical implications of securitization in the financial crisis so as to help individuals and managers better assess risk, align incentives, and design appropriate policy responses. (shrink)

Securitizing Islam examines the impact of 9/11 on the lives and perceptions of individuals, focusing on the ways in which identities in Britain have been affected in relation to Islam. 'Securitization' describes the processes by which a particular group or issue comes to be seen as a threat, and thus subject to the perceptions and actions which go with national security. Croft applies this idea to the way in which the attitudes of individuals to their security and to Islam (...) and Muslims have been transformed, affecting the everyday lives of both Muslims and non-Muslims. He argues that Muslims have come to be seen as the 'Other', outside the contemporary conception of Britishness. Reworking securitisation theory and drawing in the sociology of ontological security studies, Securitizing Islam produces a theoretically innovative framework for understanding a contemporary phenomenon that affects the everyday lives of millions. (shrink)

Securitization of Islam: A Vicious Circle: Counter-Terrorism and Freedom of Religion in Central Asia By Lenz-RaymannKathrin, 324 pp. Price PB €39.99. EAN 978–3837629040.

In Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality, Douglas Portmore introduces a novel position regarding the actualist securitism – a position he argues is theoretically superior to the standard views in both the actualist and possibilist camps. After distinguishing the two camps through an examination of the original Procrastinate case, I present Portmore's securitism and its implications regarding his modified Procrastinate case. I level two serious objections against securitism: that it implausibly implies that morality is radically more demanding for the virtuous (...) than it is for the vicious and that it fails to recognize moral vice in a wide range of cases. I close by arguing that a possibilist variant of Portmore's securitist view is impervious to such objections and thus appears theoretically superior to the actualist version Portmore promotes. (shrink)

A relatively new debate in ethics concerns the relationship between one's present obligations and how one would act in the future. One popular view is actualism, which holds that what an agent would do in the future affects her present obligations. Agent's future behavior is held fixed and the agent's present obligations are determined by what would be best to do now in light of how the agent would act in the future. Doug Portmore defends a new view he calls (...) moral securitism, which is supposed to avoid the problems associated with actualism. On this account, what an agent would do in the future is treated as fixed iff that agent's future actions are not currently under the agent's present deliberative control. φ-ing is under an agent's present deliberative control iff whether the agent φ's depends upon the immediate outcome of the agent's present deliberations. I argue that moral securitism falls prey to two of the same serious problems that actualism does: it lets agents avoid incurring moral obligations because they have rotten moral dispositions and entails that agents ought to perform truly terribly acts. After providing a few standard counter-examples to actualism to show how it is plagued with these two problems, I offer my own example which demonstrates that moral securitism is subject to a version of these same two problems. I then review Portmore's response to my objection, arguing that it fails. I end the paper by offering a tentative revision of moral securitism that would allow it to avoid the aforementioned problems. (shrink)

The contemporary debate in democracies routinely refers to online misinformation, disinformation, and deception, as security-issues in need of urgent attention. Despite this pervasive discourse, however, policymakers often appear incapable of articulating what security means in this context. This paper argues that we must understand the unique practical and normative challenges to security actualized by such online information threats, when they arise in a democratic context. Investigating security-making in the nexus between technology and national security through the concept of “cybersovereignty,” the (...) paper highlights a shared blind spot in the envisaged protection of national security and democracy in cyberspace. Failing to consider the implications of non-territoriality in cyberspace, the “cybersovereign” approach runs into a cul de sac. Security-making, when understood as the continuous constitution of “cybersovereign” boundaries presumes the existence of a legitimate securitizing actor; however, this actor can only be legitimate as a product of pre-existing boundaries. In response to the problems outlined, the article proposes an alternative object of protection in the form of human judgment and, specifically, “political judgment” in the Arendtian sense. The turn to political judgment offers a conceptualization of security that can account for contemporary policy practises in relation to security and the online information threat, as well as for the human communicating subject in the interactive and essentially incomplete information and communication environment. (shrink)

