ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that (in)securitization – “making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics” (Huysmans, 2014: 3) – now calls for much fuller attention than it has hitherto received in sociolinguistics. The chapter draws on Foucault and Mbembe’s ‘necro-power’ to introduce (in)securitization and its historical and contemporary role in the management of large populations. It then outlines some of (in)securitization’s prototypical features (states of exception, enemies and inferiorized ‘races’, walls and fortifications, intensified alertness, silencing), turning after that to (in)securitization’s entanglement with standard language in two empirical studies. In one, people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro experience ongoing violence from drug traffickers and police but have developed digital media practices and a discursive register to resist this (counter-securitization); in the other, Greek Cypriot secondary school teachers and students navigate post-war reconciliation through precarious engagement with Turkish, the language of the former enemy (de-securitization). There are substantial differences between these two sites, indicating the need for close, sustained ethnography. Even so, (in)securitization is still vital to an understanding of how people in these places orient to standard language; beyond this, with increased geopolitical instability, it is hard to doubt (in)securitization’s growing relevance to a plurality of sociolinguistic processes and practices.
