Emotions and securitisation: a new materialist discourse analysis
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221151038 |
| Author | Aurora Ganz |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221151038
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(2) 280 –305
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221151038
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Emotions and securitisation:
a new materialist discourse
analysis
Aurora Ganz
Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Abstract
In this article, I explore how pride as a collective emotion is ontologically bound to the
securitisation of energy and put forward an innovative method that engages materiality
and discourse in securitisation theory. I examine the case of energy securitisation in
Azerbaijan to show that collective pride is anchored to materialisations and reiterative
identity discourses that stick to energy sites and align with the nation in ways that fit
with the coercive and controlling nature of securitisation. While the existing literature
on emotions and securitisation engages with the process of threat construction and
focuses on the audience’s affective experience, I approach securitisation as threat
construction and threat management and locate the affective dimension of the process
in a transversal space that considers the affective experience of the audience alongside
that of the securitising actor. This article pays considerable attention to methods and
introduces an experimental new materialist discourse analysis, which accounts for the
material, affective and non-human world exerting an agential force on the texts.
Keywords
Securitization, new materialism, emotions, discourse, critical security studies, energy
Introduction
In this article, I explore how pride as a collective emotion is ontologically bound to the
securitisation of energy and put forward an innovative method that engages materiality
and discourse in securitisation theory (ST). That security as securitisation has taken over
multiple sectors of our life, such as energy, is concerning. However, theoretical and polit-
ical opportunities for novel ways of thinking about, doing, and feeling security exist. I
use the securitisation framework to conduct a politically aware investigation of security
Corresponding author:
Aurora Ganz, Department of Political Science, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain.
Email: aurora.ganz@upf.edu
1151038EJT0010.1177/13540661221151038European Journal of International RelationsGanz
research-article2023
Original Article
Ganz 281
without restraining the analysis to the most visible manifestations of extraordinary
politics.
My purpose is to theorise the relationship between emotions and securitisation
through a new materialist (NM) onto-epistemology and outline a novel method to address
empirical questions through the case of energy securitisation. In the literature, securitisa-
tion has been approached as a speech act (Buzan et al., 1998), a practice (Bigo, 2000) or
a policy (Balzacq, 2008). In this article, I claim it is also an emotional process. I make
explicit how emotions are engineered into energy securitisation and show that judge-
ments about what energy objects to secure and what security to provide are emotionally
saturated. By looking at where pride resides and how it navigates through the assemblage
of energy securitisation, I shed light on how and why specific ways of seeing and manag-
ing energy (in)security emerge and resonate in Azerbaijan.
This article opens energy security studies after its long attachment to technical scient-
ism and geopolitics. Recent attempts have sought to renovate the field through qualita-
tive and interpretative approaches (Sovacool, 2014). ST has offered a novel pathway to
explore energy security beyond mainstream frameworks, abandoning the alleged neutral
objectivity of positivist studies, and drawing attention to the concept’s fluid and political
nature (Nyman, 2018; Surwillo, 2019; Szulecki, 2017). In other words, securitisation
conceives of energy security within power struggles and socio-cultural frames.
While research has examined the space of security in energy, it has been less attuned
to its affective dimension. Emotions remain either implicit or absent from energy secu-
rity studies. Similarly, albeit acknowledged, the (re)production and mobilisation of emo-
tions in securitisation mostly remain covert and undertheorised. By investigating the
interrelationships between emotions, energy and securitisation, this article attempts to
merge research fields that have not received much attention and are rarely seen as inter-
connected. I shift the focus towards an emotion, pride, which is commonly understood as
a positive emotion and is hardly seen in conjunction with the feeling of insecurity, typical
of securitisation. While studying energy securitisation in Azerbaijan, pride got my atten-
tion because it appeared as an underlying and recurrent rhetorical theme. Yet, I noticed
that also things embodied, communicated and endorsed a sense of collective pride that
was performative of energy securitisation. In the field, I observed and perceived pride in
the surrounding urban architecture, massive energy infrastructure and sophisticated
security technologies. Matter – intended as the tangible things (Connolly, 2013;
Herschinger, 2015) and the less corporeal stuff (Leonardi, 2010) that compose the world
– and materiality – meaning the substantial characteristics of an object – are not inert but
act upon the context in which they exist (Miguel et al., 2021).
This principle is at the heart of new materialism, a theoretical approach that resusci-
tates the role of the tangible world within continental philosophy and after postmodern
attempts to recentre onto-epistemological debates away from matter and towards discur-
sively situated knowledges (Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012). Because securitisation theory was
born out of postmodern thinking, it foregrounds ideational dynamics at the expenses of
matter. New materialism offers an opportunity to rebalance the relationship between
discourse and materiality, healing the presumed separation between human and non-
human worlds. Albeit reinserting matter, new materialism shares with postmodernism a
distrust in ‘a priori’ metaphysics and foundationalist epistemologies that understand
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