The purpose of this introduction is to concisely present The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization Footnote ¹ so that those unfamiliar with this work are better able to engage with the symposium. The book develops a Theory of Just Securitisation outlining when securitisation is morally permissible.Footnote ² Securitisation, here, refers to more than a securitising speech act coupled with a legitimising audience's tacit or actual acceptance of the threat and defence framing. Arguably the question of the morality of securitisation is most pertinent when the same encompasses the use of measures and conduct that most reasonable persons would ordinarily (that is, in times when there is no relevant threat) consider unacceptable, largely because of the harm and/or the violence risked or entailed.

This research started from the twin observations that: (1) it seems reasonable to hold that the use of extraordinary emergency measures is at least sometimes morally permissible (for example, when human beings are faced with a pervasive and highly lethal infectious disease). And (2) that we – as a discipline – do not have a systematic normative theory that enables us to distinguish between securitisations that are morally justifiable, and those that are not. The bulk of the literature on ethics and security is split between scholars who, with a view to its many adverse consequences, including for putative beneficiaries, have a negative view of securitisation, preferring ceteris paribus desecuritisation. While those whose view of security is more positive tend to focus on the – undoubtedly desirable – condition of being secure and not (or not so much) on exceptional, often forcible, security practice.Footnote ³

Just securitisation theory (JST) takes the form of principles/criteria that designate when securitisation is morally permissible. JST is about curtailing the occurrence and destructiveness of securitisation. The substantive criteria are developed using a reflective approach inspired by analytical philosophy's method of reflective equilibrium. Central to this is the just war tradition (JWT). Although war and securitisation are distinct concepts, they are similar insofar as both involve extraordinary measures. Moreover, the JWT, – contra some critical security/International Relations scholars – has for centuries aimed to limit the possibility and destructiveness of war.Footnote ⁴ The JWT is authoritative on the question of the morality of war, in part, because it is simultaneously a product of, and an exercise in, intersubjective learning that spans countless generations and places.Footnote ⁵

Like recent versions of just war theory, JST is divided into three sections. The just initiation of securitisation is concerned with the move from politicisation to securitisation, and as such informed by jus ad bellum criteria, which cover ‘the transition from a state of peace to a state of war’.Footnote ⁶ Just initiation of securitisation consists of the following five criteria.

1. 1. Just reason: There must be an objective existential threat to a referent object, that is to say a danger that – with a sufficiently high probability – threatens the survival or the essential character/properties of either a political or social order, an ecosystem, a non-human species, or individuals.

2. 2. Just referent: Referent objects are entitled to defend themselves or are eligible for defensive assistance if they are morally justifiable. Referent objects are morally justifiable if they meet basic human needs, defined here as necessary components of human well-being. Political and social orders need to satisfy a minimum level of basic human needsFootnote ⁷ of people part of or contained within that order and they must respect the human needs of outsiders. Ecosystems and non-human species, in turn, need to make a contribution to the human needs of a sufficiently large group of people. Human beings are justifiable referent objects by virtue of being intrinsically valuable; all other referent objects therefore have instrumental value derived from the need of human beings.Footnote ⁸

3. 3. Right intention: The right intention for securitisation is the just cause. Securitising actors must be sincere in their intention to protect the referent object they themselves identified and declared.

4. 4. Proportionality: The expected good gained from securitisation must be greater than the expected harm from securitisation, where the only relevant good is the good specified in the just cause.

5. 5. Chances of success: Securitisation must have a reasonable chance of success, whereby the chances of achieving the just cause must be judged greater than those of [less harmful] alternatives to securitising.

Some readers will recoil at the mention of real threats, and by extension query the meta-theoretical compatibility of just war theory – which does not question the epistemological accessibility of real threats – and securitisation theory. Undoubtedly, securitisation theory is about threat construction. However, even an overriding interest in threat construction does not necessarily rest on an outright rejection of real threats.Footnote ⁹ This is important. Certainly, only real threats can justify the kind of rule breaking that is characteristic of successful securitisation. To be clear, in JST, the existence of a just cause does not by itself render securitisation morally permissible. Still, just cause enjoys a privileged position in so far as none of the other criteria can ‘be satisfied, even in principle, unless just cause is satisfied’.Footnote ¹⁰

In accordance with JST, when the five criteria listed above are satisfied, then resort to securitisation is justified. Importantly, in this book justified does not mean that relevant actors now have a moral duty to securitise the issue. All it means is that such actors are now – from a moral point of view – permitted to securitise.Footnote ¹¹ In short, JST recognises that whether or not a real threat is securitised remains a political choice of securitising actors.Footnote ¹²

The focus on permissibility is the reason why last resort, widely considered a pivotal requirement of the jus ad bellum, does not feature in JST. In moral philosophy it is generally accepted that judgements regarding the permissibility of self- and other-defence are yielded in the evidence-relative sense, which is to say, when the available evidence suggests that forceful defence is the best option.Footnote ¹³ Criterion 5 of JST includes this logic. It holds that securitisation is justifiable only when the available evidence suggests that securitisation has comparatively better prospects of achieving just cause than less harmful alternatives (including politicisation). Extrapolating further, I hold that when politicisation has failed to satisfy the just cause (that is, when securitisation is the last resort), securitisation is no longer optional but obligatory.Footnote ¹⁴ In short, last resort sits within the realm of the duty to securitise.

Besides last resort, legitimate authority is the other prominent jus ad bellum criterion missing from JST. It is absent because legitimate authority cannot be reconciled with the multi-actor lens provided by the Copenhagen School – and explicitly adopted by JST – whereby actors other than (legitimate) states can securitise. The conceptually wider ‘representative legitimacy’ put forward by some just war theoristsFootnote ¹⁵ in an effort to include non-state actors, in turn, is regarded as superfluous. Thus, the criteria of JST – notably the just referent object and right intention – already guard against agent-benefiting securitisation.Footnote ¹⁶

The second part of JST is inspired by the jus in bello, ‘which specifies the rights and obligations of actors once in the state of war’.Footnote ¹⁷ Just conduct in securitisation is concerned with the nature of the security measures used and the obligations and rights of executors of securitisation. Put differently, the three criteria constitutive of ‘jus in securitisation’ specify what practitioners of security need to consider when they carry out securitisation.

