Professor Rita Floyd

• Advanced Diploma in Environmental Conservation, University of Oxford, 2012
• PhD in International Relations, University of Warwick, 2007
• Masters by Research in Politics, University of Edinburgh,2004
• BA (Hons) International Relations and Politics, University of Portsmouth, 2003, 1st class

Professor Floyd researches and teaches in security studies. She is interested in the ethics of emergency politics, in security theory and climate/environmental security. Floyd also has a general interest in IR theory, especially the English school.

Floyd is the originator of Just Securitization Theory. Her 2019 book The Morality of Security: A theory of Just Securitization (Cambridge University Press) combines insights from the just war tradition and securitization studies to provide a theory of morally permissible security practice. This book was shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize in 2020. A symposium on the book was published in the European Journal of International Security in 2022.

In 2024, Floyd published The Duty to secure: From just to mandatory securitization, also with CUP. This book builds on top of the Morality of Security. It considers when securitization is not ‘merely’ morally permissible, but morally required of actors and different levels of analysis.

Floyd has been in Birmingham since April 2012 when she was appointed Birmingham Fellow in Conflict and Security. Before then she was a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick and before then an ESRC post-doctoral fellow. She received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Warwick. Her PhD was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press as Security and the Environment: Securitisation theory and US Environmental Security Policy. It appeared in paperback in 2014, and it was translated into Chinese in 2021. 

Undergraduate:

• POLS 319: Security in Europe: Actors, Crisis and Threats (formerly European Security) 

Postgraduate:

• G22: Security Studies 

I am second PhD supervisor to Bruno Dalponte.

Dr Floyd's is concerned with the ethics of securitization. Her monograph entitled: The Morality of Security: A theory of Just Securitization will be published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. This book is informed by three research questions: When, if ever, may we move an issue out of normal politics and treat it as a security issue? If an issue is securitized, how must the security actions be conducted? If an issue is securitized, how and when must the securitization be reversed? This book offers answers to each one of these challenging questions. It does so by combining Security Studies’ influential securitization theory with philosophy’s long-standing just war tradition into a major new and innovate approach to the ethics of security: Just Securitization Theory. Informed by the just war tradition each research question is answered by setting forth a number of universal moral principles that govern just initiation of securitization, just conduct during securitization and just termination of securitization (just desecuritization), respectively.

In January 2019 Dr Floyd will commence a prestigious Independent and Social Research Foundation Mid-career Fellowship awarded for my project Emergency politics: security, threats and the duties of states. Building on her existing work on just securitization this research project is concerned with the obligation to securitize. It’s central research question is this: When, if ever, are states morally obliged to treat putative threats as a matter for emergency politics and address them using exceptional measures? This project will tackle issues such as culpability in threat creation and the obligation to securitize, the costs to securitizing actors and the issue whether or not the request for other-defence via securitization by putative referent objects renders securitization obligatory. Whilst this project is ultimately intended as a research monograph in its own right, it builds logically on the assumptions of my existing work on just securitization. After all, a theory of the obligation to securitize must begin by thinking about the permissibility to do, as one can only have a duty to perform acts (i.e. securitization) that are permissible.

Rita a Fellow of the Institute for Environmental Security (IES), (www.envirosecurity.org/). 

From July 2010 – July 2011 she was an independent consultant to the Climate Change and Energy Programme of the New Economics Foundation (http://www.neweconomics.org/) on a DFID sponsored systematic review.
See: Johnson, V., Fitzpatrick, I., Floyd, R. & Simms, A. 2011. What is the evidence that scarcity and shocks in freshwater resources cause conflict instead of promoting collaboration? CEE review 10-010. Collaboration for Environmental Evidence: www.environmentalevidence.org/SR10010.html