Actor,Audience(s) and Emergency Measures: Securitization and the UK's Decision to Invade Iraq

The concept of securitization has produced a considerable amount of debate over the meaning of security. However, far less attention has been paid to the role of audiences and their relationship to actors in the securitization process. Informed by the work of Thierry Balzacq (2005), and through analysis of the decision of the UK government to join with the USA in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in this article I show that although the general public can indeed play a valuable role in providing an actor with `moral' support concerning the `securityness' of an issue, more crucial, however, is the `formal' support provided by parliament concerning the `extraordinaryness' of the means necessary to deal with it. My argument is thus that securitization can in this way be seen as a distinct two-stage process marked by a `stage of identification' and a `stage of mobilization'.