measures and the suspension of normal politics in dealing with the issue.’ 34 In order for this to happen, the securitising actor must possess the means to be able to apply the emergency responses. 35 This securitisation process can have
different 'referent objects', depending on whether they belong to the military,
political, environmental, economic, or societal sector. The main strength of this
security paradigm is that by broadening the agenda to encompass the different
sectors, it deconstructs the reified meaning of power politics that epitomises
traditional approaches, by giving individuals, social groups, and even the environment ‘a legitimate claim to survival.’ 36 A large part of the CS security
analysis involves the societal sector, which they define as ‘the sustainability,
within acceptable conditions for evolution, of traditional patterns of language, culture, association, and religious and national identity.’ 37 This is a significant
development in security studies, as it separates the state from that of its
population and recognises that existential threats do not always come by
violence or force.
The following section will discuss the CS analysis in more detail by
focusing on its weaknesses and the criticism it receives from alternative security
theories. Although the inclusion of different sectors broadens the concept of
security, it does not actually deepen it beyond traditional conception as it works
within the same narrow definition of security, in that survival is linked to
existential threats, than previous paradigms. In line with this fixed definition, the
fixed framework of securitisation causes it to become a self-referential practice
due the nature of the intersubjective threats and how the only role the audience
34 Matt McDonald, "Securitization And The Construction Of Security", European Journal Of International Relations , 14.4 (2008), 567. 35 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution Of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 213. 36 Buzan, Wæver, de Wilde, (1998), p. 36. 37 Ole Wæver, Identity, Migration, And The New Security Agenda In Europe (London: Pinter Publishers, 1993), p. 23.
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