ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, human smuggling and trafficking activities in the Taiwan Strait have not only frequently attracted the attention of the international community, but also elicited widely different responses from various observers. While some would believe these activities to be part of the inevitable consequences of globalisation, others like the Copenhagen School, represented by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, prefer to place the similar topics in a new analytical framework based around the subjective construction of security. While it is understandable that the new concept of securitisation proposed by the Copenhagen School stemmed from the European environment, and can not necessarily be applied to the complexities of East Asia, this chapter tests the utility of securitisation with an empirical case study on the smuggling and trafficking in persons in the Taiwan Strait.
