Security, the translation

In: Security dialogue, Band 42, Heft 4-5, S. 343-355

Abstract

This article confronts the basic idea of securitization with the concept of translation. By critically examining Wæver's deliberately traditionalist and essentialist conceptualization of security and his notion of a distinctly speech-act-theoretical approach to securitization, it develops a processual refinement that reads articulations of security as translations. I claim that this conceptual transposition has the potential to open the current securitization discourse to an alternative perspective and to new avenues of research on the travel, localization and/or gradual evolution/transformation of security meanings.