ABSTRACT
The theoretical framework that guides and structures this study is informed by securitization theory, Patrick Jackson’s concept of legitimation (2006) and poststructuralist propositions.1 Although these are different contributions to the IR literature and operate on different analytical levels, they complement each other and work in combination because they are all committed to the same ‘philosophical wager’, namely mind-world monism, the view that social objects do not exist independent of our ideas or beliefs about them.2 In post-structuralist parlance, which has particularly influenced this book, the objects of our knowledge are neither objectively given, nor independent of our interpretations or language, but are products of our ways of categorizing the world. That is not to say that discourse has priority over non-discourse, that objects do not exist without thought or language – but ‘that they could not constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence’.3 In line with this monist position, the theory of acceptable war is informed by a particular understanding of threat. The object subjected to war does not necessarily constitute a ‘real’ existential threat, but it is represented as such. Copenhagen School securitization theory was chosen as a point of departure because the dynamics and concepts outlined in this theory seemed to capture the logic of what was happening in Russia when the Second Chechen War was launched. Indeed, according to Wæver, the Copenhagen School endeavour was precisely about uncovering ‘what practitioners actually do in talking security’.4 Copenhagen School securitization theory provides a conceptualization of a process that combines the onset of urgent securitizing talk which positions a particular issue as a threat to survival, acceptance of this representation among the audience, and the enabling of emergency measures ‘beyond rules that would otherwise bind’.5 When Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister in summer 1999, he clearly framed Chechnya as an existential threat to Russia in his speeches. His claim was so widely accepted in the Russian public that a war, the crudest of emergency measures, could be undertaken without protest. Such a war had been beyond the rules of the game, defined in terms of the domestic political debate, only half a year before. Despite this intuitive, initial fit with the case at hand, Copenhagen School securitization theory is inadequate to catch the dynamic social process that goes
on when war becomes acceptable. The making of an acceptable war is a much broader social process and has much wider societal ramifications than Copenhagen School securitization theory allows us to investigate. In the case of the Second Chechen War, the discursive process which established Chechnya as an existential threat was full of interaction across political leadership and public constituencies. It included many more voices than that of the Russian leader. In the course of this process Chechnya was given a new identity, but also Russian identity was re-constituted. The representations of Chechnya as an existential threat to Russia were a drastic break with the official representations only half a year before, yet this enmity had been centuries in the making. Finally, the radical re-articulations of Chechnya and Russia during 1999 were not confined to words: they manifested themselves quite literally in detentions, bombs, torture and killing. All this suggests the need to create a framework that pays more attention to inter-subjectivity, context, identity-change and materiality than Copenhagen School securitization theory does. Such a framework is within reach if we take the post-structuralist underpinnings of securitization theory more seriously. This chapter will proceed in four sections. The next section outlines how post-structuralist ideas on policy production can be used to re-phrase securitization as a discursive process of legitimation. It includes an argument in favour of substituting a post-structuralist concept of discourse for the Austinian speech act as a core concept in the theory. Picking up on and specifying this broader outline of securitization as a discursive process of legitimation, I then in the second, third and fourth sections move on to show what post-structuralist insight does to securitization theory when elaborated to address the question of how war becomes acceptable. In these sections, I expound key concepts and relations in securitization under headings suggested by the Copenhagen School, namely representations of existential threat, emergency measures and audience acceptance,6 offering a post-structuralist re-interpretation. This will imply disrupting the sequence from representations by securitizing actors via audience acceptance to emergency measures as suggested by the Copenhagen School in order to benefit from post-structuralist insights on how significative and material discursive practices are intertwined and co-constitutive. By emphasising the productivity of discourse, the framework will go beyond reinterpretation to provide insights ‘unreleased’ in Copenhagen School securitization theory, while stripping it of extra-discursive concepts. Where possible the writings of Wæver, Buzan and de Wilde are revisited to find support for the conceptualizations offered.7 In other places, second generation securitization literature is engaged to contrast or to find support. Research questions that will guide the empirical enquiry in this book are formulated, and several caveats issued as to the Russian case of securitization for war in 1999.
