plays in the successful implementation of the process is whether they accept the
securitising move. This critique is developed further by the PARIS School, they
focus on the narrow nature of the securitisation process as a whole in that it
does not acknowledge other significant lenses like sociological, psychological or
law. By only analysing the discursive element of speech acts, they also criticise
the CS for not recognising past or present situations that have allowed for
successful speech act, or the impact that speech acts have on external factors in the securitisation process. 38 According to Bigo, it is not just political elites making
speech acts that are the securitising actors, instead a range of security
professionals such as boarder control, police officers and even private
companies, all play a role in the securitisation process through the continuation of routines and practices that they employ to respond to the threat. 39
Matt McDonald’s supports this criticism by arguing how the CS exclude
the audience and outside factors from theoretical analysis, as securitisation
theory is only concerned with the exact ‘moment of intervention’ in the sense
that it does not appreciate the context of the act which facilitates it becoming a security issue. 40 Thus, with no knowledge of context in the framing of security
issue below the extraordinary measures, the distinction between the political
and security realms can easily become blurred. Many scholars highlight this
limitation and there is a common perception that the model is not equipped to
define the difference between serious politicisation and an act of securitisation. 41
Following on from the criticism surrounding the discursive approach of
speech acts, by engaging with Hansen’s criticism of the silencing that
38 K. Fierke, Critical Approaches To International Security (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 174. 39 D Bigo, ‘ International Political Sociology ’ , in Security Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 126. 40 McDonald, (2008), p. 564. 41 Alan Collins, Contemporary Security Studies , 5th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 180.
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