Chapter 3: The Copenhagen School

Introduction

The Copenhagen School (CS), which emerged in the 1990s, has been and is being used to refer to the works of Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde and others studying international security. The CS has contributed to security studies by developing “a substantial body of concepts to rethink security, most notably through its notions of securitization and desecuritization . The core ideas of securitization has attracted a wide range of scholarly attention and debated extensively in academic circles. e CS has been placed in Critical Security Studies that challenge the mainstream theories of International Relations.

Traditional View of Security

For most scholars of security studies, security is not an easy term to define. At its base, the term ‘security’ involves the “alleviation of threats to cherished values” . Both Realist and Liberal theories generally “explain security by identifying an objective situation as threatening to an objective entity”. In other words, according to traditionalists, security means a freedom from any objective military threat to the state survival in an anarchic international system. According to Realism, “state is the primary ‘ referent object’ that is to be secured and the focus is predominantly on the military sector and on other issues only to the extent that they ‘bear directly on the likelihood and character of war . The most effective strategy that states employ to survive in the system, according to Realists, is balance of power not bandwagon .

The Copenhagen School

The CS contributed to security studies in three major theoretical and conceptual ways: the theory of securitization, the notion of different sectors of security and regional security complex theory . Additionally, the CS has developed the idea of security sectors. Barry Buzan has first put forward the idea of widening of the security agenda outside the military realm. As Buzan et. al . put it, the CS “examines the distinctive character and dynamics of security in five sectors: military, political, economic, environmental and societal. It rejects the traditionalists’ case for restricting security to one sector” (Buzan et. al ., 1998: vii), i.e. the military sector. Finally, the CS has introduced the concept of regional security complexes. Regional security complexes was first developed by Buzan and fully analyzed by Buzan and Waever’s book Regions and Powers in 2003. They defined regional security complexes “as sets of units whose security processes and dynamics are so interlinked that security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed and resolved apart from one another”.

The Theory Of Securitization

As mentioned above, threats, according to the traditional view of security, are objective phenomena that exist out there. Traditionalists argue that security is about the survival of the state. “It is when an issue is presented as posing an existential threat to a designated referent object (traditionally, but not necessarily, the state, incorporating government, territory, and society)” (Buzan et. al ., 1998: 21). The securitization theory, on the other hand, argues that threats are discursively constructed and “securitization like politicization, has to be understood as essentially an intersubjective process” (Buzan et. al., 1998: 30). is means that an actor can declare a particular issue to be an ‘existential threat’ to a particular referent object (McDonald, 2008: 69), traditionally the state.

According to Austin, each sentence can convey three types of acts, the combination of which constitutes the total speech act situation:

• locutionary-the utterance of an expression that contains a given sense and reference;
• illocutionary-the act performed in articulating a locution.
• perlocutionary, which is the “consequential effects” or “sequels” that are aimed to evoke the feelings, beliefs, thoughts or actions of the target audience

Securitization theory argues that “in any intersubjective process, such as securitization, the purpose is to prompt a significant response from the other (perlocutionary e ect); unless this happens there is no securitization. Necessarily, then, perlocution is central rather than tangential to understanding how a particular public issue can change into a security problem” .

The second condition for successful securitization entails a ‘securitizing actor’ who is in “a position of authority and has enough social and political capital to convince an audience of the existence of an existential threat”.

Even though the theory of securitization occupies a large part in the works of the CS, Buzan et. al. argue that “it is better to aim for desecuritization : the shifting of issues out of emergency mode and into the normal bargaining processes of the political sphere” .

The CS and Security Sectors

As mentioned above, the first contribution that the CS has made to the security studies was to widen the scope of security as to include not only the military sector but also economic, political, environmental and societal sectors. e CS has challenged the traditionalists’ intense narrowing of the field of security studies. The CS has argued that the traditionalists’ military and state-centered view was mainly imposed by the Cold War necessities. However, in today’s world, restricting security only to the military sector ignores other important security issues in world politics because after the Cold War new issues were added to the political-military agenda. us, the CS adopts “a multi sectoral approach” and argues that if this “approach to security was to be fully meaningful, referent objects other than the state had to be allowed in the picture”

The CS’s earlier emphasis on the role of the state in all sectors was later revised and referent objects other than the state were brought into the picture. According to the CS the concept of security has expanded from exclusively military onto political, economic, societal and environmental sectors. It has also argued that referent objects other than the state (individuals, social groups, humanity as a whole) should be included in security studies.

