The West’s politics orients around the Enlightenment state. Our modern ideal of governance is tolerant, bureaucratic, and egalitarian. We expect the benefits of rule of law, and on this condition, cede to government the monopoly of violence, as Max Weber famously put it. This is our security trade. Most Westerners alive have never experienced true chaos, so the trade has proved its worth. Nonetheless, calcifying economic inequities and persistent problems with immigration, education, and crime mean the Western ideal today is under enormous pressure from the left and right. Critics from the postmodern left and the premodern right fret that the West has lost its way.

The pressure on our ideal is not simply the populist fear that leadership is mismanaging governance. Anxiety is rising amongst commentators that the geopolitical plates are shifting under us. The Rand Corporation—whose researchers are much-relied upon by government—recently cautioned policymakers: “Discerning how the forces of premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity interact to shape the prospects for peace and prosperity will be an increasingly important task for analysts in coming years.” Rand believes the evidence shows key markers of “modern life” are attenuating: state competence and commodity access are declining, whilst organized crime and protracted conflicts, with significant impact on migrations, are growing. Their prognosis is sobering: “As trends that define the general arc of human experience, they are unlikely to be reversed and might, at best, be delayed or mitigated to some extent.” 

Rita Floyd is an Enlightenment theorist addressing our anxiety about security. The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization is an academic contribution to the rules that governments, institutions, and corporations must follow if they are to make the world more secure. She is an Associate Professor of Conflict and Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK. In addition to The Duty to Secure, Floyd has two previous monographs on security, also published by Cambridge University Press. The Duty to Secure is an interesting mix of moral theory and international relations (IR).

The book begins by laying out assumptions and definitions. The first assumption is the social contractual duty which obliges states to protect the people living within their jurisdictions. A second is that there is now a well-established right of humanitarian intervention. Such interventions, like NATO’s air war against Serbia in 1999, are wars of choice. Floyd observes that there is no legal obligation for states to militarily intervene even when atrocious crimes are afoot in a sovereign country. Nonetheless, “the right to protect” or the “ethics of rescue,” founded upon the core Enlightenment “principle of the moral equality of people,” establishes that a state’s protection can extend beyond its own folk to those of other nations.

These two assumptions are not free from challenge—and we will return to them later—but together they prompt the question driving the book: Does morality demand more obligatory action by our governing bodies in the name of justice and order? To probe this question, Floyd examines the security role of states, non-state actors, and collective security organizations, like NATO. Given geopolitical realities today, I think Floyd’s third chapter on the governance obligations of non-state actors, like commercial outfits, is especially interesting.

Just War Modified

Floyd calls the intensification of obligatory action on the part of governing agencies securitization. This is a technical term. Its definition shows it is a more “aggressive” idea than run-of-the-mill security. Securitization is defined as institutions of governance “using threat-specific, often liberty defying, rigorously enforced, and sometimes forcible emergency measures to address a threat, for example, mass surveillance, limited military action, and forced restrictions on freedom of movement.” The Duty to Secure was written during Covid, and Floyd offers the cordon sanitaire as an example of securitization. The definition is basic to the book and captures well the intensification of government Floyd imagines. Note the language of “emergency measures” in the definition. It points to a third assumption. Floyd does not appear to accept von Clausewitz’s idea that war is politics by other means but consistently says “securitization and war are both forms of exceptional politics.” Again, we will return to this assumption below.

Floyd invokes war because her theory of securitization is a modification of just war thinking. She writes, “I consider the just war tradition authoritative on the issue of the ethics of war, and by extension emergency politics.” It is an important part of the argument that just war theory is offered as a control on the scope of emergency measures in securitization.

