This type of book gives political science a bad name. It comprises an indecipherable concoction of semantic gobbledygook, liberally peppered with tiresome repetition with virtually identical texts appearing on successive or almost successive pages and glaring grammatical errors—leaving the reader to puzzle over whether it was ever submitted for the review of an editor.
Its lamentably shuns any trace of the straight-forward for the agonizingly and needlessly abstruse. Indeed, it is a book that appears to revel in calling a “spade” a “manually operated device designed to generate elevation differentials in the upper levels of the crust of the Earth.”
Moreover, its deplorable defects in style are matched only by commensurate deficiencies in substance.
The focus of the book purports to be the concept of “Securitization,” which the authors attempt to present a one-size-fits-all analytical framework that can be applied to case studies as diverse as a stunningly successful preemptive military strike (the 1967 Six-Day War) and a failed diplomatic initiative (the 1993 Oslo Accords).
However, despite the centrality of the concept to the book, try as I may, I could not find any clear definition by the authors of what they meant by the term, other than some critical references to the use by others of the notion, forcing the luckless reader to scourge the internet to acquire an inkling as to what the authors carry on about.
In broad brushstrokes, “securitization theory” adopts a decidedly conspiratorial and manipulative approach to national security, according to which issues are not threatening in themselves; only by referring to them as “security” issues do they become security problems, thus facilitating the enlistment of greater resources to contend with them. In other words, Israel could neutralize the danger posed to it by Hezbollah by refraining from alleging that it poses a danger.
In summation, this is a book that is virtually unintelligible, riddled with non sequiturs, and should be given as wide a berth as possible.
