The Environmental in Security

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The Environmental in Security

Securitization Theory and Russian Environmental Security Policy

Erdem Lamazhapov

Master Thesis

Peace and Conflict Studies 45 credits

Department of Political Science Faculty of Social Sciences

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

June 2020

Word Count: 34,939

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The Environmental in Security:

Securitization Theory and Russian

Environmental Security Policy

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The Environmental in Security: Securitization Theory and Russian Environmental Security Policy

Erdem Lamazhapov http://www.duo.uio.no/

Trykk: Fridtjof Nansens Instituttet

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Abstract

Environmental security is one of the non-military aspects of security in international security studies, making it both misunderstood and mysterious in its ideational content. This thesis presents an application of the securitization theory in the context of securitization of the environment in Russia. Applying quantitative document stream and relative power methods and qualitative methods of discourse analysis, I draw upon a database of Russian legal and administrative documents from 1987 to 2019. Finding the core assumptions of the

securitization theory correct, this thesis challenges it in regards to the possibility of distinction that security is an area beyond politics, whereas safety is a part of normal politics. Providing insight into the intentions and moves of key securitizing actors, as well as referent objects of security, this thesis concentrates on both international and domestic aspects of environmental securitization in Russia. Designed as an embedded mixed-methods case study, the thesis confirms its findings in subunit analysis of securitization of the environment by Russia during the NATO Operation Allied Force and in the Arctic. The thesis finds that it is difficult to characterize security as being beyond politics, as well as desecuritization in the Russian context is improbable. Concluding the discussion of securitization in the Russian context, the thesis reflects on the role of security and language in identity construction.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am gratefully indebted to Research Professor Elana Wilson Rowe of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs for her invaluable guidance and wisdom, as well as great patience as a mentor. Steering me in the creative process, she has always kept the metaphorical doors of her office open even in these troubled times.

I would also like to thank everyone at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, especially my academic contact Research Director Pål Wilter Skedsmo and Research Professor Arild Moe, whose academic friendship was extremely valuable for this thesis.

Finally, I feel eternal gratitude to my family, both in health and in memory, without whose unconditional support this accomplishment would have been impossible.

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List of Abbreviations

AMEC Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation CIS Commonwealth of Independent States CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union CSTO Collective Security Treaty Organization

EAEC Eurasian Economic Commission

EAEU Eurasian Economic Union

ECHR European Court of Human Rights

EMERCOM Ministry of the Russian Federation for Affairs for Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters ENMOD Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of

Environmental Modification Techniques EurAsEC Eurasian Economic Community

FRY Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

GKChP State Committee on the State of Emergency Goskomprirody /

Goskomecology

State Committee of the Russian Federation for Environmental Protection

Goskomsever State Committee of the Russian Federation for Northern Affairs

GOST Inter-State Standard

ICTY International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991

ISS International Security Studies MNR Ministry of Natural Resources NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

OAF Operation Allied Force

OSCE Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe RSFSR Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic

SCO Shanghai Cooperation Organization SCRF Security Council of Russian Federation SOZD Legislation Support System

SSR Soviet Socialist Republic

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UN United Nations

U.N. GAOR United Nations General Assembly Official Records

US United States of America

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WTO Warsaw Treaty Organization

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1 Introduction

Security is an overriding priority for all nations. It is also fundamental for both disarmament and development.

Security consists of not only military, but also political, economic, social, humanitarian and human rights and ecological aspects.

— Report of the International Conference on the Relationship between Disarmament and Development, 1987

Russia’s former minister for environmental protection Viktor Danilov-Danilian compared human civilization to a venture enterprise, a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. Protected by the civilizational armor of technology, humans minimized the threats from natural disasters and pandemics. During the birth of the modern nation-state, political, economic, and social primary risks were primary for humans. As the modern concept of security developed, people were concerned with intentional threats, posed by other humans. In the XX century, however, humanity maxed out on the permissible disturbance of the ecosystem, which led to ever- increasing environmental risk, an insecurity, which became unfamiliar to humans. This served as the impetus for generating the concept of environmental security – an ideal state of affairs, in which environmental risks are minimized. Nevertheless, heuristically, security and threat construction rely upon intentionality of threats. Environmental security threats, on the other hand, do not have to be intentional – the worst kinds of environmental disasters were unintentional and, therefore, ensuring environmental security requires a different state response.

The Copenhagen School securitization theory is one of the most influential theories that expand security beyond the military sector in international security studies, allowing to conceptualize security in terms of a variety of referent objects: state, environment, humans.

Based upon advancement in the philosophy of language, it provided a consistent theoretical framework for analyzing both military and non-military aspects of security, which is, to its theorists, a realm beyond the political process. Security in Copenhagen School is contradistinguished not only with threat or insecurity, but also with safety, which is a part of normal politics; a distinction rooted in English semantics.

With the goal to reveal the “environmental” component in security, this thesis shall critically assess the Copenhagen theory in its application to the environment, using the case of securitization of the environment in Russia. Towards this end, it is guided by the following interlinked research questions – one conceptual, the other empirical:

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1. How does the distinction between security and safety affect the criteria for deciding whether an event is an instance of securitization, and the processes of threat construction, securitization, and desecuritization?

2. How did the environment become securitized in Russia, where did this securitization originate from, what kind of threats were used, and what role does the securitization play in the process of identity construction?

Answering the conceptual question requires resolving the analytical one, i.e. adjudicating whether Russian appellation to environmental security was a valid instance of securitization and scrutinizing its development.

This thesis is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 2 will consider the concept of environmental security, paying special attention to how it is presented in the Copenhagen School. Chapter 3 will describe the methods employed in this study: namely, quantitative methods employed in the first halves of Chapters 5 and 6, and discourse analysis employed in Chapters 4-7. Chapter 4 will examine the concept of security in Russia, as well as the first phase of development of environmental security. Chapter 5 revisits environmental security in the Russian foreign policy image, examining where it originated and how it spread internationally (from Russia, to Russia or both). Chapter 6 examines environmental security in the Russian domestic discourse in the process of domestic identity construction. Chapter 7 will summarize these findings, applying them to two concise cases: the securitization of the environment during the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia and in the securitization of the environment of the Russian Arctic. Finally, Chapter 8 will conclude this thesis, appraising the application of the securitization theory within the environmental sector to a non-Anglophone country with an independent security tradition. As the thesis shows, I find that Russian use of environmental security, while a case of securitization, is not an extraordinary tool beyond politics. These findings will be further discussed in the conclusion.

