Copenhagen School
Petr Ocelík
MEB401 / MEB427 / ESS427
1st November 2016
Outline
• Assumptions.
• Securitization.
• Security sectors.
• Regional security complex.
Copenhagen school
• Context: traditionalists vs. revisionists.
• Analytical framework for study of international security.
• Currently: mainstream approach in security studies.
• Based on:
• (“radically”) idealist ontology
• interpretative epistemology (discourse analysis)
• “residual traditionalism”
Security as a social construct
• There is no “essence”, no universal feature of security.
• Security is socially constructed and intersubjectively
shared.
• Security is a self-referential practice: an issue becomes a
security issue only by being labeled as one.
 Focus on discursive construction of security issues.
Securitization
• Framing
• standard (depoliticized)
• politicized
• securitized
• Audience acceptance
• Extraordinary measures
• Linkages
Securitization
• Securitization actors: ones that declare – via illocutionary speech act
– existential threat towards a particular referent object.
• Functional actors: ones that significantly affect the dynamic of the
security environment (sector).
Speech acts
• Locutionary act: the literal meaning of the utterance.
• Illocutionary act: the social function of the utterance, for what
purpose it is used in a given context.
• Perlocutionary act: the effect of the utterance in a given context.
“I warn you, the oil is running out!”
• Locutionary act: made vocal sounds, said that with a Czech accent.
• Illocutionary act: making a warning about (an existential) threat.
• Perlocutionary act: made you (audience) feel insecure (or amused).
degree of widening modes of widening (modified Weisová 2004)
horizontal
(sectors)
vertical
(referent objects)
values threat sources
narrow concept military-political state sovereignty,
territorial integrity
other states,
(non-state actors)
widened concept societal nation,
societal groups
national unity,
identity
(states),
nations,
migrants,
hostile cultures
economic state, non-state actors,
institutions, individuals
development,
subsistence
states,
market failures
environmental environmental systems,
humankind
sustainability,
survival,
quality of life
states,
globalization,
humankind
Regional security complex
• Brings back geography to IR.
• Structural characteristics:
• Boundaries: differentiation from the rest of the system.
• Anarchy: number of actors in the complex.
• Polarity: distribution of power within the complex.
• Social construction: relationships of amity and enmity.
• Definition (Buzan and Waever 2003: 44):
“...set of units whose major processes of securitization,
desecuritization, or both, are so interlinked that their security
problems cannot be reasonably analyzed apart from one another.”
• Security constellation: aggregate of all four levels of analysis.
Copenhagen school and energy security
• Energy not considered as “a distinctive area of security interactions”.
• Typically included in an economic sector.
• Other options: energy sector as a new (additional) one? Energy
sector as a supra-sector? (Palonkorpi 2008)
 Let’s discuss this. 
Summary
• A comprehensive framework for security analysis.
• Esp. theory of securitization now part of the mainstream.
• The objective: desecuritization of the debate.
• Criticism: state-centric, inconsistent use of constructivist and
rationalist concepts, focus mainly on discourse (omits context),
conceptual and methodological doubts (audience).