The concept of securitisation has gained increasing prominence in the past decade. Initially developed in Copenhagen, the term has been used to describe the broadening of the security agenda and the framing of particular issues as existential threats across the world. In spite of this prominence, very little work has been undertaken that questions the extent to which the concept can be applied beyond the Western world. This volume engages with these questions, providing a theoretical overview of issues with using the concept beyond the West, along with empirical papers looking at its use in a number of different contexts. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

This volume aims to provide a new framework for the analysis of securitization processes, increasing our understanding of how security issues emerge, evolve and dissolve. Securitisation theory has become one of the key components of security studies and IR courses in recent years, and this book represents the first attempt to provide an integrated and rigorous overview of securitization practices within a coherent framework. To do so, it organizes securitization around three core assumptions which make the theory applicable to empirical studies: the centrality of audience, the co-dependency of agency and context and the structuring force of the dispositif. These assumptions are then investigated through discourse analysis, process-tracing, ethnographic research, and content analysis and discussed in relation to extensive case studies. This innovative new book will be of much interest to students of securitisation and critical security studies, as well as IR theory and sociology. Thierry Balzacq is holder of the Tocqueville Chair on Security Policies and Professor at the University of Namur. He is Research Director at the University of Louvain and Associate Researcher at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po Paris.

Offers an innovate approach to ethics and security, combining securitization theory and the just war tradition.

This book introduces you to the key issues in contemporary studies on Terrorism. Its interdisciplinary approach provides a unique intellectual rigour which introduces readers to cutting-edge research. Bringing together chapters contributed by members of the Terrorism and Political Violence Association network, it offers an insight into a variety of traditional and critical perspectives. It also equips Undergraduate and Postgraduate students with the study skills needed to succeed in coursework and assignments, especially dissertation work. Drawing on the expertise of TAPVA members, this book: Explores contemporary issues, such as drone warfare, state violence, children and political violence, cyber-terrorism and de-radicalisation. Features case studies drawn from a range of international examples, lists of further reading, key concepts and questions for use in seminars and private study. Provides you with study skills content designed to help you complete your dissertation. This is the perfect textbook to guide you through your studies in terrorism, political violence, international security and strategic studies.

This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these case studies show how securitisation has projected evolving and often contested local ideas of the organisation of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics have then conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorising to a theory of international systematisation, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. By the same token, by depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general.

Andrew W. Neal argues that while 'security' was once an anti-political 'exception' in liberal democracies - a black box of secret intelligence and military decision-making at the dark heart of the state - it has now become normalised in professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic 'anti-politics'. Using archival research and interviews with politicians, Neal investigates security politics from the 1980s to the present day to show how its meaning and practice have changed over time. In doing so, he develops an original reassessment of the security/politics relationship.

Der Band stellt erstmalig die 'Machtfrage' in der gegenwärtigen konstruktivistischen Sicherheitsforschung. Wie lassen sich Machtverhältnisse, die Probleme der Sicherheit und Unsicherheit betreffen, aus transdisziplinärer und historischer Sicht analysieren? Der Band führt Beiträge aus der Geschichtswissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte, Politikwissenschaft, Soziologie, Kulturanthropologie und Rechtswissenschaft zusammen, um die bislang eher implizit gestellte Frage nach der konzeptuellen Bedeutung von Macht in Prozessen der Versicherheitlichung zu eruieren. Durch konzeptuell-theoretische Aufsätze und durch historische Fallstudien, die vom 16. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert reichen, werden die dominanten Paradigmen der Critical Security Studies, die zumeist aus den Internationalen Beziehungen stammen und oftmals den Staat ins Zentrum der Analyse rücken, in ein neues Licht gerückt.