War Without Sound:

The Securitization of Development

in the Absence of Peace
Jennifer Hyndman
Centre for Refugee Studies
York University, Toronto
Post-War Development in Asia and Africa
13
th
Annual CEPA Symposium 1-3 Sept. 2014
Argument
1. Fear is a powerful political resource that is at
once an expression of vulnerability to political
threats (real and perceived), as well as a
rationale for security measures against them;
2. Securitisation is a strategy to produce such fear
and consent to militarised development in
order to combat threats but enable growth;
3. Securitised development may seem the logical
outcome in an environment characterised by
risk.
Securitisation
Introduced by the
Copenhagen School of
Critical Security Studies,
it analyses how a
political or social
problem becomes read
through a security
prism (Campesi, 2011:
2).
Is a process of social
construction that moves
an area of regular
politics into the area of
security by employing a
discursive rhetoric of
emergency, threat, and
danger aimed at
justifying the adoption
of extraordinary
measures (ibid).
How are vulnerability and fear used to
underwrite development initiatives
embedded with violence and/or
displacement?
Securitising Migration & Development
Canada's border is long and open to both
commerce and people. Since disease does not
need a visa, we cannot be healthy in an
unhealthy world (CIDA 2001, 6).
Implicit is the precautionary management of
these geopolitical/public health threats by
A) providing development aid to help people help
themselves in their regions of origin;
B) by militarising the (Canadian) border and
creating more exclusionary measures
Huysmans (2006)
Analysing securitization in the context of
immigration and asylum, Jeff Huysmans argues
that
the pursuit of freedom from existential threats
institutes political communities of insecurity. It
is a peculiar process of constituting a political
community of the established that seeks to
secure unity and identity by instituting existential
insecurity (2006: 47).
Aradau and Van Munster (2008: 23)
These authors examine how decision-makers and
those who govern try to tame the future in a post-
9/11 context uncertainty where potential
catastrophe has become once more the dominant
political imaginary of the future.
Their Foucauldian approach
focuses on how presumably incalculable catastrophic
risks such as terrorism are governed. different policies
such as war, surveillance, injunctions to integration and
drastic policies against antisocial behavior in fact
function with a dispositif of precautionary risk (24).

Tourism as a site of
securitisation and development
Tourism may seem a banal sideshow to the big G
Geopolitics of post-war displacement, reconstruction
and development, but Diane Ojeda (2013) and I
contend that it is a key space of securitisation.
Ojeda (2013) contends that tourism is a site of
everyday geopolitics because it is co-constituted at
the intersection of internal displacement,
paramilitary violence, multinational land grabs, and
drug production in Colombia.
Using a feminist geopolitics framework, she shows
how the quotidian leisure practices of tourism are
inseparable from national and international politics.
Post-war Tourism
Tourism in the precarious context of ceasefire
Colombia and in other post-war contexts
invokes national security as a rationality for
suitably militarised protection practices
against possible threats:
tourism and militarization have been enabled
and maintained by shared routes, itineraries,
landscapes and spaces, such as those of Vive
Colombia. (765)
Ojeda on Violence, Displacement, Tourism
That those places that tourists can finally visit
again are those to which millions of displaced
people cannot return to speaks to the multiple
violences that, through the discursive and
material production of tourist destinations
an intensive process of touristification are
supposed to have made Colombia safer
(emphasis added).
War Tourism
As an activity undertaken at the end of military
conflict, war tourism might simply be seen as a
sadistic voyeuristic curiosity in bad taste;
But there is more to it: the tacit reproduction of a
possible threat, a resurgence of rebel insurgency, or
precautionary risk as part of the tour serves to
securitise development and produce consent to it:
The possible return of terrorism and war provides
a rationale for the militiarisation of development
war by other means (Dahlman, 2009).
No trust, no development
Precautionary risk