Audience,politics,and the moral ambiguity of security – comments on Rita Floyd’s The Duty to Secure

Rita Floyd is one of the strongest and most prolific voices in contemporary security theory. Her theory of just securitization developed over multiple articles and most comprehensively articulated in her book The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization (Floyd, 2019) is now finding a new extension. She has moved from theorising moral permissibility of securitization to a moral duty to securitize. Floyd’s latest book, The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization, is meticulously argued and delivers the highest standard in the tradition of analytical moral and political philosophy.

In The Duty to Secure, Floyd seeks to remain within the broad remit of the securitization theory. She chiefly relies on the iteration of the theory as it was originally developed (Buzan et al., 1998), rather than drawing on its later variations (such as the Bourdieu inspired sociological reorientations of the theory). At the same time, Floyd has been a consistent critic of one building block of the original securitization theory, the audience, and the related role the original authors ascribe to the securitizing speech act addressing this audience. In this book she goes as far as to claim that ‘securitization succeeds . . . not when a relevant audience accepts the threat articulation (i.e. the securitizing move), but rather when the securitizing actor changes their behaviour away from routine conduct to the exception in response to a threat’ (131). Indeed, within certain parameters it is far more reliable to trace changes of behaviour rather than analysing social processes of collective acceptance or the lack thereof. This line of thinking leads Floyd to conclude that ‘we ought to exclude the audience as a categorically analytically relevant category for securitization’ (132). She is well aware that her position is at odds with the original securitization theory as well as with most of its contemporary iterations. Nevertheless, she maintains that getting rid of audience is within the spirit of the original theory. She sees the purpose of audience in the original theory as ‘delimit[ing] the occurrence of securitization’ or ‘foreclosing analytical irrelevance’ (132). In her view, the process of securitization works mechanistically and thus the audience bears no impact on its success or – for that matter – its justness. For Floyd, securitization happens when securitizing actors change their observable behaviour and address an issue with exceptional measures. Audience as the addressee of the initial securitization move can thus be safely ignored.

There are two intertwined, problematic consequences of this proposition. One is theoretical, the other substantive. I remain unconvinced that Floyd’s removal of the audience, in The Duty to Secure even more so than before, keeps her work within the remit of securitization theory. Notwithstanding later interpretations which only further expand the role of the audience in securitization processes (Balzacq, 2005; Côté, 2016), audience is crucial for the original theory of securitization. It crucially contributes to the articulation of the threat. From its inception, securitization has been theorised as an intersubjective process (Buzan et al., 1998: 30). It is this characteristic that allows the securitization theory to explain why one and the same threat, say, Covid-19, can be securitized dramatically differently in different social and political contexts. Contrary to Floyd’s behaviouralist emphasis on observable exceptional measures, the original authors go as far as to say that ‘[s]ecuritization is not fulfilled only by breaking rules (which can take many forms) nor solely by existential threats (which can lead to nothing) but by cases of existential threats that legitimize the breaking of the rules’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 25). In politics, legitimization happens intersubjectively.

Not all conceptualisations of security necessitate an intersubjective process and concomitant social legitimation to formulate an understanding of a threat. Ken Booth’s (2007) theory of world security operates with the notion of security as emancipation – which is accessed via subjectively perceived, objectively observable insecurities. Booth has little patience for intersubjectivity when it comes to security. With her categories of ‘real threat’ and ‘objective existential threat’, Floyd comes conspicuously close to Booth. They only fundamentally differ in their approach to argumentation – Floyd is a systematic analytical philosopher while Booth is anything but systematic and philosophically analytical. But their message is identical: there is a moral duty to secure. In her earlier work (Floyd, 2007), Floyd sought to bring together Booth’s strand of critical security thinking and securitization theory, appreciating the value of each. In The Duty to Secure, in contrast, the few references to Booth are to differentiate herself from him, over-emphasising Booth’s scepticism about states as vehicles of security. This is not a fruitful move. Instead, had Floyd embraced the convergence of their two projects, she would have benefited from the tensions inscribed into Booth’s theory. Yes, states are the key problem for Booth, but they are also pragmatically approached as a key part of the solution, the foremost bearers of the duty to secure. As the primary loci of politics, states have unmatched agency and security is the most extreme form of politics. Reluctant to work with irreconcilable tensions, Floyd instead resorts to the neat, but unrealistic, political theory of states’ contractual responsibilities to provide security. This move leads her – as it has many others – back to the notion of national security (which Booth and securitization scholars jointly reject) and flattens the realm of politics as operating in specific spatio-temporal configurations of power and values.

The Duty to Secure, like Floyd’s earlier book The Morality of Security, was inspired by revisionist just war theory. It is therefore vulnerable to similar criticisms. In the words of one of its most eloquent critics, ‘the central feature’ of just war theory ‘is a refusal to conceptualize war as a collective enterprise’ (Brown, 2017: 94). Revisionist just war theorists share with other analytical political and moral philosophers the belief that all social behaviour can be understood ‘in terms of individual responsibility at all levels’ (Brown, 2017). Floyd might argue that moral duty to secure which she ascribes to collective bodies is not an individual but a collective responsibility. Yet, her normative theory of security is ultimately even more problematic than, say, Jeff McMahan’s ethics of killing. Even critics of revisionist just war theory admit that killing, as an act of utmost cruelty of one person over another person, cannot be completely subsumed under the argument of war as a collective enterprise. Soldiers who keep personal kill logs illustrate this tension. Some soldiers claim they are unaffected by having taken a life. Yet they still keep the count. Others, equally committed to the collective enterprise, struggle deeply with the trauma of killing and ultimately leave the military. War is a collective enterprise that comprises of individual acts of killing (and other violence) which have profound impact on those who commit them.

Security is different from war. Pursuing it, even with the most extreme means, can sometimes be deemed perfectly noble and suitable. More often than not, some will find its pursuit easily acceptable, while others will struggle to reconcile themselves to it. This tension explains why it is more difficult to judge the morality of security than that of war. It is also the reason why Booth purposefully gives moral preference to the viewpoint of those suffering from insecurity. Otherwise, the moral philosopher assessing whether security is just or not, including in The Duty to Secure, typically addresses hypothetical causes. But what about the real ones? Again, Covid-19 comes to mind. Not only would a Floyd-inspired analyst need to be able to decide whether it was Australia, Sweden, China or Nigeria that securitized the pandemic successfully, while others failed. The threat, after all, was the same. The analyst would also have to reach a verdict on whether an actor, say the British government, fulfilled its duty to secure or not. But what if it fulfilled its duty toward some groups and terribly failed others? What if it succeeded 1 week, but failed 2 months later because it kept pursuing the same policies and time matters? When is it ever possible to say the pursuit of security was just?

It is thanks to Rita Floyd’s sustained work on the ethics of security that the field has a conceptual framework through which to address ethical questions with the same seriousness afforded to other areas of moral and political philosophy. While some of us are unlikely to adopt the methods of analytical philosophy, Floyd’s contributions remain an important reference point for all of us engaging with the normative dimensions of security.