ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the formation of the security state in a world continually subjected to forces outside the state's domain, especially the real and imagined threats of terror and the rise of terrorism. It reflects on the current global environment and discusses how the state constitutes and reconstitutes its role in the creation of security. In and through the state's discursive maneuvers, national security discourse is used to inscribe and prescribe specific agency to issues and events. The forces of globalization is understood here as a process of increasing intensity and extensity of relationships between organizations and agencies, agents and groups, and individual and community. The act of terrorism is not viewed, under this rubric of US securitization, as a symbolic act designed to influence change based on injustice or maltreatment. The terrorist event is mobilized into American public discourse as a threat to the nation's security.
