SECURITECH

The problem

Over the past decade, the Baltic Sea region has witnessed a growing level of tension. Russian airplanes have systematically breached Danish and Swedish sovereign airspace,1 a Russian submarine was spotted in Swedish waters and a recent Russian military drill featured a scenario of dropping a nuclear bomb over the centre of Stockholm. These visible examples of Russian revisionism are worrying. And the current war in Ukraine only adds to this trend. However, the focus on the visible and spectacular has made current policies fail to understand a deeper level of transformation which is changing the security of the Baltic Sea Region. The Cold War of our era is taking place at a slow, but solidifying pace at the level of un-spectacular, technical, mundane critical infrastructure. Energy infrastructure stands central here. Once in place, energy infrastructure stays and ‘morphs’ the security of a region. And so do the negotiations and categorisations underpinning the construction and running of it. Therefore, the research group SECURITECH is undertaking the first investigations into the technification of security authority in critical infrastructure and creating an international network on the topic.

State-of-the art

While a debate on critical infrastructure is emerging, energy studies as an academic field has failed to grasp the enormity of the current situation. Most frequently, energy is analysed as an energy market with importer/exporter as the main analytical distinction or as a matter of geopolitics. A thin understanding of the politics of energy security as traded in friend/foe terms flourishes. However, the steady production of and negotiation over energy infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region as an instance of the technification of security politics has been overlooked as has an ensuing displacement of security authority. SECURITECH aims to fill this gap. By peering to critical security studies, the study emphasises the growing attention to a process of banalisation, whereby security moves away from the spectacular to the bureaucratic day-to-day decisions. A gradual and un-spectacular move strips the traditional, centralised state responsibility and authority in security politics and puts other hybrid forms of governance in its place. The relevant place to look becomes the struggle for authority in negotiations between private companies, civil servants, environmental organisations and energy experts working on or combating energy infrastructure projects. The project argues that we need to understand these technified negotiations that transform strategic environments, displace authority and challenge security. Therefore, the project asks:

How are energy infrastructures negotiated and organised by key stakeholders in energy infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region, and with what consequences for security authority and accountability? Which lessons on the technification of security authority follow?

Theoretical contribution

SECURITECH places itself in the theory debate on securitisation and its focus on how security should be understood as a process rather than a stable concept. It further recognises work on how different meanings of security are produced in specific practice fields The project agrees that state authority is increasingly diffused and banalised. As PI Trine Villumsen Berling has argued elsewhere  technical forms of expertise may close off political deliberation on account of an issue being ‘too technical’. By bringing in knowledge from Science and Technology Studies on how issues can move from ‘matters of concern to matters of fact’, SECURITECH aims to add to the current state of the art in security and energy studies alike by seeking to define the mechanisms by which a series of negotiations turn the “messy” world of e.g. nuclear energy into “organised” and non-catastrophic, manageable issues and thereby desecuritize and (re)define who has authority.

Cases

Three types of energy infrastructure at different levels of completion in the Baltic Sea Region will structure the empirical research in three work packages:

1. Planned nuclear power facilities in Poland
2. The recently opened Lithuanian liquefied natural gas terminal ‘Independence’
3. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline

All cases entail close negotiations between civil society, authorities, and private companies in the Baltic Sea Region over highly technical and security issues.