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THEORY-898: In Gangneung, South Korea, in 2022, people the authors observed by chance in beach-front cafés outwardly ignored routine retaliatory missile launches and military sites on the beach, while a missile malfunction at night under a news embargo was followed by tweets voicing fear of war with North Korea and blaming the government and military

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StatusActive
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Tagssociety-and-governance, emotion-and-affect
SourceLIT-1478 — Routines die hard: Ontological security and audience agency in securitisation
SupportsCLAIM-445 — A protective regime, in a person, an institution or a system of states, becomes self-maintaining when the interventions it authorizes shift the evidence used to judge its necessity, the authority and resources of those who judge it, the capacities of its constituents or the threat environment itself in ways that favour its continuation; this can happen when the original threat was real and the first protection apt, and it is a failure only where the regime has become less responsive to evidence that it is no longer needed
Cited as “extends” byTHEORY-1202 — A securitised public keeps its routines by not attending to routine security practices, which keeps an anxiety about the threat latent rather than absent; when the security apparatus itself disrupts those routines the anxiety surfaces, and with it blame of the apparatus

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Source

Ku & Finch, LIT-1478, Review of International Studies 52(2): 306–331, read in full in NOTE-1133: pp. 315–329, Tables 1–7. The supplementary materials were not read.

What was actually shown

  • Routine (25 May 2022). Launches every ten minutes for an hour, loud and visible from beach cafés; most patrons “continued conversations or took in the sights while outwardly ignoring” the launches (pp. 319–320). Of 19,630 unique tweets that day matching the keywords, “only 23 unique tweets mentioned war” (p. 325).
  • Disruption (4–5 October 2022). A Hyunmoo-2 malfunctioned and exploded on the airbase; the news was embargoed until a 7:00 am press conference. Tweets filtered for “war” and “North Korea” asked whether war had broken out, then criticised the military’s competence and the government’s secrecy (Tables 1–6).

What could have come out otherwise: a securitised public living beside an airbase could have reacted visibly to routine launches. It did not, while the reaction to the malfunction shows the threat framing was available.

What this does not say

  • That publics resist securitisation. The authors argue the opposite: inaction “may allow for the reproduction of securitising practices and the structure of securitisation” (p. 314).
  • That the calm reflects inner calm. “While we cannot access people’s internal reactions, they seemed unfazed based on their outward behaviour” (p. 317, fn. 57).
  • That latent anxiety was measured. It is inferred from the reaction to disruption, in tweets selected on words that express it.
  • That this is ontological agency rather than habituation. No alternative is tested.

Connections

  • CLAIM-445. Corrects its “What it does not say” bullet: the routines are kept against anxiety, not against the security narrative, and the authors read routine inaction as letting securitisation persist. Their delegation argument (p. 312), that accepting securitisation hands the management of anxiety to elites, is the claim’s epistemic feedback from the audience’s side. Disruption by the protector, followed by blame of it, is one observed way such a regime is questioned.
  • CLAIM-446. The record’s analogy: routine as avoidance of attention that keeps anxiety latent and its object unexamined.

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