One of the most important and controversial contributions to a vibrant body of new security theories since the 1990s has been the idea of securitization. However, rather than providing a consolidated position the discourse on securitization has only just begun to transform the new idea into a more comprehensive security theory. This article argues that such a theory needs to go beyond the current reflections on securitization by the Copenhagen School. Through internal critique and conceptual reconstruction the article generates an alternative framework for future empirical research and identifies two centres of gravity as a first step towards a more consistent understanding of securitization as a comprehensive theory of security.

This article confronts the basic idea of securitization with the concept of translation. By critically examining Wæver’s deliberately traditionalist and essentialist conceptualization of security and his notion of a distinctly speech-act-theoretical approach to securitization, it develops a processual refinement that reads articulations of security as translations. I claim that this conceptual transposition has the potential to open the current securitization discourse to an alternative perspective and to new avenues of research on the travel, localization and/or gradual evolution/transformation of security meanings.

While a range of recent accounts have suggested developing a more contextualist conceptualization of securitization theory, few analyses have actually provided detailed operationalizations of the interplay of language, power and context in securitizations. By suggesting and specifying a way of analysing securitizing moves in relation to intertextual linkages with popular culture, this article examines such interplay in processes of securitization. In doing so, the article not only suggests a contextualist operationalization of securitization theory but also hopes to contribute to studies on discourse, intertextuality and pop culture in international relations more generally.

This article confronts securitization theory with the war in Afghanistan and thus explores questions and dynamics of securitization in a specific communicative situation of military combat. The confrontation highlights not only less well researched questions of implementation, resistance, legitimacy and difficulties of establishing authority in securitizations, but it also inspires a conceptualization of counter-securitization within the theory. In Afghanistan sovereign power to control and realize a securitization at the implementation stage was significantly fragmented so that processes of securitization became more iterative and interactive, and acts of acceptance versus resistance with regard to securitizing moves were more complex than traditionally assumed by the theory. Reflecting on securitization theory, the article thus explores the case of Afghanistan through a conceptualization of its dynamics as a prolonged political game of moves and counter-moves marked by securitizing and counter-securitizing speech acts in which the communicative situation of war becomes visible as a process of strategic interactions in continuous sequences of action and reaction.

This article aims at enhancing our understanding of how collective interpretations of threats, stabilised and temporarily fixed in names, travel across different local discourse communities. I contend that globally accepted names result from gradual cross-cultural processes of localisation. Specifically, I argue that the discursive dynamics of elusiveness, compatibility and adaptation suggest a framework of analysis for how collective interpretations or names travel.