Energy Securitisation: Beyond the Copenhagen School

Securitisation studies is a vibrant, dynamic and ever-growing academic subfield, comprised of scholars from different disciplines, contested theoretical underpinnings, and diverse methodological approaches, who share an interest in how security issues emerge, spread and dissolve. The proliferation of empirical applications of securitisation theory to a diverse range of issues has highlighted the analytical merits and explanatory power of the approach, and its utility in understanding the political stakes involved in constructing issues in terms of security. There have, however, been relatively few attempts to examine the trend towards the securitisation of energy over the past decade. This is problematic because securitisation studies could act as a welcome corrective to objectivist and materialist understanding of energy security which remain dominant in energy studies. It is also problematic for securitisation theory, because energy has emerged on the security agendas of almost all developed countries and the theory should be able to account for this. In this article, I suggest that these two problems are, in fact, one and the same. Energy securitisation is often a more complicated process than many of the more obvious cases of securitisation (e.g. terrorism and migration) but wider securitisation studies has the conceptual tools to understand this process. Such resources have not, however, been fully exploited in the form of detailed empirical case studies. In this article, I review the full range of conceptual approaches to studying securitisation – both philosophical and sociological – and examine how they can be applied or adapted in order to examine energy securitisation. This assessment is based on three core arguments. First, there is a need for analysts to pay much greater attention to the different performative logics of security and risk interact within concrete cases, rather than assuming that any utterance of ‘energy security’ is a de facto energy securitisation (Bigo, 2002; Corry, 2011). Second, the role of pre-existing material conditions, particularly differences between the supply chains for alternative forms of energy, has been neglected in most existing case studies. There is therefore a need to better explicate how these conditions shape, enable and constrain the dynamics of energy securitisation. Third, the wide variety of actors involved in these supply chains and the multi-sectoral nature of most energy issues multiples the entry points for different logics of security to percolate and to challenge dominant representations.