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Copenhagen School

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DOI: 10.4135/9781483359922.n95

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

Contributors: Scott Nicholas Romaniuk

Edited by: Bruce A. Arrigo
Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy
Chapter Title: "Copenhagen School"
Pub. Date: 2018
Access Date: April 5, 2018
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks,
Print ISBN: 9781483359946
Online ISBN: 9781483359922
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483359922.n95
Print page: 224
©2018 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
SAGE SAGE Reference
Copyright © 2018 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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 w a s 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:

1. 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”).
2. The commencement of special/emergency/extraordinary actions in an attempt to secure
and protect the referent object against the existential threat.
3. 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

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 SAGE SAGE Reference
Copyright © 2018 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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.

See alsoConstructivism; Critical Security Studies; National Security; Politics; Securitization

Scott Nicholas Romaniuk

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483359922.n95
10.4135/9781483359922.n95
Further Readings
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.London, England: Routledge,
1997.
Buzan, Barry. People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International
Relations.Hemel Hempstead, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983.
Ejdus, Filip. “Editor’s Word.” Western Balkans Security Observer, v.4/13 (2009).
Huysmans, Jef. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU.London,
England: Routledge, 2006.
Knudsen, Olav F. “Post Copenhagen Security Studies: Desecuritizing Securitization.” Security
Dialogue, v.32/3 (2001).
Wæver, Ole. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” I n Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On
Security.New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Williams, Paul. “Critical Security Studies.” In Alex J. Bellamy (ed.), International Society and
Its Critics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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