Key Concept: Securitization (Copenhagen School)

The concept of “securitization” was developed by the so-called Copenhagen School to analyze processes whereby powerful actors such as governments identify a particular phenomenon as an existential threat and use it to legitimize the deployment of emergency measures. The concept of securitization challenges the traditional understanding of security as something objectively given. Instead, it highlights the ways in which issues are constructed as urgent and existential threats by political actors to attain wide-reaching powers that extend beyond the normal constraints and control of the legal and political system. Securitization theory thus provides a series of relevant critical theoretical tools for analyzing the political dynamics that allow the deployment of extraordinary measures such as going to war, declaring a state of exception, etc.