Introduction: Securitisation, what do we mean?

In Europe there is a vibrant debate over a number of competing schools in security studies. The Copenhagen (securitisation), Aberystwyth/Welsh (critical security studies) and Paris (Bourdieu inspired work of Didier Bigo and Thierry Balzacq, also known as insecuritisation) Schools are among the most debated and critiqued new approaches. However, beyond a common opposition to realism and traditional militarist, statist approaches to security, the non-traditional wider and deeper approaches often fundamentally deviate from each other. They differ on what the referent object of security should be, whether security is negative or positive, whether the objective should be to securitise or desecuritise, and whether the emphasis should be on normative or explanatory theory.

This chapter amalgamates the CS’s securitisation theory focused on discourse and security speech-acts with the CS’s more sociological approach focused on practices, governmentality and technologies to enrich the literature and contribute to its normative value with empirical application. While the CS argues that security issues are the political outcome of illocutionary speech-acts and that one of the most effective ways of analysis is through the discursive practices in different security sectors, the CS’s work has been concerned with practices of security shifting the focus from political agency to institutions and professionals involved in the definition of threats and the technologies to govern them (Buzan 1983, Buzan, Wæver et al. 1998, Bigo 2002, Collective 2006). Nevertheless, both schools do not account for the role of institutionalised perceptions of threat on identity narratives and hence fail to understand the interplay between (de)securitisation and ontological security.

Though rooted in different fields and criticised for their varying weaknesses, these two schools of thought have different strengths in terms of their analytical, normative and practical utility and can in fact be complementary. Even though the dialogue between the two schools has so far been minimal, the CS’s emphasis on practices is highly significant for

explaining the under-theorised concept of institutionalised securitisations where the role of the speech-act and the enunciator diminishes by default, and where the perceptions of threat and feelings of fear seep into identity narratives and daily routines. As such, the securitisation process becomes multi-actored (i.e. elites, media, civil society), multi-directional (i.e. top- down, bottom-up, horizontal), and multi-layered (i.e. discourse, imagery, routines), escaping discourse to encompass performative forms of communication.

Even though the CS’s securitisation is probably the most widely applied and fully developed study of securitisation processes, it is also widely criticised and its application and interpretation varied. However, since its initial inception based on a more regimental prescription of rules and conditions, securitisation as a concept and as a process today is more flexible in its meaning and application. Often, the concept of securitisation is largely defined as a “process by which threats get constructed” (Coskun 2011:8), and boiled down to a broad constructivist tool for analysing the construction of threats and the feelings of insecurity and fear in the literature. On the one hand, it could be argued that securitisation theory has been thinned out to an extent that it has lost its rigour and analytical value; on the other hand, it could also be argued that it provides a popular loose framework that can be contextualised to different realities to explore how something registers as a security issue and translates into a political, emotional and performative reaction based on fear.

Without a strict commitment to either the Copenhagen or the Paris School, I use securitisation as a broad constructivist tool for understanding the construction of threats and the feelings of fear, because my main objective is not to trace these constructions but to analyse their role in identity narratives and in turn their implications for peacebuilding and reconciliation. In parallel with Adener, Chapman, and Theodossopoulos’ concept of ‘hollow categories’, I treat securitisation as a ‘hollow signifier’ (see Ardener and Chapman 1989, Theodossopoulos 2007). Just as hollow identity categories are forever incomplete and malleable ways of seeing the world, and need to be supplemented with spatial and temporal information to acquire more specific meaning; securitisation as a hollow signifier, gives us a general loose framework of analysis, which is about construction and articulation of security issues and hence, conception

interpretation is not a value judgement on validity or importance of the signifier, but reflects the subjectivity and externality of the image produced for the threat, and multiplicity of ways a threat can be produced. The threat can be reinvented, reproduced, accumulated, reinterpreted, negotiated at different levels by different actors through different means. In other words, without temporal and spatial context that adds meaning to the security issue, and helps us understand the process that shapes perceptions around the threat, ‘securitisation’ itself is a hollow signifier. As such, (de)/(in)securitisation simply denotes a process where an issue is constructed somehow by someone as a security issue and is perceived as a threat to something by some group somewhere.

The aim of this chapter is therefore to present my approach to the securitisation literature. The first section of the chapter will provide a brief literature review for the securitisation framework with a particular focus on critiques and its weaknesses. Theorising ‘institutional securitisation’ as a process that is located both within discursive practices of actors and within routinised acts or performances, the second section will discuss how marrying two schools of securitisation can benefit the framework and help its application in conflict environments. Empirically, the fieldwork data as well as secondary sources clearly establish the constructed existential threat (i.e. Turkish immigrants and Turkishness perceived as an existential threat by Cypriots) that the thesis focuses on (Hatay 2008, Loizides 2015). Thus, instead of tracing this construction through discourse analysis or looking at governmentality of insecuritisation, a pragmatic moulding of the Copenhagen and Paris Schools will assist the thesis in exploring how institutionalised threat perceptions relate to identity narratives, ontological security and in turn to peacebuilding on the island. Calling for a pragmatic amalgamation of the two schools to help securitisation be more amenable (responsive to context) and to add depth to our understanding of institutionalised securitisations, the chapter aims to remedy the overreliance on speech-acts that neglect the social and performative aspects of securitisation. Finally, the concluding section that emphasises the importance of routinised practices, imagery and the role of civil society and media for institutionalised securitisations and its intricate relationship with collective identity narratives sets the scene for the next theoretical chapter that adds ontological security to the theoretical framework of the thesis.