The Sociality of Securitization: Symbolic Weapons of Mass Deception (original) (raw)

Abstract

Two dominant and converging social developments of the post-World War II area have reached its climax of crisis in the contemporary. Although seemingly radically different in nature and origin they are isomorphic in relation and might significantly be described with the common concept of “securitization”; economic-financial securitization on the one hand, and political-military securitization on the other. Both developments and their entanglement have been led by the United States but have engulfed the world on a global scale. Together these major social developments constitute the securitization of the field of global political economy. The global movement, convergence and social implications of the two major trends of securitization are here conceptually coined as a process of “securitization of the social” that in turn produces “a sociality of securitization”. The paper concludes that the two concurrent processes of political-military and economic-financial securitization not only undermine their own explicitly stated social goals of risk reduction, economic growth and social stability, but actively creates the opposite. Rather than encouraging trust, confidence and growth, the sociality of securitization generates social distrust and distancing, cultures of fear, militarism, and deep patterns of global inequality – a “socialism for the wealthy” – and thus evidently undermines sociality itself.

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