From Copenhagen to the Paris School and Risk Conceptions

Most of the authors discussed so far have tried to address the shortcomings of the CS concerning

‘unsuccessful’ securitisations in the environmental sector within a wider Copenhagian framework. While this has undoubtedly brought the debate forward, it cannot entirely solve all the problems and might overstretch the CS to the point where it is better to approach the issue from a new perspective.

The Paris School: Practices and Professionals of (In)Security

Particularly the questions about the importance of the context, the threshold between ‘normal’

and exceptional’ and the role of elite-speech acts have inspired the idea that unnoticed and slowly proceeding ‘(in)securitisations’ might be much more important than the CS would suggest (Bigo 2002, 2008). Eventually, this has led to the ‘Paris School‘ of ‘(in)securitisation’

(Bigo 2002; Huysmans 2002, 2004; Bigo 2008, 2009: 124). It takes up ideas from Bigo’s previous work in sociology and criminology (Bigo and Walker 2007) and combines Bourdieu’s concept of ‘the field’ (Bourdieu and Coleman 1991) with Michel Foucault’s works on power and governmentality (Foucault 2006b, 2006a). For the Paris School, the elite speech act is only the most visible part, made possible by a long lasting securitisation process in which besides those speech acts, various incremental practices of professionals of (in)security play a much more important role (Bigo 2002: 73). Thus, it is the uncounted and often unnoticed ‘little security nothings’ (Huysmans 2011) that gradually transform an issue towards security. The continuing securitisation of migration in Europe, with ever increasing security measures at the borders is the prime example of this line of thought (Huysmans 2008).

Concerning the securitisation of climate change, the Paris School emphasises the multiplicity of actors involved in the securitisation process. It makes visible the diverse forms of securitising articulations, ranging from parliamentary debates, political reports to scientific climate models and specific practices. And it highlights the long-term nature of the securitisation process, which in the case of climate change has been unfolding at least since the late 1980s. However, the Paris School also has some characteristics that inhibit its usefulness

36

for analysing the securitisation of climate change, which is why there are, to my knowledge, no studies that solely rely on it for studying climate security debates. Its unique micro level of analysis, meaning the focus on traditional professionals of (in)security, does not really enhance our understanding of what has happened in the case of climate change. In contrast to for example migration, where border security and customs agents as well as surveillance technologies play a vital role, climate change has not been primarily governed and securitised by those traditional professionals of (in)security. Instead, a wide range of actors such as scientists, environmental activists and organisations as well as think tanks and political elites have been the central players. These have contributed to the securitisation of climate change through the articulation and popularisation of different climate security discourses, which construct climate change as a specific political issue. One could of course conceptualise defence policy think tanks as ‘professionals of insecurity’, however, they are not the actual agents of insecurity in the Paris sense. They do not carry out the direct practices of insecurity such as controlling border traffic, which from a Paris School perspective drive (in)securitisation processes in the first place. Thus, while adding to our understanding, the Paris School alone may be not the first choice to analyse the securitisation of climate change.

Risk Approaches: Governing Uncertain Futures

Connecting in many points to the Paris School, the rapidly expanding research agenda on concepts of risk and risk based securitisations seems promising for studying the climate security debate (Corry 2012; von Lucke et al. 2014; Aradau and van Munster 2007; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008; Dillon 2007). Risk and uncertainty are not entirely new in IR and Security Studies and scholars have already used these concepts in early realist works on the uncertainty of the balance of power and the security dilemma of states (Herz 1951; Morgenthau 2006).

However, with the introduction of new epistemological approaches such as constructivism and post-structuralism, the meaning of risk hast shifted decisively (Kessler 2012: 22–23). The core claim of the risk perspective is that instead of clear cut and immediate threats, in modern times politics is more about global, diffuse and seemingly incalculable risks (Beck 1992; Hameiri 2008; Hameiri and Jones 2013; Daase and Kessler 2007). Against these risks, one cannot defend oneself in the same manner as against classical threats, but it is only possible to keep them under control with risk management strategies or precautionary and pre-emptive approaches.

Environmental issues regularly have been connected to concepts of risk (Lash et al. 1996;

Charpentier 2008; Corry 2012; Davoudi 2012). In fact, certain key characteristics of modern risk approaches such as the ‘precautionary principle’ (derived from the German

37

‘Vorsorgeprinzip’) have first been introduced in connection to the environment (Raffensperger and Tickner 1999; Aradau and van Munster 2007: 103; Ewald 1991, 1999).

The origins of risk focused approaches on securitisation lie in the general debates on risk in Sociology and International Relations (Beck 1992, 2002; Giddens 2002; Luhmann 1993) but also in Michel Foucault’s works on biopolitics and governmentality (Foucault 1983, 1975, 1980, 2006a, 2006b). Similar to the Paris School, the general argument here is that it is not always immediate and existential threats but often rather long-term, diffuse risks that are evoked in securitisation processes. Works in the Foucauldian tradition conceptualise risk not as objective category opposed to security but as discourse or dispositive that enables to govern risks with certain technologies of power (Kessler 2012: 20; Aradau and van Munster 2007;

Lobo-Guerrero 2007; Neal 2004). In this sense, risk discourses routinise and normalise the notions of ‘out of control’ and extraordinariness usually associated with the evocation of security. In addition, risk management technologies try to control the unknown future, try to bring back the future into the present by preparing for everything this future could hold (Methmann and Rothe 2012). Concrete technologies, for instance, are insurance schemes or hedging strategies (Kessler 2012: 24). Hence, risks are allowed to materialise (because being unknown they could not be prevented one way or another) as long as one is insured against or made resilient towards such events. Transferred to securitisation theory, the clear dichotomy between normal and exceptional situations drawn by the CS does not hold because risk management tries to normalise even this very state of exception and thus makes it permanent (Aradau and van Munster 2010: 76; Agamben 2005). As a long-term, global, highly uncertain but possibly devastating risk, global climate change is a prime example for the concept of risk, which has led some authors to speak of a ‘riskification’ instead of securitisation (Corry 2012).

Others see the usage of diffuse and long-term risks as part of the securitisation concept, as the endpoint of a continuum and argue for a rethinking and extension of the original securitisation concept (von Lucke et al. 2014; Diez et al. 2016).

However, as climate change is not solely constructed as a long-term risk, but oftentimes presented as an immediate and concrete threat, exclusively looking at its securitisation through the lens of risk and Paris is problematic and can generate new problems. To a certain extent, these approaches replace the traditional security logic of classical securitisation theory, with a micro or long-term perspective that mainly looks at less confrontational everyday practices, security professionals and a risk based security logic (Opitz 2008b: 204; Larrinaga and Doucet

38

2008). Yet, climate security discourses are more dynamic and multifaceted; they entail elements of threat and survival, state and human centred security conceptions as well as diffuse risk constructions. Moreover, although implicitly included in the Foucault based Paris and risk approaches, questions of power, are not discussed sufficiently. Thus, these approaches do not engage, at least not as their primary focus, with idea of the parallel exercise of different forms of power (ranging from top-down and direct sovereign, to more indirect and productive forms such as disciplinary and governmental power) in securitisation processes that can help to understand the different forms of securitisation and varying political consequences. Moreover, beyond the argument of professional of insecurity and governance through risk, they do not spell out in detail how exactly relations of power are linked to processes of securitisation. Thus, to better understand climate security discourses we need a theoretical framework that can give us a more thorough understanding of the dynamic aspects of security and its interrelatedness with questions of power as well as its rootedness in the context where it is enacted (Ciuta 2009) – which, in my opinion, the CS, Paris and Risk approaches cannot entirely provide.