Security Studies: From State to Human Security

The Copenhagen School of security studies, associated chiefly with Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde and systematized in their 1998 book Security: A New Framework for Analysis, developed securitization theory to explain how an issue comes to be treated as a matter of existential security rather than ordinary politics. On this account, security is not simply an objective condition but a "speech act": when a political actor successfully frames an issue, whether military, environmental, economic, or societal, as posing an existential threat requiring emergency measures, and a relevant audience accepts that framing, the issue becomes "securitized," moving it outside normal democratic deliberation and legitimating extraordinary responses that would otherwise be considered unacceptable.