The accountability solution: understanding the audience in securitisation theory by asking a different question

ABSTRACT This paper stems from two problematic topics encountered in the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory (ST) scholarship and its developments. The first is the clash of ontologies among the different approaches to the theory, being two of them the political and sociological approaches. The second arises not only from the questioned role of the audience within the theory but also from its imprecise definition even after the advent of what can be called the ‘audience turn’. As some authors have paved the road for a more rigorous definition of the audience, there is still a cognitive gap between the securitising move and its acceptance that needs to be understood in its fullness. Given these points, this work offers a solution for the above conundrums by asking ‘what does securitisation do?’ instead of ‘what is securitisation?’. This shift results in the recognition of the audience’s agency in the form of accountability for accepting the securitising move. Moreover, this new focus stresses the constant motion needed to construct reality, resulting in two more properties credited to the audience’s definition: fluidity and multiplicity. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to emphasise the relevance of securitisation’s transformational power by revising and criticising the polarisation of the current literature, and at the same time to address not only the ‘problem of the audience’ but the cognitive gap within the securitisation process.