Securitization, desecuritization and counter-securitization all at once: the case of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal
(2021) IPS Belgium Seminar Series — Location: Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles (17.December.2021)
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- Authors
Dieudonné, Jérémy 
- Abstract
- The struggle around the adoption of the Iran nuclear deal gave place to heated debates in the United States in 2015. Tremendous amounts of resources have been used to derail this deal. Indeed, pro-Israeli actors attempted to securitize Iran towards American lawmakers specifically and the American public more broadly through a wide array of channels, from direct lobbying to television ads. However, despite the magnitude of the attempt, the securitizing actors have not – fully – achieved their goal: to derail the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA). How can we understand it? Setting itself within an International Political Sociology framework, this article highlights the strong movement of both counter- and de-securitization that strove to impose a different narrative in the field concerned with Iran. The analysis is based both on process-tracing through mainstream newspapers and on a lexicometry and content analysis of the texts published between January 2013 and September 2015 by three main pro-Israeli organizations and of Obama’s most important speeches on the deal and J Street publications. This paper examines how counter- and de-securitization can occur concurrently to the securitization move in an attempt to resist the latter. Moreover, this article argues that the counter-move actors are not limited to the ones targeted by the securitization attempt – i.e. the referent subjects – but can also be carried out by other actors with appropriate capital in the same field. In this case, the Obama administration and J Street were not the referent subjects of the primary securitization. Still, they set themselves as the actors behind the counter-move. This proved to be decisive in preventing the original securitization from succeeding. The main challenge here is therefore to (re-)conceptualize security as a contested element and to broaden the potential actors involved in its definition.
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Citations
Dieudonné, J. (2021). Securitization, desecuritization and counter-securitization all at once: the case of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. IPS Belgium Seminar Series, Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100592