The Securitization of Humanitarian Migration

At the outset it needs to be stated that I am not an international relations theorist and thus my review here is constructively engaged with Watson's book from a wider perspective. The book's analysis emerges from within international relations theory (and securitization theory in particular) and claims to be a groundbreaking attempt at enlarging the conventional approaches to what is termed ‘humanitarian migration’ (or forced migration). Yet it needs to be noted that the theorising on security that is presented in this work remains within the narrow confines of international relations theory and, as inevitable as this may be for academic monographs, it is also a problem. For instance, given the widespread discussion across many disciplines over the notions of sovereignty, security and exceptionalism with regard to, among others, the theoretical work of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, securitization is considered in this book only within the narrow and often outdated confines of what predominates in conventional and slowly progressing critical international relations theories. Besides the necessary questioning of academic interdisciplinarity and its usually problematic and narrow focus, it can be suggested that there is also the wider problem of the self-disciplining of the disciplines. Securitization studies, and theories in particular, appear to have often taken their object of study, to a smaller or larger extent, at face value in terms of its dominance in public discourse, negating the possibility of considering their own complicity in justifying and reproducing the securitizing apparatuses at a discursive level even when, as with Watson here, a valuable attempt is made to approach the dominant discourse critically

Complicity · Dichotomy · Discipline · Economics · Epistemology · Exceptionalism · International relations · International relations theory · Political science · Politics · Securitization · Social science · Sociology · Sovereignty · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Global Security and Public Health · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Philosophy

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