Publications of Roe, P.

Actor, Audience(s) and Emergency Measures: Securitization and the UK's Decision to Invade Iraq

The concept of securitization has produced a considerable amount of debate over the meaning of security. However, far less attention has been paid to the role of audiences and their relationship to actors in the securitization process. Informed by the work of Thierry Balzacq (2005), and through analysis of the decision of the UK government to join with the USA in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in this article I show that although the general public can indeed play a valuable role in providing an actor with `moral' support concerning the `securityness' of an issue, more crucial, however, is the `formal' support provided by parliament concerning the `extraordinaryness' of the means necessary to deal with it. My argument is thus that securitization can in this way be seen as a distinct two-stage process marked by a `stage of identification' and a `stage of mobilization'.

Reconstructing Identities or Managing Minorities? Desecuritizing Minority Rights: A Response to Jutila

A response by Paul Roe to Matti Jutila's essay about his article "Securitization and Minority Rights: Conditions of Desecuritization," which appeared in the 2004 issue of "Security Dialogue," is presented. According to Roe, to desecuritize minority rights is to undo what has been done, which is, to allow minority self-organization, to put a stop to secret police surveillance and to re-legalize those particular sorts of demands.

Securitization and Minority Rights: Conditions of Desecuritization

This article assesses the possibilities for applying the concept of desecuritization to the area of minority rights. The major conclusion is that a Jef Huysmans-type deconstructivist strategy, while perhaps conducive to the desecuritization of the individual migrant, is not possible in the case of the collective minority; indeed, the desecuritization of minority rights may well be 'logically impossible' in certain cases. The article seeks to show how, in seeking to maintain their collective identity, minorities are necessarily imbued with a certain 'societal security-ness', which, if removed, results in the death of the minority as a distinctive group. The article therefore suggests that 'managing' securitized issues might be more profitable than trying to 'transform' them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misperception and Ethnic Conflict: Transylvania's Societal Security Dilemma

This article proposes that instances of ethnic violence can profitably be viewed through the concept of a societal security dilemma. It begins by arguing that the explanatory value of the security dilemma might be enhanced by shifting the focus of the concept away from its traditional concern with state sovereignty to an emphasis on ethnic identity instead. This is proposed through combining the security dilemma with the Copenhagen School's notion of societal security. In this way, the article claims that the resultant societal security dilemma is able to capture certain dynamics between ethnic groups that its traditional variant necessarily misses. The article then goes on to show how ethnic violence between Hungarians and Romanians in the Transylvanian city of Tirgu Mures can be partly explained by the societal security dilemma concept. It argues that many Romanians were mobilized on the basis of the misperception that Hungarian societal security requirements necessarily threatened their own identity. The article concludes that misperceptions on both sides were enabled by the weakness of the Romanian State; that insufficient mechanisms existed for the clear, unambiguous signalling of intentions.

The Intrastate Security Dilemma: Ethnic Conflict as a 'Tragedy'?

This article seeks to pull together the main body of work on the security dilemma and that concerning the relatively recent move in international relations in reconceptualizing and operationalizing the concept away from its usual interstate setting. First, it will discuss some of the ways in which the security dilemma has been defined. Second, it will concentrate on the work of those writers who have conceived of 'ethnic security dilemmas' and 'insecurity dilemmas' occurring at the intrastate level. Third, it will suggest some possible answers to the problems that this body of writing has raised. Fourth, it will both introduce and further develop the concept of the '(inter-) societal security dilemma' as a possibly more productive way of explaining the outbreak of ethnic violence. Moreover, throughout the article the question as to if and when ethnic conflict can be seen as a 'tragedy' in Herbert Butterfield's sense of the word will be addressed.