Learning to feel,learning to fear? Emotions,imaginaries,and limits in the politics of securitization

Discourse! What do you mean? ⁴

The ontology envisioned by the Copenhagen School’s Security: A New Framework for Analysis is discursive (Buzan et al., 1998: 25–26), which is problematic given the wide array of meanings applied to the term ‘discourse’. Wӕver’s emphasis on Austin’s speech act theory, however, narrows the meaning of discourse to language (Stritzel, 2007: 361). Here ‘securityness’ is brought about through the constitutive power of speech acts that create new social realities such as ‘naming a ship’ or ‘betting’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 32, 26). This reading is supported by the critiques of so-called ‘second generation’ theorists (Stritzel, 2012: 552), who argue that the emphasis on speech acts is too ‘self-referential’ (Balzacq, 2005: 177), inadequately takes into account the broader audience–speaker relationship (Salter, 2008: 327), or is defined by an ‘internalist centre of gravity’ which excludes context (Stritzel, 2007: 360–362). The common thread in these critiques is that an inward focus on semantics misses the broader social relations which structure the authority of the speaker, the audience, and the context in which they are contained. Thus, George W Bush’s admonitions regarding the threat of Al-Qaeda post-9/11 matter not only because they are conveyed in a narrative of danger and urgency, but also because, as president, he sat at the apex of political authority in designating threats for the United States. Although something of a simplification, this discussion highlights two distinct ‘ontological poles’ in securitization theory: language and sociality. ⁵ While there is a great deal of interaction between these two categories, say in the way language constitutes images of dangerous others (Campbell, 1998) or the way certain groups, such as women, are prohibited from speaking security (Hansen, 2000), the central point is that the social reality that we refer to as the ‘politics of security’ is impossible without either. Everything seen in securitization studies should be a function of these two categories, which together constitute ‘discourse’.

What is puzzling about this literature is that it continually, if sporadically, employs a host of related concepts involving fear (Hansen, 2000: 305; Abrahamsen, 2005; Aradau, 2004: 400; Karyotis, 2007: 281; Barthwal-Datta, 2009: 293–294; Buzan and Wӕver, 2009: 264–271; Williams, 2011), emotion (Balzacq, 2005: 179; Vuori, 2010: 260; Sjöstedt, 2013: 151), drama (Åtland and Ven Bruusgaard, 2009: 340–341; Salter, 2008), and even horror (Huysmans, 1998b). While these concepts certainly have linguistic and social dimensions, they also invoke a subtly different interpretation of securitization as a visceral, emotional process. This tacit interpretation is evident in at least three areas of the literature.

First, the concept of emotion is conspicuous in empirical descriptions of world politics where fear and securitization are presented as tacitly causal or at least coterminous. For example, Buzan and Wӕver claim that American ‘Unipolarity has therefore been securitised as a threat by both other great powers and by smaller powers fearing to become the object of this project’ (2009: 264), whereas Aradau contends that the ‘securitization of migration creates and subsequently legitimizes itself on the basis of everyday fears, such as the fear of crime’ (2004: 400). References to fear, particularly within public debates, come to be taken as empirical indications of securitizing moves and their resistance (e.g. Barthwal-Datta, 2009; Karyotis, 2007). This tacit association is shared with popular ‘folk’ accounts of securitization where the expansion of state powers under the auspices of countering danger is attributed to some prior fear, such as how the enlargement of the US surveillance regime is attributed to post-9/11 fears (e.g. Stitsa Granick and Sprigman, 2013). The lexicon of fear makes the claims of securitization intelligible in a popular vernacular, both in academia and beyond.

Second, references to emotion are prevalent in critiques of the Copenhagen School over the issue of ‘intensification’ (Williams, 2003; Abrahamsen, 2005). The slow and gradual building of relations of enmity and danger is not well captured by speech act theory where meaning is generated through instantaneous utterances. Abrahamsen has thus argued that the process of securitization is better envisioned as a ‘continuum’ where issues are ‘increasingly placed within a logic of fear’, some of which represent manageable risks while others achieve the saliency of existential threats (2005: 65). Similarly, in tracing the influence of political realism Williams has argued that the approach ‘echoes’ Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘the political’ in that ‘[what] makes an issue “political” is the particularly intense relationship that actors feel toward it’ (2003: 515–516, emphasis in original). This account sharpens our understanding of threat construction as a process of enmity, but it raises the question of whether viewing intensification in terms of how ‘actors feel toward [a relationship]’ (2003: 515, emphasis added) presupposes a different ontological substrate than language.

