Huysmans, Jef. "Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security". Alternatives, Vol.27, No.1 (2002): 41-62.

Huysmans, Jef. "Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security". Alternatives, Vol.27, No.1 (2002): 41-62.

• The idea of 'societal security' has become prominent in contemporary European politics, as many domestic threats like drug trafficking, immigration, and crime have been reconstructed as foreign policy issues and security problems. This raises concerns that the idealization of a secure society could degrade liberalism and encourage fascistic violence (41-42).
• Scholarship about security issues can never be apolitical because the concept of 'security' is essentially contested. My defining or delineating security issues, a piece of scholarship is contributing to the debate (43).
• This problems is especially acute for scholars attempt to avoid the securitization of certain issues, since by writing about the lack of security issues posed by a phenomenon, they still establish a link between that phenomenon and security, thereby continuing the securitization they want to prevent (43, 47, 50, 53).
• Some have suggested that this dilemma can be solved by not being a dipshit and instead having the research argue against the securitization of a field. In this way, even though the debate is continued, the persuasive argument that the securitization is a distortion of real conditions still fights against securitization (47-48).
• "It is often misleading to counterpose the ideology of security to human rights because they sometimes have more in common than their authors would like to admit. They often share the same concept of insecurity and diverge only in their solutions" (51).
• The ability to successfully securitize an issue, meaning to be able to make others believe that an issue is a security threat, is limited to certain societal roles. The primary individuals with this power are statesmen and politicians, although military, academic, and police experts are even more influential because they have power, and also construct the theories that politicians based security threats on have (53-56).
• Changing either the cultures of these expert institutions, or opening up security dialogues to include a broader range of expert positions on security is a necessary step in changing the process of securitization (58).
• "The way in which asylum and immigration questions are presently structured in the political debate in West Europe, and the way security enunciations have penetrated it, suggest that the security formation that governs the field is a conservative one with strong roots in a 'vulgarized' Hobbesian understanding of the human condition" (60).