Security, the translation

Abstract

This article confronts the basic idea of securitization with the concept of translation. By critically examining Wæver’s deliberately traditionalist and essentialist conceptualization of security and his notion of a distinctly speech-act-theoretical approach to securitization, it develops a processual refinement that reads articulations of security as translations. I claim that this conceptual transposition has the potential to open the current securitization discourse to an alternative perspective and to new avenues of research on the travel, localization and/or gradual evolution/transformation of security meanings.