Traditionally, the research conducted in the field of security studies have been primarily focused on questions regarding war and conflict between states and alliances. After the Cold War, security research focus shifted primarily to stabilization of regions in the third world and the war on terror.
Within the field of security studies, the consensus is that terrorism as a phenomenon is considered to be a threat to the democratic world. However, there is no extensive research concerning whether or not states consider individual terrorist groups as security threats.
The purpose of this study is to use the Securitization theory by The Copenhagen School to comment on how individual states describes the terror group called “the Islamic State” (the “IS”) and if the group is described as a security threat to their individual state or not.
Furthermore, the purpose of this study is to determine if there are differences in the official statements issued by states which are conducting war against IS and by those that are not. Another aspect that will examined is whether one can determine a difference in the way IS is described before and after the attacks in Paris November 13, 2015.
The results show that the IS, before and after the Paris attacks, is described as a security threat by the head of state in Britain, as a state that wages war on the IS, but not by the head of state in Sweden, which does not wage war against the IS. It is also possible to detect a difference between the countries waging war against the IS and those that do not, in the respective head of states’ discourse. These results indicate that states that are at war with the IS will also describe the IS as a higher threat in their official statements.
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