In case you missed it, quite the IR controversy has broken out. In August 2019, Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (hereafter H&RM) published “Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the...
This is the twelfth contribution to our securitization forum. Clifford Bob is professor of political science and Raymond J. Kelley Endowed Chair in International Relations at Duquesne University....
This is the eleventh contribution to our securitization forum. Can E. Mutlu is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Bilkent University. His research interests are located at the...
This is the tenth contribution in our securitization forum. Clara Eroukhmanoff is a PhD candidate at the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. She recently published an...
The following is a lead piece for a forum discussing why securitization theory has had so little traction in American IR. Drawing on established and emerging scholars from around the world, the forum will run from September 16th - 30th and feature guest posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Two years ago Dan Nexon approached Eric, a petulant graduate student, about organizing such a forum with the support of Patrick T. Jackson. Dan and Patrick soon had to leave Duck of Minerva for International Studies Quarterly. The project was put on hold until Eric met Jarrod at ISA in New...
It is shocking how little attention Iran’s recent efforts to satisfy the international community’s demands on nuclear question have received in the news media and academic discourse. As I write this, there are 1182 related news stories on news.google.com related to Rob Ford’s struggles with the crack cocaine and only 85 related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Prepping for my graduate course on IR Theory, it struck me how little we talk about the process of desecuritization. The securitization process is well covered, we often are able to analyse, describe, and deconstruction the process...
Neill Blomkamp's "Elysium" packs a punch for an action sci-fi film even if its punches don't land. So yeah ... Jodie Foster doesn't give her best performance and the other roles for women in the film are completely lame. Â A beefy Matt Damon, bless his heart, is poorly cast. Â The core plot line doesn't make much sense. Â Look, let's face it, there is just no way Blomkamp can match the brilliance of his earlier hit, "District 9." Nevertheless, this film plays well with a range of contemporary possibilities/anxieties in the Global North: post-human bodies, surveillance drones, biometrics, the...
For students of international affairs and security, especially from either side of the Atlantic, its that time of year again when we  congregate at the ISA Conference to muse on the globalisation of everything in a borderless world...after enduring an increasingly unpleasant border regime at the Airport. I'm not sure about our readers, but the general experience of Heathrow, JFK or LAX is not exactly border free. In the age of anxiety, about mass casualty terrorism especially, the airport in states that once fancied themselves far away from the troubled places on the planet has become an...
This is a guest post by Jarrod Hayes.  Jarrod is Assistant Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Southern California in 2009. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy. He is currently trying to determine what should be on the cover of his forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press while trying to reconcile that with the maxim that books should not be judged by their covers. One of the important areas of debate in securitization theory is...
This is a guest post by Brandon Valeriano and Ryan Maness. Cyberwar is a pressing international security problem. The news media breathlessly covers any potential attack before the facts are in. Policy briefs and reports are produced on all levels of government and private industry. It would then behoove us to take a step back and examine opinions about the cyber security threat according to perceptions among policymakers, academics, and cyber security experts in order to understand how the threat emanating from the cyber security realm is constructed in the public discourse. Each...
Corey Robin's Jacobin essay is getting a lot of attention, including from Jon Western at the Duck and Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I don't think that it detracts from Robin's essay to note that the argument he's making is long-standing in international-relations scholarship. It appears in David Campbell's seminal Writing Security and, more recently, in the form of "securitization theory" (PDF), complete with similar invocations of Thomas Hobbes. Scott's criticisms of Robin gets at an ongoing issue with securitization theory. Scott notes that security threats, particularly in...
2012 interview with Barry Buzan.