Securitization as a context-changing speech act

Securitization theory is the most well-known Nordic contribution to the study of security. A key division within its 35-year-long history of debate is its bifurcation into two main interpretative communities, those of the ‘philosophical’ and ‘sociological’ interpretations of securitization theory. The present article engages with this division by examining the issue of context and the transformative capacities of speech acts, and discusses what it would entail for the philosophical interpretation to take context seriously. In this way, the article contributes by disrupting the by now received reading of contexts and generations within securitization studies. The way the sociological approaches have viewed context in securitization risks the merger of the conventional and natural efficacies of speech acts. It is, therefore, necessary to keep the illocutionary effects of securitization separate from its perlocutionary effects. Securitization moves may be about swinging audiences and producing emotions in them, but securitization may also be about transforming the rights and duties that relate to an issue and the relationship between the speaker and audience. Studying these separately leads to different research interests and requires different methods: illocutionary forces can be discerned from the acts alone whereas perlocutionary effects cannot.