Third, references to emotion in the securitization literature are becoming increasingly evident in the broader ‘visual turn’ (Möller, 2007; Vuori, 2010; Hansen, 2011). Vuori draws a comparison to advertising, where ‘images can evoke emotions that thereby facilitate the “purchase” of a securitization argument’ (2010: 260). For Hansen, security imagery has the capacity to evoke ‘“immediacy” in the form of emotion’ that becomes most acute in portrayals of death and violence (2011: 56–57). This has left the literature in the awkward position of recognizing that images matter because of their capacity to convey emotion, but without any understanding of what emotions mean for securitization.

Far from being tangential idiosyncrasies of the literature, these examples reflect more systemic limitations on how security is theorized and understood in practice. To be clear, the above works have produced laudable contributions which expand the theory beyond its narrow focus on speech acts, but none has gone so far as to grant emotion any degree of ontological autonomy. ⁶ The concept of fear effectively ‘haunts’ the framework. Fear has no explicit role in the conceptual apparatus of the theory, both in linguistic and sociological variations, yet empirical descriptions seem unable to dispense of it. Understanding how emotions play a unique and significant empirical role in securitization entails recognizing how they are irreducible to language and authority. Here the literature on emotions in IR is a valuable resource.

Beyond and before discourse

A useful preliminary way of understanding emotions is as multidimensional ‘complexes’ (Burkitt, 1997: 39) of biological, cognitive, and social forms of human experience. This multidimensional character makes for great difficulty in mapping emotions onto the conventional social theories that underpin IR (Ross, 2006; Mattern, 2011). Yet the resulting debate over the nature of emotion and its relation to IR has produced at least three themes which point to a distinctive ontological character. The first is that emotions stress the boundaries of articulation. In Hutchison’s (2010) discussion of the 2002 Bali bombing, she stresses the challenge of representing trauma. Here ‘[a] certain speechlessness is said to accompany pain, signalling that perhaps both its somatic and emotional nature is not only incomprehensible but also unable to be truly shared through language’ (2010: 70). Solomon offers a similar view inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis where ‘emotions result’ when affect, ‘which is difficult to articulate’, is ‘translated into recognisable emotional signifiers’ (2012: 908). While emotions are commonly represented within language (e.g. ‘small powers fear great powers’), they are sustained outside of language through lived experience (trauma) and habits (remembrance) which structure the receptivity and plasticity of certain representations over others. The fact that some representations fall flat, such as Mukasey’s conflation of terrorism with digital piracy, while others become resounding successes, such as the securitization of Iraq, suggests a background optic of emotional evaluation over the authenticity representations (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008: 124).

Emotions should also be understood as embodied. Drawing on contemporary neuroscience both Mercer (2010) and Ross (2006) argue that emotions have a distinct physiological dimension, a visceral quality that cannot be reduced to a mere ‘belief’. The centrality of embodied experience has led Bleiker and Hutchison to contend that some of the most poignant representations are those that focus on the body, such as images of torture in Abu Ghraib, as it is an effective medium for emotional conveyance (2008: 130). For Mercer, the bodily experience of emotion is what contributes to the unique strength of emotional beliefs, because what ‘you feel influences not only what you believe, but how strongly you believe it’ (2010: 7; see also Sasley, 2010). Audiences are not passive receptacles to security talk; they are actively observing and appraising meaning, both on the semantic and social registers, but also on an emotional register which has a physiological (affective) aspect.

Finally, emotions are often unconscious. As a counterpoint to earlier constructivist presumptions that emotions are conscious beliefs, Ross argues convincingly that some forms of emotions, what he labels affects, are nonconscious bodily sensations that ‘are too inchoate, unexpected, or inarticulate to be imbued with meaning’, but nevertheless are able to ‘tinge our intellectual beliefs and judgements’ (2006: 198–199). Emphasizing an unobservable background of judgement, psychoanalytic approaches within IR share a similar position where unconscious desires and emotions guide, and sometimes frustrate, collective action (Sucharov, 2005; Salter and Mutlu, 2012). In the context of securitization, the grounds for rejection or acceptance of securitizing moves may be for reasons that are not self-evident in the immediate discourse.