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2 Securitization Theory and the Environment

Environmental security is one of those poisonous concepts, which cloud the mind.

— Wolfgang Sachs

2.1 The Meaning of Environmental Security

There is no single definition of environmental security, neither among security theorists nor among security practitioners. A lot of the criticism wielded against the study of environmental security focuses on the fact that there is little agreement on what the term actually means. In fact, it is often claimed that even the policy practitioners themselves do not completely understand the full implications of the term as well. Brinchuk (2003), for example, finds no difference between environmental protection and environmental security and bemoans application of such a vague term.

Thus, finding a definition of environmental security is an important task that needs to be accomplished in the course of this inquiry. It is interesting to note that the philosophical foundation of the Copenhagen theory, namely Austinian philosophy, finds it is pointless to analyze the meaning of any term in isolation from its contextuality. In an essay titled The Meaning of a Word, Austin (1979) argues against “the supposed ideal language” and argues that “actual language” has little respect for our semantical assumptions. The meaning is contained in a vague implicit semantic convention, rather than a rigid nuclear nominalist definition. My definition, therefore, will go beyond the textbook definitions, aspiring to be a living one, based upon theory and practice of environmental security lifted from the Russian empirical material.

Semantically, the term environmental security is a combination of two ontologically distinct terms, environment and security (Barnett, 2001, p. 1). Thus, the definition of environmental security needs to cover two distinct bases: in what way environmental security refers to the environment, and in what way it constitutes security. Grasping the nebulous relationship between these two is a task that rests on the shoulders of the security analyst.

Generally speaking, the evolution of modern security studies has resulted in focusing on aspects of security, rather than on preoccupying with defining the term as a noumenon. These aspects

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include: actor (who secures?), referent object (whose security?), functional scope (security where?), threats (security from what?), and strategy (security by what means?) (Buzan &

Hansen, 2009, p. 9-10).

From the point of view of traditional security scholars, environmental security is somewhat of an oxymoron. “Traditional” security studies is an extremely broad term, as it includes schools that fall on different sides of both the rationalism/reflectivism debate and utilizes both positivist and post-positivist epistemologies. As such, the distinction between traditional and unconventional security studies is only useful in terms of the traditionalist- critical debate. Although heterogeneous in character, traditional security analysts generally place the emphasis on systemic issues and explain the behavior of collectivities as primary units of analysis. As such, security is concerned only with power politics, which is clearly differentiated from other state interest areas, including economics or the environment. Besides this shared limitation of the functional scope of security to the military and shared interest in the collectivities as a unit of analysis, “traditional” schools of security studies cannot be said to constitute a coherent group, spanning from realist and neorealist approaches to liberal and constructivist ones.

A second heterogeneous group that finds itself on the other side of the traditionalist- critical debate is critical security studies. Although there does not exist clear boundaries of the critical security studies, this group can be loosely characterized by its interest in the individual or the global community as the referent object of security, as well as the way security discourses play a role in social construction (Buzan & Hansen, 2009, pp. 35-37). From the epistemological perspective, this group is mostly post-positivist, thus Critical security approaches often add a normative dimension to security practices, speculating about how environmental security should be, rather than about how it is practiced (Floyd & Matthew, pp. 22).

Many of the research groups, however, fall into neither category. Such is, for example, the Copenhagen School, which posits itself “explicitly… as a middle position between traditionalist state-centrism on the one hand and equally traditional peace research’s and critical security studies’ calls for ‘individual’ or ‘global security’ on the other” (Buzan & Hansen, 2009, p. 213). Securitization theory builds upon John L. Austin’s and Searle’s philosophical contributions in the form of the speech act theory, applying it to international security studies.

Security, in this sense, is understood as a performative utterance, a speech act that takes place under certain “felicity conditions” in a process called securitization. The Copenhagen School

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5 hypothesizes that security is therefore an epipolitical phenomenon that transcends the rules of the political game and lifts political issues onto a qualitatively new level, outside the realm of normalcy. This type of move is otherwise known as a securitizing move, whereas the issue is presented as if it were beyond the rules of the political game by virtue of its importance. An issue being securitized, therefore, is positioned in terms of an existential threat that its disruption presents and the extraordinary measures that solving this existential threat calls for (Buzan et al., 1998).

Table 1. Different Perspectives in International Security Studies

Traditionalist Versatile Critical

ISS perspectives (Neo)realism Strategic Studies Liberalism Constructivism

Copenhagen School Peace Research

Welsh School Feminist Human Security Referent object State or collectivities State, collectivities,

society, the environment

Individual, globe

Sector Violent conflict

“Resource wars”

Power dynamics

Desecuritization Conflict resolution

Ecological security

Threats Primarily external External and internal External and internal

Approach Descriptive Descriptive

Normative

Normative Epistemology Primarily positivist

Primarily rationalist

Mixed

Soft-positivist

Post-positivist Reflectivist

Although the Copenhagen School is mostly informed by post-positivist epistemologies, since it necessitates a distinction between the security analyst and the securitizing actor, it is, strictly speaking, neither positivist, nor post-positivist, employing an epistemological approach, which Buzan and Hansen (2009) call speech act analysis. This approach is formed under the influence of the 20^th-century philosophers of language, primarily Austin, Searle, Derrida, Schmitt, and others (Floyd, 2010, p. 9).

Similarly to the critical school, the securitization theory also incorporates a normative aspect: securitization is undesirable because it implies a certain political immediacy to the security issue, thus bringing it outside of the realm of normality. This is in a way, an admittance

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that the normal political process has failed. Securitization, in this respect, is a political move that is always undesirable (Buzan et al., 1998, p. 29).

