Can securitization theory be saved from itself? A decolonial and feminist intervention

Introduction

Recently, the article ‘Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School’, by Howell and Richter-Montpetit (2020), sparked an intense debate in security studies by highlighting what the authors viewed as the racism of the Copenhagen School. Subsequently, Wæver and Buzan (2020) pleaded their case that many securitization studies use the race variable and are aware of racism. The relevance of the debate is undeniable. Several authors have explored the possibilities (and limitations) of connecting gender, racial studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, and securitization theory (Bertrand, 2018; Gray and Franck, 2019; Hirschauer, 2014; Ibrahim, 2005; Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016; Saeed, 2016). Our objective in this intervention is to contribute to this debate with two main arguments.

First: We understand that securitization theory can be racist through negligence. Racism through negligence is unintentional and occurs through the perpetuation of whiteness (Ware and Back, 2001) and the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2000). Whiteness is the maintenance of privileges of white people, in all areas, without any inquiry into the racial problem. The coloniality of knowledge corresponds to whiteness at the level of knowledge production – that is, it concerns a production of white knowledge that does not reflect on race and racism. The concepts of whiteness and coloniality of knowledge help us to understand racism through negligence, which is perpetuated through silence. Our first argument states that it is this type of racism that has marked a large part of security studies, including securitization theory. Drawing on the concepts and authors referred to above, we venture that racism through negligence can be corrected through a recognition of its existence. For this to happen, it is necessary to highlight what was being neglected – in this case, to recognize the importance of coloniality and therefore race in contexts of securitization. The consideration of the colonial dimension in securitization studies should find race relevant in many processes, since the colonial-racial system is a central structure of the formation of the modern state.

Parallel to this debate, we question the absence of gender that also characterizes securitization theory, as Lene Hansen (2000, 2020) has pointed out, which makes it sexist through negligence. We outline the bridges and gaps between securitization theory, critical security studies, and race and gender studies in the first theoretical section of this intervention. In the second theory section, we contribute to the ongoing debate by bringing the idea of the ‘colonial/modern gender system’ (Lugones, 2010) to critical security studies.

Second: To overcome the racist and sexist neglect of securitization theory, we highlight the need for empirical studies. From a theoretical and epistemological point of view, it is necessary to recognize race and gender as structural conditions to understand securitization theory as an ally of critical security studies. But it is also essential to conduct empirical studies that use racial and gender discourses as variables of analysis in an operational and pragmatic way. After the two theory sections, we present an example of empirical research – a study of the securitization of Tupac Amaru, an Argentinian social organization with an indigenous background, and its political leader, Milagro Sala – that demonstrates how race and gender are involved in securitization processes as part of the colonial/modern gender system.

After developing these two arguments, which correspond to the various sections of this intervention, we conclude the intervention with the proposal that securitization theory can only be saved from itself through a feminist and decolonial perspective that includes race and gender as structural and discursive aspects of securitization processes.

Securitization and its critical proponents

The relationship between ontological perceptions and definitions of threat has been a topic of discussion in security studies for at least two decades. At first, securitization theory was considered an innovation in this area, since it maintains that security issues are constructed as such not from the recognition of threats but from securitization acts themselves, through a ‘self-referential practice’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 204) related to intersubjective and shared understandings about security. When securitization theory has no ontological assumptions, its critical capacity enables reflections on power relations (for example, coloniality and gender) that are reflected in the ‘speech acts’ produced in the construction of a threat by a securitizing actor.

However, some criticism has been voiced regarding the character of the theory and its possibilities as a critical perspective (Bertrand, 2018; Hansen, 2000). It has been argued that the concept of securitization itself presupposes power dynamics that underlie the very ability to securitize through speech acts, so it does not include the subaltern as an actor in security speech. We identify a problem of silence due to limited social representation, where people who are classified socially in relation to their race, gender and class are portrayed as objects to be protected or threats to be prevented, in a securitizing vocabulary. This is related to a social imaginary where they are portrayed as victims or transgressors (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015). This can be seen in empirical studies of the process of desecuritization of female combatants in the pacification of Sierra Leone (MacKenzie, 2009) and in the finding, in a study that draws openly on the concept of intersectionality, that refugee women are constructed as vulnerable while male refugees are presented as a threat in the British media (Gray and Franck, 2019).

