The Securitization Of Terrorism And The Evolution Of U.S Counter-terrorism Policy

Due to the September 11 attacks, terrorism is no longer a conventional agenda that just stays on the political track, but it has been elevated to the level of homeland security and national security. September 11th event prompted the fundamental transformation of US national security strategy. The new national security strategy has treated international terrorism as the primary threat to US national security, though the United States never abandoned strategic issues of coping with the threat to American primacy that was caused by the competition between great powers. In face of this threat, the United States has made a series of policies and taken emergency measures, such as congressional legislation, setting up the Department of Homeland Security, launching the war in Afghanistan. And US has gained support and positive responses from other countries and the United Nations.Although US successfully achieved securitization of terrorism agenda, since then it exaggerated the threat by discourse, which has made many anti-terrorism policies gradually cross the boundary of governing terrorism. Regardless of the doubt and opposition in international society, US eventually overturned Iraqi Saddam Hussein’s government in order to meet its own interests and the strategic objectives by means of its unilateral and preemptive strategy. Based on securitization theory as a analysis model, this thesis will put the US anti-terrorism policy into this model for inspection and reflection. Firstly, the securitization theory innovated by the Copenhagen School provides a social constructivist approach for security studies in order to understand who achieve securitization on which conditions. This paper will elaborate the theoretical connotation and logic framework of securitization theory, and analyze the indispensable elements for successful securitization, including speech act, security actor, audiences and so on. Securitization theory refers to concepts of "speech act" and "inter-subjective security", and avoids choosing one of subjective and objective security from epistemology by creating discourse security. Discourse security assumes that security actors express an "existential threat" by discourse to gain support from the audiences, and then declared to break the rules legitimately to deal with these threats. The complete path of securitization is that security actor represents the existential threat and struggle for the support of audiences so that the issue is requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outsides the normal bounds of political procedure. Generally speaking, Securitization theory provides a new perspective for studying security and reflecting on security policies.Secondly, this paper will research on how the US government promoted the domestic public and international organization to advocate its anti-terrorism action by the model of "speech act". American anti-terrorism policies also proved that the combination of discourse and power can construct a "real threat". For example, the US government successfully presented Iraq as an existential threat by use of the security words such as "axis of evil" and "weapons of mass destruction". At the same time, by means of security discourse and media, the US government acquired the legal rights to use "extraordinary measures" to deal with the threat of terrorism and the "Iraqi threat". On the one hand, by analyzing the US anti-terrorism cases with the theoretical model of securitization theory, the thesis is possible to verify whether securitization theory has explanatory power to explain the process of some issue securitized. On the other hand, this paper has revealed the real aim of US anti-terrorism war, which is using discourse to exaggerate the extent of threats in order to realize its national interests. Securitization offers an effective perspective to criticize US anti-terrorism policies. Moreover, securitization theory lays a theoretical foundation for debating on the desecuritization of terrorism issues, which means the move of an issue out of the sphere of security.Finally, as a security policy analysis tool, securitization theory yet has some shortcomings when it was used to analyze the securitization practice in the process of American anti-terror war. In this paper, the simplification principle of securitization theory will be rethought, because it excludes many important factors imposing influence on the process of securitization. And one of these important factors is the shaping function of mass media to change and lead the mainstream voice of the public. Meanwhile, through the analysis of US anti-terrorism case, the paper reveals that the analytical standards and scales of securitization theory are too open and fuzzy in the empirical analysis. So these problems have side effects on the analytical value of securitization theory as a policy tool. In addition, the Copenhagen school didn’t pay much attention to the validity assessment of securitization and desecuritization framework. But one important thing is that the securitization of terrorism issue also has its positive value, which would promote the country or society to reach a common cognition on the threat and take effective measures to actively cope with terrorism.