We are pleased to announce that Dr Rita Floyd, Lecturer in Conflict and Security at POLSIS, has recently won a prestigious mid-career fellowship from the Independent and Social Research Foundation for her project Emergency politics: security, threats and the duties of states.
The project builds on Rita's existing work on just securitization and 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.