Ritualised securitisation: The European Union’s failed response to Hamas’s success

Abstract

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.

Up in the air: Ritualized atmospheres and the global Black Lives Matter movement

“…In IR, recent research has usefully continued many of these same themes to explore rituals of global politics. Much of this work examines ritual activities in many of the formal and institutional spaces of global politics, such as the European Union’s (EU) efforts to ritualize its internal processes (Salgo, 2017) as well as the EU’s foreign relations (Charrett, 2018), rituals in parliaments (Rai, 2010), regional organizations (Davies, 2018), declarations of independence (Knotter, 2020), and official apologies (Kampf and Löwenheim, 2012). Other work explores rituals outside of formal spaces in broader socio-political and cultural settings, such as the construction of authority (Kustermans et al, 2022), visual politics (Aalberts et al, 2020), securitization (Oren and Solomon, 2015), protests (Russo, 2018), and everyday militarism (Wegner, 2021).…”

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“…Through domestic and transnational organizing across rural towns in the American Midwest to small villages across the United Kingdom to European urban centers to embassies and streets in South Africa and Indonesia, the graphic nature of the video of George Floyd's killing and the primary claims of BLM have spread globally. 2 International Relations (IR) has recently seen significant rising interest in rituals of global politics Baele and Balzacq, 2022;Charrett, 2018;Cronin-Furman and Krystalli, 2020;Davies, 2018;Holmes and Wheeler, 2020;Kampf and Löwenheim, 2012;Knotter, 2020;Koschut, 2014;Kustermans et al, 2022;Mälksoo, 2021;Oren and Solomon, 2015;Pacher, 2018;Salgo, 2017;Wegner, 2021;Wong, 2021). The global BLM movement of 2020 vividly displayed many kinds of ritual practices, from the rhythms and reverberations of protest marches to shared and reiterated discourses and symbolic gestures across countries, to the ritual sharing of video and photographs across social media.…”

Critical Security History: (De)securitisation, ontological security, and insecure memories

“…Charrett's claim that, 'securitisation is maintained through its own ritualised mechanisms of measuring and judging the performance of the marked threat.' 73 Taking these repetitive aspects a step further she argues that securitizing actors find it difficult to step outside their prior 'discursive order' or provide dissenting views. 74 Understanding securitization in this way, however, downplays and precludes the constant possibility for contestation and even fissures in the ritual.…”