The silencing is not a failure of securitization theory per se. Buzan and Hansen (2009: 19) even claim that international security studies has a ‘history of Anglo-centric (and militaristic and patriarchal) bias’. Hence, our first argument is that the racist and patriarchal character of securitization theory also permeates security studies and the field of international relations (Taylor, 2012; Vitalis, 2015), because it permeates the production of knowledge as a whole. It is a product of coloniality and the perpetuation of whiteness (Quijano, 2000; Ware and Back, 2001).

Neglect of certain dimensions and categories of analysis (especially race and gender) is disguised as a supposed neutrality and as a methodological choice regarding the analysis of speech acts. Thus, desecuritized themes are banished to the sphere of so-called normal politics (Wæver, 1995) without any recognition that this strategy does not take into account the intrinsic violence of normal politics (Bertrand, 2018; Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016; Opitz, 2010). Moreover, the Copenhagen School fails to realize that gender and race issues are not always related to the societal security sector and may be linked to the political security of states (Hansen, 2000). Critical security studies has advanced reflection on security problems regarding the exposure of groups of individuals in situations of insecurity and practices of (in)securitization (Bigo, 2014), and has introduced normative debates on the use of speech and/or practices to understand security (Hansen, 2000). Many of the contributions to securitization theory, especially in relation to the context and the audience of the securitization process (Balzacq, 2015; Léonard and Kaunert, 2011), have been put to good use in research that aims to analyze the social configurations of power in such processes.

Accordingly, our concept of securitization starts from the understanding of the classical perspective – that a securitized problem is the intersubjective construction of an existential threat. However, we build on the basis of a ‘sociological’ turn in securitization studies that realizes that this process is established as an instrument of political disputes and government practices (Balzacq, 2015; Opitz, 2010).

In this sense, we understand and endorse many of the epistemological criticisms of classical securitization theory, recognizing the perspective that characterizing non-Western cases as cases of securitization may constitute a simplification of more complex sociopolitical processes (Wilkinson, 2007). There are geopolitical limitations in the theoretical constructions that permeate the area of security studies, from its beginnings to contemporary times. We also realize that the ‘periphery’ of knowledge production (Tickner, 2013) has not been included as a reflection on either side of recent debates (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020; Wæver and Buzan, 2020). Still, there is a critical potential to expand the analysis that considers the social classification of people in securitization studies, including its geopolitical dimensions.

We want to emphasize that studies that use the concept of securitization to demonstrate inequalities of power in empirical processes have been conducted for some time (see Gray and Franck, 2019; Hirschauer, 2014; Ibrahim, 2005; MacKenzie, 2009; Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016; Saeed, 2016). Our concern is that these studies were intentionally ignored in the critique of ‘classical’ theory by Howell and Richter-Montpetit (2020), although much of the literature that adopts the concept of securitization generally recognizes its limitations and tries to overcome them, usually by modifying it, to the point that we can speak of ‘theories of securitization’ in the plural (Balzacq, 2015). In a sense, at least the controversy over racism in securitization theory has brought the required attention of Wæver and Buzan (2020) to this debate, where (in the long answer) they recognize some of the work that has been done in the field on race, racism and securitization.

Having overcome the limitations of analyzing colonial structures and gender and race discourses, we recognize the potential for critical security studies of having securitization as a tool, while researchers have the possibility of politicizing securitization (Buzan et al., 1998: 35). Critical approaches can demonstrate that when we analyze government discourses in relation to groups of individuals, whether they are recognized as citizens or foreigners, to criminalize is to securitize. Securitization theory has neglected the political effects of colonialism and race as relevant categories to be analyzed in the construction of threats (Moffette and Vadasaria, 2016). We understand social classification processes such as genderization and racialization should have a central role in the theory, since their insertion would complexify the understanding of power relations involved in the securitization process, as well as the consequences of being securitized – and of being marginalized – in that process. So far, however, coloniality, race, and gender have not had a prominent role in securitization theory.

The colonial/modern gender system for securitization studies

As Wæver (1995: 57) has observed, the securitization process is related to power dynamics: mainly the power of elites to establish threats and objects to be referenced and protected. Balzacq’s (2015) interpretation also recognizes that securitization is made possible by a situation in which the securitizing agent has the power to securitize; therefore it is hierarchical. This allows us to acknowledge the possibilities and limitations of securitization as a discourse and as a practice of power. Nevertheless, patriarchal (Pateman, 1988) and colonial (Mignolo, 2001) power have not yet been incorporated as central elements in the analysis of securitization processes. Decolonial studies has been instrumental in exposing that traditional theorists understand power less well than they believe, since they obscure and exclude much of the existing power dynamics from analysis and ignore hierarchies. The decolonial turn recognizes that specific historical conditions are constituting processes that classify people and states socially and subjectively within world capitalism and colonial logic (Quijano, 2000). Similarly, gender is produced and propagated through speech, which in turn are causally related to the power relations between individuals, groups, and states, as well as the functioning of the capitalist production system and international security dynamics (Gentry and Sjoberg, 2015).

