ABSTRACT
In sociological terms, reconceptualising security as a pragmatic act, rather than solely as a speech act, finally creates space for the issue of the context in which securitizations occur to be considered. This chapter takes as its starting point the premise that when used for empirical investigation, securitization theory results in an account of security that has effectively been decontextualized. I refer to these final, theoretically-compatible accounts as meta-narratives of security, or meta-securitizations, in order to indicate that they are abstractions of accounts of security that conform to the theoretical model offered by securitization theory. As such, security meta-narratives are retrospective and, crucially, selective abstractions of all the different acts and narratives that contributed to a successful securitization, stripped of reference to any internal dynamics and local context that are not directly related to the final securitization. Problematically for empirical studies, meta-narratives often bear little resemblance to people’s experiences of how securitizing moves developed and are understood within a particular context. The Copenhagen School’s prioritisation of theoretical coherence has meant that consideration of local understandings have been largely ignored, despite the fact that such local knowledge offers the analyst a way to situate securitization specifically in relation to local conditions – i.e. as a pragmatic act – rather than in relation to potentially spurious theoretical assumptions.
