Security concept

My name is Barry Buzan, I am professor of international relations at the LSE. I took my first degree at the University of British Columbia. I did my PhD here at the LSE – in what now seems a very long time ago. I taught at UBC briefly, had a post-doc there, then I was at Warwick for a long time and now I’ve fetched up here.

My work has mostly been on the theoretical side of security. I’ve been working with the concept of security for a very long time. I think I can reasonably claim to have written the first book that was about the concept of security because it was an odd hole in the literature – if you wanted to study justice or love or any other kind of social concept you probably would find a shelf load of books that discuss the concept. But security, there wasn’t such a book. So my interest has been in the concept itself, both what it covers – what the terrain of it is – and also, more recently, in conjunction with colleagues in Copenhagen, to look at the process by which something gets designated in security language. It’s a more constructivist take on it. In other words, here the perspective is not that threats are necessarily objective things – that if there are fifty tanks on your borders, that’s necessarily a threat because they’re tanks – but how it is that a society or any group of people come to designate, or not designate, something as a threat.

This offers you a range between paranoia on the one hand – like individuals, societies can see threats where there are none in an objective sense – or complacency on the other hand; where societies don’t define something of a threat when it actually is. So it offers two ways of looking at security: the more traditional objective threat analysis – which can be military, but it can also be environmental and societal, depending on what you want to designate as a threat and what you’re concerned about the security of; and then there’s the social side of it – what’s the process by which threats get constructed: who speaks it, who listens to it, how does something get put together and accepted as a threat.

You can see that process with the ending of the Cold War. It was a very interesting example of how something which had been very successfully constructed as a threat, and I think in most people’s eyes, not everyone, but in most people’s eyes, in the West and probably in the East, was accepted as a real threat – and probably was – but all of that disappeared in four or five years. The rhetoric changed and a different discourse began to emerge, and within four or five years it was all gone – as indeed was the Soviet Union. So that’s a very interesting example of what I would call a de-securitizing process; where something which is established as a threat gets un-done and wound down and accepted as no longer being a threat. So it’s a process that works in both directions.


What is security?

Since the ending of the Cold War, there have been a lot of changes. The military agenda, the traditional security agenda, dropped down in salience very greatly and various other sorts of things emerged and got more prominence. There were a lot of talk about societal security, identity, nationalism, religion and all of those kinds of things. There were more talks about economic and environmental security. So during the 90s, there was a considerable broadening out of the agenda - which had been visible before - a move away from security as being principally about military things, and a move towards accepting a wider range of things as being part of what the security discourse was about.

There are, of course, some people who think that security is just military and that the two things define each other. I’m not a fan of that position because it seems to me that the military isn’t intrinsically about security issues. My sense of a security issue is that it goes along with a certain kind of formula, that there has to be an existential threat, a big threat to something - a referent object which is highly valued by a group of people - and that that combination of things leads to call for extreme measures, or emergency measures of some sort. That to me is the kind of formula for identifying what’s a security issue and what’s not. In other words, it’s an attempt to take things out of the realm of normal politics and attach to them an emergency type of priority, saying “we have to do something about this, and we have to do it now and quickly because if we don’t, something we value, maybe us, is going to disappear or be seriously damaged in some way.” That to me is what differentiates security politics from normal politics. And it could be military stuff, but it could not.

If you think of security in that way, then aspects of military stuff aren’t security. The fact that the Danes sent peacekeepers to Bosnia, or wherever, isn’t a security issue for Denmark. It’s normal politics. It’s part of their foreign policy. I think it’s important to break the link between the military and the security agenda, and to look at it instead in terms of this formula that I’ve set out. My colleague Ole Waever calls it “panic politics”. It’s about emergencies and how to deal with them. 


Objective view of security?

I’m not sure that you can come to an objective conclusion about security, and there are certainly no guarantees that it’s going to be clear. Political life is very seldom clear. It’s always going to be contested; it’s going to depend on what values different people bring to the discussion. One person’s open-and-shut case for securitization will not be another person’s, and there will be contestations. So the job of politicians or of campaigners of any sort is to try to get their version of securitization accepted. There will be some people who are quite happy with the war on terrorism because it serves their interest in a variety of ways, it’s saleable as an “objective threat” and looks real enough with some evidence out there – you can back it up. Others will say “this is just a distraction”, that we really need to be worried about the fact that the icecaps are melting, that the ocean levels are rising, that the climate is going to go to hell, and that that will make all this other stuff look pretty trivial. So there are going to be different positions, different priorities.

