Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T22:36:10.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Revolutionary securitization: an anthropological extension of securitization theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2012

Martin Holbraad  and
Morten Axel Pedersen
Martin Holbraad*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, UK Research Associate, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Morten Axel Pedersen
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Research Co-ordinator, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
*
E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the basic coordinates of the model itself. The argument involves two main steps. First we relativize the Copenhagen School model, showing the contingency of its premises. In its paradigmatic form, we argue, the model is liberal in that its abiding concern with states of emergency turns on an ontological distinction between political subjects (e.g. people) and political structures (e.g. state). By contrast, revolutionary politics in Cuba concertedly rescinds just this distinction, to bring about an alternative, non-liberal political ontology. We then go on to use the Cuban case to construct an alternative model of securitization, which we call revolutionary. On this model, the move of securitization pertains, not to a passage from ordinary politics into a realm of emergency, but to a deliberate ontological fusion of the two, such that rule and exception also become coterminous.

Keywords

anthropologysecuritization theoryCopenhagen schoolrevolutionCubapolitical ontology
Type
Original Papers
Information
International Theory , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 165 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On Revolution. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Translated by Alberto Toscano. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bengelsdorf, Carollee. 1994. The Problem of Democracy in Cuba: Between Vision and Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bill, McSweeney. 1996. “Identity and security: Buzan and the Copenhagen school.” Review of International Studies 22(1):81–93.Google Scholar
Bubandt, Nils. 2005. “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds.” Security Dialogue 36(3):275–296.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Anthony. 2002. “Aporias of security.” Alternatives 27:1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buur, Lars, Jensen, StephenStepputat, Finn (eds). 2007. The Security-Development Nexus. Expressions of Sovereignty in Southern India. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstituttet.Google Scholar
Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Olede Wilde, Jaap 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.Google Scholar
Deleuze, GillesGuattari, Felix 1996. What Is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, GillesGuattari, Felix 1999. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Draper, Hal. 1987. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Emmers, Ralf. 2009. “Securitization.” In Contemporary Security Studies, 2d ed., edited by Alan Collins, 109–126, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Evenson, Debra. 2003. Law and Society in Contemporary Cuba, 2d ed., The Hague: Kluwer Law International.Google Scholar
Floyd, Rita. 2007. “Human Security and the Copenhagen School's Securitization Approach: Conceptualizing Human Security as a Securitizing Move.” Human Security Journal 5:38–49.Google Scholar
García Luis, Julio (ed.). 2008. Cuban Revolution Reader: A Documentary History of Fidel Castro's Revolution. Melbourne: Ocean Press.Google Scholar
Guevara, ErnestoCastro, Fidel 2009. Socialism and Man in Cuba. New York: Pathfinder Press.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holbraad, MartinPedersen, Morten Axel 2009. “Planet M: The Intense Abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.” Anthropological Theory 9(4):371–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holbraad, Martin, Pedersen, Morten Axel. in press. Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest, and the Future. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jensen, Steffen. 2010. “The Security and Development Nexus in Cape Town: War on Gangs, Counterinsurgency and Citizenship.” Security Dialogue 41(1):77–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapcia, Antoni. 2000. Cuba: Island of Dreams. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Kapcia, Antoni. 2005. “Educational Revolution and Revolutionary Morality in Cuba: the “New Man”, Youth and the New “Battle of Ideas”.” Journal of Moral Education 34(4):399–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kent, Alexandra. 2006. “Reconfiguring Security: Buddhism and Moral Legitimacy in Cambodia.” Security Dialogue 37(3):343–361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1992. The State and Revolution. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Mesa-Lago, Carmelo. 1978. Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization, 2d ed., Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Neocleous, Mark. 2006. “The problem with normality: Taking Exception to “permanent emergency”.” Alternatives 31:191–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, Noel. 1990. Portrayals of Revolution: Images, Debates, and Patterns of Thought on the French Revolution. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Pérez, Louis A. Jr 2005. To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Quigley, John. 1989. “Socialist Law and the Civil Law tradition.” The American Journal of Comparative Law 37(4):781–808.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Power of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rotchshild, Emma. 1995. “What is security?” Dædalus 124(3):53–98.Google Scholar
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1961. Sartre on Cuba. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by G. George Schwab. Chicago: Chicago University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections. Updated ed. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2010. Metafísicas Caníbales: Líneas de Antropología Postestructural. Translated from the original French by Stella Mastrangelo. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vuori, Juha A. 2008. “Illocutionary Logic and Strands of Securitization: Applying the Theory of Securitization to the Study of Non-Democratic Political Orders.” European Journal of International Relations 14(1):65–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Wagner. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Revised and expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Michael C. 1998. “Modernity, Identity and Security: A Comment on the “Copenhagen Controversy”.” Review of International Studies 24:435–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Michael C. 2003. “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.” International Studies Quarterly 47:511–531.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, Claire. 2007. “The Copenhagen School on Tour in Kyrgyzstan: Is Securitization Theory Useable Outside Europe?” Security Dialogue 38(1):5–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willerslev, Rane. 2009. “The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death Among the Siberian Chukchi.” American Ethnologist 36(4):693–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wæver, Ole. 2009. “Waltz's Theory of Theory.” International Relations 23(2):201–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. When the Party commits suicide. The Human Rights Project. Accessed February 5, 2011. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/when-the-party-commits-suicide/.Google Scholar