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Article Excerpt
Prime Minister Tony Blair has described Africa as a "scar on the conscience of the world." This article argues that New Labour's increasing attention to Africa is part of an ongoing securitization of the continent; interactions with Africa are gradually shifting from the category of "development/humanitarianism" toward a category of "risk/fear/threat" in the context of the "war on terrorism." The securitization of Africa has helped legitimize this "war on terrorism," but has very little to offer for Africa's development problems. Keywords: Africa, securitization, development, New Labour, war on terrorism.
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At the Labour Party Conference that followed shortly after the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair delivered what is widely perceived as one of the most important--and also most powerful--speeches of his political career. With the televised images of the collapsing Twin Towers still etched on people's minds, the speech expressed the prime minister's hope that "out of the shadows of ... evil should emerge lasting good" and outlined his vision of a new, reordered world founded on justice and "the equal worth of all." (1)
Central to the construction of this new world order was Blair's renewed promise to help Africa. "The state of Africa," he declared, "is a scar on the conscience of the world." In his characteristic, almost messianic style, Blair assured his audience that the scar could be healed "if the world as a community focused on it." This would entail a much more interventionist role for Britain and what he called the "international community," and Blair portrayed the new world order as one in which the United Kingdom was always ready to defend human rights and democracy in Africa. Thus, he told his audience, "if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1993, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act there also."
This speech, and in particular his description of the continent as a "scar on the world's consciousness," is emblematic of Blair's compassionate and intensely moral discourse on Africa. In the wake of September 11, Britain's Africa policy appears at first glance to diverge from the U.S. approach. Whereas U.S. policies toward Africa have moved increasingly toward a more aggressive and militarized approach, justified as part of the "war on terrorism" and aimed at securing access to strategic resources and military bases, British policies continue to attract attention for their explicitly humanitarian, moral agenda, as seen for example in the recent launch of Blair's Commission for Africa. (2)
This article argues that while Britain's actions on the African continent are much less visibly militarized than U.S. policies, New Labour's approach to Africa has changed in subtle yet important ways following the events of September 11. The centrality of Africa in Blair's speech to the Labour Party Conference following September 11 is indicative of these changes. The continent had comparatively few direct links to the al-Qaeda networks, and it is not immediately clear why the prime minister would choose to devote so much attention to Africa at a time when on his own admission many Britons were "anxious, even a little frightened."
My suggestion is that the prime minister's attention to Africa is part of an ongoing "securitization" of the continent, evident not only in the British government's discourse but also more broadly in, for example, U.S. policies and in academic debates. Through this securitization, dealings and interactions with Africa are gradually shifting from the category of "development/humanitarianism" to a category of "risk/fear/security," so that today Africa is increasingly mentioned in the context of the "war on terrorism" and the dangers it poses to Britain and the international community. Given Blair's global profile, these issues go beyond UK foreign policy and raise important questions relating to Africa's place within structures of power and global governance.
The argument proceeds in three stages. First, I outline the key points of securitization theory as developed by the Copenhagen school of IR theory. While this theoretical framework is useful, I argue that it also requires some modifications in order to fully capture the significance and nuances of New Labour's policy toward Africa. The second part of the article illustrates the progressive representation of Africa and underdevelopment as dangerous and as a potential risk to the West. (3) Viewing securitization as a specific speech act, I analyze the manner in which the continent and its underdevelopment have come to be treated increasingly as a security issue in various government policy statements. At the center of this process is the link between New Labour's much discussed "ethical dimension" to foreign policy and the events of September 11. The former entailed from the outset a presentation of poverty as a potential risk in an increasingly globalized world, and post-September 11 this discourse acquired a much more explicit security dimension.
Finally, arguing that securitization is not merely a symbolic or linguistic act, the article discusses the politics and potential implications of framing Africa as a security issue. I conclude that the securitization of Africa may have helped mobilize support for the "war on terrorism," but that is has very little to offer in terms of solving the continent's development problems. By contrast, securitization is more likely to have damaging implications for Africa and its peoples.
Securitization Theory
Since the end of the Cold War, the agenda of security studies has been both "broadened" and "deepened" to include new sectors and referent objects. Economic, societal, political, and environmental risks have been added to the conventional preoccupation with military threats, while individuals, groups, communities, and even ecological systems have been conceptualized as referent objects alongside the state. (4)
The theory of securitization as developed by the Copenhagen school is best understood in this context of a broader security agenda, (5) but it differs from many accounts in its more nominalist approach to security. Unlike most "critical" or "human" security studies, the Copenhagen school does not regard security as an unquestionable good, as something to be maximized and realized as widely as possible by states, groups, and individuals; (6) instead, security is seen to bring its own dangers. Politically and normatively, therefore, the crucial question is no longer "more or less security?" but whether or not an issue should be treated as a security issue. (7)
In securitization theory, security is not an objective condition but the outcome of a specific social process. Drawing on the understanding of speech acts developed by John Austin and John Searle, the Copenhagen school examines security practices as specific forms of social construction and securitization as a particular kind of social accomplishment. The social construction of security issues (who or what is being secured, and from what) is analyzed by examining the "securitizing speech acts" through which threats become represented and recognized. These speech acts are not a straight for ward description of an already existing security situation: they bring it into being as a security situation by successfully representing it as such. In the words of Ole Waever:
What then is security? With the help of language theory, we can regard 'security' as a speech act. In this usage, security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance itself is the act. By saying it, something is done (as in betting, giving a promise, naming a ship). By uttering "security" a state- representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it. (8)
By regarding the utterance itself as the primary reality, the approach of the Copenhagen school allows in principle for an almost indefinite expansion of the security agenda. In practice, however, it is not the case that anything and everything can be securitized or that any "securitizing actor" can attempt to securitize any issue and referent object. (9) Different actors have very different capacities to make effective claims about threats and to present them in forms that will be recognized and accepted as convincing by the relevant audiences. In short, not all claims are socially effective, and not all actors are in equally powerful positions to make them. Similarly, while empirical contexts provide crucial resources and referents for actors attempting to securitize an issue, they cannot ultimately determine what are accepted as security issues or threats. (10) Rather than wholly open and expandable then, the securitizing speech act is deeply sedimented and structured, rhetorically and culturally as well as institutionally. (11)
The Copenhagen school further limits the security agenda by insisting that security is not synonymous with "everything that is politically good or desirable," but argues instead that the concept has to be reserved for a much more specific usage. (12) Securitization, according to the Copenhagen school, is the specific speech act of framing an issue as an "existential threat" that calls for extraordinary measures beyond the routines and norms of everyday politics. In the words of Buzan and Waever:
The distinguishing feature of securitization is a specific rhetorical structure.... That quality is the staging of existential issues in politics to lift them above politics. In security discourse, an issue is dramatized and presented as an issue of supreme priority; thus by labelling it as security an agent claims a need for and a right to treat it by extraordinary means. (13)
Securitization, in this conceptualization, is not simply about the avoidance of harm; instead, its defining feature is the ability to place an issue above the normal rules of liberal democratic politics, and hence justify emergency action to do whatever is necessary to remedy the situation. As the following exploration will show, New Labour is increasingly presenting African issues within a narrative of security. Increased globalization, the prevalence of conflict on the African continent, and the attacks of September 11 provide the key empirical context for these claims, yet it is the speech act, not the objective condition, that makes Africa and its...
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