When it comes to environmental security, Buzan et al. (1998) recognize that the environmental security agenda is driven by a set of actors, which is quite different from the traditional security sectors. In particular, they underline the importance of the transnational scientific “epistemic communities” in shaping the agenda for environmental security. At the same time, state actors play a decisive role in politicization of the scientific events. Thus, the role of scientific actors in determining the ideational content of the environmental security agenda is stymied significantly by political institutions, which are guided more by short-term events and the “presumed urgency” of a particular issue. As such, securitizing moves do not always correspond to scientifically viable threats (e.g. the myth of overpopulation, see Hough, 2014, p. 45), and not all environmental threats make it to the security agenda (e.g. climate change).

Widening the field of security studies for the Copenhagen School does not come simply in the form of opening the discipline to new “sectors” of security. An important expansion to the previous theoretical framework was the inclusion of the multiple referent objects for securitization. Among others, the Copenhagen School allowed, inter alia, for the inclusion of social groups and stateless nations (societal security), the ecosystem at large, etc. as valid objects of securitization.

2.1.1 The Copenhagen School as a Theoretical Basis

What makes the Copenhagen School an interesting perspective for the analysis of environmental security is not the way that they approach the environment as a separate field of security studies. Rather, it is the securitization theory itself and the way that the Copenhagen School is able to approach security as “a self-referential practice”, thus employing the post- positivist methodology in the field of environmental security. Thus, an analyst can empty security of its meaning, focusing on the rheme (discourse/process) of security instead of its eidos (form). The phenomenon of security is thus analyzed not as how it is or what it is (eidos), but as a process or a discourse of its manifestation (rheme). As such, it makes it possible for the security analyst to take security in all of its forms, in the way it is conceived in the corridors of the securitizing actors. In the words of Buzan et al. (1998, p. 25), “the exact definition and

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7 criteria of securitization is constituted by the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political threats.”

Discourse, or process, is an important prerequisite for securitization in the classical securitization theory. Thus, securitization theory makes a distinction between a mere securitizing move, which is introducing something as a threat vis-à-vis the chose referent object, and securitization, which requires acceptance of such securitizing move by a target audience.

This requirement for acceptance from the audience serves as a sieve that allows the analyst to differentiate between securitizing moves that are not accepted, and therefore do not constitute successful securitization, and legitimate cases of securitization.

At the same time, the demand for acceptance by the audiences is not the only significance filter that needs to be applied. Instances of securitization can also be discussed in terms of their scale as the gravity of threat or the importance of the referent object. As such, some threats, perceived as more urgent, will make a better case for securitization, which entails giving the issue the priority of a security issue and lifts it to the suprapolitical realm.

2.1.2 Philosophical Foundations of the Securitization Theory

Securitization theory is mainly based on the philosophical ideas of speech act theorists, especially Austin’s performative utterances. Performatives are such utterances that constitute an action by the means of speech, whereby an act is performed by pronouncing the words, where one can say that an actor “is doing something rather than merely saying something”

(Austin, 1979, p. 235). Such performative utterances can be further classified into three groups:

locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is the most basic form of a speech act and constitutes a certain phatic act that connects and identifies the meaning of the words, as in the following locution: “He said to me ‘Shoot her!’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and referring by ‘her’ to her” (Austin, 1967, p.101). The illocutionary act is the performative content of the locution, which in the previous example would constitute a request: “He urged me to shoot her” (Austin, 1967, p.101). Finally, since the actual intention behind the speech act is to produce a certain outcome, or a “consequential effect,” which might not match the content of either locution or illocution, Austin distinguishes additionally a perlocutionary act.

Continuing this example, a perlocutionary act would be “He persuaded me to shoot her,” thus achieving the perlocutionary effect of persuading the listener (Austin, 1967, p.101).

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Performative utterances, particularly illocutionary acts, form the backbone of securitization theory (Floyd, 2010, p. 12). Securitization in itself follows illocutionary logic: by performing a securitizing move, the securitizing actor is not merely seeking to establish the meaning and the logical relationship between the words, rather the speech act carries a certain illocutionary meaning, namely establishing a certain threat as a security issue and thus bringing it outside of the realm of normal politics. In this too, however, securitization must follow the logic outlined by Austin, since some securitizing moves will be successful and some not.

Indeed, a performative utterance will only be meaningful under certain circumstances, as simply shouting “I will name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin” would not produce the appropriate effect if it were done by a “low type” not possessing the right to do so (Austin, 1979, pp. 239- 240). Austin christens these appropriate circumstances as felicity conditions, of which there are six: 1) that there is a conventional procedure, specifying “uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances;” 2) that the particular circumstances and the particular persons are appropriate for the particular procedure; 3) that the procedure is executed correctly and; 4) completely; 5) that the participants are sincere in performing the procedure and; 6) that the participants “must actually so conduct themselves subsequently” (Austin, 1967, pp. 14-15). If the felicity conditions were not satisfied, such act would be considered infelicitous. Moreover, if the conditions one to four are not satisfied, such act would be considered also void (Floyd, 2010, pp. 12-15) Hence, the performative utterance by our “low type” is a misinvocation, because he possesses no power of naming a ship, a misexecution if he were to break the conventional procedure, and an insincerity, if he referred to the ship as Queen Elizabeth regardless of the name previously given.

In securitization theory, these felicity conditions are simplified to three “facilitating conditions”:

1) The demand internal to the speech act of following the grammar of security, 2) the social conditions regarding the position of authority for the securitizing actor, - that is, the relationship between speaker and audience and thereby the likelihood of the audience accepting the claims made in a securitizing attempt, and 3) features of the alleged threats that either facilitate of impede securitization. (Buzan et al., 1998, p. 33)

Conditions one and two are clearly drawn from the first four felicity conditions, whereas condition three is a reformulation of the conditions five and six from the perspective of threat.

Yet, these facilitating conditions are not a perfect reflection of Austin’s felicity conditions, since Austin’s first four felicity conditions do not make a mention of how the audience accepts the performative utterance.

