Deconstructing security.

• Author: Ivan, Ruxandra

Environmental security. Food security. Military security. Markets security. Social security. Human security. It seems that all the aspects of everyday life are covered by some form of security. Barry Buzan deplored, in the first edition of his very famous book, People, States, and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post Cold War Era, the fact that the concept of 'security' was insufficiently developed in international relations and political science and that it was only used in its military dimension (Buzan 1983). The situation is completely different nowadays and probably Barry Buzan will not have anything to complain about anymore. Because the concept of 'security' penetrated the whole range of human activities. But the unstoppable inflation of 'security' discourses might prove just as unproductive, if not as dangerous, as neglecting the concept.

The method

The main question that will guide this article concerns the evolution of the understanding of 'security' since the 80s, when Barry Buzan first draw the attention to the limited use of the concept, until nowadays, when it seems that 'security' is everywhere. We will make an inquiry into the meaning of this emphasis on security and the way it can be interpreted, or read.

The term 'reading' immediately directs us to the idea of textuality, of the world as being constituted like a text that we incessantly interpret (Derrida 1967a). We will actually try to interpret the discursive phenomena that created an inflation of the security preoccupations among theorists, policy-makers and the public opinion through a method proposed by Jacques Derrida, which is the double reading (Derrida 1972a; 1972b). The method has been successfully used in IR theory by Richard Ashley (Ashley 1988), who deconstructed the concept of "anarchy" through a double reading. This is a strategy of interpretation of the discourse and, finally, of the world understood as a discourse or text. The first reading is a commentary, or repetition, of the dominant interpretation, which reproduces its apparent internal coherence. It is a re-construction or re-assembling of the mainstream discourse. The second reading is an attempt to seize the instability points of the first reading, with the purpose of exposing its internal tensions, the system of binary oppositions upon which rests the dominant interpretation, as well as what is excluded from it. The reason why we chose this method is that we have been intrigued by the easiness with which the word 'security' is associated with every aspect of everyday life, as if an immediate and constant danger would perpetually hang over us. This led us to raise the question of how we came to consider this constant preoccupation for security as being natural. How did this stability effect appear? The double reading method will allow us to grasp the way in which the discourse about security was constructed and whom it serves, since, in the words of Robert Cox "theory is always for someone and for some purpose" (Cox 1981: 128). It will show how this discourse has been instrumented by the political power in order to extend the sphere of intervention of the State into the private lives of the citizens. This approach has the advantage of questionning the status quo of the theory, as well as concepts that are usually taken for granted (and 'security' is one of them) with the purpose of showing how knowledge and power are intertwined (Foucault 1975).

'Security' doesn't seem to be a problematic concept. It has been so widely debated since it was relaunched by the Copenhagen school, that it would appear that little has been left outside the discussion. However, it is precisely this saturation and its apparent stability that makes it problematic. The most stable concepts, the most deeply embedded in 'normal' discursive practices, the most taken for granted, are, in fact, the most problematic, because we ceased to question them a long time ago. Without being questioned, they subtly evolved in a way that we are not aware of. Moreover, after September 11, the concept of 'security' has evolved in an at least bizarre opposition with 'liberty': it appears that societies have to choose between being more secure, with the price of restricting their liberties, and keeping their civil liberties untouched, with the price of being in danger (58). Except for some IR researchers from the poststructuralist stand, such as R.B.J. Walker, Jef Huysmans, Didier Bigo, who took part in the Challenge project (Challenge 2009), nobody has yet questioned this opposition; moreover, the policy-makers present it as inevitable, and the public opinions take it for granted. Thus, the object of our inquiry is not security as such, but the meaning it has in today's discursive practices. Derrida thought that "we need to interpret interpretations more than we need to interpret things" (Derrida 1967 b). We will try to unveil what has been hidden behind the apparent stability and consensus around the meaning of concept of 'security', through the strategy of double reading.

Why is this strategy useful? According to Derrida, we have to identify the double structure of meaning of a concept (Derrida 1972b: 10). The first one is inherent to what he calls 'logocentrism'--that is, the system of significations which is commonly assigned to a concept in the current discursive practices. In this reading, the concept is clear, stable, apparently natural and unquestioned, because the whole network of meanings in constituted inside the discourse. The second structure of meaning is external to the discourse and is related to the understanding of its mode of constitution and instability points, that have to be uncovered. This is the task of the second reading. In what concerns our subject, the first reading will reproduce the security discourses as they appear in IR theory, security studies, but also in political practice. This will be a simple repetition of the dominant, mainstream way of understanding security in the recent decades. We will uncover the way in which 'security' has been coupled with various other concepts; one direction of inquiry will be, for example, the process that constituted the concept of 'human security', leading to 'humanitarian assistance' and 'humanitarian intervention', to end up, nowadays, in 'responsibility to protect'. During the second reading, we will try to deconstruct the evolution of the discourse about security in order to understand the significance of this evolution, on the one hand, for the relations between the 'international community' and the nation-State, and, on the other, between the State and the citizen. This will inevitably lead us to the problem of sovereignty, which is, after all, underlying all discussion about international security in the 21th century. As we will show, during the evolution of the concept, a shift has taken place. At the beginning of the debate, the need for human security was used in an attempt to justify humanitarian intervention. But, since this could not be reconciled with the basic principle of state sovereignty, the concept shifted towards 'responsibility to protect'. This concept, while replacing that of 'humanitarian intervention' after 2000, is not incompatible with sovereignty.

Security: the first reading

From hard security to societal security

Security seems to have been the most important preoccupation of men in the state of nature, as described by the contractualist philosophers of the 17th and 18th century. This is the main reason why they decide to give up part of their individual sovereignty by willingly submitting to political power: "Fear of oppression, disposeth a man to anticipate, or to seek aid by society: for there is no other way by which a man can secure his life and liberty" (Hobbes 1651: XI, 9). Security is, according to Hobbes, the main incentive for men to live in society; this is also the task of the highest authority of the State: "The office of the sovereign (be it a monarch or an assembly) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the sovereign power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people (...) But by safety here, is not meant a bare preservation, but also all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or hurt to the commonwealth, shall acquire to himself" (Hobbes 1651: XXX, 1). In a strange way, the words of Hobbes seem to anticipate the meaning given to 'security' by the Copenhagen School in the 1990s: not only preservation of life, but also a whole range of conditions that assure a good life in all its dimensions.

While all through the Cold War, security has been perceived in military terms security meaning protection of the State against the threat of a conventional or nuclear war--towards the end of the 1980s, Hobbes' definition seems to slip into the field of international politics. The author who brought it in is Barry Buzan; in his first book on the subject (Buzan 1983) he argued that too little attention has been devoted to the concept of 'security' in International Relations. His ideas needed a few years to develop into an articulated vision which attracted other scholars. Together with Ole Waever and other theorists, he produced a categorization of security into five different fields: military, political, economic, environmental, and societal (Buzan, Waever, Kelstrup and Lemaitre 1993). These authors observed that the new European security agenda of the end of the 20th century focuses on other types of security threats than the traditional, Cold War security agenda, which was mainly preoccupied by military aspects. After the Cold War, security can be re-conceptualized on two dimensions: "state security"--in the traditional sense, and "societal security", which is focused on identity as the basic value of a society. Identity, the authors contend, is at least as important as physical preservation; this is why a...