ABSTRACT

Speech act theory1 is at the heart of critical inquiry in the field of International Relations (IR). This has been explicit in how Onuf (1989) has studied the social construction of norms, but also in other social constructivist research, for example in the case of Ruggie (1998) through application of Searle’s (1995) social theory. Like most other forms of social constructionism (Hacking 1999), these approaches are critical in the sense that they want to reveal the social constructedness of most of the things studied in the field of IR, and thereby the potential to alter world affairs. Such critical standpoints have led me to investigate the social construction of security. In the field of critical security studies, although there are other constructionist approaches, the most widely used theoretical framework that explicitly uses speech act theory is the theory of securitization (Wæver 1995, Buzan et al. 1998, Balzacq 2010a). In this chapter, I articulate the design and results of a decade of study that has investigated political security in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the concomitant intention to develop the theory of securitization.2