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9 2.1.3 Modifications of the Classical Securitization Theory

Ever since the securitization theory was developed by its authors, several important theoretical contributions proposed significant adjustments to some of its tenets, especially when these positions proved to be hard to operationalize. Balzacq (2019) structures this debate along three principal lines: whether securitization is performative (subjective) or audience-oriented (intersubjective), whether securitization takes the issue beyond the realm of normal politics, and whether securitization can be analyzed as a game of legitimacy.

The question of whether securitization theory should focus more on the subjective or inter-subjective view is entrenched in the facilitating conditions of securitization. On the one hand, the Copenhagen School postulates that no securitization is possible if a securitizing move is not accepted by the audience, which stems from the felicity conditions. On the other hand, the identity of the audience is not entirely clear; what and who constitutes a legitimate audience.

Emphasis on the audience comes in the securitization theory as an important instrument of ascertaining whether securitization took place because it is inter-subjective, the analyst is able to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful cases of securitization. Such a prerequisite is a direct reformulation of Austin’s felicity conditions. At the same time, it serves a different purpose: when a security analyst writes or speaks security, she “executes a speech act, this speech act is successful if the problem raised becomes recognized as a security problem”

(Floyd, 2010, p. 47). Thus, the demand for the recognition of a securitizing move by a certain audience makes it possible to differentiate between different actors and their agency to perform a securitizing move. Balzacq (2019) formulates it as a dichotomy between performativity and intersubjectivity: a speech act is a performative within itself and thus a self-referential instance of securitization, yet it is not given a title of security since that would assume that security is a speech act; a conclusion that would put the analyst in hot water from the standpoint of external validity. An uneasy balance between these two is found when the Copenhagen School makes a distinction between securitizing move and securitization, but it is also problematic, since it makes introduces tension within the theory, while audience acceptance is rarely demonstrated and is often assumed.

Furthermore, finding the audience proves to be problematic, since it is not entirely clear what this relevant audience is. Ironically, Buzan et al. (1998, p. 41) mention this important theoretical concept only in passing, defining it as “those the securitizing act attempts to convince to accept exceptional procedures because of the specific security nature of some

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issue.” To a certain extent, this is deliberate, as specificity introduces excessive rigidity, which would not allow the theory to adapt to the specific political circumstances of a specific issue (Wæver, 1997, p.3). Balzacq (2019, p. 336) attributes this to the fact that security audiences are often invisible to public scrutiny, yet this lack of transparency does not justify denying the existence of such audiences. At the same time, Floyd (2010, pp. 50-52) chooses more simplistic definitions of an audience, equating it to the electorate.

Beyond the question of audience, the practice of acceptance of a securitizing move is also implicit, since the audiences rarely issue explicit notes of approval. These lines of communication are defined as discursive and intersubjective since they require audiential assent. Yet, since they are implicit, this is rather difficult to operationalize, which led some to omit this step altogether (Floyd, 2010; Sjöstedt, 2008; Eriksson, 2000). Moreover, these processes often take non-verbal forms, such as in the form of meaningful silence (Hansen, 2000). Some have sought to analyze this in terms of government practice (Hansen, 2013;

Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2002). Since only a successful securitization would enter government practice, it can serve a useful proxy for audience acceptance. Building upon this, Balzacq (2019) proposes that instead, one should examine “regimes of practices” within the sociological mechanism of securitization, reconciling both verbal and non-verbal security practices.

Analyzing this in terms of government practice, however, is problematic from a different standpoint: routines are hardly extraordinary measures.

Thus, a second issue is a question of whether securitization entails a break with the realm of normalcy in politics. Buzan et al. (1998, p. 23) emphasize that security “frames the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics,” which allows them to introduce a normative dimension to securitization. An issue travels the path from being “non-politicized”

(outside public debate and government attention) to being “politicized” (as being recognized as a run-of-the-mill issue within normal political processes) to being “securitized” (at which stage it is so urgent it is dealt with by employing extraordinary means, which may violate rules of the regular political game) (Buzan & Hansen, 2009, p. 214). Bigo (2002) demonstrates that routine bureaucratic practices, rather than emergencies, form the backbone of the work for security professionals. This has lead Floyd to adopt a state-centric view that these routines are in themselves political in the sense of being conducted by the polity, yet they do not go beyond the normal politics (Floyd, 2010, pp. 57-58). Furthermore, since these security practices are still conducted by the state, the normative judgment of the “extraordinarity” of securitization is

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11 thereby extended to these security practices. This, however, does not appear entirely convincing: not only does this approach remove the securitizing aspect of verbal utterances; it also gives the polity unilateral control over the securitization process, something that runs contrary to Austin’s theory and that the Copenhagen School carefully attempted to avoid.

Rather, it is more useful to conceptualize securitization as a practice within the ordinary political process, but one that deals with extraordinary issues. Thus, as Balzacq (2019, p. 343) expresses it, “securitization’s outcomes are numerous, unpredictable, and non-linear.”

Indeed, Buzan et al. (1998, pp. 27-28) themselves argue that securitization can be

“institutionalized.” This is a situation, where “states have long endured threats… and in response have built up standing bureaucracies, procedures, and military establishments to deal with those threats. Although such a procedure may seem to reduce security to a species of normal politics, it does not do so.”

2.2 Towards Agent-relative Analysis of Security

The first section roughly outlined the points of contention between the critical and traditionalist schools in security studies. Borrowing an example from Buzan and Hansen (2009, p. 44), traditional security scholars disagree that HIV/AIDS, while detrimental to human well-being, economy, and society, can be considered a threat to security in the same way that a military incursion would. However, it is not impossible to imagine a military conflict to have far lesser loss of life, economic and societal implications than pandemics or natural disasters. Indeed, Farber (2009, pp. 1075-1076) notes that Katrina and 9/11 are scalable in terms of magnitude, loss of life, and property damage, while the effects of climate change would be insurmountably greater.

