The Securitisation of Covid-19′ 

The global coronavirus pandemic which originated in Wuhan China, gave states the power to implement emergency measures and allowed them to throw human rights out of the window, removing people’s basic rights and freedoms in the name of security. The lengthy duration of the pandemic with its multiple waves and mutations, resulted in the securitisation of public health responses globally, along with numerous long and short-term restrictions on human rights that have been far-reaching. Consequently, most global human rights treaties only include provisions concerning emergencies that apply in the initial phase of response, when it is prolonged, and restrictions change in nature they become problematic because they create more permanent trade-offs when they are introduced incrementally in the name of health security.  

The term ‘human security was first created by the United Nations Development Programme in their’ 1994 ‘Human Development Report’, which began to shift the focus of security away from the state onto the experience of individuals and how they feel secure or insecure in everyday life. This development transpired at the same time, that infectious disease namely HIV/AIDS was to be perceived as a threat to national security, widening the definition of security and allowing for war like measures, to deal with social issues globally. Shifting the aims of global governance from a strict focus on the security of the state (national security), towards a broader or alternative focus on the security of people, either as individuals or, as a global/international collectivist, has the effect of modifying the concept of security in the realist sense. This maintains a narrow Cold War conception of security defined in military and state centric terms, while accepting climate, economic and social threats as the same as military threats.  

The result is that the dominant process of interaction is not war or emancipation (e.g. securing people against poverty or persecution) but rhetoric persuading an audience to accept issues like migration, climate change and health as threats to life, which justifies the use of exceptional measures. For instance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the 11th of March 2020, declared coronavirus a global pandemic, pointing to over 118,000 cases in 110 countries and the sustained risk of further global spread of this new disease. The declaration of Covid-19 as a pandemic provided the language to justify a security-orientated response, with continual references to the ‘war on the virus’, allowing for trade-offs in the name of perceived safety (e.g. In the form of secrecy, placing limitations on otherwise inviolable rights, redirecting society’s resources and energy to a single issue and the approval of experimental drugs). This is evident in the UK governments response on the 23^rd of March, when they announced a national lockdown which included far-reaching social contract restrictions, a “stay at home” order, general shutdown of public life and closure of non-essential retailers.  

These directives and the language that comprised them rather than enabling support, positioned Covid-19 as a threat and asserted it as an international security concern, that should take absolute priority and where extraordinary measures were logical. In ‘Security a new framework for analysis’ (1998), Buzan et al’ argue that security is not homogeneous and issues in themselves are not essentially threatening rather, it is by speaking to them as ‘security’ issues that they become ‘security’ threats. The ‘speech act’ model involves three steps, the structure of the decision-making process, the role of the securitising actors in framing the issue as a threat, the acceptance of an audience and escalation above politics into the category requiring exceptional measures. The Copenhagen School first conceptualised the ‘Securitisation theory’ in the 1990s, in an attempt to understand how relatively benign issues become security threats. In this approach, the actor using the ‘speech act’ has claimed the right to handle the issue through extraordinary means and to break the normal political rules of the game such as, in the form of secrecy, placing limits on otherwise inviolable rights, fast tracking authorisation of experimental vaccines or redirecting society’s energy and resources to the specific issue). 

However, speech acts are not rational or logical based on hard facts, instead they are distorted, righteous, emotional and ideological. This allowed the government to produce climates of fear that legitimised emergency powers and led to a situation where not only the ‘virus’ was securitised for the public, other people and public spaces also became objects to fear. The NHS which was a source of national pride, became the rallying point for the government’s ‘securitisation’ of Covid 19, epitomised by the ‘Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’ campaign and the promise that an experimental, novel vaccine technology, was the only option we had to de-securitise the pandemic. Ole Weaver’s (1995)  ‘securitisation and desecuritisation’,  argues that when political issues are securitised, they are dealt with as life-or-death issues that require exceptional measures such as, the use of large-scale violence, postponing parliamentary scrutiny of governmental decisions, limiting possibilities for political protest, diluting protection of privacy and watering down fundamental norms like freedom of speech and the prohibition of torture. 

This makes domestic security policy problematic as, it is no longer a ‘state of affairs’, it is instead carefully crafted by politicians and global elites, who have widened the referent object of security not only to include individuals, groups and environment but to include everyone. The long-term implications of securitising health and introducing exceptional measures, lie in limiting privacy and other rights affected by ‘stay at home’ orders that could become part of the government’s toolkit to limit rights under the guise of ‘national security’. The continuing crackdown on both journalistic freedom and freedom of speech, to control news that deviates from the approved narrative is extremely concerning and has led to the silencing of dissent or of the mere questioning of authorities’ advice and guidance. While the use of ‘war on terror’ rhetoric has allowed for novel forms excessive surveillance strategies such as, tracking, tracing and digital surveillance previously deemed unacceptable. This constitutes both a general threat to human rights and a specific threat to the right to privacy that will only act to exasperate underlying problems like economic inequality, political exclusion and environmental degradation. 

Written by Yvonne Maclean