CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Fako, Edin |
|---|---|
| Title | Strategies of Desecuritization |
| Summary | An important school within the field of security studies, the Copenhagen School takes a discursive approach to understanding how security is constructed. Their theory of securitization aims at explaining how issues become securitized, or taken out of the sphere of normal, deliberative politics, into the realm of emergency politics and extraordinary measures. Seeing security as doing more harm than good, the Copenhagen School prefers desecuritization, the lack of a language of emergency measures or existential threats. Theories of desecuritization have conceptualized strategies for desecuritizing migrant identity in Europe and national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper looks to analyze and evaluate these desecuritization strategies for new cases: deeply divided, post-conflict societies. The argument made here is that existing desecuritization strategies cannot be applied outside of a liberal democratic context. As such, a new strategy is provided: structural desecuritization through the implementation of power sharing mechanisms. By introducing the literature on power sharing as a guide to desecuritizing ethnic identity in post-conflict states, this paper aims at reconceptualizing existing strategies, pointing out the assumptions that inhibit their broader salience. The case of post-Dayton Bosnia is offered as an example of how structure and institutions can work to desecuritize ethnic tensions, that is, to bring ethnic relations back into the sphere of normal politics. |
| Supervisor | Roe, Paul |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/fako_edin.pdf |
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