ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the alternative risk configurations constructed by the ‘progressive intellectuals’ on the Peace Issues Discussion Group (PIDG) as part of the securitization process. Whilst the ‘policymakers’ were attempting to securitize risks in treaties with the US state, the PIDG provided contrasting risk configurations in an attempt at ‘desecuritization’. Their risk configurations, in an attempt at ‘perlocution’, were widely adopted by their ‘audience’ – that is, the urban Japanese public. The policymakers ‘won’ in that their risks, constructed more through ‘illocution’, were formally securitized through the ratification of the Peace and Security Treaties in 1951 and the Security Treaty in 1960, and later came to be socially accepted. Nevertheless, the logics and resultant risk configurations espoused by the PIDG established the antimilitarist norm which tempered state security policy (see Hook 1996: 26–41). Having described the wider empirical background of resistance as an element of modern development (Chapter 4), and the logics which the intellectuals advocated within that continuous trajectory (Chapter 5), this chapter applies Luh-mann’s categories of primary and secondary risk to the resultant PIDG statements. As in Chapter 3, my aim is to demonstrate the applicability of Luhmann’s categories as a conceptual approach to the study of risk in securitization. I again use diagrams of the risk configurations. They should be read as explained in Chapter 3.