1. 6. Proportionality:Footnote ¹⁸ The security measures used must be appropriate and should aim to only address the objective existential threat that occasions securitisation.

2. 7. Necessity: The security measures used must be judged effective in dealing with the threat. They should aim to cause, or risk, the least amount of overall harm possible; and do less harm to the referent object than would otherwise be caused if securitisation was abandoned.

3. 8. Discrimination: Executors of securitisation must respect a limited number of relevant human rights in the execution of securitisation.

In addition to just securitisation The Morality of Security also theorises just desecuritisation. Although desecuritisation logically (that is, in time) follows on from securitisationFootnote ¹⁹ I hold that the justice of desecuritisation does not define or alter the justice of a prior securitisation or vice versa. They are separate processes with distinct outcomes. Moreover, unlike securitisation, desecuritisation is – when criterion 1 (timing) of just desecuritisation (below) is satisfied – morally required of relevant actors, as no securitisation can be justified in the absence of a just cause (see above).

The criteria of just desecuritisation are informed by a mixture of jus post bellum, which specifies ‘the rights and obligations of actors once they have transitioned from a state of war into a state of peace’Footnote ²⁰ and jus terminatio, ‘which governs the transition’ from war to peace.Footnote ²¹ Overall, just desecuritisation identifies three criteria that specify when and how securitisation must be unmade.

1. 1. Timing: Desecuritisation of just securitisation must occur when the initial and related new objective existential threats have been neutralised, whereas desecuritisation of unjust securitisation must occur immediately.

2. 2. Action: Desecuritisation should ideally be publically declared and corresponding security language and security measures should be terminated with immediate effect.

3. 3. Long-term aim: In order to avoid renewed and/or reactionary securitisation, desecuritising actors should undertake context-specific restorative measures.

The purpose of JST, and hence The Morality of Security, is threefold. First, it aims to enable scholars of security, who almost inevitably have a view on the justice of any given securitisation to normatively evaluate securitisations past and present. Second, JST equips practitioners to make informed judgements on what they ought to do in relevant situations. Third, JST has the potential to empower the general public to hold relevant actors accountable for how they practise security. For the latter to become a reality, however, it is important that other scholars engage with just securitisation. A good starting point is to criticise, improve, and refine what this book started. It is here where the symposium comes in.

The Morality of Security Footnote ²² has two connected ambitions. First and foremost, Rita Floyd sets out to place the analysis and critique of securitisation on more secure normative foundations. The book is overwhelmingly devoted to this task, to proposing and defending what Floyd calls Just Securitization Theory (JST). But, in so doing, she also intends the book to contribute to a new research agenda in the study of securitisation in particular and the morality of security in general. This project seeks to remedy what Floyd takes to be the blind spot about ethics that has long pervaded the study of security, especially in International Relations. Floyd's ambition, in this wider sense, is to lay the groundwork for what she hopes can become ‘a meta-theoretical framework organizing thinking on ethics and security in general’ (p. 211). In this respect, the book forms part of a recent turn to ethics in security studies.Footnote ²³ It also connects to parallel developments in cognate fields: in political theory on emergency politics; in law/criminology on police ethics; and, more recently, principles of preventive justice, and work in anthropology on the morality of security.Footnote ²⁴ Floyd refreshingly presents her work a vehicle for extending these discussions, the first word on just securitisation but in no sense the last word on that topic. It is in this spirit that I approach the book.

I am not an International Relations scholar. My interest in questions of in/security has come from within criminology (whatever that may mean!). As such, it has long struck me that certain parallels exist between the study of securitisation and analysis of social reactions to crime. In particular, I think that strong – unexplored – affinities can be found between securitisation and the concept of moral panic.Footnote ²⁵ The standard approach to both – episodes of securitisation, and incidents of moral panic – is what one what call empirical analysis with a critical intent. The task at hand is to locate and dissect particular securitisations/moral panics asking questions such as: what amplificatory speech acts/rhetoric is being mobilised and circulated and by whom? How is that rhetoric received? What security measures follow? Against whom are they targeted and with what effects? How and why do these episodes end? Such analysis is typically accompanied by a strong whiff of scepticism, even disapproval. The critique rests on the known risks of securitisation/panic – a threat to due process and the rule of law; the curbing of human rights; an exclusionary logic that others minority groups; the sidestepping or erosion of democratic politics. But there is usually also an implicit claim about disproportion (carried, of course, in the very idea of ‘panic’) – of getting matters out of hand, of illiberal measures being taken unnecessarily, either to assuage fear or in pursuit of unstated ulterior projects.Footnote ²⁶

The question that hangs in air with respect to such critical charges is how is one to know if securitisation (or panic and the actions that flow from it) is warranted. The common suggestion in studies of both securitisation and moral panics is that it's not. The rhetorical moves are assumed to be inflated and the attendant measures out of proportion. At worst, they construct the very threat to which security actors claim to be responding. As Floyd puts it, critical security studies has a ‘widespread normative preference for desecuritization’ (p. 23). Its dominant impulse is a rejection of securitisation in favour of ordinary/democratic politics (p. 37), or a will simply to deconstruct and resist forms of power. Similar dispositions have long pervaded the study of moral panics: they are generally taken to be dubious things that sociologists – alert to the ‘forces of hyperbole and hysteria’– should expose and call out.Footnote ²⁷ Attention is seldom paid to the morality of whatever panic is being critiqued, and almost never to episodes of ‘morally appropriate social reaction’.Footnote ²⁸ The problem is that these critical claims are for the most part not grounded. They are left hanging, something that all urbane, knowing liberals know to be true. Or else they depend upon deflating risk or denying the existence of the ‘threat’ to which securitisation, or panic, is a response.

Floyd's book is a valuable attempt to move beyond these forms of critique by insinuation, or at least to relocate the hermeneutics of suspicion on firmer soil. Having made a distinction between security as a state of being and security as a set of social and political practices (a distinction to which I return below), she starts from the premise that the latter has no intrinsic value but can be justified if certain conditions are met. In so doing, Floyd moves problems of justification from the margins to the centre of the analysis of securitisation. Her guiding questions are these: how can we decide if any particular act of securitisation is morally justified, or even desirable? Can there be morally permissible, or even virtuous, securitisations? In other words, when is it morally right for a problem to be treated as an urgent priority, lifted out of normal politics, and dealt with by exceptional means?

