An Analysis Of The Security Construction Of The "Islamic State" By The United States

The international security is one of the core concerns for international relations studies. A security issue is constructed by people and is inevitably subjective in nature.The Copenhagen School argues that securitization is a special kind of political means.And a security problem can be prioritized and solved with the political and social resources brought about by securitization.Within the framework of securitization theories, this article traced United State’s speech-act representation and analyzed the variations of its policy towards ISIS at both utterance and non-utterance levels. On the securitization spectrum of American political agenda, ISIS, seen as a growing threat,had slided from the non-political side to the securitization side. This process could be divided into three stages: non-political concern, existence threatening issue and public accepted threat. Through discursive representation of securitization, the U.S.government successfully persuaded its people to accept the logic of the threat of ISIS.A complete securitization process involves speech-acts and common understanding,as well as the abnormal measures. Except the speech-acts, the U.S. government had also formulated detailed policies in the aspects of national security, economy and diplomacy in order to consolidate the achievements of securitization.By the end of 2015, the securitization mission that America conducted aiming at countering ISIS had seen some initial success. However, with the implementation of complementary policies, the relations between America and ISIS will be deteriorated and becomeincreasinglyantagonistic, which shall add more complexity to this issue.