In the English language, this contention is complicated by the fact that some things are considered security issues, while others are safety issues. The distinction between security and safety is summarized by Idsø and Jakobsen (2000, quoted in Albrechtsen, 2003) in the following manner: “Safety is protection against random incidents. Random incidents are unwanted incidents that happen because of one or more coincidences. Security is protection against intended incidents. Wanted incidents happen due to a result of deliberate and planned act.”¹

1 Ironically, the French branch of the multinational Securitas security services company had to similarly defend the necessity of their services: “La sécurité désigne les moyens - humains, techniques et organisationnels - de

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Yet, few languages actually make a distinction between security and safety (at least in the same way that English does), with a notable exception of East Asian languages (where 安全 safety and 安保 security). One is pressed to find European languages that do: it is contested whether French makes the same distinction², while German Sicherheit, Italian sicurezza, Norwegian sikkerhet, Spanish seguridad omit the distinction altogether (Hamilton, 2016, p.

186). In fact, the legitimacy of this distinction even in English is contested, consider e.g.

Hamilton (2016, p. 186), noting that “safety denotes the concrete fact of being removed from danger, whereas security merely denotes the presumption that one is safe, whether this be true or not.” Indeed, Albrechtesen (2003) concludes, “the differences between security and safety are not remarkable.” Additionally, one can think of scores of synonyms that convey similar meanings in any language, like English, Russian and Norwegian surety (уверенность, trygghet), readiness (готовность, beredskap) or protectedness (защищённость, beskyttethet).

In defining security as issues taken “out of the realm of normal politics,” the Copenhagen School attempts to salvage the security-safety debate. It is perhaps this bewilderment with the problem of translation that led Wæver to accept that security “has a specific meaning only within a specific social context” (Lipschutz, 2003, p. 10). The direction that the Copenhagen School takes on this matter is adding a certain degree of normativity to security. Considering environmental security, Buzan and Wæver (2003, pp. 64-65) argue that attaching the label of security tends to evoke “us vs. them” mentality and, due to its defensive logic, is perilous. Buzan (1992, p. 25) recommends substituting the security perspective for a more solution-driven “process-type” remedy. After all, environmental problems are rarely intentional, and Buzan and Wæver think it ought not to be a security issue (Floyd, 2010, p. 46).

Yet, since environmental security as a concept exists in the world, they feel compelled to include it in their analysis.

To some readers, perhaps, this might justly appear to be counterintuitive. For example, if the reader is convinced that environmental problems are serious, deserve undivided government attention, and urgent action, calling for environmental security would be a reflection of the gravity and immediacy of the issue. Striving to tone down this normative

prévention et d’intervention contre les risques à caractère accidentel… La sûreté désigne l’ensemble des moyens dédiés à la prévention des actes de malveillance. Ces actes, par définition volontaires, ont pour finalité le profit et/ou l’intention de nuire.”

2 Some dictionaries define La Sécurité as safety and La Sûreté as protectedness.

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13 reprehensibility of securitization, Floyd (2010) divides the outcomes of desecuritization into politicization (when the issue remains on the agenda) and depoliticization (when the issue disappears from the agenda too). Thus, treating the environment like any other political problem without attaching a security label is morally good, while striking it altogether is morally bad because it hinders solving the problem.

This, however, only takes the problem one level down, and is still inherently Anglo- centric, as it assumes that the political instrumentarium of any decision-maker includes the terms security and safety. Indeed, I believe that this does not hold true even to English-speakers, who are hardly in agreement on the definition of either term. Thus, a critique of securitization is at the same time a critique of “safeticization.” Why is securitization morally questionable, but analyzing the same issue under the lens of public safety is not?

I posit that this moral critique of securitization is misguided not because securitization is inherently morally good, but rather because it is mistargeted. Securitization can beget “us vs.

them” mentality because modern humans (which, regrettably, encompass even security studies theorists) are heuristically conditioned to allocate blame.³ The modern system of criminal justice, which presumes free will and heavily relies on the motive of an individual in determining appropriate punishment, draws extensively from Kant’s retributivist ethics of justice (Scheid, 1983; Murphy, 1987). As such, it assumes that it is always possible to assess the magnitude of a crime and to find a commensurate punishment, both deterrent and retributive at the same time (Scheid, 1983). The right to punish rests on the fact that a crime is an

“intentional transgression,” and offenses of strict liability, which do not possess mens rea, are not subject to criminal liability. This is an example of the permeating influence of deontological ethics on the modus operandi of everyday life.

Deontological theories are normative theories, in which actions could be considered to be morally wrong, reprehensible, or permissible. Agent-centered deontological theories, in particular, emphasize the importance of intentionality in establishing human agency (Alexander

& Moore, 2016). Hence, the obsession with the intentionality of threats unnecessarily complicates the distinction between safety and security (which I argue is inherently Anglophone), a distinction to which the Copenhagen School is also partial.

3 On self-serving bias and allocation of blame, read, for example, Sedikides et al. (1998)

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The deontological spell can be remedied with a pinch of consequentialism: in analyzing threats, it is more useful to think about their magnitude, not the intention behind them.

Consequentialism argues, “what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future,”

i.e. its consequences (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2019). When thinking about what constitutes a security threat, therefore, a consequentialist security practitioner considers it against some arbitrary scale of danger: an issue is elevated to the rank of security issues when it is thought to be sufficiently threatening; the more immediate the danger, the greater it is securitized. This allows the analyst to keep a certain degree of normativity while avoiding descent into the blame- game of securitizing actors.

Floyd (2007) brilliantly attempted to stir the normative securitization in the direction of consequentialist analysis. Proposing positive and negative versions of securitization, she postulates that securitization can be considered positive then and only then when it maximizes genuine security. Floyd (2010) considers three criteria of the morality of securitization (just securitization): 1) objective existential threat; 2) legitimate referent object; 3) adequacy and appropriateness of a security response.

Although analytically captivating, this normative annex to the securitization theory suffers from the same flaw as its deontological counterpart: an attempt at objectivity. When considering objectiveness of a threat, legitimacy of a referent object, and adequacy of response the security analyst (or community) has to put herself into the shoes of a judge of moral character. This agent-neutral approach assumes that the security analyst can abstract to the observer’s perspective, but the Copenhagen School establishes that analysts, too, in “writing security” are “doing security.” Assuming that there is some genuine security that may be maximized, the security analyst would make herself vulnerable to the same criticism as utilitarianism.⁴

Thus, the version of consequentialism proposed here is agent-relative, i.e. in which observers must adopt a position of one of the actors or analyst’s own position (Sinnott- Armstrong, 2019). It is in this way more faithful to the original intersubjective nature of securitization proposed by the Copenhagen School. Since no security analyst can be credibly considered objective or free from biases, security threats and their securitization can be

4 Thus, in considering the magnitude, I by no means propose a utilitarian view on threats. Since threats are by nature subjective, in the infamous trolley problem the threat of being flattened by a trolley is equally dire for each of the workers, hence killing a single worker is no more permissible.

