The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy Copenhagen School

Edited by: Bruce A. Arrigo

Chapter Title: "Copenhagen School"

Contributors: Scott Nicholas Romaniuk

2018

The Copenhagen School of security studies is an academic school that employs a critical approach
to security studies. It is part of the postpositivist movement in the field of international relations
(IR), which became a salient part of post–Cold War scholarship. IR theorist Barry Buzan’s 1983
book People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations forms the
bedrock of the school’s academic thought. Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde are two well-known
scholars connected with the school. At the core of the school is the way in which many different
types of security issues interact with domestic politics. Drawing on the ideas of the ontology of
constructivism within the field of IR, the Copenhagen School looks at threats to states (i.e., national
security) as matters that are socially constructed. The term Copenhagen School was first used by
Professor Bill McSweeeny, an expert in peace studies at the University of Dublin and one of the
Copenhagen School’s principal critics. Securitization is a seminal feature of the Copenhagen
School, whereby actors turn regular issues of domestic level politics into issues of high politics
that affect states on a national level (i.e., when something becomes an issue of national security).
Security as a socially constructed phenomenon is highly subjective. This view held by the
Copenhagen School is a guiding aspect of its view on security and security-related issues. The
securitization process comprises three distinct phases: The creation of an existential threat (i.e., an
issue or event such as climate change) before a referent object (i.e., a state or group of states) (this
phase is called the “speech act”). The commencement of special/emergency/extraordinary actions
in an attempt to secure and protect the referent object against the existential threat. The receiving
of the speech act by one or more audiences. One of the major problems associated with this
process, particularly the third phase, is the lack of control that a securitizing actor ultimately has
over the way in which the audience receives and subsequently processes or interprets the speech.
During the course of this process, the referent object can be categorized in one of three ways. First,
it can be nonpolitical. Second, it can be politicized and therefore require action by government in
“normal” ways or by using nonexceptional means. Third, the referent object can be extrapoliticized
(or securitized). While the first stage involves nondebated (private) responses or action, the second
is debated (public), and the third can lead to the use of extraordinary measures. Examples of
extraordinary measures include long-term military occupation; extreme forms of interrogation and
torture; reduction in civil liberties, such as phone tapping or the Central Intelligence Agency’s
policy of rendition, detention, and interrogation; and the use of militarized drones in drone strikes
and targeted killings. Proponents of the Copenhagen School speak of the issues of security in terms
of different facets of contemporary international politics and societies. These facets can be taken
as different areas or fields, such as the state and society, the state and the military, levels of politics
and, the field of economics and its impact on other areas, as well as the environment and the many
changes within it and how it affects people and states. As such, the Copenhagen School (through
security studies theory) addresses a truly wide spectrum of issues and events that affect the world
today and people living within it. The depth of analysis within each field can be significant and is
therefore able to engage with and “widen” the materialist security studies practiced more
traditionally. This capacity to examine and analyze objects and events within the international
system by means of various sectors represents one of the main pillars of the Copenhagen School.
One of the major problems of security concerns is that what is considered a threat in one country
may not necessarily be considered a threat in another country. Different states are faced, in many
cases, with their own unique set of issues that cannot easily be translated from one state to another
or from one region to another. Thus, regional security complex theory, a theory of regional security
attached to the Copenhagen School (put forward by the school’s primary scholars), is used to
approach the “clustering” of security in different geographical locales. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and the South East Asia Treaty Organization constitute two examples of regional
security arrangements formed as a result of patterns of cooperation and discord or hostility
securitization and de-securitization processes. The Copenhagen School has attracted much
criticism from scholars of other IR theoretical areas. For example, some claim that it has taken far
too strong a European perspective on issues related to security. Furthermore, the claim is often
made that the school fails to conceptualize and problematize critical terms within the field. It might
be beneficial if it, as Filip Ejdus (2009)—editor of the journal Western Balkans Security
Observer—points out, “would devote itself more to the theorization of the term ‘political’ and take
a clearer and better articulated normative stand in relation to the dichotomy political-security” (p.
1). Finally, a leading IR scholar, Lene Hansen, in her article “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security
Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School,” published in 2000 in
Millennium, has argued that the Copenhagen School fails to adequately include gender in its
security scholarship.