At war or saving lives? On the securitizing semantic repertoires of Covid-19
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221122957 |
| Author | Stephane J Baele,Elise Rousseau |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221122957
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(2) 201 –227
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221122957
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At war or saving lives? On
the securitizing semantic
repertoires of Covid-19
Stephane J Baele
University of Exeter
Elise Rousseau
University of Namur
Abstract
This paper offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the ways and extent to which the US president
and UK prime minister have securitized the Covid-19 pandemic in their public speeches. This
assessment rests on, and illustrates the merits of, both an overdue theoretical consolidation of
Securitization Theory’s (ST) conceptualization of securitizing language, and a new methodological
blueprint for the study of ‘securitizing semantic repertoire’. Comparing and contrasting the
two leaders’ respective securitizing semantic repertoires adopted in the early months of the
coronavirus outbreak shows that securitizing language, while very limited, has been more intense
in the UK, whose repertoire was structured by a biopolitical imperative to ‘save lives’ in contrast
to the US repertoire centred on the ‘war’ metaphor.
Keywords
Covid-19, language, methods, securitization, semantic repertoire, speeches
Introduction
In October 2019, exactly 45 days before the first Covid-19 case was detected, the Nuclear
Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security launched a brand-new
benchmarking effort aiming at assessing health security across the 195-state parties to
Corresponding author:
Stephane J Baele, Centre for Advanced International Studies (CAIS), Department of Politics, University of
Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 5EG, UK.
Email: s.baele@exeter.ac.uk.
1122957IRE0010.1177/00471178221122957International RelationsBaele and Rousseau
research-article2022
Article
202 International Relations 37(2)
the International Health Regulations. The Global Health Security Index ranked states
according to their level of preparedness to deal with serious outbreaks. In this list, the
United States of America ranked first, the United Kingdom second. Yet, by summer
2020, both countries ranked in the top-10 of the states the worst hit by the Covid-19
pandemic. Much of the controversy that ensued centred on whether the two governments
had initially downplayed the risk or/and been inconsistent in their decisions – and,
crucially, communication – about the pandemic.
The present article sheds light on this puzzle, from the specific angle of Securitization
Theory (ST). More precisely, we offer a multidimensional evaluation of the intensity and
way in which the US President and UK Prime Minister have securitized the Covid-19
pandemic in their public speeches. In other words, how they framed it as an urgent secu-
rity threat requiring extraordinary measures. This assessment rests on, and illustrates the
merits of, an overdue consolidation of ST’s conceptualization of securitizing language,
which allows us to compare and contrast the two leaders’ respective ‘securitizing seman-
tic repertoires’ – the specific combination of words they adopted in the first months of
the coronavirus outbreak to depict the virus as a security threat – and measure the inten-
sity of their securitizing language over time.
In doing so, this research uncovers two main findings. First, the intensity of securitiz-
ing language in both countries was surprisingly low. We show that while both the US
President and UK Prime Minister did securitize the Covid-19 pandemic in their public
speeches, they did not make an extensive use of securitizing language – with the excep-
tion of some noticeable and widely mediatized spikes. Second, we reveal a paradox:
while the intensity of the securitizing language has consistently been higher in the UK, it
is in the US that the discourse of hard security has been more prominent. To investigate
this, we undertake a granular analysis of each securitizing semantic repertoire and show
that this variation is explained by a difference in the way each leader securitizes the issue.
In particular, we show a variation in the referent object of Johnson and Trump, that is,
what is seen as ‘existentially threatened’ and as having ‘a legitimate claim to survival’.1
Indeed, while the UK’s securitizing repertoire has been systematically structured by the
biopolitical imperative of ‘saving lives’, the US’ repertoire is characterized by the use of
the war metaphor. Perhaps counterintuitively, therefore, we show that using the war met-
aphor does not necessarily mean that the overall discourse over an issue will be highly
securitized.
These findings might come as a surprise since the pandemic seems to present a text-
book case of securitization, with extraordinary measures being implemented after state
leaders pronounced powerful speech acts presenting the disease as a fundamental threat.
As the canonical formulation indeed goes, securitization happens when ‘an issue is pre-
sented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions out-
side the normal bounds of political procedure’.2 On the one hand, as the virus accelerated
its propagation in the months of January–May 2020, almost every single government
across the globe took extraordinary emergency measures of a kind and scope unseen dur-
ing 20th century peacetime: drastic lockdowns were ordered, massive liquidity was
injected in national economies, the army was deployed in the streets, borders were
closed, etc. On the other hand, the governments who deployed these measures were keen
to present the disease as a security threat to be tackled urgently. To take a few examples,
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