In just war reasoning there must be a just cause to wage war, or, for Floyd, to legitimatize securitization. As she expresses it, “there must be an objective existential threat to a referent object.” A “real existential threat” can, but does not necessarily, mean lethal threat. The designation is of wider scope, including “severe physically or mentally disabling effects,” and so might include profound threats to family life or livelihoods. Though of wider scope, Floyd’s talk of severe is meant to do real work. Hers, she explains, is not a cosmopolitan theory. Most security theorists throw a wide net over many of the world’s problems, e.g. being committed to global justice, many “are concerned with achieving equality or with ending poverty.” Floyd’s focus is narrower, arguing “we do not have a duty of justice to the less well off, but simply a humanitarian duty to alleviate suffering.” 

“The just referent object” can be a people but could also be something like an eco-system. She writes, “Referent objects are entitled to defend themselves or are eligible for defensive assistance if they are morally justifiable. Referent objects are morally justifiable if they meet basic human needs, defined here as necessary components of human well-being.” Again, the definition is designed to be of wide scope. It might mean halting a genocide but securitization of an object “eligible for defensive assistance” could also be the great fauna of Africa. As a seriously threatened part of our ancestral heritage, these charismatic animals meet Floyd’s definition of a worthy object of securitization. Indeed, it is routine that privately run luxury safari parks employ mercenaries to hunt poachers and they do so, putting it euphemistically, with the safety catches off.

In my surmise, Floyd is a Lockean. A committed social contract theorist, against postmodernism, she contends that “the just war tradition by contrast sits firmly in analytical political and moral philosophy with proponents subscribing to universalism and reason, taking manifest aggression as a just cause of war.” Her commitment to reason enables classifications of threats that allows wide scope to sovereign states so long as their acts do not trigger existential threats. Her talk of “basic human needs” suggests a philosophical anthropology is operating in the background of her thinking. Having an Enlightenment confidence in public reason and manageable desires, Floyd is sure that her account of “the exception entails measures and conduct that most reasonable persons would ordinarily (i.e., in times when there is no relevant threat) consider unacceptable largely because of the harm or the violence they risk or entail.” Those supportive of the Western tradition of classical political philosophy will applaud Floyd’s confidence in reason’s management of appetite but worry about her framing assumptions.

Non-State Actors

One principle missing—and often thought to be the anchor of just war reflection—is legitimate public authority. True to the Enlightenment, Floyd’s theory is state-forward. Part of her confidence in contract theory is her belief that states are other-regarding. She writes, “Bearing in mind here that the need to prevent securitizing actor’s acting in their own as opposed to the interest of the just referent object is the greatest rationale for representative legitimacy.” This is a consequential belief. It impacts her account of the scope of non-state actors in securitization and, in my opinion, sells short the full import of her book.

Floyd omits the legitimate authority condition of just war because she believes it is sufficiently met by her core definition. The “objective existential threat to a referent object” formula entails that securitizing agents are other-regarding. Though states are the primary securitizers, Floyd puts them on notice. If the state’s social contract compass gets muddled, its sovereignty will erode rapidly. “The principle of mandatory securitization is really based on the idea that there are some things states are not allowed to do. Most notably if a state endangers an innocent (in the relevant sense) minority—other states, etc., have a duty to come to the rescue. In other words, self-determination is not sacrosanct.” The “etc.” opens the door to non-state actors delivering hard security.

This is a fertile line of inquiry as it links with Rand’s current research into waning state legitimacy and the growth of neomedievalism. For Rand, neomedievalism describes a world where the Enlightenment state is in decline, preindustrial warfare is growing, and, in consequence, the postmodern privatization of security surges. Unsurprisingly, her Enlightenment sensibility means the fate of the state is controlling: “sub-state actors are morally permitted to securitize only when states have manifestly failed to address a threat, or when the state is a threatener.” Feeling abandoned by their government, farmers in Mexico forming a self-defense league to protect their community from cartels might be an example. Floyd is tolerant of non-state actors, but wary.

Self-defense leagues are one thing but what Floyd does not tolerate are mercenaries hired by businesses taking on the role of securitization. “I suggest that non-state actors are not morally permitted to employ Private Military and Security Companies that would enable them to have a duty of mandatory securitization because of the adverse consequences for international order, stability, and security.” Worried about consequences, Floyd’s point is not an a priori prohibition but an empirical question, as the sociologists like to say. There are studies—like Mary Martin’s 2020 Corporate Peace: How Global Business Shapes a Hostile World—that list cases where workplace security operations radiate out to shore up the wider community. Indeed, NGOs in risky theatres often set up shop within the ambit of these security cordons staffed by mercenaries.

