This article addresses the normative dilemma located within the application of `securitization,' as a method of understanding the social construction of threats and security policies. Securitization as a theoretical and practical undertaking is being increasingly used by scholars and practitioners. This scholarly endeavour wishes to provide those wishing to engage with securitization with an alternative application of this theory; one which is sensitive to and self-reflective of the possible normative consequences of its employment. This article argues that discussing and analyzing securitization processes have normative implications, which is understood here to be the negative securitization of a referent. The negative securitization of a referent is asserted to be carried out through the unchallenged analysis of securitization processes which have emerged through relations of exclusion and power. It then offers a critical understanding and application of securitization studies as a way of overcoming the identified normative dilemma. First, it examines how the Copenhagen School's formation of securitization theory gives rise to a normative dilemma, which is situated in the performative and symbolic power of security as a political invocation and theoretical concept. Second, it evaluates previous attempts to overcome the normative dilemma of securitization studies, outlining the obstacles that each individual proposal faces. Third, this article argues that the normative dilemma of applying securitization can be avoided by firstly, deconstructing the institutional power of security actors and dominant security subjectivities and secondly, by addressing countering or alternative approaches to security and incorporating different security subjectivities. Examples of the securitization of international terrorism and immigration are prominent throughout.

Why and how do political leaders and bureaucrats miss opportunities or make mistakes? This article explores the pressures to conform and to perform that direct securitising decisions and practices. It begins with the assertion that the European Union missed an opportunity to engage with Hamas after the movement’s participation and success in transparent and democratically legitimated elections, and instead promoted a politics of increased securitisation. The securitisation of Hamas worked against the European Union’s own stated aims of state-building and democratisation, and increased the resistance image of Hamas. This article investigates the rituals that shaped this decision, arguing that punitive and conforming dynamics implicated the knowing of the event. Performance studies and anthropology observe how rituals let participants know how to behave in a given situation, and they performatively constitute a social reality through the appearance of normalcy or harmony. Hamas was reproduced as threat through the European Union’s compulsion to repeat a policy of conditionality, which was performative of Hamas’s ability to respond diplomatically to its own securitisation. First, at a discursive level, rituals simplify or reduce the complexity of an event by allowing participants to respond to new issues through existing regimes of intelligibility. Second, at a practice level, rituals impose an imperative to perform within the workplace, which limits the possibility for dissent or for challenging hierarchy within the institution. This investigation relies on elite interviews with senior Hamas representatives conducted in Gaza, and interviews with European Union representatives who were involved in monitoring the elections and enacting a response to Hamas’s success.

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