Description
Securitisation implies distance: an existential threat (a referent subject) that endangers a group worthy of protection (a referent object). These are separate entities. How does this account change when the threat is already within one’s borders, one’s community, one’s very body? What kinds of new urgency and extraordinary responses become ‘justified’ by this sense of proximity and intimate, immediate, danger? Drawing on examples from a range of fields – including the securitisation of migration, anti-LGBT moral panics, and the ‘security turn’ in genocide studies (Straus, 2015; Moses, 2021) – this paper examines the process by which discursive and strategic framings of ‘dangerous proximity’, ‘infiltration’, and ‘treachery’ are used to enable and direct particularly intense responses. It argues that, in addition to the traditional elements of a securitising speech act (securitising actor, referent object, and so on), critical security scholars should also take engage with the (literal or metaphorical) ‘subject positionings’(Doty, 1993) between the threat and the referent object, which inform and shape securitising moves.
