SECURITY AS SPEECH ACT
SECURITY AS SPEECH ACT

DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTIONS ON THE SYRIAN REFUGEE CRISIS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to emphasize the way in which discourse constructions and portrayals of selected issues can be shifted from normal politics and placed under the umbrella of “emergency security issues”. The theoretical framework tackled here is the one provided by the Copenhagen School of Security Studies and the case study focuses on the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis. According to the scholars from the Copenhagen School, the concept securitization entails the construction of threats following a “grammar of security” (in Barry Buzan’s terms). Consequently, no issue is a threat per se, but “anything could be constructed as one” by employing discourse constructions. As such, (in)security is in fact speech act. The article will apply this theoretical and analytical framework on European and North American speech acts regarding the Syrian refugee crisis. The aim is to show how refugees are portrayed as threats to European and American security and how the refugee crisis is named, presented as existential threat, and shifted into emergency politics. The latter is then employed by certain speech acts as justification for claiming the need to use whatever means are necessary to block the presented imminent threat.

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