Jef Huysmans

The European Union and the Securitization of Migration

This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in western Europe and how the European integration process is implicated in it. Since the 1980s, the political construction of migration increasingly referred to the destabilizing effects of migration on domestic integration and to the dangers for public order it implied. The spillover of the internal market into a European internal security question mirrors these domestic developments at the European level. The Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs, the Schengen Agreements, and the Dublin Convention most visibly indicate that the European integration process is implicated in the development of a restrictive migration policy and the social construction of migration into a security question. However, the political process of connecting migration to criminal and terrorist abuses of the internal market does not take place in isolation. It is related to a wider politicization in which immigrants and asylum-seekers are portrayed as a challenge to the protection of national identity and welfare provisions. Moreover, supporting the political construction of migration as a security issue impinges on and is embedded in the politics of belonging in western Europe. It is an integral part of the wider technocratic and political process in which professional agencies ‐ such as the police and customs ‐ and political agents ‐ such as social

What's in an act? On security speech acts and little security nothings

This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of ‘act’ in the study of securitization. While much has been written about the discursive and communicative aspects of securitizing, the concept of ‘act’ that contains much of the politicality of the speech-act approach to security has been relatively ignored. The task of re-engaging ‘acts’ is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context, in which politically salient speech acts are heavily displaced by securitizing practices and devices that appear as banal, little security nothings. The main purpose of the article is to begin the framing of a research agenda that asks what political acts can be in diffuse security processes that efface securitizing speech acts.

Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, On the Creative Development of a Security Studies Agenda in Europe

Egbert Jahn, Pierre Lemaitre and Ole Weaver, Copenhagen Papers 1. European Security - Problems of Research on Non-military Aspects. (Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, 1987). Ole Weaver, Pierre Lemaitre and Elzbieta Tromer, eds. European Polyphony: Perspectives beyond East-West Confrontation. (London: Macmillan, 1989). Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup, Pierre Lemaitre, Elzbieta Tromer ad Ole Weaver, The European Security Order Recast. Scenarios for the Post-Cold War Era. (London: Pinter, 1990). Ole Weaver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe. (London: Pinter, 1993). Barry Buzan, Ole Weaver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

Defining social constructivism in security studies: the normative dilemma of writing security

Explains security formation as it relates to social interpretations from a social constructivist perspective. Consequences of approaching identity questions from a security perspective; Interpretation of security problems in the societal area without the risk of repeating the securitization of the area; Sociological understanding of the governing work of the security information; Mobilization of security formation from a sociological angle.

Politics of Exception and Unease: Immigration, Asylum and Terrorism in Parliamentary Debates in the UK

This article analyses how the British political elite has securitised migration and asylum since 9/11 by looking at when and how parliamentary debates linked counter-terrorism to immigration and/or asylum. The findings suggest that there is considerable reluctance within the political elite to introduce or especially sustain the connection between migration and terrorism too intensely in public debate. The parliamentary debates also show that for understanding the securitising of migration and asylum one cannot focus exclusively on the main security framing that is found in counter-terrorism debates, which we name ‘the politics of exception’. There is at least one other format, which we call ‘the politics of unease’, that is central to how the British political elite securitises migration and asylum, and contests it, in the public realm.

Critical methods in International Relations: The politics of techniques, devices and acts

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

International politics of insecurity: normativity, inwardness and the exception

This article seeks (a) to show the complexities of the concept of exception in international politics, (b) to suggest that the current politics of insecurity are not limited to a clash over the status and limits of normativity in international politics, and (c) to introduce conceptual groundwork for theorizing international politics of insecurity as a contest of the exception. By combining normative and existential concepts of exception, a conceptual matrix is introduced that distinguishes between political liberalism and realism, on the one hand, and anti-diplomatic ultrapolitical realism and liberalism, on the other. While the focus in discussions of exception is often on the tension between realist assertions of the limited validity of international norms and liberal assertions of the real capacity of international norms to constrain political power, something more complex may be going on in current international politics of insecurity. The conceptual matrix draws attention to an additional tension between those realists and liberals willing to retain common grounds for symbolic mediation in international politics and those seeking to intensify antidiplomatic inwardness.

Security unbound: Enacting democratic limits

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

Shape-shifting NATO: humanitarian action and the Kosovo refugee crisis

The article deals with NATOs intervention in Kosovo. Instead of focusing on the military and diplomatic interventions, the article looks at how NATO developed a humanitarian interest in providing assistance and protection to the Kosovo Albanian refugees. In the name of the refugees—and to a lesser extent, of internally displaced persons—NATO entered a humanitarian field and was partly transfigured into a humanitarian agency during the crisis in Kosovo. The political significance of NATOs humanitarianism was that its reputation for competence and its image of respectability and honour depended to an extent on how well it supported the international assistance to the Kosovo Albanians. The stakes were not limited to the immediate Kosovo context, however. The symbolic struggle for reputation and honour resonated directly in the political struggle for the conservation and transformation of the European security complex. The success of the humanitarian operation became an additional element of demonstrating the value of military capital for acquiring political authority in the definition and management of security problems in post-Cold War Europe.

Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. collective Responds

HAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’, the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitizationHAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’,1 the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitization. If, in this sense, the article can be read as a manifesto (with, we should note, the important prefix ‘networked’), we did not assert, as Andreas Behnke Rejoinder