“Securitisation is the notion that national security policy is not a natural given but is rather ideologically constructed by moving political issues beyond politics to justify the use of extraordinary emergency measures to address a perceived existential threat,” said Isaac Mwinlaaru of the Department of English at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He noted that although the newer term, ‘counter-securitisation’, has been mentioned in the literature on security studies since the late 20th century, it was Holger Stritzel and Sean C. Chang who first systematically used it as an analytical framework in 2015 in a paper published in the journal Security Dialogue. Stritzel and Chang, according to him, conceptualised counter-securitisation as discursive strategies that are deployed to resist processes of securitisation.
Isaac N. Mwinlaaru is in the eighth cohort of the Iso Lomso fellows and currently in his first residency at STIAS. His study examines counter-securitisation in discourses against asymmetric International Security Cooperations (ISCs), focusing on media reportage on Ghana-United States’ security relations. He hopes that this project will result in a book which will more broadly confront the theory of counter-securitisation with discourses of resistance and decoloniality in Post-Cold War Africa. The overall objective is to include resistance discourses on security relations in the Sahel region of Africa, where recent coup d’etats are linked to imbalances in international security relations between Africa and the West.
He explained that the concept of securitisation was introduced by the Copenhagen School of international relations in the late 1990s and involves a securitising actor, usually a powerful political leader, who frames a situation or particular people as posing an existential threat, justifying the use of extraordinary emergency measures against them. “Securitisation is a speech act – it is the use of language to bring (in)security into live, claim danger and legitimate the use of violence to eliminate threat” he said.
As examples, Mwinlaaru pointed to two speeches by US President George W. Bush, following 9/11. The first was President Bush’s address to Congress on 19 September 2001, which identified Al-Qaeda and the Taliban as securitising subjects, made specific demands against these organisations and constructed a polarised world of ‘them and us’ between nations that would support his War on Terror and those who would not, leaving no grounds for neutrality. And the second was a telecast address on 7 October 2001 to the American people about the attack on Afghanistan, which reiterated the Taliban as posing an existential threat and justified the use of extraordinary military operations against them.
Mwinlaaru then explained that counter-securitisation involves resistance against such securitising acts and often involves using similar discursive strategies as the securitising process itself. “Counter-securitisation aims to delegitimise and delay or reverse the securitisation process,” he said.
Thus far Mwinlaaru’s work has involved examining resistance against international security agreements between Ghana and the US. According to him, “International Security Cooperations have become crucial and globally widespread due to shifts in the global security situation post-Cold War and gathered momentum following the American-led anti-terrorism campaign that followed 9/11”. They usually involve defence policy coordination, research and development, joint military exercises, education and training, arms procurement and the exchange of classified information. He observes that African nations, including Ghana, have become more involved in international security cooperations because of new threats of terrorism in the Sahel region of West Africa – estimated to account for 43% of global terrorism deaths in 2022.
Mwinlaaru’s work has specifically focused on two such agreements between Ghana and the US, namely the 2015 Ghana-US agreement to resettle two Guantanamo Bay detainees suspected of terrorism in Ghana and the 2018 Ghana-US Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, which effectively would allow the US unrestricted access to military resources in Ghana, to transport military equipment to Ghana with tax waivers and to deploy their troops from Ghana if needed. Both these agreements faced parliamentary opposition and walk-outs at the time of their signing.
Mwinlaaru’s study examines how these Ghana-US security relations have been discursively constructed and resisted by the Ghanaian elite in the press. The data comprise a corpus of newspaper items involving 183, 797 word tokens, i.e. a specific instance of a word or phrase that appears in text or speech. The media covered included major print and online newspapers.
The ongoing analysis involves a combination of transitivity analysis (a method that places the verb as the key player in clauses) which is used to tease out recurring themes, as well as close-reading, contextual and sociological analysis. “It’s a long process to balance the grammatical and sociological analysis,” he explained. “The method is also interpretive taking into consideration the people and context involved.”
He explained that his initial interest was in broadly understanding how relations between the US and Ghana were construed in the media. Examining it from the perspective of counter-securitisation arose when he had observed that emerging patterns from his analysis were telling a story of resistance that needed to be theorised further.
Showing examples, he indicated that his findings so far reveal that a range of discursive frames were used to construct Ghana-US security relations as an existential threat to the Ghanaian people. These also served as a counter-discourse to the American military approach to anti-terrorism, emphasising ideas like: if Ghana is seen as a US military ally, Ghana, in turn, becomes a target of terrorism, opening Ghana to danger from terrorist groups in the region. “The idea of the US trespassing on Ghanaian sovereignty was also expressed in the data – we find anti-imperialist sentiments built on a culturally traumatised history. These issues can be explained by the lack of equality in the agreement and the exclusion of the Ghanaian people as part of the referent objects of the securitisation process by the US government and within the security agreements,” said Mwinlaaru.
“The Guantanamo detainees’ issue was particularly complex,” he added, “causing discussion within the Muslim community about their unjust and lengthy detention without trial as well as a Christian Islamophobic reaction.”
Mwinlaaru pointed out that the counter-securitisation was led by Ghanaian elites, political opposition leaders as well as ordinary citizens, and aimed at resisting the militarisation of relations between the US government (the securitising actor) and the Ghanaian government and delegitimatizing the use of emergency measures against regimes and targeted organisations.
“The study is significant by showing that counter-securitisation is a robust resistance strategy that goes beyond contexts where there are actual conflicts to include resistance against exploitations in asymmetric international security relations,” concluded Mwinlaaru.
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography