Foreign or Domestic? The Desecuritisation of Indian Affairs and Normativity in Securitisation Theory

Abstract

Is securitisation normatively undesirable? Many scholars who have studied this process by which issues come to be treated as pertaining to ‘security’ have argued that it is indeed preferable to keep as many issues as possible from being securitised. Rather, most issues ought to remain politicised such that they are seen as the legitimate subject of public debate. By contrast, I argue that we ought not to ascribe any inherent moral valence to securitisation or the reverse process of desecuritisation. Instead, each attempt to (de)securitise an issue ought to be debated on its own terms. To support my argument for the moral ambiguity of (de)securitisation, I examine the US Senate’s debate over whether to transfer the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of War to a new Department of the Interior in 1849. I argue that this is an inflection point in a longer desecuritising process by which the United States – acting on a presumed hierarchy – coercively assimilated Native nations into its domestic political order. I conclude that scholars should not discard (de)securitisation as an analytical tool but can instead use work on (de)securitisation to inform public debate on the likely consequences of any particular (de)securitising move, thereby serving a chastening role in public discourse.

Greenland in Arctic Security

“…The analysis in this chapter diverges from but complements prior research on Indigenous peoples and securitization. While the few studies examining Indigenous peoples and securitization typically focus on the power of state security claims over those of Indigenous peoples (Greaves 2016a(Greaves , 2018Hossain 2016;Szarejko 2021), there is a prior step in the study of securitization that is often overlooked: the very decision to frame a given issue as a security threat. Securitization is a discursive choice; if no issue is inherently a security issue, and other means exist to affect an appropriate state or political response, then factors that influence the initial decision to securitize or not are also salient for securitization analysis.…”