The political projects of internationalizing higher education unfold the relations between the penetrative workings of neoliberal modernization and the securitized authoritarian state. In this chapter, I specifically analyze the Bologna Process, which I understand as a Eurocentric hegemonic project of neoliberal modernization in the field of higher education and research. Analyzing the Bologna Process is important to further understand the relations between the (authoritarian) state and neoliberal globalization, especially since the decision to join the Bologna Process was made by the (...) Russian state in its goal to catch up with neoliberal modernization, contrary to the opposition of Russian academic communities. The Russian state imagined it could use the Bologna Process to gain status in world politics by increasing its competitiveness. Despite the decision to endorse the Eurocentric Bologna Process, Russian higher education has been recomposed under Putin’s rule, resisting the globalized projects of neoliberal modernization and securitizing and nationalizing higher education. However, even in this academic environment, assaulted by globalized neoliberal rationality and the securitized authoritarian state, one can notice alternative academic lifeworlds understanding internationalization in terms of intercultural dialogue. (shrink)

Drawing on the author’s archival research in Germany and the US, empirical data about US-allied troop sexual violence during post-World War II occupied Germany suggests a complex interplay between gender, security, silence production, and state identity. Through a feminist security studies lens, this article theorizes about an unexplored, obscured form of de-securitization: the unmaking of a security issue or referent object as active silence. De-securitization as silence provides a unique insight into silence production, gender’s normativity, and security. To (...) move beyond de-securitization’s presumed politicization, the argument identifies specific hypervisibilities and new state-self, dominant memory regimes as acts, discursive representations, processes, or incidents of de-securitization – producing and reproducing active silence and facilitating the making of a newly imagined, ‘good’ German state-self. (shrink)

This book contributes to research on Islamophobia and critical security studies by exploring the historical trajectory and the intra-party dynamics that led three Western European centre-left parties (British Labour Party, French Socialist Party, and Italian Democratic Party) to securitize Islam. Western governments have increasingly framed Islam as a threat to national security in recent decades. Yet, the ideas and languages through which securitization manifests across and inside right-wing and left-wing parties is less examined by current literature. This book shows (...) that political parties translate security (particularly the securitization of Islam) in the name of various ideological references. This is necessary to understand why the same securitized threat (Muslims) is interpreted differently by political parties on the Right and the Left. The author engages with one main question: How do Islamophobia and specifically its securitarian dimension travel across and inside political parties? The author argues that the securitization of Islam travels across and inside parties through a process called translation, which occurs through the appropriation of tropes traditionally belonging to the other political pole. Translation is active, because Islamophobic tropes are translated into a language coherent with partisan ideologies. Translation is also collective. If the securitization audiences are not persuaded by translation, the process might be rejected, and such rejection can lead to de-securitization. Translation is also influenced and made possible by contextual elements: the party history, the interaction between the Right and the Left, and significant external events that increased the perception of insecurity raised by Muslims. (shrink)

This article examines therelation between the Security Council andinternational judicial bodies. The first partexplains, on the basis of linguistic theoriesof international security, the new role assumedby the Security Council after the Cold War. Thesecond part analyses, on the basis of insightsborrowed from legal semiotics, the position ofinternational judicial organs vis-à-vis theSecurity Council (especially the InternationalCourt of Justice and the Tribunals for Rwandaand the former Yugoslavia). The article arguesthat international judicial bodies havedeveloped ways of checking the power of theSecurity Council, which (...) go beyond thetraditional modes of judicial review. Legalsemiotics offers the tools necessary tounderstand these countervailing activities andthus the relation between internationaljudicial bodies and the Security Council ingeneral. (shrink)

Rita Floyd’s "The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization" is an important and insightful book that delineates a theory of just securitization (modified from the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria in just war theory) involving three sets of principles governing the just initiation of securitization, just conduct of securitization, and just desecuritization. This book is a much-needed addition to the security studies and just war scholarship. -/- Here, I explore the potential (...) of Floyd’s just securitization theory (JST) to provide insights into the moral justifiability of non-state groups that are not political entities engaging in resistance against forms of structural violence that pose an existential threat to those groups. Using the case study of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the threat of white supremacy to African Americans as an illustrative example, I argue that structural forms of violence can meet Floyd’s definition of an objective existential threat, justifying the resort to securitization by groups such as BLM. (shrink)

