‘Great power rivalry and the securitization of humanity’: Nathan Alexander Sears' last presentation

The morning before the fire that took his life, Nathan Sears and I presented on a panel about catastrophic and existential risk at the International Studies Association's Annual Convention. We had a good turnout for the 8:15 AM slot on the opening day of the conference, but flight cancellations had, at the last minute, reduced our panel from five presenters to just Nathan and I (alongside our very adaptable discussant, Daniel McCarthy). The unexpected change would normally have made me anxious, but Nathan's enthusiasm was contagious, and we happily took a few minutes to catch up before beginning. Nathan started his presentation by explaining that it represented two firsts for him: his first time presenting after successfully defending his doctoral dissertation and his first time presenting before he had had his morning coffee. The former was a clear source of pride; the latter did not slow him down a bit. With the right mix of confidence, authority and humility, he sketched out his theory on what was, to him, ‘one of the most striking dilemmas of world politics’ (Sears, 2023: p. 3): humanity's failure to ameliorate the greatest threats to its own existence.1 From nuclear and biological weapons to the prospect of climate catastrophe and ecological collapse to the risks posed by emerging technologies, humans—or, more accurately, certain segments of humanity—have produced a growing number of threats by which we can conceivably destroy ourselves as a species. But despite the apocalyptic stakes, the supposed rationality of state actors, and the necessity of humanity's survival to state survival, international actors have generally failed to remediate these existential threats. To explain why, Nathan turned to securitisation theory. In this approach, an issue does not become a matter of security because of its objective characteristics. It does so instead through an intersubjective social process in which a ‘securitising agent’ convinces the relevant audience that the issue represents an existential threat to a referent political body, thereby enabling extraordinary measures to address that issue (Buzan et al., 1998: pp. 21–47). An issue becomes a matter of security (with the concomitant urgency and priority) through a discursive process that involves framing and the negotiation of meaning. Most commonly, the securitising agent, the relevant audience and the enactors of extraordinary measures are all national political authorities—leaders and agencies of national governments—focused on national security. The state or ‘nation’ (however defined) represents the key referent in the securitisation process. When the referent of a threat is all of humanity, however, the problem is that the international system is short on formal political authorities that can act as securitising agents and audiences for humankind, and national self-interest impedes the concerted and cooperative actions required to protect humanity as a whole (see: Buzan & Wæver, 2009). In these circumstances, Nathan argued, the great powers are the actors best poised to ‘speak’ and ‘do’ security on behalf of humankind as the security referent (Sears, 2023: p. 14). The key question then becomes: when do the great powers focus the securitisation process on humanity, rather than adopting a national security frame? Echoing Kenneth Waltz's (1959) ‘three images’ of international relations, Nathan's answer involved three levels of analysis. The great powers are most likely to securitise existential threats to humanity (as such) when: there is a stable distribution of power among the great powers; securitising agents within the great powers' national institutions frame the issue in terms of humanity rather than narrow national interests; and when the leaders of the great powers believe the existential threat to be credible and do not perceive other great powers as hostile. Nathan demonstrated his theory with case studies of the great powers' failure to internationally govern nuclear weapons immediately after the Second World War, and their agreement to abrogate biological and toxin weapons through the Biological Weapons Treaty of 1972. In his paper, Nathan was grappling with difficult conceptual issues and advancing the field. Key challenges in the application of securitisation theory, for example, include demonstrating that the process indeed occurs as the theory proposes, and assessing the extent to which a ‘securitising move’ successfully securitises an issue. Nathan developed two metrics to address these problems: a ‘spectrum of discourse’ to measure the extent to which the existential threat to humanity is the dominant frame of an issue, and a ‘spectrum of action’ to assess the extent to which the resulting security actions represent extraordinary measures. Any attempt to quantify security discourse and action is tricky, but Nathan made a valuable first pass at the problem and surely would have developed these tools further. It is also worth considering the likely critiques of Nathan's analysis and speculating on how his work may have evolved in response. Realists would likely argue that state actions on existential threats boil down to questions of material power. As Nathan's account suggests, it is only when their relative power and national interests are not implicated that the great powers are willing to address issues of public concern. For realists, the discursive practices highlighted by securitisation theory are largely superfluous and unnecessary to the explanation. As our discussant insightfully noted, there is indeed a tension between the material conceptions of power Nathan uses to explain great power behaviour and the discursive forms of power at the heart of securitisation theory. But Nathan seemed to be moving towards a more sophisticated and multifaceted understanding of power. He cited status and prestige as important motivations for the Soviets to sign on to the Biological Weapons Convention, for example (Sears, 2023: p. 37). More broadly, his account highlights the importance of bureaucratic politics, national institutional structure and international norms as influences on the securitisation process. And he recognised that beliefs and ideologies shape leaders' actions. A related issue concerns the extent to which the great powers represent the sole or primary securitising agents (and security audiences) in the securitisation of existential threats to humanity. If, as securitisation theory holds, discourse is central to security practice, then we might expect a wider range of state and non-state actors to perform as securitising agents. For example, a transnational network of scientists and activists striving to limit and prohibit nuclear weapons contributed to the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (Evangelista, 2002); a similar movement in the interwar years led efforts to outlaw international war (Hathaway & Shapiro, 2017); and years of global advocacy by the 1000+ organisations in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines made possible the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which established a powerful international norm in the name of human security without the support of the United States, Russia and China. In the same vein of these examples, Nathan highlighted multiple forms of authority involved in securitisation: political, institutional, epistemic and charismatic (Sears, 2023 pp. 16–17). I think Nathan's subsequent work would have engaged more deeply with these different forms of power and authority to explore the sorts of discourse and facilitating conditions that enable securitising moves to succeed or fail (e.g. Jarvis & Legrand, 2017; McDonald, 2012; Van Rythoven, 2015). The paper he presented at ISA was just a starting point for a broader research program. In addition to post-war nuclear governance and the Biological Weapons Convention, Nathan had identified eight other episodes in which the international community attempted to securitise existential threats on behalf of humanity, including efforts to address the depletion of the ozone layer, the climate crisis, artificial intelligence and biodiversity loss. Had he delved into these additional case studies, he likely would have considered a variety of alternative explanations of the failure to securitise existential threats to humanity and generated abundant insights on securitisation and power. The policy implications of his theoretical thinking were always at the forefront of Nathan's mind. The question of who can ‘speak’ and ‘do’ security, he concluded, is especially crucial today. If the great powers are actors best positioned to securitise existential threats to humanity, then the resurgence of great power rivalry and growing sources of tension between them bode very poorly for the fate of humankind. Our best hope may be that other actors, state and non-state, can contest narrow national security frames and demand the extraordinary measures that might save humanity from self-destruction. Nathan would certainly have been on the frontline of the struggle. These reflections offer no more than a glimpse of how sharp Nathan was, and how promising a career was cut short. The field of world politics has lost a brilliant mind; it has also lost someone who was genuinely concerned about the future of humanity and who maintained a hopeful optimism that is in gravely short supply. It was a pleasure to know him, and a privilege to present alongside him. The author declares no conflict of interest. Michael Lawrence is a Research Fellow of the Cascade Institute's Polycrisis Project where he uses complex systems approaches to study the growing interactions between global crises. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

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