These concerns over articulation, embodiedness, and consciousness hold import for securitization theory because they outline a unique ontological stratum that extends beyond language and social relations. Here, the invocation of ‘ontological poles’ is useful because it highlights the constitutive interactions that language, sociality, and emotions have with each other while at the same time not being reduced to one another. This dynamic is neatly illustrated by the now infamous example of the 2007 ‘General Petraeus or General Betray Us?’ advertisement. ⁷ Engineered by an anti-war advocacy group and run in the New York Times, the advertisement sought to raise doubts over the authenticity of General Petraeus’ reported reduction of violence in Iraq during the 2007 troop surge (Tapper, 2007). Through a relatively simple play on words (language), the advert sought to raise fears over trusting (emotion) ⁸ the leading American military official in Iraq (social position). The emotions literature in IR is a valuable resource in this respect as it sketches the outlines of a unique ontological stratum that, while overlapping with language and social authority, extends beyond conventional securitization theory.

While the focus of this argument is ontology, it has very practical implications for the viability of securitization theory. Two interrelated concerns are at stake. The first is the adequacy of the theory in reflecting the social reality of the politics of security. Securitization theory was never intended to offer a one-to-one correspondence with reality, but it did intend to capture more of how ‘ordinary people’ thought and talked about security (Buzan and Wӕver, 1997: 242). Yet emotions are arguably a central feature of the encounters of ‘ordinary people’ with security, whether in accusations of fear mongering or in the traumatic aftermath of a terrorist attack. Such emotional experiences are often lost in the abstract models of IR (Sylvester, 2013: 1–2), with the consequence being a prematurely narrowed empirical analysis.

For example, scholars of humiliation in international politics have produced rich and compelling empirical accounts of how feelings of humiliation fuel regional security dynamics (Callahan, 2004; Fattah and Fierke, 2009; Saurette, 2006). Intriguingly, Fattah and Fierke’s analysis of militant Islamists comes close to making a securitization argument where an existential threat (further humiliation) becomes a basis for legitimizing exceptional measures (terrorism) (2009: 81–82). Here the concept of humiliation is understood as ‘express[ing] a relationship between feeling and value’ (2009: 70) that arises from collective memory and trauma. Yet Fattah and Fierke’s contribution, and indeed the entire literature on humiliation, is either invisible to the securitization analyst or crudely reduced to a speech act from an authoritative position. The latter possibility is especially problematic as it leads to viewing audiences as passive vessels waiting for emotions to be authoritatively spoken into them. This disregards the potential for audiences to come to the interaction with embodied feelings that may pre-emptively frustrate an emergent threat image. Thus, it is not a coincidence that securitization theory has not engaged with the literature on humiliation even though they occupy overlapping terrain. It is a product of a parsimonious social theory whose reductionist tendencies toward language and authority, while still more productive than conventional materialist alternatives, all too often ‘reduce out’ the emotions of the audience even though they may be integral to the dynamics of a securitizing move.

The fact that a theory is not a faithful representation of reality is not a problem in and of itself, particularly if one emphasizes other values such as explanatory utility (Jackson, 2011). Wӕver may agree, arguing that theory is ‘a model from which one might produce empirical statements’ (2011: 470). The concern here is not the philosophy of science employed in securitization theory per se, but its internal coherence. This brings us full circle to the concept of ontological slippage. When securitization analysts employ a lexicon of emotions in describing the politics of security they subtly ‘slip’ outside the ontology of speech act theory along with more sociological variants. Much like the structural realists of the decade before, securitization analysts say the world is one thing and then describe another. Incoherence within the approach therefore represents a far more significant problem, one that can only be resolved by excising the concept of emotion from the analysis, or by reformulating the theory to give a more coherent account. The following section attempts the latter.

The affect/emotion debate and collective emotions

In often-cited IR articles both Ross (2006) and Mercer (2010) mount a sustained critique of an appraisal view of emotions where cognitive, conscious appraisals precede bodily feeling. These critiques share a common narrative which invokes the philosophy of William James and the contemporary neuroscience of Joseph Ledoux and Antonio Damasio to argue, compellingly, that appraisal theories ignore the visceral dimensions of emotion which precede conscious belief. Using this critique, Ross is able to differentiate emotion from affect, with the latter representing ‘nonconscious and embodied emotional states’ which are absent of clear intentionality (2006: 197, 206). Mercer lacks the explicit distinction between affect and emotion but the function of the critique is similar; emotion is a physiological experience which precedes and ultimately strengthens beliefs (2010: 4–6). This critique is especially effective given its presentation as a recent progressive development in the science of neurobiology. ¹⁰