While the roots of security studies are intertwined with international relations, it is understood as bordering different disciplines, so it can potentially engage with other areas (Buzan and Hansen, 2009). Consequently, it is possible to bring security studies closer to the discussions of coloniality as configurations of power. Although we have not found studies that used decolonial feminism to theorize about securitization or critical security studies, we realize that it has the potential to address many of the limitations we identify.

The concept of intersectionality is essential for understanding the main structures of modern society – patriarchy, racism, and capitalism – that demarcate people’s lives and political processes, and, consequently, the dynamics of international security. These social structures that interact with each other create the categories of women, race, and class (Davis, 1981) that segregate and hierarchize social groups. In dialogue with intersectional theory, decolonial feminism (Lugones, 2010) places these three dimensions in an international perspective, emphasizing the idea of coloniality. Thus, patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are the main social structures strongly demarcated by historical colonialism and its roots in the economy, politics and culture that persist to the present day, establishing what Lugones defines as the ‘colonial/modern gender system’.

Although these concepts can lead to different paths of analysis, their epistemological common ground allows us to advocate that coloniality, racialization, and genderization are products of historical constructions, neither universal nor essential. Culturally and historically situated analysis of securitization processes has the capacity to incorporate social classification configurations such as racialization and genderization, although we do not see this happening very often. We intend to illustrate in the next section how the conduct of empirical research plays a decisive role in efforts to analyze the social configurations of power in securitization processes.

The colonial/modern gender system in a securitization process: A case study from Argentina

Despite the limitations set out above, securitization theory proves to be useful in enabling the analysis of power dynamics involved in state security discourses and the construction of threats as an instrument of state governmentality (Opitz, 2010). Feminist approaches to security and decolonial feminism, in turn, complement structural analysis by exposing the modern state as a gendered and racialized construction.

The second argument of this intervention is a defense of empirical studies as a way of overcoming the neglects of the classical perspective of securitization theory by analyzing how the dimensions of coloniality intervene in processes of securitization. To illustrate how an empirical turn can make the case for securitization theory, we present our research on the construction of racialized women who actively participate in political life as a threat to the governmentality of the modern state.

Our investigation focused on the case of Milagro Sala, an indigenous woman who is the leader of the organization Tupac Amaru in Argentina and who was arrested in 2016. The organization is linked to several different ethnic groups, such as the Mapuche, the Guarani, and the Kollas. The objective of our study was to analyze how the process of securitization in this case is intertwined with processes of racialization and genderization. With this example, which reinforces the requirement for theoretical openness, we seek to demonstrate the importance of methodological openness and empirical research that employs the variables race and gender in studies of securitization processes.

Sala was elected as a member of the Mercosur Parliament, the civil representation body of the trade bloc’s member-states, at the end of 2015, and arrested shortly afterwards, in January 2016, because she was perceived as being the ‘organizer’ of a protest in front of the seat of government in Argentina’s Jujuy province. Sala and other activists from Tupac Amaru were accused of several crimes in relation to their protest in Jujuy, and legal recognition of the organization was suspended by Executive Decree 402-G. We conducted our analysis of these events using content analysis and critical discourse analysis of political and media discourses. The political speeches we analyzed were from 13 statements and interviews published in the newspaper La Nación during 2016, given by the governor of Jujuy, Gerardo Morales, and by Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, as well as by official representatives and allies of their governments. We also analyzed the decrees that removed legal recognition and government funding for Tupac Amaru (Decree No. 402-G and Decree No. 403-G, promulgated in the ‘Official Diary’ of the province of Jujuy on 13 January 2016).

From the analysis of the data, we identified the state as the main actor in the securitization process under study. We verified the state’s actions through an examination of: (i) the speeches of Gerardo Morales (provincial governor), Mauricio Macri (president of Argentina), and their coalition allies in their respective governments, which reinforce an image of both Sala and the Tupac Amaru organization as enemies of the population of Jujuy; and (ii) the executive decrees that criminalized the political demonstrations that were being held in front of the provincial government headquarters, which were published shortly after Morales took over the government of Jujuy province.