This paper is critically engaged in the elaboration of the securitization and stigmatization of migration and Islam in the West, which is believed to be leading to the rise of Islamophobic sentiments and to the backlash of both multiculturalism and republicanism. Migration has been framed as a source of fear and instability for the nation-states in the West in a way that constructs ‘communities of fear’. It will be claimed that both securitization and Islamophobia have recently been employed (...) by the neo-liberal states as a form of governmentality in order to control the masses in ethno-culturally and religiously diverse societies at the expense of deepening the already existing cleavages between majority and minorities with Muslim background. (shrink)

When is it permissible to move an issue out of normal politics and treat it as a security issue? How should the security measures be conducted? When and how should the securitization be reversed? Floyd offers answers to these questions by combining security studies' influential securitization theory with philosophy's long-standing just war tradition, creating a major new approach to the ethics of security: 'Just Securitization Theory'. Of interest to anyone concerned with ethics and security, Floyd's innovative approach (...) enables scholars to normatively evaluate past and present securitizations, equips practitioners to make informed judgements on what they ought to do in relevant situations, and empowers the public to hold relevant actors accountable for how they view security. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explore the emergence of perspectives on raceRace, genderGender, and sexualitySexuality in an educational experience in a context of militarizationMilitarization or (in)securitizationSecuritization of urban peripheriesPeriphery in Brazil.

This article reflects on securitization efforts with respect to ‘killer robots’, known more impartially as autonomous weapons systems (AWS). Our contribution focuses, theoretically and empirically, on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a transnational advocacy network vigorously pushing for a pre-emptive ban on AWS. Marking exactly a decade of its activity, there is still no international regime formally banning, or even purposefully regulating, AWS. Our objective is to understand why the Campaign has not been able to advance its disarmament (...) agenda thus far, despite all the resources, means and support at its disposal. For achieving this objective, we challenge the popular assumption that strong stigmatization is the universally best strategy towards humanitarian disarmament. We investigate the consequences of two specifics present in AWS, which set them apart from processes and successes of the campaigns to ban anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, and laser-blinding weapons: the complexity of AWS as a distinct weapons category, and the subsequent circumvention of its complexity through the utilization of pop-culture, namely science fiction imagery. We particularly focus on two mechanisms through which such distortion has occurred: hybridization and grafting. These provide the conceptual basis and heuristic tools to unpack the paradox of over-securitization: success in broadening the stakeholder base in relation to the first mechanism and deepening the sense of insecurity in relation to the second one does not necessarily lead to the achievement of the desired prohibitory norm. In conclusion, we ask whether it is not the time for a more epistemically-oriented expert debate with a less ambitious, lowest common denominator strategy as the preferred model of arms control for such a complex weapons category. (shrink)

Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as useful fiction and FICINT, a shorthand for fictional intelligence, they have sought to develop a new genre—the national security novel—which blends nonfictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this article, I trace how the national security novel developed through a process of securitization, (...) which has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s current and future impact on national and global security. (shrink)

După sfârşitul celei de a doua mari conflagraţii mondiale, Europa se afla în ruină şi dezastru economico-social. Ajutorul dat de Statele Unite ale Americii în reconstrucţia statelor europene a fost vital pentru supravieţuirea Occidentului european. În anul 1948, cinci state (Franţa, Marea Britanie, Belgia, Ţările de Jos şi Luxemburg) semnează Tratatul de Cooperare Culturală, Socială, Economică şi Apărare Colectivă, pe scurt Tratatul de la Bruxelles. După numirea generalului Dwight Eisenhower în funcţia de comandant suprem aliat în Europa, acest tratat va (...) deveni parte a documentelor NATO. Nevoia de apărare împotriva ameninţării sovietice se face şi mai vizibilă în propunerea ministrului de externe francez Réne Pléven. Planul Pléven, propus în anul 1952, viza constituirea unei Comunităţii Europene a Apărării, dar şi a unei Comunităţi Politice Europene. Planul nu a fost votat de către Adunare Franceză în anul 1954. Eşecul acestei comunităţi se datorează lipsei de viziune a liderilor europeni. O altă piedică în adoptarea acestui plan a fost teama statelor naţionale de posibila federalizare a Europei. (shrink)

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in the (...) history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state. (shrink)

