The Copenhagen School is a strand of critical security studies that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s around scholars affiliated with the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI), most prominently Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. Its canonical statement is the 1998 book Security: A New Framework for Analysis, which broadened the security agenda beyond the military-state nexus that dominated Cold War realism.
Three concepts define the school:
- Securitization theory: security is not an objective condition but a speech act. When an authorized actor labels an issue an "existential threat" to a referent object and an audience accepts that framing, the issue is moved out of normal politics and into a domain permitting extraordinary measures. Wæver introduced this argument in the early 1990s.
- Sectors of security: threats and referent objects can be analyzed across five sectors — military, political, economic, societal, and environmental — each with distinctive logics.
- Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT): developed by Buzan and Wæver in Regions and Powers (2003), this argues that security interdependence clusters geographically, so most threats travel more easily over short distances, producing durable regional patterns.
The school occupies a middle ground between traditional realism and more radical post-structural approaches. It accepts that material capabilities matter but insists that what counts as a security issue is socially constructed through discourse and political practice.
Critics — including the Aberystwyth (Welsh) School associated with Ken Booth — argue securitization theory is too state-centric, Eurocentric, and insufficiently emancipatory, privileging elite speech acts over the lived insecurity of marginalized populations. Feminist scholars such as Lene Hansen have pushed the framework to address gender and silence. Despite these critiques, the Copenhagen School remains one of the most cited frameworks in contemporary security studies and is widely applied to migration, cyber, climate, and pandemic policy debates.
Example
In 2015, EU leaders' framing of Mediterranean migration as an existential threat to European societal cohesion was analyzed by scholars as a textbook securitization move in the Copenhagen School tradition.
Frequently asked questions
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde are the core figures; their 1998 book Security: A New Framework for Analysis is the foundational text.
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