Several international movements and organizations ¹ denounced the criminalization of Tupac Amaru activists, highlighting the arbitrary arrest of Milagro Sala. This made it difficult to legitimize the process, but did not prevent the final decision of the state apparatus. Sala was sentenced to three years for the protest conducted outside the headquarters of the Jujuy government and barred from holding a position in any social organization. After her arrest, the Argentine government constantly tried to legitimize the process. Sala was granted house arrest after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) requested a precautionary measure for her detention (Rodríguez Niell, 2017). We therefore conclude that the actions of international organizations such as the IACHR had drawn attention to the case, which made it more difficult to establish the criminalization and securitization processes. However, the house arrest was revoked less than a month after its concession, and Sala subsequently returned to regular imprisonment.

In relation to the gender variable, we observe that references to danger and violence were made more frequently in relation to Sala than to the organization as a whole. The statement that ‘she was the leader of an organization that politically managed a province’ was a constant (see, for example, La Nación, 2016a). As a political leader, Sala was constructed as being manipulative, dangerous, and violent – a treatment that reinforces the view, highlighted by Pateman (1988), that women should not be in the political space and, if they are, it is because they are not good women. For our analysis, we also draw on fieldwork carried out by Tabbush and Gaona (2017: 315), who regard the actions against Tupac Amaru as an example of criminalization of ‘female activists who question entrenched racial, gender, and class inequalities in Latin America’ given the large numbers of women in leadership positions within the organization. Tabbush and Gaona (2017: 316) conclude that the persecution of the Tupac Amaru movement is related to ‘the circulation of radicalized hatred in a multi-ethnic society’, and that the government’s policy is based on an alleged need to ‘save’ the poor women and men who belong to the organization.

In relation to the race variable, we observed that no explicit references were made to the indigenous issue and that Sala was not enunciated as an indigenous person in any of the political discourses we analyzed. This fact highlights deracialization as a form of securitization. This process by which ‘deracialization’ is used as a way to legitimize the criminalization of socially classified groups is related to what Moffette and Vadasaria (2016) perceive as the link between securitization and racial governmentality. As deracialization is not explicit in the speeches analyzed, we can only perceive its colonial dimensions when we approach the context – in this case, the construction of Latin America, the Argentine state and its whiteness policies.

While Sala herself uses the rhetoric of race, referring to herself as black, and the organization of which she is a part has an indigenous name, the apparatus of power silences this dimension. In the Argentinian case, then, race intervenes to deracialize, to diminish the strength of the indigenous movement. Our findings thus contribute to the discussions about deracialization as an instrument of power, reinforcing the argument that Latin American ideas about miscegenation (Martínez-Echazábal, 1998; Van Dijk, 2005) were meant to hide racism and continue to be a method of silencing black and indigenous movements. Our findings thus appear to be relevant for several discussions about deracialization as an instrument of power in Latin America (Briones, 2003; Escolar, 2007; Martínez-Echazábal, 1998; Quijada et al., 2000; Segato, 2010), reinforcing the idea that ‘race’ was politicized by the state for purposes of homogenization, this time based on the concept of ‘mestizaje’. Whiteness played a strategic role in the project to homogenize the Argentine nation, where the participation of immigrants from Europe was extolled, while African and indigenous influences were rendered invisible in the nation’s historical-social and cultural construction. The imaginary that the nation is ‘plural’ at the same time that European descent is magnified can even be used as a resistance strategy when socially classified groups question pre-established categories of ‘race’ (Escolar, 2007: 104–105), but it mainly reflects the invisibility of the indigenous population.