As IR theorists John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato recently pointed out, rational choice theory, not rich moral reflection, dominates Anglo-American international relations theory. In her 2019 The Morality of Security, Floyd lamented that “ethics in Security Studies is not a major area of research.” As she explains in this new book, her turn to ethics is not utopian. She concedes “the realist in me ultimately believes that humans are prone to tribalism and hence conflict,” yet she also thinks along with idealist IR that competent institutions can help deliver worthy securitization. Skipping between the two theoretical colossi of IR studies, Floyd’s fresh contribution to the “nascent literature” of security ethics fits our social media age well. Her intuition seems right that a moral theory addressing issues in hard security will “enable scholars and the public to hold practitioners accountable for how they practice securitization.” Government may be able to tough out bad publicity for a good while but scholars holding out a standard does structure popular perceptions and how historians chronicle events.

Besides states and non-state actors, there is a guarded role for an organization like NATO in securitization, believes Floyd. She takes a balanced approach to the Ukraine War, granting the legitimacy of NATO’s expansion but conceding it stirred a hornet’s nest, and she judges NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign in Libya as a disaster. Not all securitizing efforts are prudent. However, NATO has a legitimate securitizing role to play, since it is both a creation of social contract theory and aims to deliver basic human needs, being ready to protect and advance democracy and human rights. Appearing in February 2024, the book would have been in production on October 7th, so Floyd did not have the chance to apply her theory to Israel/Gaza. 

Contestable Assumptions

The Duty to Secure is 200 pages of theory. Happily, the writing is lean and the rigor commendable. The table of contents is well-organized in numbered sections and makes the argument easier to follow. The direct writing reflects the virtues of Anglo-American philosophy. The downside is that the language is heavy with a specific lexicon, reads a bit “sciencey,” and there are few concessions to a more historical or humanistic approach. Entertaining this approach might help with starting assumptions.

At first blush, the social contract assumption at the base of Floyd’s theory might seem unproblematic. It has Lockean pedigree and is obviously reputable. That said, for a security analyst it is debatable. Anarchists do not accept that the state operates for the care of the common good. For anarcho-syndicalists such as Mikhail Bakunin—or for him, militarized anarcho-syndicates—non-state actors are the core, and only legitimate, focus for security provision. Even someone who is not an anarchist might be concerned that Floyd’s social contract theory is too thin of an idea whittled down to security rather than the “thicker” concept of the rule of law, the latter packed with all manner of rights and duties that apply the brakes to state action.

Similarly, linking humanitarian intervention to the Enlightenment “principle of the moral equality of people” is a far thinner concept than that of dignity which founded the Renaissance’s Francisco de Vitoria’s innovation of humanitarian intervention. Dignity has value characteristics of distance, discretion, and sobriety and prompts the idea that persons are not to be toyed with. Again, this “thicker” concept seems to add potent riders to the scope of government intervention.

The departure from Clausewitz should be resisted. Of course, we live in an age when there is supposedly such a thing as the crime of attack—it is why people think Russia so obviously wrong—so war, as von Clausewitz understood it, is now out of fashion. The cost, however, is the loss of thinking of war as an ordinary part of politics with all the humanistic riders this entails. The contemporary Italian anarchist, Giorgio Agamben has written exhaustively about the dangers present in the state of exception politics in his massive Homo Sacer. He warns that emergency politics creates what he calls a “zone of indistinction” where traditional rights and duties are obscured. In consequence, persons no longer negotiate socially and politically via these beacons but effectively reside inside security camps.

The Duty to Secure raises important questions and should all studies that take up Floyd’s challenge apply her rigor, we will be well served. For my part, I think a more fulsome humanistic tradition of inquiry would help.