Securitizing "The Other": A case study on Israeli and Palestinian institutional discourses.

• Author: Georgia, Calin-Stefan
• Position: POLSCI PAPERS - Case study

Introduction

The goal of the study is to analyze how "the other" is expressed through Israeli and Palestinian institutional discourses and how does it fit in within the Securitization model put forward by the Copenhagen School and improved upon by various authors in the last decades while applying Discourse Analysis, alongside the Systemic Functional Grammar. Embedded deep within any process of empathy, how one perceives and interprets "the other" is inextricably linked to the pre-conditions of negotiation in any conflict. Following a field research trip in the Palestinian Territories and Israel in 2015, the present article was put forward, which contains part of my doctoral research on the securitization of "the other" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The article bridges together theory and the operationalization of the concepts used in my research alongside the analysis of Israeli and Palestinian discourses, focusing on the way the speaker of the discourse portrays "the other" within the text.

The Securitization Theory is a product of the Copenhagen School of International Relations and was first coined by Ole Waever in 1995 in his article Securitization and Desecuritization (Waever, 1995). The theory was later developed together with Barry Buzan (Buzan & Waever, 2003) and became very popular as an alternate and contrasting approach to classical security studies. Like any other theory which has in due time become mainstream, Securitization is still developing and has not yet reached its mature stage, although some would say it has gone a long way since its initial critique (Mcsweeney, 1991) and shortcomings (Mcsweeney, 1999) concerning inter-subjective processes, identity and other key concepts that are crucial to the operationalization of the theory. Spearheading the constructivist approach towards International Relations and specifically Security Studies, which has been dominated for quite a long time by realism and neorealism, the Securitization Theory brings forth a new emphasis on social dynamics, incorporating concepts like identity and subjectivity into what once was a cold, pragmatic world devoid of any human emotion. Securitization has been chosen as the main theory because it aims to explain human behavior and to create an optimal environment for more accurate theoretical models that can help make sense of our dynamic social world, but at the same time possesses the versatility of being applicable to other case studies than the ones used for their development and testing. Portrayed as a theory of the Speech Act, Securitization's both advantages and shortcomings reside in its interdisciplinary character, but on the other hand this offers it versatility and the option of modular theory and research design.

To this regard, the study aims to enrich this field of study by employing Systemic Functional Grammar alongside Discourse analysis in order to process and analyze discourses, addressing the issue of the nature of the security act and the relation between the securitizing actor and the target audience. This approach yields a methodology which (when applied to a larger corpus of analysis) could identify markers for measuring the effectiveness of implemented policies or strategies relating to security and securitization/desecuritization. Furthermore, the article comes to support the need for empirical investigation into the nature of "existential" threat threshold (Abulof, 2014) expressed in Securitization and the way it manifests within the Israeli-Palestinian context, pointing out to an intertwined securitization phenomenon.

In the present study, this theory was used in order to explain the societal impact of projecting an image of "the other" though institutional channels, thus using institutions as a carrier for a message with a powerful societal impact, benefitting from the institution's "social capital" (Bourdieu, 1977) with a target audience. Furthermore, cognitive linguistics has underlined a physical link between ideas and brain functions in "that ideas are physically instantiated as part of our brains and that changes occur at the synapses" (Lakoff, 2008) and that this phenomenon occurs either in a situation of trauma, where an intense synaptic activity takes place, or in the case of repetition, when less intense but constant synaptic activity takes place, physically embedding the ideas into the human brain. Thus, it is safe to say that a speaker imbued with social capital with a certain target audience who speaks to it through multiple discourses which contain several common elements would greatly contribute to triggering, enforcing or changing certain behavior patterns in the members of the target audience. One of the limitations of the present study is its focus on only one discourse per securitizing actor, which will be addressed in subsequent studies, and will enlarge the corpus of the research.

The article features four chapters: the present "Introduction," a "Literature review" chapter where the main works and key authors that have laid out the foundations for this research are briefly reviewed, followed by "Theory" which is dedicated to explaining the main concepts which employed in the current study, "The case study" which contains information about the two analysis of the Israeli and Palestinian texts, as well as a social and political context to the present study and puts the analysis into a historical context and "Conclusions and limitations."

Most of the literature dealing with Securitization Theory, especially the theory-building one, focuses on the national or supra-national level, analyzing how state actors relate to one another, often employing a holistic approach for theory building. There are exceptions to this, mainly regarding the use of Speech Act Theory methodologies to analyze political discourses for a sub-state level of analysis like Vuori (Vuori, 2003) or Baidoun's (Baidoun, 2014), where the unit of analysis consists of the discourse of political leaders or media discourse. This work aims to add to these exceptions while building on the empirical grounding of Securitization by employing Hallidayan Transitivity in order to fragment Palestinian and Israeli institutional discourses, highlighting and focusing on cognitive processes, specifically the ones referring to "the other" and thus analyzing its securitization. Last but definitely not least, the study aims to shed some light on the context in which a securitization process takes place, contributing to setting the stage for a better understanding of both the "existential threat" to the Referent Object, Balzacq's concept of "psycho-cultural disposition" (Balzacq, 2011a) and the "deep securitization" (Abulof, 2014) of the Israeli and Palestinian socio-political environments in the context of the securitization of "the other." From these points of view, the article addresses not only a gap in literature, but also aims to build on the nomothetic character of the theory by engaging skepticism related to the lack of empirical studies grounding it, its lacunae in the operationalization of its concepts, while at the same time expanding on its tools to analyze phenomena at the "grassroots" levels of analysis.

Literature review

After Ole Waever's initial coining of the term (Waever, 1995), Buzan and other's work build up on it and conferred it a more coherent, if still yet underdeveloped form (Buzan & WAEVER, 2009; Buzan & Wilde, 1997; Neumann & Waever). A brief view on this theoretical model as developed at this point refers to "securitization" as an inter-subjective process "that takes politics beyond the established rules of the game and frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics" (Buzan & Wilde, 1997). After due critique of the theory (Mcsweeney, 1991), a notable shift in the 1997 publications on the theory is the revised attitude towards the state-centric approach to it, opening up the spectrum of securitizing actors to a whole world of complex non-state entities. One of the most notable critiques of Securitization came in 1999 (Mcsweeney, 1999), contesting, among others, the very definition of security with which the theory operated and its conceptual framework of several key concepts like identity, values, the very object of study (i.e. whether it consists of individuals or groups) which he found to be too vague and contradicting themselves, rendering the empirical application of the theory somewhat elusive given the lack of operationalization these core concepts. The most notable recent development of Securitization, which plays on its foundation as a Speech Act Theory is Balzacq's new framework for analysis (Balzacq, 2011 b) which not only expands on the role of culture and identity as factors in the inextricable inter-subjective processes which animate the theory, but also delves into methodological aspects relevant to aspects of Securitization--which were up until now ignored, or sidelined at best.

Another key issue which impacts the present study concerns the very nature of the security act, and is highlighted by Huysmans (Huysmans, 2011) in his article "What is in an Act? On security speech acts and little security nothings." In this article, the author points to the nature of the security act as an exclusive "Speech act" as interpreted by "Securitization" and opens an agenda for re-engaging "the conception of act in relation to securitization" by including security practices and phenomena that seem "banal" which manifest outside the realm of the explicit "Speech act" which he calls "little security nothings." Huysmans adds "Reading politics through a conception of act that works with a sharp distinction between the everyday and the exceptional and that links political rupture to a gravitational conception of decision is problematic for securitizing processes in which little security nothings rather than political speech acts with critical weight do the...