Securitization as a causal mechanism

Abstract The article seeks to offer a way forward in discussions about the status of securitization theory. In my reading, this debate has been inhibited by the difficulty of finding an appropriate version of ‘understanding/explanation’ that would be consistent with the meta-theoretical commitments of a post-structuralist theory. By leaving ‘explanation’ and/or all versions of causality to the positivist other, the Copenhagen School also left its own explanatory status often implicit, or only negatively defined. Instead, the present article claims that the explanatory theory used in securitization research de facto relies on causal mechanisms that are non-positivistically conceived. Using the appropriate methodological literature renders this explanatory status explicit, exposing the theory’s non-positivist causality and thus, hopefully, enhancing its empirical theory.