Abstract :
The Copenhagen school’s theory of securitisation has mainly focused on themiddle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states,construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. Its argument has been that thismiddle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collectivepolitical units can construct each other as threats, and the difficulty of finding audiences forthe kinds of securitisations and referent objects that are available at the individual andsystem levels. This article focuses on the gap between the middle and system levels, and askswhether there is not more of substance there than the existing Copenhagen school analysessuggests. It revisits the under-discussed concept of security constellations in Copenhagenschool theory, and adds to it the idea of macrosecuritisations as ways of getting an analyticalgrip on what happens above the middle level. It then suggests how applying these conceptsadds not just a missing sense of scale, but also a useful insight into underlying politicallogics, to how one understands the patterns of securitisation historical, and contemporary