The Security Sectors

The Military Sector: According to the traditional view on security, the military sector and the referent object, the state, occupy the most important place in security studies. The CS also puts special emphasis on the traditional/military conception of security.

The Environmental Sector: The debate about environmental security started in the 1980s and it represents the first attempt to broaden the security agenda. At that time, only few works “included the environment in their analyses. The CS is an exception, and even if the environment was not its primary concern, the School dealt explicitly with it and its peculiarity”. The School has investigated several environmental issues as they were emerging in the European debate over security. After Buzan wrote exclusively on the environment, it was recognized as one of the sectors that needed to be considered in their specificity for analyzing contemporary security dynamics. The environmental sector has both scientific and political agendas and they often overlap and sometimes shape each other .The scientific agenda is constructed mainly by scientists and environmental institutions and consists generally of nongovernmental activities that fall outside the political realm. The political agenda, on the other hand, includes essentially governmental and intergovernmental activities.

The Economic Sector: The economic sector, according to the CS, revolves “around access to the resources, finance and markets necessary to sustain acceptable levels of welfare and state power”. Economic threats can have direct consequences for individuals, nations and states thus threaten the very existence of these entities. In the economic sector, one can detect various referent objects at different levels. Economic threats can also be presented as threats in other sectors. “What is merely economic or political within the economic sector may have security implications in other sectors”.

The Societal Sector: Many in the area of security studies define the societal security as the most intriguing of the five sectors considered in the CS. “In this case, reference object of security is not the state as a government or a territorial entity, but rather as a collective identity”. According to the CS, the state is the referent object for political, military environmental and economic security, but society is the referent object for societal security. us, the CS treats societal security as a separate referent object of societal security. Societal security represents the security of ‘we’ identities such as national identity groups. Members of a society share common ideas and practices that help them develop a common identity and form a social group.

The Political Sector: Political security is another contribution of the CS in broadening the security agenda. Political threats are an important source of concern for a state. Although political security occupies a significant place in the security agenda of the CS, it is the most difficult and ambiguous concept to distinguish from military security. According to the CS, political threats are those that are directed toward state sovereignty. Since these threats can involve military means, they can be often confused with the military security. Therefore, the CS sorts out nonmilitary threats as political threats to state sovereignty.

Regional Security Complex Theory(Rsct)

R egional security complex theory (RSCT) was first developed by Barry Buzan in the 1980s and over time it was updated and applied by a wide range of theoreticians belonging to the CS to different regions in the world ranging from the Middle East to Asia and Europe. In their 2003 book, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver further elaborated the theory and offered a comprehensive analysis of international security. RSCT, like Neorealism, focuses on security. However, the difference between them lies in the levels of analysis they adapted in studying security. While Neorealism argues that the system level analysis best capture security relations in today’s world, RSCT argues that “the most relevant scale for conceptualizing military and political security functioned at the regional rather than the system level”. For RSCT, regional level is the best starting point in studying security and only after that should analysts proceed to interregional or global levels. In its original version, RSCT, which Buzan labels it Classical Security Complex theory (CSCT), mainly focused on the state as the primary unit of analysis. It also gave primacy to military and political sectors “as the principal forum for security relations”. The key premise of RSCT is that there exists a strong interdependence among the national security interests of a group of states located in a geographical proximity. RSCT argues that security of all states in the system is interrelated and security or insecurity of a state inevitably affects the security or insecurity of others. According to RSCT, power is “a central variable in differentiating regions conceptualized as security complexes”.

Acharya states that there are eleven RSCs in the world with three main categories. e main criterion in establishing those categories is the number of great powers located in each RSC . The above argument links RSCT with Neorealism, which argues that in the anarchical system, states must concentrate on their power and try to increase their relative capabilities. Finally, if amity prevails and using force is out of question among states, security communities exist in a given RSC. Changes in perceptions or the distribution of power will obviously require a redefinition of a RSC.

Conclusion

The CS contributed to security studies in three major theoretical and conceptual ways. These are (1) the theory of securitization, (2) the notion of different sectors of security and (3) regional security complex theory . The concept of securitization has been the central contribution of the theory despite other ideas. The CS diverts from traditional theories in that threats are mainly social constructions created by intersubjective meanings. Theory of securitization assumes that security is an intersubjective and self-referential issue and rejects the objectivity of security issues. Additionally, the CS also has developed the idea of security sectors. The CS put forward the idea of widening of the security agenda outside the military realm. us, the theory examines the distinctive character and dynamics of security in five sectors: military, political, economic, environmental and societal. Finally, the CS introduced the concept of regional security complexes , which are defined in terms of mutually exclusive geographic regions.