The Duty to Secure

An in-person & online book launch and conversation with Professor Rita Floyd.

An in-person & online book launch and conversation with Professor Rita Floyd, author of The Duty to Secure, also featuring Mary Kaldor & Jamie Shea.

Postponed

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Can social repression ever be justified? For example, when far-right activists try to burn down a hotel housing refugee seekers in Britain, as occurred last summer, should the state try to eliminate the movement and imprison its violent members? What about environmental activists who block traffic on major highways for hours? Was the UK government right to imprison those protesters while forbidding them from explaining their motives to the jury?

Such cases often fall under the heading of “securitization,” which former ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Professor Rita Floyd defines as the use of threat-specific, often liberty defying, rigorously enforced and sometimes forcible emergency measures. In her new book, The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization (Cambridge 2024), Professor Floyd explores how and when such measures can be morally permissible, articulating a range of criteria that includes just cause, right intention and proportionality. Her book asks when and whether such measures are not only allowable but ethically required. She specifies what kind of actors have such obligations, why, when and to whom. Professor Floyd puts her analysis in an international framework, and asks whether such duties pertain only to populations of one’s own state or also to people in other states?

Rita will discuss the practical implications of her work for existing duties, including NATO’s Article 5 and the “responsibility to protect” norm. In a time when the gap between governments and their publics seems to be increasingly, Professor Floyd sheds light on the ins and outs of a pressing and difficult subject.

Rita will be joined by two panelists: Professor Mary Kaldor, Director of the Conflict Research Programme at The London School of Economics and Political Science and author of Global Security Cultures (2018, Polity); and Professor Jamie Shea, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.

This event is the thirty-fifth in the ISRF’s series of Book Launches.