Repost and Like: Securitisation Theory in a Globalised World

“The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be. Because these 6 countries represent values, they represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force” Emmanuel Macron. Twitter post. June 7th, 2018 12:49 p.m. This Tweet clearly portrays the strained social media atmosphere preceding the 44th G7 summit (Boyd 2014; Standage 2013). It demonstraits that Twitter is being used by world leaders to construct issues as security threats and as a new forum to air international disputes. Securitization theory (Buzan et al. 1998) focuses on the construction and emergence of security problems in discourse- a process that we now observe on social media. Fixating on homogeneous complexes, conventional speech acts and the state, this theory has failed to adapt to the modern network-arranged global trends introduced by social media in the current digital era (Barberá 2013). This study aims to understand these new securitization dynamics by testing the theory in the context of a modern globalized world, analyzing the idea that securitization emerges from different practices (Balzacq 2011) and linking actors across sectors (Wullweber 2013; Buzan et al. 1998). The study will focus on the 45th G7 summit, a salient moment for international dispute and securitization, and will distinguish between three actor groups: government members, the media and the Twitter audience. The Project will rely on quantitative text analysis to measure the security sentiment in Twitter data, and to detect and analyze securitization patterns (Mikolov et al 2013). The results of this study could overhaul the international security field by problematizing the traditional elite-centered perspective, and could unveil a new understanding of diplomacy, international conflict, and the uses and effects of social media.