Using just war theory as her jumping off point, Floyd constructs a ‘systematic normative theory’ (p. 207) that answers those questions. There is little value in a symposium such as this in (each contributor) supplying a detailed recital of Floyd's just securitisation theory, which by any measure is detailed, clear and rigorous. A brief summary will suffice. For Floyd, just securitisation has to meet three tests: just initiation, just conduct, and just termination. She fleshes out each test with a set of principles, or criteria, for determining what is to count as just in each case.

In respect of initiation, there are five such criteria: there has to be an objective existential threat (which can be intended by an agent, caused by an agent, or agent-lacking, such as flooding or pandemics); a referent object is only morally justified in defending itself if it meets ‘basic human needs’ such as autonomy and physical health; security actors must possess sincere intentions; the expected benefit from securitisation must exceed the anticipated harm, and the security action must stand a reasonable chance of success. Perhaps the most surprising omission from this list (especially to someone working in a field in which legitimacy has become central to questions of police and penal power) is that of audience legitimacy.Footnote ²⁹ Crudely put, Floyd thinks that equivalent work is done by the requirement to meet basic human needs (pp. 140–7). The clearest break with extant work on securitisation lies in Floyd's insistence on objective existential threats – an idea, Floyd contends, that critical security studies tends to shun or ridicule (p. 77). The latter hold that security threats are either constructed by and within strategies of securitisation, or else deemed unknowable. Security is, in other words, a label applied to a threat, not inherent in the threat itself. By contrast, Floyd insists on the reality of objective existential threats, which exist regardless of whether they have been framed as such, though she notes that ‘real threats’ only become matters of security (rather than, say, health or criminal justice) when actors frame and respond to them as such (p. 79). This seems likely to be a bone of ongoing contention – one perhaps where security studies might learn from long-standing debates in sociological criminology on the ontological reality of ‘crime’. Is crime a mode of behaviour or a category that ‘we’ decide to apply to (some, but not other, or all) harmful/threatening acts?Footnote ³⁰ In both cases, my sense is that one can acknowledge the reality/immanence of threats, while continuing to think that the issues at stake concern the analytic and policy lens through which one interprets and responds to such threats.

In respect of the remaining two tests, Floyd delineates a further six principles. Just conduct requires that the security measures used must be appropriate; that these measures must be judged effective and cause the least amount of harm, and that executors must respect a limited amount of human rights. When determining how and when to end a just securitisation, the following criteria apply: desecuritisation must occur as soon as the threat has been neutralised; it must – in rhetoric and action – be declared publicly; and to avoid renewed securitisation, actors should undertake context-specific restorative measures. Unlike the tests with respect to initiation and conduct, which determine what is morally permissible, those referring to just termination specify actions that are morally required.Footnote ³¹

Rather than taking issue with particular aspects of this framework, or the veracity of any of its specific principles (a task for which others are better equipped), I want to reflect on the animating purposes of just securitisation theory taken as a whole. I take these purposes to be twofold. What Floyd offers first is a theory of limits, one aimed at ‘restricting the occurrence and destructiveness of securitization’ (p. 9). She acknowledges that securitisation is an inevitable and recurring feature of international relations. She explicitly eschews pacifism and accepts one can imagine securitisations that will pass her tests. This is not at attempt at back-door abolition. Floyd anticipates, however, that the number of securitisations that meet the criteria set by just securitisation theory will be few:

Just securitisation is, secondly, a theory with practical intent. As a backwards-looking theory, it offers scholars tools of moral evaluation that can be deployed to scrutinise and critique securitisations that take place in the world (p. 207). But just securitisation also looks forwards. Floyd's aim is to offer a theory with the ‘potential to guide the actions of security practitioners in concrete situations’ (p. 4) and render them accountable for their decisions. Indeed, just securitisation theory appears to be couched with this practical purpose in mind. Floyd argues that, as an action-guiding theory, the principles of JST cannot be ‘unreasonably demanding’ (p. 173). She also suggests that the theory's ‘simple and straightforward format (i.e., a list of principles) should mean that it can be easily operationalised, which is to say it has the potential to guide practitioners of security in decision-making’ (p. 48).

I want to conclude with some observations on these two ambitions, starting with action-guiding theory. I am sympathetic to the idea that political theory can and should be action-guiding. But proponents of any such guidance need to avoid committing ‘the scholastic fallacy’ by paying careful sociological attention to its conditions of reception and utilisation.Footnote ³² Two aspects of these conditions are germane in the present case: contestability and time. Securitisation, it seems to me, shares the following feature with moral panic: it is ‘almost always an outside observer's category, not a self-description of the participants, at least not while they are participating’.Footnote ³³ To be sure, securitisation requires speech acts and security activity. But it is also common for security actors to dispute or deny the claim that they are ‘securitising’ an issue, sometimes while in the process of doing precisely that. This not only makes securitisation distinct from the case of war (notwithstanding war's sometimes fuzzy boundaries), and the just war theorising on which Floyd leans heavily. It also makes it likely that security actors may contest not just the content, but also the applicability, of the tests Floyd proposes that they pass. Cognate considerations apply to questions of time. Like moral panics, securitising episodes are moments of energy, excitement, and anxiety. In such moments, the securitising claim is not only that the response to existential threat has to be lifted from normal political processes. It is also a call to suspend the rules of political time.Footnote ³⁴ It is necessary to do things urgently, with great speed, without delay, as delay is sure to be costly.

I mention these considerations because they speak to the difficulties just securitisation is likely to have in simply getting the hearing it requires in order to stand any hope of guiding action. That hearing may be refused because just securitisation theory starts with the substantive purpose of reducing the number of securitisations in the world (p. 58) and hence threatens to jeopardise ‘necessary’ protective action. But the theory also extends an invitation to a process of ethical reflection and engagement. By Floyd's own admission some of JST's tests are ‘hard to answer and potentially require much work’ (p. 134). They demand the gathering and weighing of evidence, and the exercise of comparative judgements about the possible future outcomes of inaction, politicisation, and securitisation (p. 139). All this takes time. It entails a process that is from the outset antithetical to the weight securitisation places on urgent and decisive action.

