Introduction: Situating Power in Dynamics of Securitization

Abstract

Today, ‘security’ has advanced to a conception that is equally prominent in social and political discourses and practices, and in academe. Contemporary diagnoses as well as historical reconstructions of security dynamics point out that ‘security’ has evolved as a vernacular conception whose reference dimension is constantly widening, up to a point where it appears without qualifier, but as a value in itself. For instance, it has been argued that security, once the prerogative of the modern state and its raison d’état, is meanwhile framed as a concern that transcends the interests, but also the boundaries and capacities, of the state. Developments like the expansion of ‘security’, as a normative demand, to the realm of society and to individuals’ safety, as in the conception of ‘human security’, tend to posit state-political interests in security in contradistinction to the wellbeing of social groups and societal systems of reproduction as well as to the safety of individuals irrespective of their political belonging.1 In such constellation, the conception of ‘security’ loses its seemingly self-explicatory quality, instead becoming a key vehicle for negotiations and fights over political prerogatives, social demands, and claims at cultural identities. Frédéric Gros has reconstructed some aspects of this generalization of ‘security’, arguing that while ‘security’ has a quite diverse and complicated genealogy in Western European history, it has meanwhile become a global currency whose prominence resides precisely in the conspicuous absence of any qualifier of what ‘security’ is concretely supposed to mean, and for whom.2 In particular, the notion of ‘human security’, according to Gros, serves as a vehicle for a bio-political conception of individuals as carriers of life functions that replaces the idea of individuals as holders of human rights.3 These accounts highlight the ubiquity, and at the same time vague-