What critiques of just war theory can teach us about Rita Floyd’s theory of morally mandatory securitization

Floyd’s (2024) timely and skillfully argued book, The duty to secure: from just to mandatory securitization purports to explore not simply when securitization is permissible—she did that in her previous book—but the conditions that make it morally obligatory. There is ample reason to raise such concerns. Reading the news sometimes gives me the impression that society is facing threats from every possible direction, that things are constantly getting worse, with the call to securitize growing louder and louder every day. But as a student of History, I also know that threats in one form or another are concurrent with human existence since time immemorial. This should not give reason to discount Floyd’s contribution; on the contrary, it gives the book’s arguments, along with the useful terms Floyd weaves into the securitization moral vocabulary, a timeless horizon; they apply to the current moment, just as they might apply to the world 10, 20, or 50 years down the line. Her aspiration is that academics and practitioners can draw from this lexicon, like they do from the just war tradition which informs Floyd’s theory, to confront situations where securitization must be undertaken. It is in this spirit, and to muddy the ethical waters so to speak, that I propose three avenues of inquiry lifted from critiques of just war theory, to push Floyd’s arguments to into spaces where theory and reality clash.

Because Floyd relies on the use of philosophical hypotheticals to arrive at general principles that might otherwise be obscured by the complexities of real-world cases (p. 30), the costs of securitization that real people might bare are essentially unseen. It’s not that they don’t matter; they simply are background noise drowned out by the power behind the general principles driving the moral argument. But these costs matter in the real world. Thus, if an argument is going to be made that securitization is mandatory in certain cases, then it is important to have a better idea of who, in all likelihood, will bear the costs.

Take two of the hypotheticals explored in the book—jihadi terrorism (pp. 61–63) and migration (pp. 63–65)—which showcase the state’s responsibility to protect its citizens and uphold its end of the social contract bargain. Scholars have shown that the costs of securitization to deal with these threats are not necessarily distributed equally across society. For example, there is clear evidence that securitization measure taken by the French government after the 13 November, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris adversely impacted Arab/Muslim populations more than others (Brunstetter, 2021: 38–45). A similar conclusion can be found for non-white migrant populations, when securitization tactics, studied through the lens of racism, were employed to confront the perceived migration crises in Germany (Hirschauer, 2025). Now, one might want to dismiss these examples as unjust side effects of otherwise mandatory just securitization to confront real threats, but this would sidestep what scholars point to as a deeper issue. Criticizing the threads of the just war tradition (the so-called Revisionists, like Jeff McMahan and Helen Frowe) that rely on analytical philosophy, Hutchings (2019) and Wolfendale (2025) argue that hypotheticals used to elicit moral principles elide the racial hierarchy built into the Western liberal tradition, from classic social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to modern day icons like Rawls. And revisionist just war theorists, too. Do arguments for (mandatory) just securitization, drawn from hypotheticals, suffer from the same blind spot?

The question is all the more important given the difficulty of desecuritization, that is, knowing when securitization has been successful such that emergency measures can be repealed. The risk, to put it bluntly, is that the powers that be securitize perpetually. And those who bear the costs bare them, perpetually. Floyd’s theory, rightly so I think, has built-in the argument for mandatory desecuritization, because emergency measures ought not last forever. However, desecuritization is a tall task. This is because security is the most precious of goods. When weighed in the macro-proportionality calculation (wherein the expected good gained from securitization must be greater than the expected harm from securitization) used to justify security measures that might undermine (some people’s) human rights for the greater good, there is a lot—too much, some would say—moral leeway. In the just war tradition, such open-ended views on proportionality problematically fueled the democracy-spreading wars of the Bush administration and the forever wars on terror perpetuated by subsequent US administrations, not to mention rights eroding domestic measures such as surveillance and racial profiling (Burke, 2004: 33; Enemark, 2014). If we accept that threats from terrorism and migration crises will be exacerbated by the emergent climate crisis, then calls for mandatory desecuritization risk always being overridden by the value given to security in the macro-proportionality calculation.

There is, I fear, a slippery slope that leads from the call for mandatory securitization to a state of perpetual securitization. Calls for mandatory securitization often include rhetoric about an enemy with whom one cannot compromise. In the just war tradition, this rhetoric is inscribed in theories of canonical thinkers whose work has informed international law, such as Francisco de Vitoria and Emir de Vattel, while in contemporary times, it has spawned intractable “just” wars against “barbarians” (Brunstetter and O’Driscoll, 2018: 255). To the extent that just securitization theory borrows from the just war tradition, a similar slippery slope appears inevitable. Stated in the form of a series of questions: How then does one prevent the securitizing effects in mandatory situations from simply becoming the new normal that, to indulge Floyd’s Rawlsian predilections, reasonable people would come tolerate, even if their security comes at the price of others’ insecurity? How do scholars and practitioners avoid the trap of securitization against barbarians and the perpetual rights-diminishing struggle this would imply?

As a final point worth worrying about, I want to turn our attention to the concern that justified mandatory securitization to counter real threats may devolve not simply into unjust securitization, but into something far worse. Every good theory runs the risk of being appropriated for nefarious purposes. Just war theory has fueled colonial wars justified in terms of the civilizing mission and preventive wars framed as democracy-spreading wars. Is there a risk that populist movements today usurp the language of just securitization theory to bewitch the public ear, gain power, and then, through what seems like mandatory just securitization policies, irrevocably erode human rights in the name of security to counter so-called internal enemies of the state? What does the tipping point, when mandatory just securitization goes too far, look like?

Floyd turns to social contract theory to buttress the argument that the state has a duty to securitize to protect its citizens against real threats. And social contract theory, along with its critics, offers some insights to begin to address this worry. Let’s start with the critics. I already mentioned above how securitization may negatively impact certain sectors of a state’s population more than others. Mills’s (1997: 16) The Racial Contract reveals the racial hierarchies that underpin social contract theory and the “language of equality which echoes in the American and French Revolutions, the Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” His analysis could be used by those interested in the ethics of securitization to further probe how practices of even just securitization may follow patterns of historical inequalities. Turning now to classic social contract theory shows why this is important. Rousseau (2003: 18, 35) warns that the most important danger for social cohesion is when one particular will dominates over others and promulgates new laws that ostensibly favor insiders over outsiders. This can have an “othering” effect which, when the new laws implement securitization policies as they might in the case of immigration, negatively impacts certain sectors of the population more than others (Brunstetter, 2012). For Rousseau, this is, in the long run, a recipe for factions, civil strife, and potentially the dissolution of the social contract—a scenario that would undermine the turn to mandatory just securitization in the first place.

To conclude, calls for necessary securitization are more and more prevalent in the public sphere as societies face threats from a multitude of vectors. The robust arguments in Floyd’s The duty to secure enrich our moral vocabulary, and thus help scholars and practitioners to distinguish between claims of perceived necessity and instances of actual moral necessity where securitization is mandatory. The next logical move is to step out of the world of moral hypotheticals and apply the moral framework to the muddy waters where theory and reality inevitably clash.