*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Dr Dimitris Skleparis is Lecturer in the Politics of Security at Newcastle University. His research is at the intersection between critical security studies and migration/refugee studies. Dr Skleparis is interested in how migration is governed, perceived, and experienced amid increasing insecurities. He focuses particularly on the dynamics between security discourse and practice and their human impact. He approaches these issues from an interdisciplinary, and mixed methods standpoint. He has published in a range of international peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to several edited volumes, research project reports, Op-Eds and policy briefs. Dr Skleparis is currently the Treasurer of the Greek Politics Specialist Group (GPSG) of the Political Studies Association (PSA).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I will turn this question on its head, and focus instead on important debates that have not taken place in one of my main research fields: critical security studies. The introduction of emergency measures that ensued the labelling of the spread of COVID-19 as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020, was instantly described as the ‘poster child for securitization’. Indeed, to many of us who are familiar with the concept and theory, everything that has unfolded since then instinctively felt like our intellectual ‘home turf’: the discursive construction of the virus as an existential threat through the use of war metaphors; the adoption of extraordinary measures to deal with the threat; and the othering/alienation of disobedient subjects (e.g. ‘Covidiots’; ‘anti-vaxxers’) and ‘suspect’ groups. We had all the necessary conceptual and analytical tools that would allow us to critically engage with each and every one of the aforementioned processes. A new ‘Golden Age’ for the field of critical security studies seemed possible. And, yet, it didn’t come. Why?

Having first-hand experience of three crises in the last decade (i.e., Greece’s economic and sociopolitical crisis; Lesbos’s humanitarian crisis; and a global pandemic) has taught me one thing: aiming at a moving target is very challenging for researchers. Questions that might seem very important at one particular juncture of a crisis, may end up being of a lesser significance at another. In other words, critical engagement with what is happening around us in ‘real time’ is a tough job. This has been even more so the case in the context of the pandemic. The Copenhagen School postulates that securitizations normally follow politicizations. However, things have played out the other way around in COVID-19 times. In the UK, for example, social-distancing – the flagship of adopted extraordinary measures in the fight against the virus – was politically uncontested at the early stages of the crisis. Yet, it wasn’t long before all public health measures became politicized and highly polarizing for the duration of this pandemic. Against this background, a researcher’s critical engagement with emergency politics runs the risk of placing them in the eyes of their colleagues, students and the general public in ‘one or the other camp’ (not in the Agambenian sense). Within this context, and given how fresh the memory of an academic debate spiraling into Twitter gutter talk was, many of us consciously ducked contentious questions altogether. Others went for the ‘low-hanging fruits’, i.e., engaged with the broader subject, but avoided addressing the ‘elephant in the room’. And very few of us, such as political theorist Giorgio Agamben, opted for a head-on confrontation with the matter. Arguing against the establishment of a state of exception on the pretext of an ‘alleged epidemic’, his series of online interventions instilled a fear of ‘getting cancelled’ into PhD students who use his theories in their theses. But, in my view, there’s another, even more important, reason why a ‘Golden Age’ for my generation of critical security studies scholars didn’t dawn: our theories have ‘blind spots’. They always had, yet, this pandemic shed an even brighter light on them. I can barely scratch the surface of what I’d like to say in the next paragraph.

The main ‘blind spot’ I’m referring to, emanates from a strong normative conviction in securitization theory: the study of intersubjective threat construction is more valuable than contemplating the existence or not of real threats. Indeed, according to the Copenhagen School, it’s not the scholar’s job to ‘peek behind [threat construction] to decide whether [something] is really a threat’. This is not to say that real threats don’t exist, though, as Waever has clarified elsewhere. This creates an obvious challenge to the researcher who wants to critically engage, in ‘real-time’, with pandemic securitization processes: how meaningful can the study of threat construction be, in the face of an existential threat that claims, directly and indirectly, people’s lives en masse? And, given that securitization is, essentially, a normative theory, what could be the ‘key takeaway’ of such a study? That political elites should avoid the securitization of the pandemic? Clearly, such a normative take would be irresponsible and in clash with scientific evidence. Instead, consider: the virus always posed differential levels of threat to different groups of people; the virus’s mutating nature, which also comes into play in this; scientific advancements (e.g., vaccines), which can effectively mediate levels of threat; as well as the possibility that the ‘cure’ (i.e., prolonged implementation of emergency measures) may end up being worse than the disease itself in the long run. Against this........

© E-International