This article develops a typology for analyzing securitization in education across diverse political contexts, including the UK, France, Hungary, Russia, and Israel. It distinguishes between the securitization of education (where education systems are constructed as threatened objects) and securitization through education (where education functions as a means of addressing perceived threats), the latter encompassing instrumental, ontological, and hybrid logics. Drawing on insights from the Copenhagen School and the Paris School, the framework clarifies conceptual ambiguities in the literature (...) and enables systematic comparison across regime types to assess the implications of securitization for education. The analysis compares overt and covert practices, examining how different securitizing logics are articulated in policy discourse, institutional design, and everyday educational practices in each case. The findings show that while regimes differ in the explicitness and justification of security measures, all cases reconfigure educational priorities, institutionalize mechanisms of control and surveillance, generate stigmatization of minorities and dissenters, foster professional self-censorship, and constrain the conditions for critical thinking within the education system. (shrink)

Chapter 5 moves to the frontline professionals who have the responsibility to safeguard victims of criminal exploitation and modern slavery. In a context of ‘austerity localism’ where local authority bodies have experienced severe funding cuts, the frontline professionals I shadowed agreed on a central point: that the tools of multi-agency partnership work and data sharing, central to the enforcement of modern slavery policies at the front line, offered an opportunity to safeguard those most vulnerable to criminal exploitation. And yet, reality (...) was not so simple. In their efforts to identify individuals ‘at risk’ of county lines involvement, professionals also came to closely monitor individuals, even—or perhaps especially—where no crime had been committed. Such monitoring further acted as a basis for developing classificatory knowledge about ‘suspect’ communities that reconceived of intimate relations as a site of coercion and exploitation. Frontline responses are best understood as forms of techno-moral governance that deepen, rather than depart from, the logics of pre-emptive policing central to the government’s domestic ‘wars’ on enemy populations. Thus, the rise of vulnerability constitutes yet another facet of liberal order building that works through the securitization of everyday life in racialized and working-class communities. (shrink)

More than a decade has passed since the tragic events that took place in America in the dramatic day of September 9th 2001. For the first time since the end of the second World War, the United States were being attacked on their own territory, without prior notice, by a non-state military force which was globally organised, for religious and ideological reasons. The terrorist attacks planned and executed by the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda on American military and civilian targets have reconfigured (...) the international security environment. The author remarks that the security of the European continent is inextricably linked to what happens outside its external borders. Transnational organized crime, illegal human trafficking, illegal migration, traffic of drug, weapons, ammunition and portable vectors, the proliferation of illegal trade of radioactive and other "sensible" technologies, the expansion of terrorist networks – they all represent threats to the Eastern border of Romania and concern the security of the EU Eastern neighbourhood. (shrink)

A un colloque organisé par le Conseil du Bien-Étre du Québec, à l'automne 1965, M. Jacques Dofny déclarait: « la lutte contre la pauvrete» ne peut se gagner par l'argent » et, par suite, « déclarer la guerre à la pauvreteé, ce n'est pas distribuer de l'argent, même si c'est l'état qui le distribue ». Par contre, il y a quelques jours, M. John Fryer, du Congrés Canadien du Travail, affirmait que le pauvre « a besoin d'argent, non de sermons (...) ». Ces deux positions représentent sans doute, les extrêmes de l'éventail du présent débat sur la pauvrete». Mais pour s'y inscrire avec lumiére, il faut commencer par inventorier, même sommairement, les principales catégories de solutions proposécs. Je veux done premiérement examiner les disproportions entre les limites de ces solutions et l'ampleur du probléme. Je noterai les déficiences de la charité privée et organisée, de l'assistance publique, des assurances sociales et enfin de la redistribution du revenu pour faire ressortir, en deuxiéme lieu, ce qui m'apparaît être les conditions essentielles de la stratégic de la guerre à la pauvreté. (shrink)

