Security, Risk, and Securitization of Climate Change

Abstract

The proponents of risk-security risk view that risk is effectively the new security. Risk widens securitization whereby exceptional measures are introduced and made permanent to deal with merely potential, hypothetical, and less than existential dangers. A transformation in the political logic of the security field of this kind is potentially problematic and has not been properly reflected in the primary theory of what security is, namely the Copenhagen School's Theory of Securitization. This article addresses this question by identifying the distinct logic of speech act that turns issues into questions of risk politics. A separate kind of speech act-'riskification'-is identified, based on a re-theorization of what distinguishes risks from threats. Threat-based security deals with direct causes of harm whereas risk-security is oriented towards the conditions of possibility or constitutive causes of harm of second order security politics harping on long term precautionary measures. While separating securitization and 'riskification ’, the analytical precision of the Copenhagen School notion of securitization is maintained. On the basis of this new framework, a critical understanding of literature has been suggested such that climate change has been securitized.