It is in part for these reasons that, while sympathetic to the aims of just securitisation theory, I remain sceptical about its focus on limits, and minded to conceive of alternative paths that one might take in a bid to reduce the occurrence and destructiveness of securitisation. In a couple of places, Floyd suggests that her project may have ‘emancipatory potential’ (p. 27). The long-desired goal of emancipation found in some parts of critical security studies ‘can’, she writes, ‘quite conceivably be achieved through just securitization (p. 210). I remain unpersuaded by this claim. What Floyd is offering, it seems to me, is a politics of radical limitation, not a politics of transformation. Her analysis focuses attention on the dynamics of securitising moves and acts. Her concern is to figure out (to return to the distinction between security as a state of being and securitisation as a social and political practice) under what conditions the latter practice might contribute to – rather than erode – the former state of being. This is a liberal project of constraining state power, or seeking principles to ground its use or extension, of setting useable criteria for having less of something deemed necessary but harmful. The supportive references to Lucia Zedner's work on security, and with Andrew Ashworth on principles of preventive justice, underscore the point (p. 46).Footnote ³⁵

But does the justifiability of securitisation, and our resources constraining it, not also depend on the institutions and practices of politicisation, a category that is almost entirely overlooked in this book? My concern here is not with desecuritisation as the supplement of securitisation (p. 178), nor with the question of what happens when securitisation is terminated. Rather, I want to emphasise the properties that ‘normal politics’ has, or might require, to resist the pull of securitisation in the first place. It is commonly remarked of moral panics that they are surface phenomena, animated by group conflict and status competition, and connected to wider anxieties about transitions in social, economic, and moral order.Footnote ³⁶ This is also arguably true of securitisations. They are not simply the outcome of existential threat and the exceptional measures needed to combat that threat. Their frequency and shape is also conditioned by prevailing status hierarchies and social exclusions (both national and global), and by the capacities of democratic politics to handle or alleviate the resulting tensions. If this is right, it demands attention not only to the moral limits one might place on securitisation. It also calls for a fuller exploration of the forms of democratic politics that conduce to security (as a state of being) and offer constraints on securitisation because of their capacity to govern risk and threat without resort to it.Footnote ³⁷ To make this point is not to detract from Floyd's clear-minded efforts to supply normative grounds to limit securitising agendas. It is simply to highlight the path not taken – one that takes us beyond the liberal project of principles-based constraint and towards an exploration of the kinds of transformative democratic politics that can foster and sustain security in ways that drain the reservoir of social anxiety, and affective support, that securitising actors mobilise and reproduce.

Rita Floyd's The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization is an important and insightful book that delineates a theory of just securitisation (modified from the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria in just war theory) involving three sets of principles governing the just initiation of securitisation, just conduct of securitisation, and just desecuritisation. This book is a much-needed addition to the security studies and just war scholarship.

Here, I explore the potential of Floyd's just securitisation theory (JST) to provide insights into the moral justifiability of non-state groups that are not political entities engaging in resistance against forms of structural violence that pose an existential threat to those groups. Using the case study of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the threat of white supremacy to African Americans as an illustrative example, I argue that structural forms of violence can meet Floyd's definition of an objective existential threat, justifying the resort to securitisation by groups such as BLM. As Floyd writes in chapter 5:

In section 1, I argue that Floyd's analysis of non-state groups leaves open the possibility that loosely organised protest groups such as BLM may constitute a non-state group for the purposes of applying Floyd's just securitisation framework. In section 2, I argue that white supremacy poses an objective existential threat to African Americans, meeting the criterion of just cause in Floyd's JST. The multilayered ways in which white supremacy creates an objective existential threat to African Americans illustrates the potential of Floyd's conception of an objective existential threat to offer insights into the impact of other forms of structural violence, such as entrenched sexism. In section 3, I show that, despite the gains of the civil rights movement, the threat of white supremacy has not been curtailed through legal reform or by democratic means. Thus, groups like BLM may be justified in resorting to extraordinary measures to combat the ongoing threat of white supremacy, including ‘whatever most reasonable persons would agree constitutes exceptional means and actions … non-state securitization can take the form of secession, civil disobedience, acts of sabotage and resistance.’Footnote ³⁹ Applying Floyd's JST to the threat of white supremacy thereby demonstrates the value of her approach for thinking about securitisation outside the traditional foci of security studies but, as I discuss in section 3, also reveals some limitations in her theory, particularly in relation to the criterion of reasonable chance of success when applied to non-state groups resisting an unjust state.

Everyone who reads a book does so from the comfort of their own ‘disciplinary home’. They also do so in a particular moment in time. Both of these factors colour their reading of the book, and shape their reactions to it. This is as much the case for my reading of Rita Floyd's The Morality of Security as it is for anyone else. Cross-disciplinary reading also lends itself to re-translations, mis-translations, and illegibility, but in those moments of muddled and re-made meaning new insights, questions and ideas can emerge. My remarks here are offered in the hope of catalysing the curiosities that such cross-disciplinary reading can nurture, as indeed my reading of this compelling and provocative book has awoken in me.

My disciplinary home is law. I am particularly interested in the content, nature, working and dilemmas of law as they relate to rights, security, and transnationalism. I read this book as I was finishing one of my own, on transnational counterterrorism and the risks that it poses to constitutionalism, accountability, and ultimately the ‘international community’ (whatever that might be). This, then, is the register in which I read Floyd, and related her insights to my own work on transnational counterterrorismFootnote ⁹⁶ and the remarkable, deep, impactful, and interminable securitisation of terrorism that has taken hold across international, regional, and national scales in the last twenty years.

