ENEMY ADDICTION: Outsider Threats, Security Frames, and Target Audiences in Contemporary US Security Policy

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Perceptions of insecurity are a key source of violent conflict and international instability. This project investigates the US preoccupation with security threats after the Cold War ended, and how the discursive redefinition of the post-Cold War landscape in terms of danger and uncertainty has locked the US into perpetuating expensive security practices - even in times of severe economic crisis. It is centred on two important and interrelated puzzling issues in international security today: 1. Following the end of the Cold War, the US moved swiftly to redefine the new security environment in terms of threats. What made this possible?2. State and non-state actors at the margins of international society can be portrayed as major threats to international peace - without posing a significant military challenge to those who 'frame' them as enemies. How is this possible? Exploring America's enemy addiction in the post-Cold War era, this project seeks to unlock these puzzles through investigating in a systematic, empirically and methodologically rigorous fashion what role policy language plays in fostering the emergence, promotion, and public acceptance of specific threat scenarios and security policy agendas. How does security language lead to security practices? Past scholarship that aimed at showing the importance of security discourse for everyday security politics has struggled to make this relevant beyond a narrow academic audience. This project develops a novel multidisciplinary mixed-methods research design that moves discourse analysis beyond a concern with semantic language-centrism to link security discourse to policy formulation, political strategy, and security policy consequences. On the one hand this serves to foster the development of the discipline through illustrating how a multidisciplinary discourse analysis that generates original datasets and offers a high degree of empirical detail can be utilized to develop a more benign scientific realism. On the other hand, this serves to demonstrate to the policy community, journalists, academic audiences, and the wider public the importance of how political agents speak. In addition to its immediate contribution to understanding policy language as a key endogenous source of security practices, the project will also enable a deeper and empirically reinforced understanding of timely and important questions in international security, such as:- To what extent is security policy a reaction to 'objective' changes in the international structure?- How can 'narrating' specific events in the international arena foster the construction of external security threats?- Does policy language matter in marginalizing political resistance?- Can 'speaking' international security differently change security policy practices?The project builds upon my previous research, which showed that security policy language aids political agents to advance specific policy agendas by fostering consensus- and coalition-building processes. Using US post-Cold War security policy as an empirical focal point, this project integrates three analytical stages of discourse - characteristics, scope conditions, and effects - to show how security discourses are operationalized by (and for) different policy audiences, and what practical implications this has. By increasing knowledge of how, when, and why the rhetorical choices political agents make successfully shape security policy agendas, this project can help to unlock the puzzle of 'enemy addiction' to foster policy alternatives.