Flags of Our Fathers

Review by Michael Sheehan

Politics and International Relations Department, Swansea University, United Kingdom

The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. By Jef Huysmans. London:Routledge, 2006. 208 pp., $135.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-415-36124-9), $35.95 paper (ISBN: 0-415-36125-7).

The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the EU, by Jef Huysmans, isa very good book, reflecting over a decade of research by the author. At firstglance, the title might suggest that this is a book of interest only to those con-cerned with the European Union or who have a particular interest in migrationas a security issue. Scholars interested in those areas will certainly gain a greatdeal from reading this volume. However, The Politics of Insecurity should be readby anyone interested in security studies or in the process of threat constructionin the contemporary world.

The Politics of Insecurity provides a detailed analysis of the politics of securitiza-tion as it relates to the migration issue within the European Union and withinsecurity studies more generally. Perhaps more important, it makes a significantcontribution to the development of the methodology of security studies. Thebook focuses on the questions of how and why certain issues come to be‘‘framed’’ as security issues, why they are framed in particular ways, and what theimplications are of reframing them so that they are no longer regarded as secu-rity issues. The core question from the outset is how to conceptualize the politicsof insecurity as a contested process of framing certain political and social rela-tionships in security terms.

In the 1970’s, the question of how to deal with refugees would not have beenconceptualized as a security issue. That security studies has broadened its per-spective to embrace such issues should be seen as a positive development interms of enabling the field to address the full range of security threats facinghuman populations. Nonetheless, this development has not come without risks,as Daniel Deudney (1990) and Jef. Huysmans (1995) himself have pointed out.Security studies was broadened in scope during the 1980’s through the work ofwhat came to be called the Copenhagen school, which added political, eco-nomic, environmental, and societal issues to the existing military agenda of thefield. Additional work in this area during the 1990’s, particularly by critical secu-rity theorists, strongly problematized the centrality of the state as referent object,which encouraged the field to turn its focus to aspects of human security. Allthese developments were very important and well worthwhile. However, for Huys-mans, the time has come to take things a step further. In a sense, the first phaseof rethinking security, during the 1980s, was focused on broad conceptual ques-tions, at the expense of detailed policy studies. This focus was understandable,but in the 1990’s more detailed studies of particular sectors and of the processesof securitization emerged, which can be seen as the second generation of thenew security thinking. In The Politics of Insecurity, and in the numerous articles hehas published in this area during the past decade, Huysmans challengesresearchers to move security analysis into a third generation. In this new incarna-tion, Huysmans wants researchers to move beyond the broad generalizations and

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International Studies Review (2007) 9, 501–503

critique that sufficed in the first generation and to engage deeply with the realcomplexities of securitization in key cases, such as the EU asylum-migrationnexus that he examines here. However, he also wants them to do so in a way thataccepts that security knowledge is not value neutral. Rather, it ‘‘inherently re-iterates particular views of the legitimate scope and form of politics’’ (p. 124).What is needed, therefore, is an approach to the study of security and securitiza-tion that incorporates a more pluralistic understanding of what constitutes ‘‘thepolitical’’ in security knowledge.

Huysmans argues that the relationship between the European Union andthe migration-asylum issue is too often seen within the context of attempts topromote internal security against such threats as transnational crime andinternal terrorism. Placed within this context, the newly arrived are often iso-lated and portrayed as disruptive elements within an otherwise coherent andhomogenous polity that is attempting to secure itself against external threats.This image leaves the refugees and asylum seekers vulnerable to the attacksof ultranationalist and right-wing political parties—despite the values ofpluralism, toleration, and multiculturalism to which the European Union iscommitted.

Huysmans constructs a careful, nuanced, and convincing argument that thissecuritization of the migration issue by the European Union is in fact the resultof a far more complex process than this xenophobia caricature suggests. Indeed,it is primarily the result of technocratic processes of administration that areexplainable through a Foucaultian analysis of the techniques of government inthe contemporary European Union. This insight is an important move in devel-oping security analysis and in particular in the analysis of the phenomenon ofsecuritization. Earlier work on securitization, although valuable, has tended tolimit arguments to discursive interpretations in which securitization is measuredin terms of the content of public political discourse and the interactions of polit-ical figures and other key actors. The value of using a Foucaultian approach isthat it directs attention toward the technology of government and the influenceof the ‘‘expert knowledge’’ possessed by the professional security community:the armed forces, police, justice department bureaucrats, and so on.

The argument is taken a step further by Huysmans with the claim that securitystudies as a subdiscipline is deeply problematic in terms of the way in which itencourages the analyst to import a conceptual structure characterized by Mani-chean assumptions of inside versus outside threat construction. Security is asocially constructed concept, and earlier analyses by researchers such as BarryBuzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap De Wilde (1998), David Campbell (1992), and JuttaWeldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall (1999) drew atten-tion to the ‘‘discourses of danger’’ involved in talking security questions intoexistence. However, Huysmans goes further than this. In the Copenhagen schoolconstruction, what defines ‘‘security’’ issues and distinguishes them from ques-tions that are simply political is the presence of an existential threat that justifiesnew priorities for political action and the use of exceptional measures to addressthat threat. For Huysmans, this approach moves dangerously toward a Schmittian(Schmitt 1985) understanding of what constitutes politics. Seeing security in thisway means understanding politics in a particular way, with assumptions aboutthe nature and location of political community.

The Politics of Insecurity deals with some very complex arguments, but Huysmansis meticulous in leading the reader through each stage of the developingargument and building each stage clearly upon the last. He includes regular‘‘signposts’’ and summarizes key points so that it is always clear how the thesis isbeing constructed.

The Politics of Insecurity will certainly appeal to those interested in Europeansecurity and in the politics of the European Union. Moreover, those interested

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in the study of security as such, and in the application of political philosophy tothe technical study of securitization, will also find this to be an intriguing,challenging, and illuminating study.

References

Buzan, Barry, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde. (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boul-der: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Campbell, David. (1992) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Deudney, Daniel. (1990) The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Secu-rity. Millenium: Journal of International Studies 19:461–476.

Huysmans, Jef. (1995) Migrants as a Security Problem: Dangers of ‘‘Securitising’’ Societal Issues. InMigration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion, edited by Robert Milesand Dietrich Thranhardt. London: Pinter.1

Schmitt, Carl. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. London: MIT Press.2Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, Raymond Duvall, and eds. (1996) Cultures of

Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

503Michael Sheehan