ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter provides a synthetic overview of the recurring, higher-order insights emerging from the various treatments of securitization and de-securitization featured in this volume, spanning a wide range of actors, audiences, and issue and policy domains. Rather than focusing on the discrete findings of the various inquiries into securitization and desecuritization that precede it, here the editor returns to the shared analytical concerns around which said investigations were oriented. In doing so, the efforts of the contributors both individually and collectively are shown to have revealed and/or reinforced three key insights of relevance to securitization theory and practice going forward: one, the intrinsic and useful malleability of the concept; two, the contingency and ambivalence that typifies the outcome(s) of securitization in application; and three, the possibilities and prospects inherent in efforts to more fully unpack and operationalize desecuritization. In addition to the particular findings of each of the preceding investigations, these and related insights speak not only to the many contributions of securitization research to the field of security studies, but also to the critical pathways which scholars would be well-advised to pursue if the explanatory power of securitization as a concept is to be sustained into the future.