The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization (2024) extends Just Securitization Theory (JST), originally developed in The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization (2019), with a theory of the moral obligation to use emergency measures to safe valuable referent objects from objective existential threats. Morally mandatory securitization includes prescriptions setting out when the duties to secure and to securitize apply, on who has such duties, and to whom. In this article, I defend (...) the theory against five critics. All of these see value in and need for the general project of rethinking the ethics of securitization, but all disagree with some aspects. Including, the theory’s communitarian roots, the usage of revisionist just war theory to derive moral principles, and/or the attempt to refocus the responsibility to protect (RtoP) norm. I use the available space to defend my choices. I conclude by pointing out directions for future research on the ethics of securitization. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Fiat-Credit Allocation Theorem (FCAT), developed by Aaron Black. Since the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, advanced economies have operated under a distinct monetary and financial regime characterized by pure fiat currencies, elastic bank credit creation, and widespread securitization of cash flows. The Fiat–Credit Allocation Theorem (FCAT) is a structural law governing credit allocation in this post-1971 era. In a fiat system with low-friction securitization, credit endogenously expands into securitizable assets whenever their (...) perceived risk-adjusted expected returns exceed the system-wide required return on risky capital (r ˉ), and contracts when returns fall below this hurdle rate. In equilibrium, risk-adjusted returns on funded securitized cash flows converge to r ˉ, creating a yield-arbitrage mechanism that drives sustained asset-price inflation, financialization, rentier dominance, and recurrent credit-driven booms and busts. The theorem formalizes this process in a minimal continuous-time framework, proves convergence under mild assumptions, and interprets key post-Bretton Woods phenomena—decoupled capital returns from wage growth, persistent r>gdynamics, and leverage cycles—as equilibrium outcomes rather than anomalies. Empirical proxies, including yield convergence across securitized asset classes post-1971, support the model's predictions. FCAT provides a unified micro-founded explanation for the regime shift from production-constrained credit to yield-chasing credit, with implications for inequality, affordability in essential sectors, and the limits of supply-side reforms. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant defines existence – in this article comprehended as the security of Self – as practical and objective rationality, as a category guided by a priori principles that metaphysically employ a categorical imperative to all humans. Friedrich Nietzsche defines existence as a dynamic, artistic process of creation, which can be shaped by a will to power to either overcome or exercise influence. Georg W. F. Hegel defines existence neither as Being nor as Non-Being, but as a continuous process of (...) Becoming. Beyond binaries of to be or not to be, the question arises how can agency be created to maintain security of Self and Others and, utmost importantly, is there a moral duty for it? “The duty of other-securitization, as indeed the duty of self-securitization,” Floyd argues, “rests on a prior duty of politicization.”. (shrink)

A convergence of four genealogies reveals drone power. Environmentality describes the contradictory uses of drones in conservation. Humanitarianism articulates how control is enacted and challenged in human crises. Securitization examines drones in surveillance and counter-surveillance. Militarization, the use of drones in war, explains domination from above and resistance from below. While theories of governmentality dominate, an emergent materialism within drone studies emphasizes the diffusion of power and agency. A synthesis of drone governmentality and drone materialism exposes four flightways or (...) elemental trajectories. The drone is an existential technology – a tool for enlivenment and senescence. As such, drone power migrates between biopolitics and resistance. In doing so, drone performativity generates assemblages of human and nonhuman actants entangled at material-discursive and onto-epistemological levels. Entrapment designates the consequences of increasing dependency on technologies in sociotechnical systems of life and death. (shrink)

Due to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax letters of a few weeks later, the concept of dual use has spread widely in the life sciences during the past decade. This article is aimed at a clarification of the dual use concept and its scope of application for the life sciences. Such a clarification would greatly facilitate the work of policymakers seeking to ensure security while avoiding undesirable interventions of government in the conduct of science. The article starts (...) with an overview of the main developments in life sciences in relation to dual use. This is illustrated by discussions on synthetic biology and dual use. The findings lead to a reconsideration of the dual use concept. An area in need of further attention is to what extent threats and intentions should have impact on the definition of dual use. Possible threats are analyzed against the background of the phenomenon of securitization of health care and life sciences: considering these sectors of society in security terms. Some caveats that should be taken into account in a dual use policy are described. An acceptable, adequate and applicable definition of the dual use concept could help researchers, universities, companies and policy makers. Such a definition should build upon, but go beyond, the view developed in the influential Fink-report, which concentrates on the so-called ‘experiments of concern’, e.g. experiments that enhance the virulence of pathogens (National Research Council of the National Academies 2004) It will be argued that—in addition to these more technical aspects—a definition of dual use should include the aspect of threats and intentions. (shrink)

This paper identifies two conceptions of security in contemporary concerns over the vulnerability of computers and networks to hostile attack. One is derived from individual-focused conceptions of computer security developed in computer science and engineering. The other is informed by the concerns of national security agencies of government as well as those of corporate intellectual property owners. A comparative evaluation of these two conceptions utilizes the theoretical construct of “securitization,”developed by the Copenhagen School of International Relations.

