Understanding Securitization Success: A New Analytical Framework

Abstract Despite prolific critique, development, and refinement of securitization theory, there is still no clear understanding of what “success” means. Whether securitization happens or not (and in what form, by what means, and to what extent) is fundamental to understanding (de)securitization contests. To advance theoretical stalemates that have resulted in no clear measure of securitization success, failure, or the grey areas in between, we distill three dimensions of success: of the securitization process, understood as the dominance (or otherwise) of discourse and policy measures with a security logic; of its relational implications for the physical and ontological security, concurrently, of both the “referent object” and the “referent subject”; and of its implications for (de)securitizing agents. Cutting through seven key “faultlines” in securitization research and integrating insights from Ontological Security and Policy Studies, we create a five-point continuum to capture shifts across all three dimensions, yielding matrices of different outcomes. Our original heuristic aims to guide rigorous empirical and normative research and help systematize hitherto unworkable cross-case comparisons about how security is made, what it does over time, and for whom.