Republican Freedom and Committees of Safety: Notes on Historicization in Critical Security Studies

Abstract

This paper discusses the historical case of committees of safety and their role in three republican revolutions in early modern western political history in order to conceptually contribute to the historicization of critical security studies. These committees were significant in amalgamating republican understandings of public freedom with demands for security from tyrannical oppression, thus highlighting the constitutive role of security considerations in the formation of republican polities and republican political constituencies. Yet, they also pointed to the seemingly self-defeating effects of those committees’ practices in situations perceived as revolutionary, which regularly involved clandestine, self-legitimating, and oppressive force against “enemies of the revolution” and potential internal opposition alike, and hence undermined normative notions of republican freedom. The paper introduces an analytical triad, consisting of definition of security situation, interpretative frame, and security repertoire, which allows analyzing historical situations of securitization in full complexity while at the same time allowing inter-comparability and the modeling of dynamic invocations of security by interdependent actors. Applied to the historical narrative, two interrelated conceptual consequences for a historicization of critical security studies are derived. First, prominent strands in critical security studies will profit from studying securitization as a politically constitutive, as opposed to a merely transformative, act, precisely as securitization crystallizes in historically specific, politically constitutive organizational forms, such as committees of safety. Second, the paper complicates accounts concerning the security/freedom nexus inherited from conceptual history, analyzing the entanglement of republicanism with security reasoning from the perspective of historically situated practices.