Using the two cases of the Icelandic Health Sector Database and Russian initiatives in biobanking, the article criticizes the view of narratives and imaginaries as a sufficient and unproblematic means of shaping public understanding of genetics and justifying population-wide projects. Narrative representations of national biobanking engage particular imaginaries that are not bound by the universal normative framework of human rights, promote affective thinking, distract the public from recognizing and discussing tangible ethical and socioeconomic issues, and harm trust in science and (...) technology. In the Icelandic case, the presentation of the project in association with national imaginaries concealed its market identity and could lead to the commodification of biodata. In the Russian case, framing in terms of "genetic sovereignty" and "civilizational code" offers pretexts for state securitization. Adherence to normative framework of human rights and public discussion of genetics in an argumentative and factual mode can counter these trends. (shrink)

In our study of U.S. counterterrorism programs, we found that anthropology needs a mode of analysis that considers security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the very heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. This article first presents a genealogy for the anthropology of security, and identifies four main approaches: violence and State terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as “security analytics.” Security analytics moves away from studying security (...) formations, and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As a framework for anthropological inquiry, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We then illustrate this approach through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter extremism. In each of our cases, we use security analytics to arrive at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of conceptual distinctions that we propose as an aid to approaching empirical situations and the study of security is, on another level, a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice for every situation. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary U.S. security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems. (shrink)

The UK government's ‘Prevent’ counter‐extremism policy was placed on a statutory footing in 2015, requiring specified authorities including NHS providers by law to work to ‘prevent people being drawn into terrorism’, leading to calls for a boycott on ethical grounds. Since 2016, mental health professionals have been embedded within counterterrorism police units in ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’, to assist in the management of individuals referred to Prevent perceived to have vulnerabilities related to mental health. Drawing on data obtained through Freedom of (...) Information requests, this paper examines these hubs in the context of Prevent's racial politics. It examines the pseudo‐scientific concept of radicalization through the lens of racialization theory and explores the whitewashing and colourblindness endemic to most research and practice at the nexus of counterterrorism and mental health. Four ethical issues arising from the hubs are highlighted: (a) the securitization of care, including the way counterterrorism concerns appear to influence medical treatment regimes; (b) harm, including potential criminalization; (c) the erosion of patient agency and confidentiality; and (d) the pathologization of political dissent. It is argued that due to the UK's status as a leading innovator in the field of counter‐radicalization, all of these highly racialized phenomena hold wider relevance and augur a troubling direction of travel for counterterrorism's turn towards mental health. (shrink)

As part of the “Solar Geoengineering: Ethics, Governance, and International Politics” roundtable, this essay examines dilemmas arising in exploring nonideal scenarios of solar geoengineering deployment. Model-based knowledge about solar geoengineering tells us little about possible climatic responses to malicious, self-interested, or competing deployments, and even less about political or cultural responses outside of the climate system. The essay argues that policy for governing solar geoengineering in a world of multiple states and uneven power relations requires a broader base for solar (...) geoengineering knowledge, beyond that offered by modeling, and a better understanding of nonideal scenarios, especially those motivated by logics beyond reducing climate impacts. It highlights the interests of military and security actors in such knowledge, and the potential for it to facilitate securitization and further reduce the prospect of multilateral collaborative governance of geoengineering in the public interest. The essay concludes that further research can be ethically justified but must be comprehensively governed. (shrink)

International Relations scholars have been reluctant to engage with questions of friendship in the international system. This may be a consequence of the predominance of (neo)realism in IR and its implications – to view the international arena as an anarchic, self‐help system, where states are trapped in the security dilemma. However, over the last six decades, some regions have overcome the security dilemma and states have constructed peaceful relationships based on mutual trust and confidence, resembling friendship at the interstate level. (...) Building upon securitization theory, this essay distinguishes between different perceptions that states may have of their own security, and links them with different types of regional peace. It proposes a two‐phase process whereby relationships may move from negative to positive peace, suggesting different mechanisms for each phase. It illustrates this model by examining the Argentine–Brazilian détente of the late 1970s and the determination to build a zone of positive peace in Latin America’s Southern Cone. (shrink)

