Description
This article assesses the lessons of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic for two important strands of Critical Security Studies (CSS) – securitisation theory and security cosmopolitanism – which are united by the limitations of their contextual foundations. We argue that the pandemic helps to reveal the specific historical, geographical, and social contexts – the Kantian peace of Europe – that informed their development, and which conditions their broader applicability. First, the article analyses the construction of ‘covid-secure’ spaces. Here, we explore the limits – and inversion – of securitisation, as the exception (danger) becomes the norm and normality (safety) the exception. Second, we analyse survival strategies in the pandemic, through the lens of security cosmopolitanism. For both, we show how CSS provides useful frameworks for the analysis of security’s creation and behaviour’s ethical calculation in the context of the pandemic. However, we stress the limits and Eurocentric foundations of approaches that would normalise the absence of threat and exceptionalise everyday conditions of insecurity, condemning those whose actions are inspired by different, structurally insecure contexts. In sum, the pandemic has brought home to Europe the security challenges – and the kinds of commonplace everyday insecurities – that have long plagued much of the world.