While others will be able to speak about the rich contribution of The Morality of Security to just war theory, the Copenhagen School, or politicisation, I will try to put some of Floyd's insights into conversation with transnational counterterrorism. Elsewhere, I have defined transnational counterterrorism as an ‘assemblage of laws, institutions, forums, processes, bureaucracies, and cooperative networks’Footnote ⁹⁷ that emerge from and operate on transnational scales, and I adopt that definition here when I refer to transnational counterterrorism. In my view, transnational counterterrorism poses some real challenges to, and offers rich potential for expanding, the account of just securitisation and desecuritisation that Floyd lays out here. This is not least because the transnationalisation of securitisation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has resulted in the proliferation of forums, pluralisation of actors, mushrooming of institutions, embedding of practices, and promulgation of laws on multiple and overlapping scales to such an extent that it calls into question an insistence on exceptionality as core to securitisation and instead, I think, compels us to think about what it means for securitisation and its products to become embedded and concretised, but in such a way that politicisation is stymied if not made impossible.

Prior to the attacks of 9/11 the transnational legal order had given some, but not very intensive, attention to terrorism. There were individual terrorism-related conventions that related to specific forms or acts of terrorism like hijacking or the suppression of terrorist financing.Footnote ⁹⁸ There was a terrorism-related sanctions process established under the Security Council, but its reach was reasonably contained.Footnote ⁹⁹ And of course there was a long running attempt to define terrorism in a legally binding way,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ an attempt that continues and remains incomplete. However, there was no transnational counterterrorism law per se,Footnote ¹⁰¹ there was no institutional infrastructure dedicated to countering terrorism at the international level (although some forms of transnational policing cooperation did engage with terrorism in the course of their work), and there was not yet the kind of total embedding of counterterrorism in transnational capital (especially the financial and telecommunications sectors) that would we are now accustomed to. All of that changed in September 2001.

That of course is not to suggest that terrorism (or counterterrorism) started with the 9/11 attacks,Footnote ¹⁰² but it is to suggest – I think rightly – that terrorism was subjected to a massive, generalised, and enduring transnational securitisation in the wake of those attacks, at least inasmuch as those of us approaching it from a legal disciplinary perspective might see it. However, it seems to me that transnational counterterrorism troubles some of the ways in which securitisation is constructed both by Floyd and by the many scholars to whom she outlines an intellectual debt in chapter 2 and, in particular, the insistence on ‘exceptional’ measures as part of it.

Let us start, like Floyd (p. 49) does, with the Copenhagen School's notion that securitisation comprises (1) a securitising move, (2) an audience acceptance of the securitising move, and (3) the use of extraordinary measures to deal with it.

Shifting our gaze to the transnational scale we can see very clearly a securitising move. Here I look not at Security Council Resolution 1368 (2001), which seemed to endorse military responses to terrorism and some have argued gave states a ‘blank check’ to respond to terrorist engagement with military force.Footnote ¹⁰³ There is an understandable temptation to zone in on this Resolution and resulting militarisation when one considers securitisation of terrorism at UN level following 9/11. However, I suggest that we look instead at Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001). This was initiated by the United States and adopted, unanimously, only 17 days after the attacks of 11 September 2001. In it the Security Council took the unprecedented stepFootnote ¹⁰⁴ of using its Chapter VII powers to oblige all member states of the United Nations to adjust their domestic criminal law to disrupt and criminalise terrorist financing, as well as establishing the Counter-Terrorism Committee,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ expanding significantly the sanctions regime,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ and harnessing the international duty of interstate cooperation decisively to transnationalise counterterrorism. As Isabel Roele puts it, the Security Council articulated a ‘no weak links’ approach to counterterrorismFootnote ¹⁰⁷ by focusing on attempting to harmonise a minimum content of domestic law which, in turn, empowers policing, security, and intelligence activity and, through the sanctions regime, necessarily folds financial institutions (and soft international institutional that regulate them, like the Financial Action Task Force)Footnote ¹⁰⁸ into the transnational counterterrorism milieu.

Audience acceptance was both voluntary (for example, more or less every member state reported its progress towards implementation to the Counter-Terrorism Committee within a few months – an almost unprecedented level of compliance with a reporting obligation), and coerced. By using Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations (by which the Security Council can bind member states to prescribed action), the Security Council made Resolution 1373 (2001) and its content binding on all member states, and by setting up an institutional infrastructure to ‘monitor’ and ‘support’ it, it created the apparatus for an ‘infra-law’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ of enforcement unlike anything we had seen in the counterterrorism space before.

However, the question that niggles at me is whether the measures introduced to deal with terrorism were ‘extraordinary’ or ‘exceptional’. They were certainly extraordinary when seen against the antecedent approach, which was to allow states to accede (or not) to international conventions at their own pace (and in fact ratification was very low and very slow before September 2001) and largely to leave terrorism as a ‘phenomenon’ for states to deal with. With Resolution 1373 (2001) terrorism was recast as a matter of international peace and security and thus the Security Council was placed right at the heart of it. While Floyd, like many others, focuses on the ‘Global War on Terror’ and militarisation, from a long-term, normative, and institutional perspective it is these moves of norm setting, institution building, and expectation shifting that were the most significant and transformative parts of the transnational reaction to 9/11.Footnote ¹¹⁰ They have continued unabated since with states now obliged, among other things, to criminalise incitement to terrorism,Footnote ¹¹¹ to require airlines to collect APIFootnote ¹¹² and PNR,Footnote ¹¹³ to establish biometric databases,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and more. The Counter-Terrorism Committee now has its own support structure (the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate),Footnote ¹¹⁵ and there is also a UN Office for Counter-TerrorismFootnote ¹¹⁶ (with satellite offices in countries around the world), a Counter-Terrorism Centre (funded largely by Saudi Arabia), a huge project of capacity building at national and regional level, and an ever-expanding project of ‘countering violent extremism conductive to terrorism’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ All of this can be directly linked back to Resolution 1373 (2001) and to the securitising moves of the United States and United Kingdom, in particular, at that time, since joined by other securitising actors including especially France, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all of whom have taken leading roles in sponsoring Security Council Resolutions, developing frameworks and standards, and funding the UN counterterrorism infrastructure.

