Description
Securitisation Theory (ST) has advocates, and certainly also detractors. Since the 90s, ST has made significant inroads into political science and IR, as well as animated sociological debates. Some may even suggest ST has advanced a whole rethinking of security and opened it to prolific theoretical and empirical inquiry. For all its merits, however, ST has been the object of strong criticism. In its early formulation, contradictions created a persistent obstacle for academic consensus. More importantly, critics have often exposed the normative compulsions within ST, highlighting ontological, epistemological, and teleological biases that put its analytical soundness into question.
In an effort to reignite interest in ST and demonstrate its analytical applicability beyond ‘usual settings’ (i.e., Western liberal democracies), this paper puts forward a framework that I capture in the concept of ‘ordering assemblages’. Drawing from ST, Pierre Bourdieu’s work, Spatial Theory, and de-colonial thinking, ordering assemblages offer a framework with the potential for: 1) breaking away from Western/Euro-centric biases; 2) blurring the disciplinary/theoretical division between security and politics; 3) demonstrating the benefits of relational and processual thinking; and 4) making the case for a redefinition of ST’s teleology through the centring of questions around order and space.
The analytical framework can offer new empirical insights into how securitisation operates, its spatial effects around power, order and identity, and the relationship between the spatial and the temporal in the constitution of (socio-political) orders underpinned by threat.
