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

Abstract

Despite a growing interest in the role of emotions in world politics, the relationship between emotion and securitization remains unclear. This article shows that persistent, if sporadic, references to fear and emotion in securitization studies remain largely untheorized and fall outside conventional linguistic and sociological ontologies. The tendency to discuss emotion but deny it ontological status has left securitization theory incoherent. This article offers a theoretical reconstruction of securitization where emotion, specifically collective fears, serve as the locus of an audience’s judgment for the practice of securitization. Yet rather than simply accepting that fear facilitates securitizing moves, the article draws on appraisal theory from psychology to argue that collective fear appraisals are often fragile cultural constructs. The generation of these emotional appraisals is often constrained by the limited symbolic resources of the local security imaginary and how agents contest and employ these resources. When the capacity to generate collective fears is constrained, so too is the practice of securitization. An empirical discussion of threat images in US foreign policy is used to explore these constraints. The tendency for securitizing moves to be interpreted as comic underscores the precariousness of social practices seeking to elicit particular collective emotions.

Keywords

Appraisal emotion fear securitization security imaginaries

Introduction

In the 1975 cult classic film Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail,¹ King Arthur leads his Knights of the Roundtable on a perilous, yet comic, journey in search of a holy artefact. Along the way the protagonists meet Tim, the Enchanter, who advises the knights of a beast that lies ahead which is ‘so foul, so cruel, that no man yet has fought with it and lived’. Should they proceed, he tells them, ‘death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth’. The knights are impressed with the wisdom of the sage who knows their names and the details of their quest, and is able to conjure fireballs leading King Arthur to remark ‘you know much that is hidden’. Committed to their quest, the knights go to the lair of the beast but are struck with incredulity; instead of a grotesque and terrifying beast they are confronted by a benign-appearing bunny rabbit, and their fear visibly dissipates. Yet upon proceeding, the rabbit turns vicious and the knights are massacred. The surviving knights retreat and quickly agree upon the status of the rabbit as an existential threat, which in turn legitimates the use of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

Beside the macabre comedy of the film is a neatly encapsulated puzzle about threat construction in the politics of security. Broadly speaking, constructivist International Relations (IR) theory has made a lasting impact on the field by showing that security issues are not self-evident from a material distribution of power, but socially constructed. Securitization theory has led the way with its emphasis on how meaning is generated through language (speech acts) and social relations (positions of authority). But as Monty Python’s Tim reminds us, there are limits to what a focus on language and social relations can tell us about threat construction. Humanitarian organizations are no strangers to the importance of language in framing the urgency of threats faced by vulnerable groups. Relatedly, climatologists’ warnings of the catastrophic effects of climate change are built on an impressive international consensus spanning the most prestigious intellectual centres of the world. Yet as agents of securitization these groups often fail, and explanations based on the power of speech acts and authority are unsatisfying as actors are often privileged on one or both accounts. Tim ultimately failed to securitize the threat not for lack of social capital, nor inappropriate use of language, but because of his failure to convince his audience that the threat was something to be feared.

The comedy of the failed securitization is a stark reminder that threat construction is an emotional phenomenon. Consider the 2008 speech of the United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey which sought to establish a discursive link between intellectual property theft and national security (Department of Justice, 2008). In arguing that international terrorists may use the proceeds of digital piracy to finance operations which target the United States, Mukasey engaged in a securitizing move that not only failed, but was seen as comic for juxtaposing threatening images of terrorism with ‘selling DVDs from the side of the road’ (Anderson, 2008). The speech evoked unintended feelings of humour rather than fear from the audience, and the securitizing move failed.²

Empirically, these instances of comedy signal a more significant concern that securitization studies is largely unequipped to engage with threat construction as an emotional phenomenon, a point made since before Hobbes, but almost totally invisible to constructivist security studies.³ In positing linguistically and culturally contrived actors, securitization scholars have oddly paralleled their rationalist counterparts in their neglect of emotions and have created an unrealistic reality – a technical discourse which is alien to the everyday experience of security (Cohn, 1987). Meanwhile, the turn to emotions within IR has made deep inroads within security studies in arguing emotions are most salient to international politics in times of urgency and crisis (Crawford, 2000: 130; Ross, 2006: 212; Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008: 129), occupying the same terrain of emergency politics that defines securitization (Buzan et al., 1998: 21, 24). While these literatures share a common ground, they have effectively passed by one another without dialogue, foregoing opportunities for fruitful synthesis and critique.

