Contribution
Securitisation theory says a securitising move succeeds when an audience accepts it, and treats audience agency as political: accepting, rejecting, contesting. Ku and Finch argue that this misses most of what audiences do, which is nothing visible. Drawing on Giddens, they name a second agency, ontological agency, the maintenance of one’s routines to keep anxiety bracketed, and they argue that “ontological agency is about inaction as much as action in the face of securitising acts” (p. 307). Inaction is not consent; it is coping, and it lets securitisation persist.
Key insight
The audience’s attention is the resource securitisation competes for, and the audience rations it to protect its routines. So a securitisation that fits routines can become “thick” and go unchallenged, while the same securitisation, once it disrupts routines, releases a latent anxiety that was there all along: “Successful and continuous securitisation thus depends on the extent to which securitising moves fit in with the audience’s routines with minimal disruption” (p. 315).
Assumptions
- Giddens’s ontological security. Routines bracket existential anxiety in practical consciousness; their disruption threatens “chaos” (pp. 310–311).
- Three features of ontological agency (pp. 310–311). The centrality of routinised practice, a sense of control, and the physical self.
- South Korea as a “hard case” (p. 315). Securitisation of North Korea there is not only rhetorical but enacted in visible military practice, which is harder to ignore than speech acts.
- Method (pp. 316–317). Unstructured observation, “akin to ‘eavesdropping’” (p. 317), of people in Gangneung on 25 May 2022, by chance: “We had no prior information about the missile launches”, and they recognise “that this may be problematic from the perspective of rigorous social science research” (p. 316, fn. 48). For 4 October 2022, virtual observation of Korean-language tweets, collected with academictwitteR in three samples (2,805, 7,456 and 470,466 unique tweets) and filtered for “war” and “North Korea” (p. 321, fns. 66–68).
Key results
- 25 May 2022, in person (pp. 317–320). A Hyunmoo-2 launch in the morning and a series of launches every ten minutes in the afternoon, loud and visible from beach cafés: “Most of the people we observed continued conversations or took in the sights while outwardly ignoring” the launches (pp. 319–320). Military sites on the beach were painted with tourist murals, which the authors read as coercing consent by making securitisation mundane (pp. 317–319). Their caveat: “While we cannot access people’s internal reactions, they seemed unfazed based on their outward behaviour” (p. 317, fn. 57).
- 25 May on Twitter (p. 325). 139,583 tweets (19,630 unique) matching the keywords; “Of these, only 23 unique tweets mentioned war”, four about the launch, all criticising it as escalation (Table 7).
- 4 October 2022, online (pp. 320–328). A malfunctioning Hyunmoo-2 exploded on the airbase at night; the government embargoed the news until a 7:00 am press conference. Tweets speculated about war and North Korean attack (Tables 1–2), then criticised the military’s competence and the government’s secrecy (Tables 3–6).
- Their reading (p. 328). The audience “is more tolerant of emergency measures to the extent that they are implemented with adequate communication and transparency”; latent anxiety about North Korea “is expressed in degrees rather than in a binary manner” (p. 329).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Audiences exercise an ontological agency, maintaining routines, distinct from political agency | conceptual | pp. 309–315 |
| C2 | People in Gangneung outwardly ignored routine missile launches and military sites | weak to moderate: one afternoon, observed by chance, outward behaviour | pp. 317–320; fn. 57 |
| C3 | A disruptive malfunction under an embargo released expressions of fear of war and blame of government | moderate as a description of tweets | Tables 1–6; filtered on “war” and “North Korea” |
| C4 | Inaction lets securitisation reproduce itself, “thin” becoming “thick” | interpretive | pp. 314–315 |
| C5 | Accepting securitisation delegates the management of anxiety to elites | interpretive | pp. 312–313, 325–326 |
| C6 | Tolerance of emergency measures depends on communication and transparency | weak: inferred from tweet content | p. 328 |
Concepts
- Ontological agency: “exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption, including disruption caused by securitisation” (p. 307); ‘backstage’, against political agency’s ‘frontstage’ (pp. 313–314).
- Thin and thick securitisation (p. 315): one inviting contestation; one ignored or accepted because it fits routines.
- Latent anxiety: anxiety bracketed from attention by routine, activated by disruption (p. 313).
Connections
It extends the Copenhagen School’s audience (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, LIT-1499) with Giddens’s ontological security and the IR literature on it (Mitzen; Steele; Kinnvall; Rumelili), and the micro-moves approach of Solomon and Steele. It distinguishes ontological agency from psychological reactance (p. 311, fn. 30).
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-445 (protective regimes become self-maintaining). The claim
cites Ku and Finch in “What it does not say”: “Ku and Finch’s South
Korean case finds publics keeping ordinary routines against
anxiety-inducing security narratives.” The reading corrects that use.
- Corrects. The routines are kept against the anxiety, not against the narratives. The authors do not find publics resisting securitisation. They find publics ignoring it, which they say “may allow for the reproduction of securitising practices and the structure of securitisation” (p. 314), and they find latent anxiety under the calm. The case is not evidence that publics fail to internalize the threat framing. Its point is that they hold it latently and do not act on it while routines are intact.
- Supports, more than the claim says. Two of the paper’s arguments are the claim’s feedbacks seen from the audience. “Accepting securitisation is also a way for laypeople to delegate the task of managing their anxiety to political elites” (p. 312): the audience hands evaluation of the threat to the protective institution, which is the epistemic feedback. And routine inaction lets securitising moves “accrete to form a structure of securitisation” (p. 312) that is reproduced “knowingly or unknowingly, leading to the persistent reproduction of insecurity and hence anxiety” (p. 313): persistence without an audience’s active consent.
- Complicates. When the protective apparatus itself disrupted routines, the audience turned on it: blame of the military’s competence and of the embargo. Disruption by the protector is one way the claim’s lock-in can break. The authors read it as a demand for transparency (p. 328), not a rejection of the securitisation.
- The claim’s bullet should be redated and rewritten by the lead, not here.
- Filed as THEORY-898.
- CLAIM-446 (governance-maintained anxiety). An analogy at the social scale, the record’s not the paper’s. Bracketing by routine is avoidance of attention that keeps anxiety latent and the threat hypothesis untested; the audience’s delegation of anxiety management is authority given to a defensive institution. The paper gives no measure of either.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.
Limitations
- Illustration, not test. One afternoon observed by chance, and one night of tweets filtered on the very words that express the expected anxiety; the authors’ footnote concedes the filter excludes tweets on the same themes without both terms (p. 321, fn. 68).
- Inner states inferred from outward behaviour (fn. 57).
- Deleted tweets missing from the samples, as the authors note (p. 321, fn. 64).
- Selection of the two events is by circumstance; no comparison with disruption by something other than the protector.
- Inaction is read as ontological agency without an alternative test (habituation, low perceived risk), though the authors note media reports of “indifference” and “apathy” (p. 316).
Open questions
- Does routine inaction differ from habituation or low risk perception? Measures of latent anxiety (physiological or survey) in the same publics before and after disruption would tell.
- Does disruption by the protective apparatus weaken securitisation over time, or does criticism of competence demand more protection? A follow-up on South Korean attitudes after October 2022 would show which.