You have to look at the discourses and how they unfold. And individuals have to make their own decisions about where they play into that – what they accept, what they can test. There’s no certainty about this, and many of the issues are difficult. Your question implies that perfect knowledge is available. This is the social world; certain knowledge is never available, and you usually have to go on the basis of “do the best you can”. But at the end of the day, you’re going to have to make a decision on the basis of less-than-perfect knowledge.


Defining security threats 

You need to study the process by which something gets designated as a security issue. Who is it who speaks this? Who has authority to speak it? Obviously, in the way in which we organize our political lives now the state leaderships have a privileged position for speaking security; it’s their job to do that. But they can’t just do so and always have it accepted. If you think about something like the Vietnam War or if you think more currently about the business in Iraq, those are highly contested securitizations which, in the case of Vietnam, eventually collapsed. Even in the US, people no longer accepted that as being a valid definition of a threat that justified what was going on there.

I think what is interesting at the moment is, of course, the war on terrorism, which is bidding to be a macro-securitization – like the Cold War was. In other words, something which defines a very big strategic domain over a long period of time and which becomes the basic priority-setter in the security agenda. Obviously, that’s the way Washington is looking at it at the moment, and that has been reasonably successful, in the sense that amongst the Western states at least - and quite a few others - there’s a willingness to agree that there is a serious threat there and to proceed on that basis in policy terms. Contrast that with Iraq, with this huge disagreement.


Threat construction

The approach I’ve been taking is an analytical approach, it’s not a normative approach – I’m not taking sides here. It’s an analytical approach which says that you need to distinguish between being part of the process of securitization by saying “this is a threat”, or accepting that this is a threat. My interest has been in looking at the process by which other people do that. So I’m interested in the way in which various things can get rapidly built up into being accepted as a security issue like the war on terrorism, or become contested like Iraq, or suddenly deconstruct like the Cold War or in Southern Africa – the whole confrontation between South Africa and the frontline states just disappeared in a very short number of years. My focus in life has not been on identifying what I think are objective threats, but on looking at the way in which others respond to that threat environment. And looking at the correlation – or lack of correlation – between what gets constructed as a threat – or not – and what might be thought of, objectively, as a threat.

For example, one of my small hobby horses – which I just use as an interesting example of the distance between objective threats and things that actually get accepted as threats - is the business of rocks falling from space and crashing into the planet and doing damage. This is an interesting example because there’s a lot of knowledge about that, unlike certain other security issues like global warming, where the science itself is contested. We know pretty much what the threat is. We know how often rocks of various sizes slam into the planet. Increasingly, we know where they are and what they are. We could do something about this if we wanted to; the technology is there. There are certainly a lot of interest groups out there that might support this for all kinds of reasons – industries who would support it because it would produce a lot of high tech contracts, trekkies who would support it because it would support the idea of getting out into space, environmentalists who are concerned about the planet, etc. There should be a sufficient constituency there for this to be constructed as a threat. The statistical evidence is sufficient for it to be so, in the sense that the chance of any one individual dying because of this is greater than the chance of their dying in an aircraft. So it’s up there in the real world of people’s lives. Hollywood has done its bit; there have been lots of good movies about asteroids crashing into the planet. But has this been securitized anywhere? No. Do people worry about it? No.

It’s an interesting case. You could construct this; global leaders might even feel that it would be a useful thing to do because it would give a common project for the whole world to pull together on. So it might be useful from the point of view of global governance. There would be all kinds of good reasons for doing this, its object would be political, but it just hasn’t happen. Why? I don’t know. But it’s interesting that it hasn’t happened and that other things, which might be thought of as less pressing, do get securitized. So that’s the focus of my concern. I’m more interested in the choices that other people make than running my own campaign to say “this is the thing we should be worried about”.