The term ‘ethnocidal miscegenation’ was coined to refer to a strategy to silence the participation of indigenous and Afro-Latino populations in Latin American societies that built the idea of ‘mestizaje’. The removal of racial/ethnic identifications in official population statistics and censuses in Argentina has been verified empirically by López (2006) and Segato (2010). Against this background, we could observe in our results what has been identified as ‘silenced racialization’ of the indigenous population, whereby speech can be racialized even if such racialization is not done formally (Briones, 2003: 77). We also carried out an analysis of media discourse in order to assess the extent to which the securitization process had met with acceptance and been regarded as legitimate. Our analysis was centered on the newspaper La Nación, since this is a recognized source of information on Argentina and has dedicated specific sections to the case of Sala and Tupac Amaru. More than one hundred news stories from 2016 were analyzed. As in the political speeches, the threat posed by Sala and her leadership role were underlined – often appearing together, as occurred in 31 news stories. As an example, one of these reports, published four days after Sala’s arrest on 16 January 2016, states that ‘thief, gangster and threatening are three of the softest words people use to describe Milagro Sala when asked who she is’ (La Nación, 2016b). The articles emphasized the organization’s ‘accumulated power’, and the idea that Tupac Amaru constituted a ‘parallel state’ in the province of Jujuy was also reiterated. We see in this a ‘coloniality of security’ (Lucero, 2015) that finds danger when communities inside the state practice any degree of self-determination, causing the state to perceive self-determination and difference as a threat.

Rooted in power relations, the media discourses that we analyzed play an important role in the securitization process since they articulate affective dimensions on which the social representations of Sala and the Tupac Amaru organization are built. Sala is not represented as a woman who is the leader of an ethnic organization of political and territorial resistance, but as a violent and dangerous woman who has accumulated power in the province. This establishes an affective dimension of aversion: given that a significant part of the Jujuy population identifies itself as indigenous (Tabbush and Gaona, 2017), the failure to identify the organization and its leaders as indigenous prevents any form of empathy from being built in relation to them.

Our analysis also allowed us to perceive various discursive disputes present in the securitization process, mainly related to the fact that Sala is a woman, indigenous and a parliamentarian. The exposure by international organizations of the race and gender dynamics present in Sala’s imprisonment is constructed by the media as a defense ‘rhetoric’, as if the use of such terms represented an attempt to ‘cover up the crimes’ of Sala. Paradoxically, Sala is constantly described as a violent woman. The Tupac Amaru movement employs a strategy of acting transnationally in an attempt to ‘counter-balance’ its confrontation with the state and securitization in the domestic arena, a characteristic also seen in several other social movements in Latin America (see López, 2006; Lucero, 2015). In other words, our analysis showed that state authorities and the media engage in a silencing of the racial and gender dimension as a way of legitimizing the criminalization of the activities of Sala and Tupac Amaru, while international organizations and the Tupac Amaru organization itself emphasize these dimensions as a form of political resistance. Race and gender thus proved to be important variables that intervened in the process by which Milagro Sala was securitized – in ways that are not immediately obvious. The case analyzed here thus reinforces our argument about the need for empirical research on how the variables of gender and race interfere in securitization processes.

Conclusions

This intervention has sought to answer the question of whether, from a feminist and decolonial perspective, securitization theory can be saved from itself. What can be concluded from this brief article is that this is possible, provided that two things are taken into account: (1) the need for theoretical and epistemological recognition of race and gender as structural features in securitizing processes; and, (2) the carrying out of empirical studies, with methodological openness, that analyze how racial and gender discourses function as intervening variables in specific securitization contexts.

Finding racial and gendered discourses as intervening variables in our case study allowed us to use the theory of securitization and, at the same time, to reflect on the colonial structure of the state in Latin America. As a variable, racial discourses can racialize or deracialize, depending on the power relations of the context in which they are inserted. In the case of the Argentine organization Tupac Amaru and its leader Milagro Sala, the colonial-racial power structure maintains white privileges by silencing the claims and very existence of black and indigenous populations. Through the analysis of racial processes in this specific case, our analysis demonstrated that such silencing – or deracialization – continues to be used as an instrument of state power in Argentina. In addition, use of the gender variable enables us to see that Milagro Sala is frequently portrayed as a violent leader both in speeches by the governor of Jujuy and in media coverage, so we consider that such a portrayal was readily accepted by the domestic audience, as Sala does not reproduce the expected gender role of Argentine (white) women. In addition, we find a class dimension: a rhetoric about the salvation of the poor members of the population that participate in the organization. Therefore, understanding the colonial dimensions as structuring factors in securitization studies (our first argument) and the addition of racial and gendered discourses as fundamental variables in concrete cases of securitization (our second argument) were central for the perception of political and social hierarchies in the securitization process analyzed. The adoption of such an approach, we believe, may represent a way to save the theory of securitization from itself, overcoming its racism and sexism by omission.

Accordingly, we argue that, when used for critical purposes, the concept of securitization, with methodological innovations, has the capacity to capture the dynamics of power in discourse, elucidating mechanisms that maintain the colonial, racist, and gendered roots of security.