This narrative can lead to a skewed view of emotion research which prematurely closes out appraisal approaches. Early proponents like Magna Arnold argued that an ‘appraisal is an “intuitive” assessment of the “here and now” aspects of situations and not a deliberative, rational process’ (Roseman and Smith, 2001: 9; emphasis in original). Richard Lazarus explicitly stated ‘that appraisal is not coextensive with consciousness, deliberateness, and rationality’ (1991a: 361). ¹¹ As founding figures of the field, both Arnold and Lazarus rejected characterizations of appraisals as only conscious beliefs. It therefore stretches credulity to say ‘[m]ost appraisal theorists, however, have assumed that appraisal is conducted consciously’ (Ross, 2006: 200; emphasis in original). Ross and Mercer’s position is more reflective of a particular reading of appraisal theory that is problematic upon closer inspection (von Scheve and von Luede, 2005: 311). Indeed, appraisal remains a central feature of emotion research in political psychology (e.g. De Castella et al., 2009; Bar-Tal et al., 2007). Most striking is that Antonio Damasio, the central authority Ross and Mercer draw upon, affords appraisal a central place in his own account of emotions as the ‘first step’ in a series of physiological processes (2004: 4–5). ¹² While Ross and Mercer raise a valid point over the fugitive and embodied nature of emotion, uncritical acceptance of their argument may lead to the premature rejection of appraisal theory writ large and thus unduly close out its versatile yet elegant account of emotion as intuitive judgement, a view I will elaborate after briefly discussing the matter of collective emotions.

Given securitization theory’s twin commitment to methodological collectivism and an Arendtian conception of politics (Wӕver, 2011: 468), any revisionary moves should be oriented to the emotions of ‘collectivities’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 35–40). While group emotions were envisioned as early as Durkheim (von Scheve and von Luede, 2005: 303), the assumption that they are private and personal phenomena remains an entrenched feature of political inquiry (Mercer, 2006). This assumption is an anachronism that should be displaced by a wealth of studies of collective emotions in IR and social inquiry more broadly. ¹³ The approach elaborated below bears some relation to Sasley (2011: 458–465), where common social cues engender collective emotions, but it stresses the role of shared experiences, practices, and memories (Hutchison, 2010; Ross, 2013; Sylvester, 2013) in generating such appraisals. In this context the analytical focus is on the collective emotions of audiences to securitizing moves, as successful instances of threat construction hinge on broadly-based intersubjective agreement. ¹⁴ How the audience feels determines the success of the practice.

Social appraisals

Appraisal theory envisions emotions as appraisals or judgements which draw together the meaning and significance of the world. It was developed to account for the wide range of emotional responses and the varying circumstances that elicit them (Roseman and Smith, 2001: 3–4). Its proponents contend that ‘emotions are adaptive responses which reflect appraisals of features of the environment that are significant for the organism’s well-being’ (Moors et al., 2013: 119). While this view often incorporates other features of emotions, such as their embodied, inarticulate, and unconscious dimensions, appraisal theories in general are distinguished by how they are organized around the concept of appraisal which is placed at the centre of the emotional experience. The idea of emotions as appraisals typically entails three common features. First, appraisals are relational in that they ‘are always about person-environment relationships’ (Lazarus, 1991b: 819, 1991a; Roseman and Smith, 2001; Moors, 2013). Emotions are neither intrinsic to the subject nor to the environment, but emerge from the kinds of relationships subjects build with the environment. Second, these relationships are never complete but are ongoing processes. Frijda argues that ‘appraisals result from the almost incessant predictive activity of the awake brain’ (2013: 169) as the feelings and memories of one appraisal feed directly into the next. Ellsworth envisions ‘emotional experience as an ever-changing process, like a river, rather than a collection of separate pools’ (2013: 125). Finally, in adopting an explicitly evolutionary stance, researchers stress that the subjective feelings and action tendencies elicited by appraisals ‘are fundamentally adaptive’ as ‘an organism cannot simply understand its situation; it has to be motivated to do something about it’ (Ellsworth and Scherer, 2003: 572, see also Lazarus, 1991a, 1991b). Here the evolutionary connotation need not narrowly imply physical survival; Nussbaum’s interpretation stresses that such judgements, which she calls ‘eudaimonistic’ (2001: 31), are adaptive in the sense of promoting broader self-fulfilment.