This article explores the latent relationship between emotion and securitization. As outlined later, securitization theory refers to emotion persistently but in an ad hoc manner without any systemic reflection on how to theorize the relationship between the two. I argue that emotions in general, and fears in particular, are crucial features of the politics of security which cannot be reduced to language or social relations. Emotions are judgements over the competency of the practice of securitization, judgements made against the background of the local security imaginary. Yet rather than reproduce the tacit understanding of the literature where fear facilitates securitizing moves, I contend that theorizing how appraisals of fear are generated offers new insights into how emotions may frustrate and constrain practices of securitization. As culturally situated judgements, an audience’s appraisal of fear is often a fragile construct limited by the paucity of symbolic resources in the local imaginary, as well as how these resources are open to contestation and destabilization. Thus, theorizing the role of emotion in securitization provides novel insights into not only why securitizing moves succeed, but why they often fail.

The article begins with a critique of securitization theory to demonstrate its incoherence over emotions. The crux of this critique is ontological; emotions have no formal status in the social and linguistic ontology of the theory, yet analysts persistently refer to them in empirical research. In short, analysts theorize the world one way and describe it in another. Then, drawing on appraisal theory from psychology, I offer a reconstruction centred upon the collective emotions of audiences as judgements of securitizing practices. These judgements are drawn from the cultural reservoir of the local security imaginary. Emphasis is given to how the structural dimensions of fear appraisals – principally relevance, incongruence, and low coping ability – can direct the analyst’s attention to domains where the generation of fear is open to contestation, as well as how the local imaginary preconditions these domains even before any overt practices of securitization. In the third and final section I engage this framework in a series of empirical probes concerning how emotions constrain contemporary threat images in American foreign policy to demonstrate its versatility and incisiveness. In the conclusion I suggest these insights can be drawn together in the counterintuitive yet illustrative analogy between the practice of telling jokes and securitization.

A critique of securitization theory

At the core of securitization theory is a distinct incoherence over the role of emotion in threat construction. This problem can be best understood in terms of ‘ontological slippage’, a critique which deserves some elaboration. The most recognizable instance of ontological slippage in IR is in Alexander Wendt’s (1995, 1999) critique of neorealism. Central to this critique is neorealism’s avowedly materialist ontology which explicitly dismisses ideational categories in favour of a parsimonious view centred on the material distribution of power. The tension is found within neorealism’s persistent recourse to ideas in the form of American ‘liberal culture’ to explain world politics (Mearsheimer, 1994–1995, 2001). Neorealism continues to ‘slip’ into ontological categories it had already explicitly dismissed, leaving the theory maintaining that international politics is one thing and then describing another. Securitization theory faces a similar problem, although its ontology requires some clarification before one can see how such a critique applies.

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.

