Barry Buzan - 4/5 - Defining Security Threats

Dr. Barry Buzan discusses the concept of security.
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/cip-pic/discussions/security-securite/video/buza...

Transcript:
"You need to study the process by which something gets designated as a security issue. Who is it who speaks this? Who has authority to speak it? Obviously, in the way in which we organize our political lives now the state leaderships have a privileged position for speaking security; its their job to do that. But they cant just do so and always have it accepted. If you think about something like the Vietnam War or if you think more currently about the business in Iraq, those are highly contested securitizations which, in the case of Vietnam, eventually collapsed. Even in the US, people no longer accepted that as being a valid definition of a threat that justified what was going on there.

I think what is interesting at the moment is, of course, the war on terrorism, which is bidding to be a macro-securitization like the Cold War was. In other words, something which defines a very big strategic domain over a long period of time and which becomes the basic priority-setter in the security agenda. Obviously, thats the way Washington is looking at it at the moment, and that has been reasonably successful, in the sense that amongst the Western states at least - and quite a few others - theres a willingness to agree that there is a serious threat there and to proceed on that basis in policy terms. Contrast that with Iraq, with this huge disagreement."

Category:

Education

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• Securitization
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