Where this approach brings added value, especially in relation to other theories of emotion within IR, is that it attempts to identify the unique antecedents, the structures of appraisal, which are associated with a specific emotion. As Ellsworth notes:

What is different about appraisal theories is that they don’t just say that a person’s emotions are constructions of the meaning of the situation and leave it at that, vague and amorphous. They specify the materials that go into this construction, the constituent elements of emotional experience. (2013: 125) ¹⁵

Differing emotions reflect differing underlying patterns of relational meaning. For example, in their assessment of fear appeals in Australian political speeches on terrorism, De Castella et al. focus their analysis on texts believed to communicate motivational relevance, incongruence, and low coping ability which combine in the more generic theme of danger to the audience (2009: 5). The crucial nuance is that while different emotions are predicated on different structures of relational meaning, how these dimensions manifest varies across subjects and situations. Increasingly, appraisal researchers are attributing this variance to cultural context (Boiger and Mesquita, 2012), particularly in terms of language and memory (Lindquist, 2013: 362). This has led to sociologists considering the role of ‘social appraisals’ (von Scheve and Ismer, 2013) where relational meaning is diffused through an array of socialization practices including literature, education, and media (Bar-Tal, 2001; see also Sucharov, 2013). Consider the minute of silence in Remembrance Day ceremonies celebrated within Commonwealth countries since World War I. Children at these events often lack the sombre disposition of adults; they may even be visibly confused by the event. Parents may try to explain to children the meaning of the event yet find it difficult to articulate and represent the embodied experience. Yet by observing the parent and the social ritual of remembrance more broadly, the child can tacitly adopt a similar appraisal pattern and experience a similar emotion (Parkinson and Simons, 2009). Communities learn how to feel from shared appraisals diffused from an array of socialization practices.

Emotion, imaginaries, and securitization

The resulting view understands collective emotions as shared and embodied judgements which reflect an intuitive synthesis of relational meaning. This is a mediated constructivist view that holds that while emotions coalesce around generic symbolic structures, such as relevance, incongruence, and low coping ability for fear, the content of these structures depends on the local context. It also captures Solomon (2013) and Ross’s (2006, 2013) insight that emotions in politics manifest empirically in composite and ambiguous forms due to mixed appraisals and evolving relational meaning. It rejects, however, the call to move from examining ‘roles of specific emotions (fear, hate, etc.) to the less defined affective attachments’ (Solomon, 2013: 131). Reducing emotions to vaguer affects risks missing the often intense symbolic struggles where agents strive to cultivate specific types of emotions among audiences. Securitizing moves do not succeed by invoking vague affective attachments, but by eliciting culturally specific fears whose emergence hinges upon the appraisal of recognizable memories, identities, images, metaphors, and other tropes to construct a plausible, yet anxiety inducing, future. ¹⁶ Here the constructivist concept of security imaginaries usefully captures the drawing together, the creative ‘imagining’ of cultural meaning necessary for emotional appraisal to occur (Weldes, 1999; Pretorius, 2008). Yet the chief advancement on the concept of imaginaries imparted here is its inherent interaction with emotions through the process of appraisal. Emotions, like fear, are not simple reflections of cultural meaning, as often presumed in many constructivist accounts of emotion, but a particular synthesis of meanings brought to bear in a situation or event. Without the structuring function of emotions there is no way for the audience to tell which cultural meanings matter and how. This is also the central methodological insight; appraisal structures can be employed as interpretive models to illuminate how and why a particular collective emotion was generated. By positing that fear appraisals are generated through highly relevant and incongruent situations with low coping potential, the theory directs our attention to key constitutive features of successful securitizing moves. Such moves succeed, in part then, because they resonate with pre-existing meaning in the local audience’s security imaginary which satisfies the structural requirements for a fear appraisal. Audiences fear threats because they represent phenomena they have already learned to fear or imaginably foresee fearing.

This account raises the residual matter of structuration, or how the relationship between the securitizing agent, audience, and imaginary is co-constitutive (Wendt, 1999). While this issue cannot be explored in full here, it is important to emphasize the imaginary is not reducible to a constellation of discursive representations situated at a cultural intertext (Stritzel, 2012). As background knowledge, it is anchored in lived experience and the practice of sharing collective memory (see especially Sylvester, 2013: 87–110), and therefore enjoys a fixity that is resilient to a superficial discursive reshaping. ¹⁷ Yet as a practice itself collective memory is also vulnerable; minute cultural innovations in seemingly innocuous artefacts from patriotic beer commercials to coffee-table books can subtly alter the way communities both remember the past and envision the future (Sucharov, 2013). Less subtly, the practice of memory can shift due to ruptures in everyday life, whether through war, disease, or other catastrophes. It will suffice to say the question of how agents reshape the local imaginary is an empirical one.