Securitization, desecuritization and counter-securitization all at once: the case of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal
(2021) MESA Annual Meeting — Location: Online (29.November.2021)
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- The struggle around the negotiation and 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 two audiences: American lawmakers specifically and the American public more broadly. They did so through a wide array of channels, from direct lobbying towards Congressmen 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, led by the Obama administration and J Street, 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: Commentary Magazine, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Washington Near East Policy Institute. It also relies on a content analysis of Obama’s most important speeches on the deal and J Street publications during the period running up to the vote in Congress. Counter- and de-securitization concepts have only recently gained attention (see Christou & Adamides 2013; Stritzel & Chang 2015; Han 2020) and have still not be fully developed and even less applied to empirical cases. Building on these authors, 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, J Street and the other organizations advocating for the JCPoA 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. Therefore, this article first demonstrates the ins and outs of the securitization process carried by the pro-Israeli organizations, most of them revolving around AIPAC. Secondly, it highlights the existence of newer pro-Israeli organizations with different views and how, along with the Obama administration, they successfully challenged the mainstream ones through a counter- and de-securitization move by distinguishing between a threatening potentially-nuclear Iran without a deal and a peaceful non-(too-)threatening Iran with a deal.
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Dieudonné, J. (2021). Securitization, desecuritization and counter-securitization all at once: the case of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. MESA Annual Meeting, Online. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100645