Species level threat: when security goes to the birds

Abstract

This article examines the securitization of ‘birdstrike’ or a vehicular collision between an aircraft and a bird. It examines how dominant understandings of birdstrike historically transformed from accidents or errors related to engineering, plane design, and manufacture into a problem of national and international security over the past few decades. Birdstrike represents one of the few cases where the agency of nonhuman animals become a problem of security. The article examines the conditions of possibility for this development by analyzing the ecological, economic, and political factors that produce birdstrike events as well as the discursive turn to security to frame these collisions. It contends that birdstrike became a problem of security because of a renewed interest in the agentic capacities of birds. The unintended consequences of this shift was to transform individual birds and bird flocks into a source of insecurity. In doing so the article documents the anthropocentrism implicit in security politics and raises concerns for emerging scholarly emphasis on new models of distributive agency and animal rights in international politics. In particular, it highlights how the historical efforts to provide a more robust account of birds and bird flocks as agents also made them into subjects in need of governance. This tendency has important implications as climate change and mass extinction complicate human relations with a myriad of nonhuman animals in international contexts.