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Those interested in the construction of security in contemporary international politics- those who reject the idea of security as a fixed ontological entity- have increasingly turned to the Copenhagen School approach to provide an analytical framework for explorations of the construction of security in particular contexts. Most prominently, of course, has been the use of the central organising concept of ?securitisation?, to point to the discursive construction of particular issues as security threats. This paper argues that while an important and innovative contribution to our understanding of security and its construction, the Copenhagen School?s framework is problematically narrow in three basic senses. First, the form of act constructing security is defined narrowly, with the focus on the speech of dominant actors, usually political leaders. Second, the context of the act is defined narrowly, with the focus only on the moment of intervention. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, the framework of securitization is narrow in the sense that the nature of the act is defined solely in terms of threats to security. This encourages a conceptualisation of security politics in negative, reactionary terms.If we are interested in understanding the processes through which particular understandings of security come to constitute the lens through which particular issues are conceptualised and addressed by particular political communities, we need to move beyond a focus on the depiction through speech of existential threats. We need also to understand how those political communities themselves are constituted, how particular articulations of security come to capture the way that community deals with those issues, and to locate and acknowledge alternative articulations of security, particularly those outlined by marginalised voices. This paper points to the importance of exploring these spaces, and provides some guidance about how we might go about defining a broader analytical framework for the study of the construction of security. In particular, it suggests that future research would do well to focus not simply on the positioning of issues as existential threats, but also to interrogate the particular meaning of security that comes to prominence in different contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]