Given all of this, it is really not clear to me that the measures introduced in and since 2001 should be said to have been ‘extraordinary’ because they lack (and were intended to lack) temporal restriction. Indeed, it is core to their design that they do not oblige states temporarily to criminalise activities: they oblige them to make permanent changes to their legal corpus and to their modes of working; they put in place committees, offices, executives, etc. at UN level that have time-limited mandates, but which are always renewed; they embed permanently ‘soft’ international institutions (that is, not international organisations having the characteristics of IOs in international law) like the US-established Global Counter-Terrorism Forum in international law and transnational governance by expressly referring to them and their soft-law standards in Security Council resolutions; they permanently and seriously shift and distort the activities of the international community and the funding of the United NationsFootnote ¹¹⁸ etc. Given this, I read with particular interest Floyd's consideration of the notion of ‘the exception’ (p. 58 et seq).

Floyd argues that ‘[w]ithout the exception … serious questions arise about what separates securitisation from politicisation’ (p. 59) and thus argues that just securitisation theory is ‘concerned only with securitisation in its exceptional form’ (p. 60). This she defines by reference to law, arguing that

While this, I think, captures well domestic securitisations of terrorism in the past (including in the United Kingdom), I wonder at the insistence on the notion of ‘emergency’ laws and ‘emergency’ powers when seen against contemporary counterterrorism. This is not only because the modes of transnational counterterrorism are clearly not ‘emergency’ (inasmuch as they are not intended to be temporary), but also because the notion of ‘emergency’ even in domestic counterterrorism is increasingly under pressureFootnote ¹¹⁹ given the well-established concretisation of counterterrorism laws, powers, technologies, and activities and emergence of what I have previously called ‘the counter-terrorism state’Footnote ¹²⁰ in which counterterrorism is bedded down as an expansive, permanent, and encompassing mode of governance. This is underpinned, accelerated, and made inevitable by transnational counterterrorism because, among other things, of its insistence on permanence, its institutional sprawl, its budgetary hold on the UN's agenda, its desirability to hegemonic states, its enforcement mechanisms, its focus on ‘capacity building’, and its construction of an ever-hardening web of transnational counterterrorism that involves international, regional, national, industry, civil society, policing, intelligence, military, and development organisations and agencies.

All of this also makes it unamenable to desecuritisation; there is no turning back from the juggernaut of transnational counterterrorism, and even if there were the non-emergency nature of its normative products are such that the legal landscape is permanently changed so that the content of rights has been recalibrated downwards,Footnote ¹²¹ the nature of international cooperation has been made data-rich and embedded, and non-security actors at the international level (like UNESCO,Footnote ¹²² the ICAO,Footnote ¹²³ or UNDPFootnote ¹²⁴) have been shifted into a securitised register that seems impossible to dislodge.Footnote ¹²⁵

On my reading of The Morality of Security this means one of two things: either transnational counterterrorism does not constitute a securitisation (because of its non-adherence to the paradigm of the ‘exception’ and non-amenability to desecuritisation), or if it does that transnational counterterrorism is outside of the sights of just security theory because of its exclusive attention on the exception. Either of these conclusions would, I think, be problematic.

The former would suggest that this is ‘mere’ politicisation, but the effect of transnational counterterrorism is to stymie politicisation at the national level. Indeed, as I have written before,Footnote ¹²⁶ that is a feature of transnational counterterrorism, with states ‘jumping scales’ from national to transnational in order to create irresistible impulses to legal and operational action in the domestic sphere. The latter conclusion would suggest that this enormous project of transnational counterterrorism cannot be subjected to the rigour of the moral and ethical test of just securitisation that Floyd so convincingly outlines in The Morality of Security and thus is either irredeemably unjust, or simply not attended to at all. Given the (sometimes under-appreciated) implications of transnational counterterrorism for rights, capital, politics, data, policing, and freedoms in everyday life, it seems a significant omission for it to be beyond the purview of just securitisation theory.

On my reading, then, attention to the transnational scales of securitisation in counterterrorism and their complex and diffuse implications at ‘subordinate’ scales raises new questions about the scope, reach, and adequacy of how we understand securitisation and the moral and ethical questions that it raises. Floyd can hardly be criticised for not having attended to this; transnational counterterrorism is sprawling, often opaque, multipronged, and ever-shifting. That is its mode of operation.Footnote ¹²⁷ That is what makes our engagement with it so urgent, and my curiosity for how just securitisation theory might be developed better to deal with it so ripe, having had the pleasure of reading this provocative and ambitious book.

In The Morality of Security, Rita Floyd sets out to detail a set of conditions according to which actors are justified in deploying ‘emergency measures’ in the face of threats to their security. In setting out these conditions, Floyd's work is meticulous in addressing a wide range of ethically informed concerns; from the nature of threats, through questions of the referent, to the intentionality of actors. In this short piece, my aim is not so much to take issue, at least not directly, with the criteria put forward by Floyd in defining a just securitisation theory (JST). Rather, my goal is to show, and to take some issue with, why these criteria come about in the first place. In other words, why, for Floyd, does securitisation (arguably better read as ‘security’) need to be legitimated to begin with? In doing so, I want to make clear two main points of contention: the first is that Floyd's understanding of securitisation; in particular, the matter of the ‘exception’, is one that reflects its ‘outcome’ and not its ‘process’. As a result, Floyd proceeds with a characterisation of emergency measures that fails to separate properly securitisation from politicisation. The second is that securitisation (security) conceived of solely as a set of exceptional (read harmful, possibly violent) practices unduly narrows the very conception of security itself. I am in no doubt that this will come as no surprise to Floyd. Nevertheless, I still think it's important to shed light on how Floyd's securitisation operates in accordance with just a single, so-called security ‘logic’: what previously has been referred to as to the ‘logic of war’, and what, similarly, here is set out as that of exception; rather than, as I present here, three security logics: ‘elimination’ (war/exception), ‘management’, and ‘transformation’. First, though, to securitisation itself.

