Silence and Chinese Globalism: Two Challenges to Securitization Theory

Recent years have seen a creative and multifaceted research programme develop around the idea of securitization. This seminar takes place on the frontlines of current securitization research, with two papers investigating how a research programme built around the idea of security as articulation can deal with security policy in authoritarian states and with the problematique of silence in a speech-based understanding of security.

Programme:
Chair: Anna Leander (Professor MSO, MPP, Copenhagen Business School)
Discussants:  Yang Yiang (senior researcher, DIIS)
Rune Saugmann Andersen (visiting researcher, MPP, Copenhagen Business School)

Presentations:
Xavier Guilllaume: The Voice of Security: Speech, Silence and the Mundane
The aim of this contribution is to re-situate ontologically, epistemically and normatively silence in light of securitization theory reliance on speech. In doing so, I hope to open up the question of the mundane in securitization theory, and more generally in critical security studies, beyond the tropes of active participation, subjection and passivity, or even resistance, which have all been thus far premised on the ability to answer, to speak, to utter, and therefore to have, to be denied, or to reject to have a voice.

Juha Vuori: Macrosecuritization with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Alignment within Global Security Discourses
The notion of ‘macrosecuritization’ aims to capture securitization dynamics where the referent object of security is not at the national level but on a global or civilizatory one. From such a vantage- point, global security is what global security does, and the framework of securitization theory allows for the study of how global security is socially constructed. The present article examines these questions in the context of Chinese security discourses and practices in relation to the kinds of threats that, at least potentially, fall into the category of macrosecuritizations

 

Xavier Guillaume is lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of International Relations and Identity and co-editor, with Jef Huysmans, of Citizenship and Security: The Constitution of Political Being.

Yang Jiang is senior researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies. She is the author of the recent DIIS report Is China Challenging the US in the Persian Gulf? As well as numerous works on Chinese diplomacy and economic policy.

Juha A. Vuori is acting Professor of World Politics at the Univeristy of Helsinki and an Adjunct Professor of International Politics at the University of Tampere. He is the author of Critical Security and Chinese Politics and co-author of A History of the People’s Republic of China (in Finnish).