Bringing Securitization Theory Back In: States’ Action Regarding Environmental Issues

Conference: The Asian Undergraduate Research Symposium (AURS10)
Title: Bringing Securitization Theory Back In: States’ Action Regarding Environmental Issues
Stream: Sustainability: Ecology, Energy and the Environment
Presentation Type: Virtual Poster Presentation
Authors:
Ziyin Liang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Yifei Shao, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Scientists and environmentalists frequently narrate environmental issues as severe catastrophes to the whole world. Ecological issues, including global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation, soil contamination etc., has been increasingly considered in states’ political agenda – which embodies scholars’ insights on the revisit of conventional security practices and the securitization theory. Securitization theory, as argued in this article, refers to transforming existing “issues” into security “threats” through speech acts and rhetoric methods. This illuminates that the “threat” is not objectively real and waiting to be discovered by humans; global security is always what humankind makes of it through social construction. This article unpacks how states attempt to securitize the environment and argues that through socially constructing a “media spectacle”, states aim to mobilize so-called “environmentalism-oriented” behaviors among individuals and different actors. This article also conducts a diachronic analysis of securitization provisions/practices in the environment before the Web 1.0 era, Professional Generated Content (PGC, namely the Web 1.0) and User Generated Content (UGC, namely the Web 2.0) era. The process of securitizing environmental issues is subject to specific historical contexts, conditions, and variables. The increasing social interactions are precisely a trade-off: although the number of platforms and approaches linking states and ordinary people rises, corresponding securitizing moves would not necessarily reach the expected outcomes.




Virtual Poster Presentation


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