In a previous engagement with the emerging debate of the ethics of security, I made the distinction between securitisation as ‘process’ and securitisation as ‘outcome’;Footnote ¹²⁸ that is, to say, between how security policy is formulated and how policy translates into actual behaviour. In doing so, I noted how the position of the Copenhagen School (CoS) itself, or, perhaps more accurately, Ole Wæver himself, was bound up ostensibly with the matter of process. In their original formulation of the concept, the CoS note that securitisation is the result of the ‘failure to deal with issues as normal politics’, with normal given meaning by reference to the ‘routine procedures’ of politics.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the context of liberal democratic states (where it's evident that the CoS’ theorising derives from),Footnote ¹³⁰ normal politics equates with how policymaking; the legislative process, takes place in accordance with established mechanisms. As I have characterised this, procedures are marked by ‘debate and deliberation’:Footnote ¹³¹ the legislature and other bodies takes its time to scrutinise the executive. With a securitised issue, though, the process is not normal, but ‘extraordinary’. In the face of an existential threat, though, the CoS presume that there will be no time for the normal process of debate, deliberation, ‘we don't have time for talking about this now. We must act and act quickly!’. Accordingly, Jef HuysmansFootnote ¹³² talks about how securitisation necessitates speed against the relative slowness of normal politics. To refer once more to my previous characterisations: the extraordinary politics of securitisation is rather about ‘silence and speed’.Footnote ¹³³ For many, this is why securitisation comes across very much as a kind of ‘panic politics’.

Set against this, Floyd's engagement with the notion of the ‘exception’ also notes how many scholars have come to equate securitisation with the Schmittian logic of ‘executive unilateralism’, where the sovereign is entitled to suspend the existing rule of law; pretty much akin to riding rough shod over the deliberative processes of the legislature.Footnote ¹³⁴ But Floyd chooses not to see exception in this way. For her, the sovereign (executive) should not be seen as above the law. Instead, Parliament (the legislature) passes new laws and grants new powers to tackle the impending emergency. On this particular point, I have, and still do very much agree with Floyd's view as to how a process of securitisation invariably proceeds. Nevertheless, this puts Floyd's securitisation very much out of keeping with Wæver's original ‘bad for democracy’ rendering of the concept; after all, it can't be bad if Parliament continues to play a prominent role in the passing of legislation.

Explicit in the endeavour of formulating a set of criteria for legitimating certain acts is the presumption that, ordinarily, such acts are illegitimate; they are, in some way, bad. JST defines under what circumstances acts of securitisation are permitted: how securitisation can be ‘rescued’ from its badness. But if not in accordance with process, from where does its badness come? This is hinted at when Floyd remarks: ‘JST is only interested in securitization as the exception. Throughout this book I refer to exceptional security action as security measures.’Footnote ¹³⁵ Exception, then, lies not in process: to say again, exception refers to (emergency) measures. It lies in ‘outcome’. This is given further expression when Floyd makes clear that ‘my interpretation of securitization is comparable to war.’Footnote ¹³⁶ Although securitisation might take place short of actual war, and, this is the crucial point, its measures will certainly be also harmful to others (deportation, detention, or incarceration) and possibly in a most violent way (torture).

Admittedly, Floyd is careful to note that securitisation ‘takes many forms’,Footnote ¹³⁷ for example, referring to Maria Julia Trombetta'sFootnote ¹³⁸ work on environmental security, where Trombetta rejects security practices as being about the exception. But this still misses the point that, in terms of the original CoS perspective, exception is not to be understood in terms of outcome (practices), but process (security formulations). Moreover, and maybe more importantly, Floyd justifies the criterion of exception as that which separates most clearly securitisation from politicisation.Footnote ¹³⁹ Understood as outcome, though, it arguably doesn't. A politicised issue; something that works in accordance with debate and deliberation, might well produce the same kind of emergency measures (harm, violence) as that of a securitised issue. Put simply, issues that are handled slowly by a legislature can also result in policies that sanctions bad things! Is what we are left with, then, simply a focus on ‘doing’ bad things, instances of policy manifesting itself to the (mostly) physical detriment of others?

In moving from process to outcome like this, Floyd's position on securitisation comes perilously close to that taken by several, more Poststructuralist scholars. Again, drawing on a largely Schmittian rendering of the political, writers such as Claudia Aradau,Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Andreas Behnke,Footnote ¹⁴¹ and Mark Neoclous (2011)Footnote ¹⁴² view securitization/security as necessarily constituting and delineating bodies of us and them, friend and enemy. This is done by way of antagonism, and one that is invariably hostile. Indeed, so hostile that for some it comes to equate with fascismFootnote ¹⁴³ and even Nazism.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This extreme characterisation aside, this position nonetheless assumes that securitisation/security is inherently about the production of winners and losers, security-haves and security have-notes, those rendered safe and those rendered abject. For the likes of Aradau, the ethical solution to the badness of security is to escape from its very condition, an emerging position in the literature that can be called ‘anti-security’. To get rid of the bad we have to get rid of the security too! For Floyd, security is not to be escaped. Security (securitisation) is rather to be rescued: through the lens of JST, harm (bad) can be permitted under certain conditions.

Another way of putting all of this is to claim that security/securitisation has an essential logic to it, that of the exception, that of war. In this regard, Floyd's JST is subject to the same kind of critique that can also be levelled against the work that Stefan Elbe has done on the securitisation of HIV/AIDS. Differently to Floyd, Elbe asks not what can legitimate emergency measures, but what justify a securitisation in the first place. Still, with Elbe, what predicates the ‘dangers’ and ‘benefits’ of securitising AIDS, and thereby constitutes how start with a balancing of the pros and cons, is a similar assumption about logic. For example, in noting how a securitisation of AIDS will likely push ‘responses to the disease away from civil society toward … military and intelligence organizations, which also possess the power to override human rights and civil liberties’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Elbe, like Floyd, like the Poststructuralists, assumes a ‘“threat-defense” logic inherent in the securitization of HIV/AIDS’,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ where threat-defence can undoubtedly be read as exception/war. To labour the point perhaps, the requirement for, and the nature of the moral calculation of securitisation derives from an understanding of just a single, and unavoidable security logic. But security/securitisation does not have an inherent logic. Such a formulation is simply overly deterministic. In fact, security has at least three logics: in addition to exception/war; what I choose to call the logic of ‘elimination’, are also those of ‘management’ and ‘transformation’.