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15 measured in accordance with the security analyst’s own perception of threat. Thus, an attempt of threat construction using the myth of overpopulation, while threatening to and securitized by a neo-Malthusian, can be dismissed by an informed social scientist. At the same time, she might be inclined to accept the devastating threat of climate change, being both personally threatened by its consequences and realizing the magnitude of devastation it is capable of causing, as well as go insofar as to bemoan the lack of securitization of the climate by powers that be.

This account of the process of threat construction differs from the Copenhagen School, which conceives securitization as an intersubjective process. Since threats are agent-relative, and thus subjective, they can be considered as neither objective nor intersubjective. If the security analyst thinks that a threat is objective, this means that either they put themselves in the position of the actor or they accept the threat as objective from their own perspective. Floyd (2010, p. 428) defines objective existential threats only as threats that endanger the actor’s existence. However, even such existential threats can hardly be considered objective or intersubjective. They are not objective, because there is no objective measurement of threat (as in original Copenhagen presentation), and not intersubjective, because there is no dialogue between the parties in the process of their construction.

Yet, there is more explanatory power that eludes agent-relative threat construction. It is the dialogue between securitization claims described by Buzan et al. (1998) when they say that intersubjectivity lies somewhere between the perceived oversecuritization and undersecuritization of certain threats. “The way the securitization processes of one actor fit with the perceptions of others about what constitutes a ‘real’ threat matters in shaping the interplay of securities within the international system” (Buzan et al., 1998, pp. 30-31). Although this is true, securitization and threat construction do not lie in this shared space between actors, on the contrary, they still lie with the securitizing actors. Although threats and securitizations are judged by other actors, the decision to securitize ultimately lies with the securitizing actors themselves.

It is freeing to the security analyst to delegate the responsibility to identify threats to the actors themselves. Rather than looking for objective threats, or intersubjective threats between multitudes of actors, the analyst can just observe the threats as they have been constructed.

Arguably, this is how the Copenhagen School has been understood and applied in practice⁵.

5 See Wilkinson, 2007

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Indeed, such a version of threat construction is much more useful for the Russian context. Not only does the Russian language employ the same word (безопасность) for both security and safety, but also it has a somewhat different threat construction/securitization culture, which I shall address in the next chapter.

The above ties in with the issue of “normalcy,” i.e. deciding what is “normal politics”

is already a somewhat positivist concept. If, however, the same intersubjectivity is applied to the issue of normalcy, it becomes clear that most actors decide themselves what is normal politics in their polities. In most countries, the state of emergency would be most extraordinary.

Yet, in Egypt, where the state of emergency has been in effect almost continuously since 1967, it is part of normal politics. Buzan et al. (1998, p. 28) indeed acknowledge that “in well- developed states, armed forces and intelligence services are carefully separated from normal political life, and their use is subject to elaborate procedures of authorization. Where such separation is not in places, as in many weak states (Nigeria under Abacha, the USSR under Stalin) or in states mobilized for total war, much of normal politics is pushed into the security realm.” The distinction between normal politics and the epipolitical can be summarized as a semantic matrix (Table 2).

Table 2. Bilingual Semantic Matrix for Safety and Security in Russian and English

English Russian

Normal politics Safety Безопасность

Beyond politics Security Безопасность

The implication of normalcy and securitization can be tied in the classic “chicken or the egg” causality dilemma. Social anthropological evidence suggests that security concerns lay at the origin of the state and normal politics, in other words, no politics would be possible without at least a rudimentary security establishment (Bates, 2009; Olson, 1993; Tilly, 1985). If security concerns always lie behind the creation of a state, the primacy of politics over security must be substantiated. Even abstracting to modern democracies, if threat construction is still part of normal politics, while security is not, the transition between normalcy and epipoliticalness has to be clearly substantiated (Bigo, 2002).

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2.3 Summary

This chapter identified the principal directions in security studies, analyzing three heterogeneous currents in international security studies: traditional, critical, and versatile. This ad hoc classification of the international security studies is used to clarify the theoretical positioning of the Copenhagen School vis-à-vis other security theories and to justify the choice of securitization theory for the analysis of environmental securitization. Then, I briefly summarized the securitization theory and its principal tenets, focusing on theoretical strengths and important aspects that make it flexible and attractive for analysis of environmental security.

This included the solid philosophical foundations of the securitization theory, particularly, Austin’s speech act theory. Finally, the chapter focused on some new developments and modifications of the securitization theory.

The second part of this chapter critically analyzed the original securitization theory, as well as some of the proposed modifications to it, and identified several issues, which will be addressed in the course of this thesis with its empirical focus on Russian environmental security.

First, it is the issue of the term “security” and securitization outside of the Anglocentric context.

Second, it is the intersubjective vs. subjective threat construction. Third, it is the assumption that securitization is not part of normal politics, which needs to be tested in socio-political contexts, where security considerations are more present in everyday life, i.e. the extent to which securitization can be considered an “epipolitical” (“suprapolitical”) phenomenon or merely the apotheosis of the political.

These theoretical issues predetermine the choice of methods, which shall be explored in detail in the next chapter.

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3 Methodology/methods

Wir können kein Faktum an sich feststellen; vielleicht ist es ein Unsinn, so etwas zu wollen.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Umwertung aller Werte, Band 1

3.1 Research Design

In the first part of this chapter, I explain what methods this study employs and how it methodologically and gnoseologically differs from mainstream studies on the environment on the one hand and from security studies research on the other. First, I describe the rationale behind choosing a case study approach, in particular, an embedded case study as a research design. Second, I explain how the data for this study was obtained and coded. Third, I describe the logical basis for choosing a mixed-methods design, as well as the concrete quantitative and qualitative techniques applied in this study. As this thesis employed a mixed-methods approach, some of the intricacies of how the methods are applied were most expediently addressed in context in later chapters, while this chapter aims to provide an overview of the methods employed on a more general level.