This article further elaborates on the “pre-crime society” thesis as developed and examined by Arrigo and Sellers. Specifically, the article focuses on the ultramodern era of digital inter-connectivity and argues that productive psychic desire is held clinically captive. Ultra-modernity is populated by cyber-forms of human relating and of economic exchange that nurture hyper-securitization. We discuss how the maintenance of hyper-securitization supports a pre-crime society, and how hyper-securitization’s object of desire consists of sign-optics. We argue that the co-constitutive (...) forces of this desire represent the sign-exchange values of post-criminology. Post-criminology’s signifiers include, among others, “predictive policing”, “crime mapping”, and “actuarial penology.” Post-criminology’s signifieds produce captivity-generating bio-digital “laws” of human relatedness. Among others, these laws sanction the neurosis of de-vitalization and certify the psychosis of finalization. We explain how the unchecked excess neutralizations of de-vitalization and finalization cultivate clinical captivity. Clinical captivity is a social anxiety in which reciprocal consciousness, inter-subjectivity, and mutual power are limited in existence or are denied an existence. (shrink)

The chapter argues that the best version of act-utilitarianism (as well as the best version of consequentialism) will: (1) evaluate sets of actions and not just individual actions, (2) presuppose securitism as opposed to actualism or possibilism, (3) index permissions and obligations to times, and (4) possess a dual-ranking structure. It argues for a version of indirect consequentialism according to which the moral permissibility of an individual action is determined by whether or not it is contained within some maximal set (...) of actions that is itself morally permissible. This version of indirect consequentialism—viz., commonsense consequentialism—is able to accommodate all the basic features of commonsense morality: special obligations, agent-favoring options, agent-sacrificing options, agent-centered restrictions, supererogatory acts, the self-other asymmetry, and even the idea that some acts are supererogatory in the sense of going above and beyond what imperfect duty requires. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Securitization of infectious diseases may involve suspension of ordinary human rights and liberties. In the event of an epidemic, therefore, it is important to limit the occasions upon which draconian disease control measures are implemented in the name of security. The term ‘security’, moreover, should not be used too loosely if it is to retain force and meaning in political discourse. It may be argued that the bar for disease securitization should be set high so that it (...) is limited to contexts involving rapidly spreading pathogens. Such an approach, however, would rule out securitization of more slowly spreading, endemic diseases such as HIV/aids. An advantage of characterizing HIV/aids as a security threat in developing countries, where the burden of the disease is concentrated, is that this is likely to mobilize resources needed to improve the situation there. That is, if HIV/aids is convincingly framed as a security threat, then governments may recognize self‐interested reasons to ramp up control measures. Following consideration of arguments for narrow (excluding HIV/aids) versus broad (including HIV/aids) conceptions of security, we conclude that the legitimacy of ‘securitizing’ HIV/aids ultimately turns on empirical and semantic issues, and we emphasize the importance of distinguishing (1) the nature of the threat posed by HIV/aids and (2) the measures required to address that threat. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Western European right-wing and left-wing parties have appropriated each other’s Islamophobic tropes to better justify the securitization of Islam to their electors. It aims at explaining the context in which the travel of four specific tropes across conservative/right-wing and liberal-progressive/left-wing ideologies occurred. This context is marked by what the author defines as ‘critical junctures’, namely, moments of urgency when the feeling of insecurity towards political Islam rapidly escalated, such as the Rushdie and Creil affairs in (...) 1989, the hundreds of victims in the jihadist terrorist attacks committed by Al-Qaeda and ISIL, as well as Brexit and the Mediterranean refugee crisis of 2015. The four Islamophobic tropes discussed in the chapter are: ‘Islam is a different civilization that violently clashes with the West’; ‘Muslim immigration is a demographic threat’; ‘Islam is incapable of separating the political sphere from the religious sphere’; ‘Islam is a patriarchal religion that poses obstacles to gender equality’. The first and second tropes sit comfortably with right-wing conservative ideologies, the third and the fourth tropes with liberal-progressive and left-leaning one. Such a wide range of stereotyped views on Muslims provides the ideological background behind current forms of securitization of Islam. The chapter then engages with securitization theories, arguing that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools do not provide the right framework to understand why the same threat (Islam) is securitized in different ways by parties of various political ideologies. To decipher this dynamic, the author proposes engaging with the concept of translation, which explains how securitization moves inside and outside parties. (shrink)

