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WMD, WMD, WMD: Securitisation through ritualised incantation of ambiguous phrases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2014

IDO OREN  and
TY SOLOMON
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Abstract

We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen School's insight that ‘security’ is not ‘a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance [‘security’] itself is the act’. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 313 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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