Appraisal, socialization, and securitization

In order to develop a framework that is not only more coherent but more incisive, I propose examining emotions as constraints on securitizing moves.⁹ As Salter (2011: 116) notes, constraints on processes of securitization are significantly under-examined. This argument accepts the above tacit understanding that an audience’s fear facilitates threat construction – as fear disposes a collectivity to accept emergency measures – yet I contend collective fear appraisals are often fragile cultural assemblages vulnerable to contestation and destabilization. It is true in certain instances securitizing agents will have a rich array of symbolic resources on hand to generate novel collective fear appraisals, as in the paradigmatic case of post-9/11 America. Yet it is more often the case that the generation of fear appraisals is constrained by the pre-existing boundaries of the local security imaginary. This reservoir of cultural meaning is embedded in collective memory, experiences, and practices which remain resistant to superficial discursive reshaping. While competent securitizing moves may draw on features of the local imaginary to generate emotionally resonant narratives, appraisal theory’s focus on how emotions are generated from a synthesis of relational meanings provides insight into how this process can be contested. In developing this argument I introduce a sociologically sensitive variant of appraisal theory from psychology and use it to theorize how emotions constitute judgements of securitizing moves against the backdrop of the local imaginary. But first I begin by engaging two key axes of the emotion literature in IR, the affect/emotion debate and the issue of collective emotions as a ground-clearing exercise.

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.

Feeling fear in securitization?

The value of this framework is in its capacity to generate empirical statements which extend beyond conventional securitization theory’s focus on language and authority. By emphasizing the contingency of fear appraisals along the relational dimensions of relevance, incongruence, and coping ability, the theory directs attention to domains where the generation of fear may be either facilitated or constrained. The latter dynamic is empirically probed in contemporary examples of American foreign policy involving intervention in Syria, the rising power of China, and the revolution in military affairs. So as not to wholly prejudice fear’s facilitative role, I briefly discuss the counter-example of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. A range of examples rather than a single case study is chosen to demonstrate the versatility of the approach.

The concept of motivational relevance in fear appraisals captures the simplistic but often ignored proposition that communities can only fear things that hold significance for them. The capacity to draw collective associations between an audience and foreign events has long been a central concern of ethics in IR (e.g. Linklater, 2007) but not for securitization studies.¹⁸ Here, the American debate over intervention in the Syrian civil war offers an illustrative example. Between the first publicly confirmed account of chemical weapon use on 21 August 2013 and the subsequent US–Russian framework for elimination of Syrian chemical weapons on 14 September, the Obama administration engaged in a series of securitizing moves to legitimize an American military intervention. President Obama argued:

On that terrible night, the world saw in gruesome detail the terrible nature of chemical weapons, and why the overwhelming majority of humanity has declared them off-limits … If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. (White House, 2013)

The urgency to act was underscored in preceding interviews where Obama argued:

the longer this conflict goes on with chemical weapons on the ground … you could end up with a situation where some of the more dangerous and unsavory members of the opposition get their hands on these chemical weapons. (PBS News Hour, 2013: 4:53)

Despite a coherent narrative spoken from the authoritative position of the presidency, this securitizing move was a decisive failure. Public opinion following the address was found to be unmoved with 65 % of respondents claiming Syria’s problems were ‘none of our business’ (Debenedetti, 2013).

The failure of the Obama administration to render chemical weapons use in Syria as relevant to America’s ‘business’ can be traced to the historical and dispositional nature of the local security imaginary. For two years prior, Americans learned how to feel about the Syrian civil war, an experience that stressed that while the conflict was important and reflected a major loss of life, it was not sufficiently relevant to the core interests of the United States to justify intervention (Pew Research, 2012). More generally, the recent history of American military operations in the Middle East and their failure to conclusively cease terrorist strikes within the United States, as demonstrated by the Boston bombings, has left the public audience sceptical of the region’s relevance writ large. In what can be understood as a revealing instance of the structuring capacity of this imaginary, Secretary of State John Kerry tellingly admitted that ‘after a decade of conflict, the American people are tired of war. Believe me, I am, too. But fatigue does not absolve us of our responsibility’ (Department of State, 2013, emphasis added). Feelings of fear were displaced by feelings of fatigue, rendering the securitization of chemical weapons use blunted.