3.1.1 Case Study as Research Design

This research utilizes a mixed-method research design. In its overarching form, it is a case study. Since my goal here is to test and offer adjustments to the Copenhagen School theory of securitization, it is designed as a hypothesis-generating case study (Levy, 2008). Hypothesis- generating case studies are “useful in explaining cases that do not fit an existing theory” for the purpose of either refining existing theoretical propositions or generating a brand-new theoretical proposition (Levy, 2008). Rather than creating a new theory from scratch, this type of case studies more often concentrates on specifying causal mechanisms, especially when it comes to existing theoretical assumptions, uncovering endogeneity and multicollinearity issues.

As such, it necessitates careful justification for uncovering particular causal relationships. Each case study thus presents a point used to alter theoretical assumptions, while the selection of a specific case is informed by theoretical necessities (Levy, 2008). The “hypothesis generation”

component in hypothesis-generating case studies is therefore a consequence of constant feedback between theory and evidence.

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19 This provides case studies great fora for identifying theoretical improvements. Indeed, rather than generalizing to the population of similar cases, Yin (2009) considers that case study findings, being subject to analytical generalization, need to be “generalized to theory.” In addition, Yin (2009, p. 48) posits single-case studies an appropriate research strategy, if the researcher’s objective is to describe the circumstances of the single case and to subsequently draw conclusions, shedding light on the larger classis of units of which the case is representative. Nevertheless, the question of external validity becomes an ontological problem, as a single case study leaves the researcher susceptible to criticism along the lines of selection bias, in which he falls in “the trap of trying to select a ‘representative’ case” (Yin, 2009, p. 37).

In other words, no matter how representative a single or a set of cases might seem to the researcher, establishing external validity for Yin means that the case study findings need to be replicated in similar cases in order to be considered conclusively generalizable.

Indeed, vis-à-vis Copenhagen securitization theory, Russian securitization of the environment can be thought to be such a special case. First, from among the profile of countries, Russia posits a rare case of consistent environmental securitization, which, contrary to what theory mandates, is not followed by equally consistent extraordinary measures. Second, from among different types of securitization, environmental security is a special case of the non- military security aspect. Third, by providing theoretical adjustment to securitization analysis, it will allow satisfying the first part of Yin’s generalization requirement, while analyzing the cross-sectional data from within the case will help, at least partially, to satisfy the second requirement.

3.1.2 Embedded Case Study as Internal Architecture

Because securitization is a complex process, it can be considered a matryoshka doll, in which there are multiple internal case studies that are important for the overall argument. As such it lends itself to within-case analysis, which is an in-depth study of a case, allowing to “support, refute, or expand (a) a theory that the researcher has selected or (b) the propositions that the researcher has derived from a review of the literature and/or experience with the phenomenon under study” (Paterson, 2010). Although the case study of environmental securitization in Russia itself is a longitudinal case study, the richness of material and “internal tension” in its dimensionality allow for cross-sectional comparison, as defined by Aaltio & Heilmann (2010).

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This lends the case study of securitization of the environment in Russia very well for an embedded case study analysis.

First defined by Yin (2009, p. 50), embedded case studies differ from holistic case studies in that they involve several units of analysis. Instead of concentrating on the cross- sectional data, these types of case studies focus on the variation identified within single cases.

As such, embedded case studies lend themselves well to a type of mixed-methods research (Scholz & Tietje, 2002, pp. 331-332). An instance of this is a case study, where the main study relies on quantitative techniques while the subunit studies “investigate the conditions within one of the entities being surveyed” (Yin, 2009, p. 63). The embedded design adds “significant opportunities of extensive analysis, enhancing the insights into the single case” (Yin, 2009, pp.

52-53). At the same time, he warns against a potential pitfall of failing to return to the larger unit of analysis. The subunits selected in this work are not ideographic case studies; they serve the purpose of illustrating, supporting, and coordinating the overall argument.

In this way, a single case study with an embedded design can be thought of as a type of nested analysis. Nested analysis requires access to “a large N cross-case dataset” which allows

“to construct a general model of the phenomenon that applies to the broader sample of cases”

(Gerring, 2006, p. 198). In order to confirm this general panel study, several qualitatively distinct case studies are selected. In such a manner, the preliminary large cross-case panel study

“provides information that should ultimately complement the findings” of the small-N case studies (Lieberman, 2005, p. 438). The advantage of using nested analysis is in triangulation: it emulates experimental research design in adding an additional dimension of variation. This acts as a control group of sorts, allowing the analyst to draw an inference to the causal question from independent sources, hopefully enhancing the persuasiveness of causal inference and consequently leading to stronger internal and external validity, even if case studies are always more successful in establishing internal validity than external validity (Gerring, 2006, p. 152).

In answering the research questions presented in the introduction, my analysis is therefore constructed as a single embedded case study of Russian environmental securitization of the environment with flexible nested research design (Figure 1): the securitization of the environment is analyzed as a longitudinal hypothesis-generating case study in two parts:

focusing on international documents in Chapter 5 (to detect the securitizing actor(s) internationally) and domestic federal acts in Chapter 6 (to detect the securitizing actor(s) domestically). Each of those parts performs a preliminary large-N analysis, which serves as an

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21 introduction for a qualitative study, which will give an answer to the research questions.

Chapters 5 and 6 inform the analyst to select embedded subunits of analysis from its within- case cross-sectional variation, which will help to validate the conclusions in Chapter 7.

Figure 1. Embedded Case Study Design

3.1.3 Data Collection

The story of securitization is primarily a story of performative speech acts. Speech acts can take different forms: official documents, statements, treaties, newspaper articles, speeches, etc.

However, they can sometimes manifest as body language, or even as silence (Hansen, 2000).

