Surrounded by Threats – How Securitization Research can be Complemented by Critical Discourse Analysis to Uncover Relations and Conceptualizations of Power

ALSO TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THE POLITICAL VIOLENCE: IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY SECTIONS My paper investigates the literature on securitization as has been presented by the so called Copenhagen School. The CPH School suggests that securitization is a form of politics, where all considerations are rendered immediately politicized through the prism of security issues. Politics thus become a simple affair of judging threats and appropriate responses. In this reckoning, for example, immigration is seen as a potential hazard for home-grown terrorism. All political and societal concerns are first and foremost issues of security. To integrate the methodology of CDA into the existing research of securitization has not been previously attempted: no studies or scientific articles dealing specifically with this aspect have been found. Critics of the CPH School have stated that they methodology has relied too much of discourse, and too little on discourse analysis and the way discourse is constructed; it has been taken too much as a given.