International politics is replete with examples where the congruence of a situation to an audience’s motivations is ambiguous, with the Arab Spring being a paradigmatic example of an unfolding event where actors are unsure of its implications for their interests. Sino–American relations within the culture industry offer a particularly acute example of this ambiguity. In 2009 MGM Studios chose to remake the Cold War era film Red Dawn, which featured a Soviet invasion of the United States. However, the remake would feature China as the central antagonist and build upon contemporary concerns over sovereign debt holdings and a fantasied repossession of US territory by China (Cox, 2013). Yet after receiving significant criticism from the Chinese press and encountering financial difficulties, the studio made the highly unusual move of digitally altering the movie and substituting all references to China with North Korea. Industry analysts pointed to the need to maintain access to the lucrative Chinese cinema market, now the fifth largest in the world, as the central rationale for shifting the nationality of the antagonist forces (Fritz and Horn, 2011).

The remaking of Red Dawn is a microcosm of the greater politics of representation in international security. Securitizing the emerging power of China depends on an audience which sees this rise as incongruent to the aspirations of the United States. However, fearing the rise of China becomes difficult when the local imaginary also relates to the country in a way that sees its rise as vital to the continued economic prosperity of the United States. MGM Studios sought to capitalize, in a very literal sense, on an audience that was predisposed to imagining China as a vivid future threat, but ended up being caught up in the very contradictions of the local imaginary itself. Instances like this demonstrate how the construction of a collective fear appraisal can be problematic; ambiguous cultural meanings lead to mixed emotions and consequently the mixed appeal of a threat image.

Coping ability has a long history in security studies, particularly in the form of research on deterrence and balancing in realist approaches to security. How an audience comes to imagine the management of threats has important consequences, particularly in preconfiguring the authority of speakers in a securitizing move. An illustrative display of this dynamic is visible in the final debate of the 2012 US presidential election. During a heated exchange, Governor Romney lamented the decreasing size of the US Navy, arguing that it was smaller than at any time since 1916. President Obama responded:

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You – you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets – (laughter) – because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. (National Public Radio, 2012)

Obama’s retort is effective on two levels. First, it portrayed Romney as out of touch with the contemporary security imaginary which predominantly envisions America’s coping strategies towards threats through the technological revolution in military affairs, a shift epitomized by the increasingly prevalent image of the drone (Kahn, 2013). More important, however, were the enervating effects this disclosure had on Romney’s authority to speak within the security field. A misapprehension of how coping is culturally imagined by the audience evinced comedy over anxiety, and Romney’s effectiveness as a securitizing agent was diminished even before a more explicit threat was articulated. Had Obama simply disagreed with the assessment, Romney’s positional authority within the security field might have remained intact. Instead, Obama was largely seen as the decisive winner of the final debate (Steinhauser, 2012).¹⁹ These considerations point to how successful security interlocutors often possess a unique sensitivity to the ebb and flow of the audience’s imagination; they are able to recognize substance of the contemporary imaginary (synchronicity) along with how it changes over time (diachronicity). This adds a previously unconsidered level of strategic depth to security talk where agents weaken the position of another interlocutor by presenting them as ‘out of touch’ and therefore disposing the audience to feel they are ‘unserious’.²⁰

