A perspective on critical security concept and international migration nexus through Copenhagen School: The quest for societal security

Abstract

This study dwells on the quest for a critical security perspective on international migration. Therefore, how international migration could be perceived through critical security studies is the main research question of this study. Critical Security Studies (CSS) or Welsh School of security studies emerged after Robert Cox’s debate between problem-solving and critical theories, especially after the 1990s. In this respect, CSS focus on questioning the mainstream theories and their interpretation of security. Instead of accepting the state as the referent object, critical security studies provide other elements that may be threatened, so that related to the security. On the one hand, CSS is, therefore, critical against the traditional approaches to security as realism and liberalism. Securitization, on the other hand, as Copenhagen School provided a speech act to put an issue into the field of security. International migration is one of the accurate examples of securitization. In this study, we employed CSS and securitization perspectives to international migration to understand how international migration could be assessed through critical theories.