The Changing Agenda of Military Security

Abstract

This chapter looks at the changing agenda of military security through the analytical lens of securitization theory (Buzan/WÆver/de Wilde 1998: WÆver/Buzan/de Wilde 2008). Its concern is not to construct some objective assessment of what military threats actually were during a given period, but to survey what was successfully socially constructed as a threat, and how the main patterns of this construction in the military sector have changed. Securitization is when something is successfully constructed as an existential threat to a valued referent object, and that construction is then used to support exceptional measures in response. Attempts at securitization may have widespread success and be quite durable (e.g. the communist/Soviet threat in the West after 1947), or they may have limited success (the recent U.S. attempt to construct Iraq as a threat), or even fail (the erosion of support for the Vietnam War in the U.S.). Desecuritization is when something previously accepted as a threat is no longer constructed as one (e.g. the ending of the Cold War). Looked at in this theoretical perspective, what is surprising is just how sharply and frequently the main patterns of securitization in the military sector have changed in recent decades.