Finally, it is worth noting that while the emotional appraisals of audiences often do frustrate the practice of securitization, this is not always the case. Some events may come to occupy such a vivid place in the local imaginary that similar instances become reflexively feared and thus become already recognized by a collectivity in security terms, albeit perhaps unconsciously. In this context cases like Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2014 pose a distinct challenge to conventional theories of securitization. While the event was widely cast in security terms by elites in the West, such as NATO Secretary General Rasmussen’s claim that the intervention ‘is the gravest threat to European security and stability since the end of the Cold War’ (Telegraph, 2014), it is worth asking to what extent Western audiences’ understanding of the event depended on an authoritative speech act. Was it really an ‘argument with this particular rhetorical and semiotic structure’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 25) which led Western audiences to accept the emergency measures of sanctions, the expulsion of Russia from the G7, and the deployment of armed forces to Eastern Europe? Or does an equally plausible explanation reside in the culturally embedded memory of the Western imaginary where institutionalized historical narratives of Soviet/Russian ‘aggression’, particularly within Eastern European states (Mälksoo, 2009), mingled with contemporary concerns over Europe’s fiscal retrenchment and energy dependency, resulting in a collective appraisal of fear by Western communities over the intervention? The differences in explanations are subtle and perhaps more complementary than contradictory, but they hold a wealth of implications for how analysts envision the politics of threat construction ranging from when issues become effectively securitized to what the appropriate strategies are for long-term desecuritization.²¹ For the purposes of this discussion it will suffice to suggest in certain cases social appraisals of fear may be so prevalent that explicit language and even authority to speak are redundant. In these cases the practice of securitization becomes akin to ‘preaching to the choir’.

Conclusion

To paraphrase Ross (2006), it is time for securitization studies to ‘come in from the cold’ and recognize the centrality of emotions to threat construction. Such a move offers a rich and promising research agenda that may include the role of other emotions (humiliation, anger, etc.) and threat images, the role of gender and embodiment in the construction of danger (Wilcox, 2013; Sylvester, 2013), or the role of emotions in the formation of communities (Hutchison 2010; Koschut, 2013). Yet there remain enduring apprehensions over the theoretical and methodological challenges inherent in studying emotions. In a recent article Williams raises the concern over coming to the ‘commonsensical conclusion that fear in politics is necessarily equated with increased securitization’ (2011: 454). He notes that some fears, such as those concerning the expansion of executive powers in liberal democracies, become powerful motivations to resist securitizing moves. This article argues that one should go even further and problematize the presence of collective fear itself by understanding it as a fragile cultural construct which is intimately tied to a particular time and circumstance. Engendering fear in an audience can be a challenging social task fraught with complexity. The precariousness of this practice is perhaps best illustrated in analogizing securitization to the more mundane yet accessible practice of telling a joke. Like acts of securitization, jokes largely depend on the social position of the speaker such that professional comedians are expected to be funny, whereas security experts are not. Rhetoric, timing, and prosody of delivery all contribute to linguistic performance. Yet jokes also demand familiarity with certain contexts, characters, clichés, and other tropes which are recognizable to an audience. In certain instances they may not resonate across multiple audiences (Salter, 2008) and they may not translate from one locale to another (Stritzel and Schmittchen, 2011). They may be purely verbal, or incorporate creative visual imagery (Möller, 2007; Hansen, 2011). They may be only marginally funny or intensely humorous (Williams, 2003; Abrahamsen, 2005), with some jokes ceasing to be funny altogether as the cultural context changes (Vuori, 2010). The point of comparing the practice of jokes to securitization is not to depreciate the gravity of threat construction whose political consequences can be dire, particularly when they lead to war. The comparison does, however, illustrate the precariousness of any social practice which hinges on eliciting a particular emotion in a collectivity. Yet it is the fact that many securitizing moves do come to be treated as jokes that betrays an empirical and theoretical complexity worthy of further study.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mira Sucharov, Jack MacLennan, Jillian Curtin, the participants of the ‘Advancing Securitization Theory’ panel at the ISA in 2012, the participants of the ‘Interpretive and Relational Methodologies’ panel at the ISA Northeast in 2014, the editors of Security Dialogue, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All mistakes are the author’s alone.

Funding

This research was supported with an SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship Award.

Notes

Eric Van Rythoven is a PhD candidate at Carleton University studying emotion, securitization, and Canadian foreign policy.

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

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

A critique of securitization theory

Discourse! What do you mean? 4

Beyond and before discourse

Appraisal, socialization, and securitization

The affect/emotion debate and collective emotions

Social appraisals

Emotion, imaginaries, and securitization

Feeling fear in securitization?

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Notes

References

Discourse! What do you mean?⁴