With the logic of elimination, the purpose of security practices is simply to get rid of the threat. Although not necessarily taking the exact form of war as it is traditionally understood (as armed conflict) elimination is about vanquishing your enemy; or at least depriving your enemy of its ability to threaten in a certain way. And, to restate somewhat, in JST, it relates to harmful, perhaps violent forms of behaviour.

Thinking about the management of threat has derived largely from the relatively recent engagement of security studies with the notion of risk. Floyd engages with risk primarily with a view to tackling the question of future threat, in particular, with the consideration of ‘prevention/preventive war’ as a possible candidate for a just securitisation.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Here, I don't want take issue with how Floyd deals with prevention in this regard. Rather, the intention is to make clear how the idea of risk (as opposed to threat) can bring with it the logic of management. As Floyd demonstrates from her discussion of the likes of Olaf CorryFootnote ¹⁴⁸ and Mikel Vedby Rasmussen,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ risk is about the future. But, as opposed to what might be described as a future ‘threat’, a risk is less tangible. Not only are risks also located in some (quite unspecified) future time, their origin is also unknown. To give a prominent example: When the US- and UK-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, a first reason given was indeed about threat: Saddam Hussein's future acquisition of further WMD capabilities posed an existential threat to his neighbours and to others. Here, preventive war against the Iraqi regime removes this possibility. A second reason, though, was that future Iraqi WMD capability also brought with it the risk of its diffusion to transnational terrorist organisations. Again, while something also for the future, from which actor(s) this might come also wasn't known (not a Rumsfeld ‘known unknown’, but an ‘unknown unknown’!). Importantly, then, while the same in its actual form (war), the conflict itself thus proceeds on the basis of two different logics; not only that of elimination (the Iraqi threat) but of management too (the risk of terrorist attack). Put simply, because risk is unknown in both source and temporality it cannot be directly gotten rid of. Instead, its ‘conditions of possibility for harm’ can be governed, or managed.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Crucially, though, the logic of management can also be found in forms other than that of offensive military action. Similar in purpose to where proponents of risk talk about resilience, other (more traditional) strategic concepts like deterrence by denial and non-offensive defence (NOD) seek to manage, not eliminate threat.Footnote ¹⁵¹ For instance, Switzerland's strategy of the mobilisation of mass reservists accepts that whatever (external military) threat it is facing cannot/should not be defeated by offensive measures. Instead, the costs of attacking and occupying the country are raised dramatically by the prospect of encountering tens upon thousands of citizens armed to defend their territorial integrity. In doing so, NOD/deterrence by denial does not seek the elimination of threat, but its management in reducing the likelihood of its very manifestation.

Similarly, in my past exchange with Matti Jutila over the securitisation of minority rights, I noted how, with a securitisation that managed potentially conflictual relations between majority and minority, ‘measures are put in place that reduce, or even effectively rule out, the recourse to emergency politics’ [measures].Footnote ¹⁵² In this particular context, the provision of multinational federalism, rather than trying to preclude the possible eventuality of succession by persecuting/suppressing the minority (elimination), such an autonomous arrangement instead seeks to manage its future conditions of possibility. Will multinational federalism be seen by everyone involved as something positive? Perhaps not. Still, it surely does not represent the kind of bad security practices that need to be rescued by virtue of JST.

The third logic of security is transformation. Unlike the logic of elimination and, in part at least, the logic of management also, transformation is invariably bereft of the kind of harm that characterises Floyd's usage of securitisation. With the logic of transformation, a security issue is tacked in such a way that the production of danger is radically reconstituted. Bill McSweeney's rendering of positive security exemplifies how this logic works; in particular, in his articulation of the difference between what he calls ‘social control’ and ‘social order’. For social control, this centres ‘on the perception of external threat and the organization of material resources to remedy the vulnerabilities exposed to the perceived aggression’.Footnote ¹⁵³ For social order, though, emphasis is placed on security as the property of a relationship: being secure cannot experienced at the expense of another (eliminating the threat) It is the security of social relations.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This is close to how Lene Hansen, for example, has thought about desecuritisation as ‘rearticulation’; ‘fundamental transformations of the public sphere including a move out of the friend-enemy distinction’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Put simply, transformation goes beyond both elimination and management in the sense that it changes (for the better) the very relationship between self and other.

To take a simple scenario of crime to sum up the difference between how the three logics operate: in an inner-city setting, a wave of burglary has sprung up perpetrated mostly by disaffected young people. With the logic of elimination, police identify and arrest the burglars with a view to successful prosecution; prison sentencing eradicates the source of threat. With management, homeowners take measures to try to ensure that any possibly break-ins will be deterred (big fences, CCTV cameras, alarm systems, and the like). The burglars don't disappear (into jail). Still, the possibility for harm (break-ins) is still addressed. And finally, with transformation, rather than simply accepting the reality of crime as it is, the young people in question are introduced to a life without the potential for criminality; for example, youth centres might be opened that help to provide certain skills for meaningful employment. And, in this way, security behaviour indeed reflects the kind of property of a relationship that McSweeney conceives of.

All in all, what this demonstrates is that a single logic (war/exception) belies the fact that security practices often take place without the kind of (violent) harm that JST endeavours to legitimise. And while it may well be true that ‘not all securitizations have the same degree of impact on the world and people around them’,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ it is equally, if not more so that, as McSweeney puts it so well: ‘most of us do not live our lives in the terror of the London Blitz.’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In much the same way that McSweeney acknowledges the necessity of social control, harmful means are indeed sometimes required to eliminate/manage security threats. This is not denied. But, for many people around the world the reality of their lives in being secure is not one of violence.

JST (as I'm sure others will be commenting on extensively) takes many of its cues from just war theory (JWT), and, like JWT, concentrates on a fairly specific set of practices. And these practices are defined by the perpetration of harm, often violent in nature. Practices that raise serious ethical questions? For sure. But, at the same time, practices that are too narrowly conceived to constitute a morality of security. Moreover, as a theory of just ‘securitisation’ (not security), in understanding exception in relation to outcome, not process, Floyd's work fails to properly differentiate politicisation from securitisation: legislatures can indeed operate in accordance with debate and deliberation; doing ‘normal’ politics, but still end up formulating policies that require the prosecution of violence. Is it, then, about a just securitisation? Or quite possibly more a theory of just harm only?