Securitization of National Interests

SECURITIZATION OF NATIONAL INTERESTS
In the decades following the end of the cold war, the field of security studies has seen new ways of thinking about international security. Dominant paradigms have been challenged by academics unsatisfied with existing concepts, looking to explain security in a transformed and globalized world. Primarily, they sought to move security studies beyond theories that recognized only military threats as challenges to State security. One leading approach to conceptualizing security is that of the Copenhagen school and their theory of securitization.
Buzan, Weaver and Jaap de Wilde are the main proponents of Copenhagen School; their aim has been widening and deepening the concept of security to accommodate it to a new, post-cold war global political order. Securitization theory radically diverts from the traditional realist and neorealist principles in that it adopts social constructivism to understanding security. Unlike these earlier traditions, securitization theory conceptualizes security as discursively established, dismissing outright the notion of objective threats. It also breaks from realist and neorealist traditions in introducing the concept “society” alongside the State as an object that can be threatened and therefore needing analysis.
When security is considered a process that is subject to moral evaluation, this idea or concept is called securitization. This paper will use constructivism theory to show how national interests are securitized because Constructivists hold that state interests are not “discovered” but “constructed” and that national security policy is not “formulated” by rational actors, but it’s shaped by contested identities and other social factors such as the norms and cultures within a society. According to McSweeny, Constructivism forces us to not only consider a wider variety of threats, but gives us ways to better understand the concept of Securitization.Buzan and Waever claim, for instance, that

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