This chapter explains the meaning and dimensions of translation. It argues that translation is active, collective, and contextual and that parties craft securitization through a circular movement of collision, appropriation, and reformulation of words. Through this process, parties interact as both agents and audiences involved into the translation of securitization and in its rejection, which can lead to the de-securitization of an issue. The author explains firstly that parties translate actively. The purpose is to avoid passive imitation (...) and to present the final product as better than the original. Although the appropriation of other parties’ tropes is used to appeal to larger electorates, it mainly seeps into the ideological repertoire of each party to keep its traditional values, norms, and identities consistent and show coherence in front of internal and external audiences. Then, the author explains that translation is a collective process. Although it can be spearheaded by individual party leaders, it is effectively achieved by internal factions and by a cluster of mediators that work behind the stage. Party leaders, factions, and mediators work to translate alternative ideological baggage into their vocabulary. Internal factionalism matters for translation and has been even strengthened in the context of the growing personalization of politics. If factions do not express sufficient convergence of interests, translations might fail and de-securitization might follow suit. Finally, the author reflects on how translations within and across parties occur in the sociocultural context where they are made and read. The translations across parties are nested in a distal context marked by left-wing orientalist and Islamophobic legacies, and in the proximate context of party interaction across the political spectrum. (shrink)

The conclusion highlights that the puzzle and arguments advanced in the book carry much significance in light of the electoral growth of radical right parties in Britain (Reform UK), France (National Rally), and Italy (Brothers of Italy). It reiterates the importance of the notion of translation to grasp how Islamophobia and its securitarian dimensions travel across countries and parties. Exploring this process allows moving beyond the methodological state-centrism of Copenhagen and Paris Schools of securitization and enriching Critical Security Studies (...) through a focus on political parties. Then, it explains the added value of a comparative approach to elicit affinities and differences in the way Islamophobic tropes travel across the Right and Left in the three countries under scrutiny. Finally, it recalls the normative implications of the debates about securitizing Islam and discloses promising areas for further investigation in the study of Islamophobia among European political parties. (shrink)

The chapter addresses the worry that if we defend agent-centered options by arguing that non-moral reasons can successfully counter moral reasons and thereby prevent them from generating moral requirements, we end up sacrificing rational options to get moral options. It is argued that we should accept _rational securitism_ and that our doing so allows us to account for rational options. On this view, the rational status of an individual action is a function of its role in some larger, temporally extended (...) plan of action, and that this plan of action is to be evaluated not with respect to whether the agent will be able to perform all the corresponding parts of the plan when the time comes, but with respect to whether, in embarking on the plan now, the agent will be able to secure _now_ that she will, when the time comes, perform all the corresponding parts of the plan. (shrink)

What makes safety claims about general purpose AI systems such as large language models trustworthy? We show that rather than the capabilities of security tools such as alignment and red teaming procedures, it is security practices based on these tools that contributed to reconfiguring the image of AI safety and made the claims acceptable. After showing what causes the gap between the capabilities of security tools and the desired safety guarantees, we critically investigate how AI security practices attempt to fill (...) the gap and identify several shortcomings in diversity and participation. We found that these security practices are part of securitization processes aiming to support (commercial) development of general purpose AI systems whose trustworthiness can only be imperfectly tested instead of guaranteed. We conclude by offering several improvements to the current AI security practices. (shrink)

European police and judicial cooperation was initiated as a counterpart to the progressive abolition of internal border controls under Schengen. Since then, the security policy of the European Union (EU) has developed into one of the most dynamic and fastest growing policy areas of the Union. The aim of this contribution is to outline the main trends and characteristics of this policy field. I suggest to conceptualised them as instances of ‘pre-emptive security’. This is an approach to security that focuses (...) on hypothetical future events and aims to prevent the most serious events (e.g. serious criminal offences) by means of risk assessments and probability forecasts, without addressing the phenomenon as a whole (e.g. crime) and its causes. Pre-emptive understandings of security differ from both reactive and pre-emptive approaches. In the paper, I outline the main characteristics of this model both in historical terms and with regard to the latest developments in the field of EU security policy. Finally, I discuss the problematic normative implications of the pre-emptive understanding of security, both for the rule of law and democracy and for human autonomy. (shrink)