COVID-19 and the Limits of Critical Security Theory: Securitization, Cosmopolitanism, and Pandemic Politics

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a growing and important series of efforts to make sense of the post-2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic through diverse lenses within the field of critical security studies (css). In this article, we set out to reverse this analytical gaze, asking not “what can css tell us about COVID-19?” but rather, “what can COVID-19 tell us about css?” In order to do this, we pair two important moments in the UK pandemic response with two prominent, yet very different, strands of critical security research: (i) “covid-secure spaces” with securitization theory and (ii) “self-isolation” imperatives with security cosmopolitanism. COVID-secure spaces, we argue, pose a significant challenge to securitization theory’s framing of security’s spaces and times. Self-isolation practices, meanwhile, raise profound ethical questions for the universalizing aspirations of security cosmopolitanism. By analyzing a ubiquitous, if heterogeneous, security challenge to everyday lived experiences within as well as beyond the Global North, the article develops a novel theoretical contribution to recent work rendering visible the Eurocentric foundations and limitations of critical security theory.