Securitisation and Emancipation: Towards a Middle Ground?

Securitisation and emancipation constitute two of the most central concepts to the broader challenge to mainstream security studies emerging particularly since the end of the Cold War. These concepts, however, and the security ?schools? in which they are embedded (the Copenhagen School and the Welsh School), have had relatively little to say to or about each other beyond dismissive criticisms or relatively vague indications of a possible academic distribution of labour that sees the approaches as not necessarily competing, but as doing fundamentally different things. First, therefore, the paper sketches out some of the reasons for the absence of a more systematic and engaged dialogue between proponents of securitisation and emancipation. The paper argues that whilst tensions and differences do exist, the problems faced by both approaches share deeper analytical and normative similarities that are usually ignored in the literature. Second, however, the paper identifies areas in which these concepts and approaches might be usefully brought together to enhance our understanding of security and the normative imperative of addressing individual suffering. The central argument advanced is that these concepts and approaches share a common normative concern with redressing structural and physical violence through the recovery or establishment of human agency through representation. We view this as the central normative imperative of both emancipation and (de)securitisation.In trying to build a middle ground and space for dialogue between the approaches the paper provides a set of interpretations of emancipation (Welsh School) and securitisation (Copenhagen School) that taken together not everyone might share ? but which we think can be justified from particular readings of key texts in both schools. In particular, we contend that a middle ground requires reading the Copenhagen School as pursuing ?normative theory? and not simply ?objectivist method?, and of thinking about emancipation in terms of agency rather than end states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]