As this study is primarily interested in securitizing moves by the representatives of the “state,”

the data for this study is acquired from official documents, speeches, and reports. There are several document sources.

First, the data from official Russian documents were collected using query results from a Russian legal database GARANT for the term “environmental security” (экологическая безопасность, безопасность окружающей среды) in various inflections. The GARANT database is a privately owned commercial compilation of most Russian legal documents with an in-built search engine.⁶ Queries are divided into different categories: government acts

6 At the time of data collection, the author had access to the 04.05.20 edition of the “GARANT-Master aero”

database.

Context: Securitization

Case: Securitization of Environment in Russia

International securitization of Environment

Domestic securitization of Environment Subunit: Arctic

Subunit: Yugoslavia

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(subdivided into federal acts, regional acts, as well as clarifications from the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Tax Service), legal commentary, judicial practice, draft legislation, international agreements, as well as applied information. The database is a nearly complete compilation of all publicly available official documents produced by all levels of the three branches of the Russian state, as well as includes documents from the Soviet era. To illustrate the extent to which environmental security is entrenched in the Russian legal vocabulary, a context-unspecific search within the database yielded hits in 197,695 separate documents.⁷

Second, the data from official newspapers and websites can be used to supplement this data from official documents when needed. From additional sources, only data from the Pravda newspaper was collected in its entirety. Until 1991, Pravda was the official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, thus serving as a mouthpiece of the official party discourse (Murray, 1994, p. 46) and an indicator of securitization for the period until 1991. For the modern period, kremlin.ru, mnr.gov.ru, or Rossiiskaia Gazeta can be used to supplement the analysis, besides any other unstructured data.

3.2 Methods

The methodological design of this study is mixed-methods research. The mixed-method design allows analyzing the same environmental data parallelly from two complementary perspectives.

According to Yin (2009, p. 63), this design “can permit investigators to address more complicated research questions and collect a richer and stronger array of evidence than can be accomplished by any single method alone.” Data collected in the course of this research lends itself well to both quantitative and qualitative methods. From the quantitative point of view, it can be considered a chronically ordered document stream; from the qualitative point of view, it can be considered a discourse. Below I shall explain in detail the methods utilized in this thesis.

3.2.1 Quantitative Methods

When analyzed quantitatively, it is useful to treat the documents collected in the previous steps as individual data points. Each document, mentioning environmental security, can be treated as a point in the analysis of environmental securitization. As such, this is a simplistic take on document analysis, as “mention” of a word here is binary and refers to a mention within the

7 Hits here are binary: the same document can contain multiple mentions of the term.

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23 document, even if it is singular. Thus, a document is treated as having “mentioned”

environmental security, without regard to whether the document uses the term several times or just once.

Russian federal documents and international treaties arrive over time, therefore I follow Kleinberg (2003) in analyzing them as “document streams,” in which not only the scale of the topic but also the time of arrival of documents can be meaningfully analyzed. Since documents appear probabilistically, Kleinberg (2003) poses that the wait time 𝑥 between messages 𝑖 and 𝑖 + 1 is distributed according to pdf 𝑓(𝑥) = 𝛼_𝑖𝑒^−𝛼^𝑖^𝑥, where 𝛼 > 0; the probability that the wait time between documents will exceed 𝑥 equals to 𝑒^−𝛼^𝑖^𝑥. The changes between these states (periods of high and low document emission) are thus a “hidden” Markov process, in which

“bursts” are transitions between these states (Eggers and Spirling, 2016, p.9).

Although documents in environmental security data arrive continuously, their volume is too low to assess them on a day-to-day basis. Furthermore, treaties, federal laws, etc. are often signed on the same day, or, as Kleinberg (2003) designs a special finite-state model, where documents arrive in discrete “batches,” of which there is 𝑟_𝑡 documents containing the relevant word 𝑤 (e.g. environmental security) out of the total of 𝑑_𝑡 documents. If there is a total of 𝑛 documents, the “base rate” of document arrival would be 𝑝₀ = ^𝑅

𝐷, where 𝑅 = ∑^𝑛_𝑡=1𝑟_𝑡 and 𝐷 =

∑^𝑛_𝑡=1𝑑_𝑡. Since there cannot be more relevant documents than total documents, 𝑝_𝑖 never exceeds 1, and the state 𝑞_𝑖 is only defined for 𝑖, where 𝑝_𝑖 ≤ 1. Given a binomial distribution with probability 𝑝_𝑖, I can thus enumerate a cost of transitioning from the state 𝑞_𝑖 for the 𝑡^𝑡ℎ batch as

𝜎(𝑖, 𝑟_𝑡, 𝑑_𝑡) = −ln [(^𝑑_𝑟^𝑡

𝑡) 𝑝_𝑖^𝑟^𝑡(1 − 𝑝_𝑖)^𝑑^𝑡^−𝑟^𝑡]. (1)

Since the analysis here is only interested in bursts of positive intensity, it is possible to quantify this burst [𝑡₁, 𝑡₂] as the difference in cost by transitioning from the state 𝑞₀ to 𝑞₁

∑^𝑡_𝑡=𝑡² ₁(𝜎(0, 𝑟_𝑡, 𝑑_𝑡) − 𝜎(1, 𝑟_𝑡, 𝑑_𝑡)), (2)

or the improvement in cost by using state 𝑞₁ over 𝑞₀, where the larger weight indicates periods of “elevated activity” (Kleinberg, 2003).

This method of identifying “bursty” periods in securitization opens the door to interesting possibilities. First, it is reasonable to assume that years, in which environmental security was a “bursty” term, would correspond to years of the securitizing moves or audience

The Environmental in Security

The Environmental in Security

Securitization Theory and Russian Environmental Security Policy

Erdem Lamazhapov

Master Thesis

Peace and Conflict Studies 45 credits

Department of Political Science Faculty of Social Sciences

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

The Environmental in Security:

Securitization Theory and Russian

Environmental Security Policy

Abstract

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Securitization Theory and the Environment

2.1 The Meaning of Environmental Security

2.2 Towards Agent-relative Analysis of Security

2.3 Summary

3 Methodology/methods

3.1 Research Design

3.2 Methods