The role of narratives in the global security framework (original) (raw)

Strategic Narrative and Security (Preprint)

The Handbook of Communication and Security, 2019

This chapter considers the strategic use of narratives in security. It reviews existing inter-disciplinary literature and builds on recent International Relations (IR) scholarship on strategic narratives. Focusing on the concept of strategic narrative, the chapter addresses the role of strategic communication in foreign policy and military endeavors, thereby bridging discussions in the political communication literature. Scholarship on strategic narratives shows that national power goes beyond the realist focus on material capabilities, hence building upon the literature on soft and smart power. This chapter illustrates the influence of strategic narratives through the lens of U.S.-led military interventions and exit strategies since the early 1990s. Specifically, I argue that narrative consistency and multilateral narrative congruence are key variables in explaining post-conflict state behavior. Their interplay influences the coherence of peacebuilding activities, burden-sharing, and institutional arrangements in multilateral missions and, indeed, exit strategies. These findings have wider implications for how scholars and policy-makers conceptualize communication and security policy in the era of fake news.

Words, images, enemies: securitization and international politics

International Studies Quarterly, 2003

The theory of ''securitization'' developed by the Copenhagen School provides one of the most innovative, productive, and yet controversial avenues of research in contemporary security studies. This article provides an assessment of the foundations of this approach and its limitations, as well as its significance for broader areas of International Relations theory. Locating securitization theory within the context of both classical Realism influenced by Carl Schmitt, and current work on constructivist ethics, it argues that while the Copenhagen School is largely immune from the most common criticisms leveled against it, the increasing impact of televisual communication in security relations provides a fundamental challenge for understanding the processes and institutions involved in securitization, and for the political ethics advocated by the Copenhagen School.

Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change

2015

While the recent IR “narrative turn” has greatly improved our understanding of how narratives influence state policy choices, we need to deepen our understanding of how narratives explain policy change. If state “autobiographies” provide such powerful explanations of why states do what they do, how can they change their policies and practices? To understand the relationship between policy change and state narrative continuity, I build on existing scholarship on narrative analysis and ontological security to examine ways in which state autobiographical narratives are used by political actors to confront state insecurities. My principal argument is that at times of great crises and threats to multiple state securities (physical, social, and ontological), narratives are selectively activated to provide a cognitive bridge between policy change that resolves the physical security challenge, while also preserving state ontological security through offering autobiographical continuity, a sense of routine, familiarity, and calm. I illustrate the argument with an analysis of Serbia’s changing foreign policy behavior regarding the disputed status of Kosovo.

"Securitizing Things: Recovering a Lost Material History of the Fear of the Next War"

Trine Villumsen Berling, Ulrik Pram Gad, Karen Lund Petersen & Ole Wæver, Translations of Security: A Framework for the Study of Unwanted Futures, 165-168, 2022

This book scrutinises how contemporary practices of security have come to rely on many different translations of security, risk, and danger. Institutions of national security policies are currently undergoing radical conceptual and organisational changes, and this book presents a novel approach for how to study and politically address the new situation. Complex and uncertain threat environments, such as terrorism, climate change, and the global nancial crisis, have paved the way for new forms of security governance that have profoundly transformed the ways in which threats are handled today. Crucially, there is a decentralisation of the management of security, which is increasingly handled by a broad set of societal actors that previously were not considered powerful in the conduct of security affairs. This transformation of security knowledge and management changes the meaning of traditional concepts and practices, and calls for investigation into the many meanings of security implied when contemporary societies manage radical dangers, risks, and threats. It is necessary to study both what these meanings are and how they developed from the security practices of the past. Addressing this knowledge gap, the book asks how different ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet in the current practices of security, broadly understood, and with what political consequences. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, anthropology, risk studies, science and technology studies and International Relations.

(In)Security and the Production of International Relations (Routledge)

Routledge Critical Security Studies , 2015

What happens to foreign politics when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state’s international behavior based on a reflexive framework of insecurity politics. It argues that governments act on knowledge of international danger available in their societies, and that such knowledge is organized by varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these show how securitization projected abroad evolving – and often contested – local ideas of the organization of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorizing to a theory of international systematization, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. Depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others.

Reconceptualising Global Security

Imperial Springs International Forum, 2020

As the purpose of a polity (and the government comprising it) is to secure the well-being of its citizens and those residing within its territory, one should not ring-fence elements of security inappropriately. National security is meaningless in the absence of human security within the state. Regional, or indeed, global security cannot be achieved in a space fractured by fear and mistrust. Just as periods of relative peace in history have been characterised by agreement on the norms constituting the legitimate order, and a balance of power that enabled accommodation of the vital interests of each state, so a peaceful and prosperous national society depends on the satisfaction of the vital interests of its citizens. We need to reintegrate the dimensions of security, recognising that the purpose of all security interventions is the reduction of threat and vulnerability. And, as crisis brings opportunity, we must seize this moment to reassess and recalibrate our responses, recognising that security is indivisible.

Contesting an essential concept: Reading the dilemmas in contemporary security discourse

Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, 1997

Violence may be the ultima ratio of politics, but it has never been the only ratio; and in a life that now has to be lived with a proliferating array of devices capable of threatening lethal global consequences it simply cannot be allowed to enjoy the practical, intellectual and moral licence once extended to it in our political discourses. 1