The Chechen Conflict: Securitisation or
Normalisation?
Bettina RENZ (University of Birmingham) & Edwin BACON (Birkbeck
College, University of London)
Paper presented to the International Studies Association Annual
Convention, San Diego,
March 22-25, 2006
In its military efforts to keep Chechnya within the Russian Federation, the Putin
regime justified a range of ‘extreme measures’ (the use of force, the bombing of
civilian targets, detention without trial, the suspension of democracy, the limitation of
media access) by means of the discourse of existential threat to the Russian state.
Having been launched in August 1999, the military phase of the operation in
Chechnya officially was declared over a year later, accompanied by a competing
discourse of ongoing ‘de-securitisation’ and ‘normalisation’ of the situation.
Contrasting official Russian portrayals of developments in Chechnya with
representations of the situation by non-state analysts and organisations active in the
republic, the paper concludes that despite the Russian authorities’ insistence today
the situation in the republic remains far from normal.
Securitisation and the study of Russian politics
This paper assesses the Chechen conflict within the securitisation framework
elaborated by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde in their 1998 book,
‘Security: A New Framework for Analysis’,
which was adapted by the authors as a
comparative tool for the study of contemporary Russian domestic politics.
In short,
securitisation happens when ‘normal’ politics is pushed into the security realm by a
political actor displaying the rhetoric of existential threat against a referent object (for
instance, the state, the nation, sovereignty, territorial integrity) in order to justify the
adoption of emergency measures outside the formal norms and procedures of politics.
The portrayal of an issue as a matter of security (the ‘speech act’) in itself does not
denote a successful securitisation, but merely a ‘securitising move’. A securitising
move becomes a successful attempt at securitisation only once the audience to which
the securitising discourse is addressed accepts, and thus legitimises, the securitising
actor’s discourse and the necessity of the advocated emergency measures. In the
1
This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the presentation of the
paper at this convention was funded by the British Academy. We would like to thank the ESRC and the
British Academy for their support. Correspondence to b.## email not listed ## and e.## email not listed ##.
2
Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder
Colorado: Lyenne Riemer 1998.
3
This paper is an abbreviated version of a chapter from our forthcoming book, Edwin Bacon and
Bettina Renz, Securitising Russia: The Domestic Politics of Putin, Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2006. In addition to the Chechen conflict the book assesses securitisation moves in the spheres of
the media and information, civil society, the economy, and migration, as well as assessing the influence
of the security forces in contemporary Russian politics.
1
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