Ritualised securitisation: The European Union’s failed response to Hamas’s success
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066118763506 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118763506
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(1) 156 –178
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066118763506
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Ritualised securitisation:
The European Union’s failed
response to Hamas’s success
Catherine Charrett
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
Why and how do political leaders and bureaucrats miss opportunities or make mistakes?
This article explores the pressures to conform and to perform that direct securitising
decisions and practices. It begins with the assertion that the European Union missed an
opportunity to engage with Hamas after the movement’s participation and success in
transparent and democratically legitimated elections, and instead promoted a politics
of increased securitisation. The securitisation of Hamas worked against the European
Union’s own stated aims of state-building and democratisation, and increased the
resistance image of Hamas. This article investigates the rituals that shaped this decision,
arguing that punitive and conforming dynamics implicated the knowing of the event.
Performance studies and anthropology observe how rituals let participants know how
to behave in a given situation, and they performatively constitute a social reality through
the appearance of normalcy or harmony. Hamas was reproduced as threat through
the European Union’s compulsion to repeat a policy of conditionality, which was
performative of Hamas’s ability to respond diplomatically to its own securitisation. First,
at a discursive level, rituals simplify or reduce the complexity of an event by allowing
participants to respond to new issues through existing regimes of intelligibility. Second,
at a practice level, rituals impose an imperative to perform within the workplace, which
limits the possibility for dissent or for challenging hierarchy within the institution. This
investigation relies on elite interviews with senior Hamas representatives conducted
in Gaza, and interviews with European Union representatives who were involved in
monitoring the elections and enacting a response to Hamas’s success.
Keywords
European Union, Hamas, Palestine, performativity, rituals, securitisation
Corresponding author:
Catherine Charrett, Queen Mary University of London, Arts One, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK.
Email: c.charrett@qmul.ac.uk
763506EJT0010.1177/1354066118763506European Journal of International RelationsCharrett
research-article2018
Article
Charrett 157
Introduction
[The 2006 Palestinian legislative elections] were notable for the participation of candidates
linked to extremist or radical groups that have advocated violence as a means to solving the
problems in the Middle East. It is hoped that this participation is an indication of the movement
of such groups towards engaging in a truly democratic process, which would be in fundamental
contradictions with violent activity. (European Parliament, 2006a: 1)
The European Union (EU) performed a commitment to democracy promotion and good
governance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) (European Commission,
2005). When Hamas was successful in the 2006 elections, however, EU institutions were
unwilling to follow through on those commitments. Despite the European Parliament
monitoring team noting Hamas’s move away from violence, and remarking on its demo-
cratic performance, the EU decided to securitise Hamas by invoking a policy of condi-
tionality. The EU Commission did not wait to see how Hamas might act once in
government, or wait to see which Change and Reform ministers the EU may maintain
relations with. Rather, the EU immediately supported the Quartet’s decision to place
three conditions on Hamas, from which a no-contact policy followed. Critics argued that
not only did the EU’s response ignore pragmatic shifts in the movement, which were
obvious through its participation in the elections, but the EU also outmanoeuvred itself
from having an effective role in mediating Palestinian politics. Natalie Tocci (2007: 141)
writes, ‘by supporting Israel, undermining democratic processes, and imposing sanctions
on a democratically elected government and a population under occupation, Western
policies have discredited their legitimacy and enhanced the resistance images of Hamas’.
This article explores how the EU came to securitise Hamas and enact a political position
that undermined its own declared objectives of democracy promotion, which then con-
tributed to an increase in violence waged against Gaza since the elections. Such a move
might be framed as a mistake or a missed opportunity (Malley and Agha, 2006; Rifkind,
2006: 5). This article investigates how such an opportunity was ‘missed’ by exploring
securitisation as a ritualised discourse and practice that limits the consideration or enact-
ment of alternative political responses.
This article is concerned with the question of agency in security politics, and the
capacity that political actors have to ‘decide’ to securitise or not, which it argues is
shaped by the duress of performative rituals. Critical approaches to security explore the
disaggregation of sovereign control over security, arguing that security is reproduced
through daily practices, rather than through a politics of exception (Bigo, 2002;
Huysmans, 2011; Neal, 2008, 2009). Agency is seen as entangled with technologies,
infrastructures and objects (Aradau, 2010; Bourne et al., 2015). Neal (2012) and Jarvis
and Legrand (2017a, 2017b), however, argue that we should not lose sight of the agency
of policymakers and bureaucrats in our analysis of securitisation and the proscription of
terrorism. This article contributes to an understanding of how securitisation is enacted by
diverse actors through their daily practices, and its critique of agency is situated with the
institutional and performance pressures that shape political decisions. Securitisation
theory provides a framework to explore how actors use the logic of security to identify
(and as such produce) an existential threat to a referent object, but it is less interested in
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