Simultaneous success and failure: the curious case of the (failed) securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom and Scotland

ABSTRACT The “near unanimous focus in the literature on successful cases of securitization” is demonstrated by Ruzicka [2019. Failed securitization: why it matters. Polity, 51 (2), 365–377] to be as problematic as it is untenable. The call to interrogate “failed securitisation” is one this article responds to, focussing on the securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom, and the puzzle of why this securitisation has, in many respects, failed in Scotland. With the normatively troubling securitisation of migration deepening throughout Europe and beyond, this divergence in Scotland requires much greater attention. Exploring both discursive and non-discursive security mechanisms, empirically, the article reveals that whilst some securitisation policies have been enacted in Scotland, the UK Government-driven securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees has not succeeded there entirely and many elements have failed. By attending to devolution, overlapping jurisdiction and multi-level governance, the article sharpens the theorisation of “failed” securitisation, with implications for broader understandings of “success” in securitisation studies, in two principal ways. First, by demonstrating that effective contestation of securitisation, resting on formal authority and policymaking power, can play a key role in securitisation failure, and second, by revealing that binary notions of “failed” and “successful” securitisations are insufficient: securitisations can both fail and succeed simultaneously.