Securing the Sacred: Religion, National Security, and the Western State

1. Religion and International Security: Theory and Method

13 1 ✦ Religion and International Security Theory and Method In this chapter I lay out the theoretical and methodological assumptions about religion and security that I bring to this book. I first explain the basic framework of securitization theory and then elaborate what I mean by the “securitization of religion.” Following this discussion, I draw on history, sociology of religion, and religious studies to develop further the antiessentialist conception of religion that informs and underpins the book’s case studies. Securitization Theory: Basic Components According to securitization theory, an actor, often but not necessarily a member of the political elite, makes a deliberate choice to frame an issue as a security issue (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). The way in which we often think about security—as a noun that denotes a sector of the state apparatus, or as an objective condition—is thus transformed into a verb: securitization. Security becomes something than an actor does. As Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde write, “security is thus a self-referential practice, because it is in this practice that an issue becomes a security issue—not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as a threat” (24). Raising an issue to the level of security can help the agent announcing the security situation to justify taking emergency measures. Such measures might include bending or breaking laws that apply in normal times, or circumventing established political procedures. 14 ✦ Securing the Sacred This basic structure of the security utterance—whereby something is posited as an existential threat to a referent object—admits of much variation . The enunciating actors, the threats, the referent objects, and the measures taken to deal with threat vary widely according to sector (economic, military) or country, region, political system, or social context. There is also a large amount of what one might call ontological variation in the theory. For example, the referent object—the phenomenon to be protected from threat—can range from tangible (a body, a species, a building complex, an army, the Antarctic) to the intangible (a way of life, a tradition, a collective identity, a set of ideas). The referent object may even be some composite of both, such as the economy, which consists of both tangible (banks) and intangible elements (public confidence). Threats, too, can vary widely in this sense, from the tangible (missiles) to the intangible (a threatening ideology). Finally, securitizing actors—the ones who publicly announce the security situation—may be heads of state, cabinet secretaries, nongovernmental organizations , corporations, activists, protestors, rebels, religious authorities, media personalities, or others. All of these actors are capable of publicly presenting a security argument, and all of them do. Thus, securitization has a common logic but many variations. Securitizations do more than posit threats. Discourses do not simply describe reality but play a role in constructing it, and security discourse is no different (see, for example, Campbell 1992; also Hansen 2006). Taken-forgranted ways of categorization and classification of the world help shape collective understanding of what can legitimately count as an object of scientific analysis (Foucault 1970). Discourse can shape the meanings of things, or help to bring into being phenomena that then come to be taken as real. In his classic 1989 study of myth, discourse, and classification for example, Bruce Lincoln showed how the effect of imperial discourses transformed the consciousness of colonized peoples so that they “came to consider themselves members of an imperial society rather than the vanquished subjects of a foreign nation” (Lincoln 1989, 4). Discourse thus constructs social meanings and can even lead to new modes of self-understanding and collective identity. Securitization theory holds generally this about what a community considers a “threat,” as well as what it considers worth protecting. Naming threats and referent objects helps bring both into being. This is why the analysis of discourse is so important in any study of securitization. Following 9/11, Western secular governments have gone to great lengths to encourage the construction of moderate Islam in order to protect na- Religion and International Security ✦ 15 tional security. In fact, the referent object moderate Islam is meant to bring into being the phenomena it intends to objectively describe. As one former Bush administration official put it, the United States’ 2006 National Security Strategy introduced the concept of moderate Islam and hoped that reformist Muslims would “populate that category” (Inboden 2012). Whether the people...