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Health as an issue of national security has been well-established over the last three decades. Jeremy Youde provides a useful discussion of both advantages and disadvantages of health securitization, identifying that while health securitization can garner attention for an issue (evidenced in the AIDS epidemic), and resources to address it that might be activated on a global scale, it simultaneously can feed into an us-versus-them mode of thinking (Youde 2022). Youde identifies the negative elements of increased surveillance, and the reproduction of paternalistic relation- ships between global North and South. Stefan Elbe (2006) looked closely at the global AIDS pandemic through the lens of securitization theory, as revelatory of the normative dilemma at the heart of securitization of health (Elbe 2006). This normative dilemma is characteristic of securitization in general: while securitizing something may raise awareness and, crucially, may direct state funds towards a targeted issue, it simultaneously invites military responses that often involve the suspension of civil rights and liberties, and it raises a threat-defence logic (2006).

The racialised dimensions of AIDS are well-established in health literature with racial and ethnic disparities evident in infection rates and outcomes (Stone 2012; Bhana 2006; Elbe 2006). While there are racialised tendencies to apportion ‘blame’ and to control movement, minoritized people are more likely to die from AIDS: this is not a discretionary behaviour of the virus, rather it reflects extant health inequalities that can be observed both globally and more locally in individual states. As Youde (2008) warns in his discussion of the potential securitization of Avian flu H5N1, securitization of health involved ‘us-versus-them’ thinking, and evoked efforts to guarantee flu vaccines (Youde 2008). The effort to prepare for a pandemic in case it happened in America before human-to-human transmission was known, was the priority and arguably displaced AIDS and other real-but-distant ongoing crises such as Malaria from the global health agenda. As Sophie Harman (Harman 2021) succinctly argues:

If the nexus between climate change, conflict, and migration is already wrongly assumed, the question is if the narratives that emerge through this context, which lead to a securitization, are useful for tackling climate change appropriately. It is argued a securitization is useful because it raises awareness of the issue, importantly hoping that the climate change receives greater attention from policy-makers. ‘But even the best of intentions cannot obscure that we don’t live in a win-win world’ (Hartmann, 2010: 239). This essay shows that the securitization of climate change hinders appropriate responses to the issue, while the negative Malthusian view deeply influences the rhetoric about climate change (Hartmann, 2014). Through the securitization, serious efforts of climate change mitigation will be undermined, and developments in foreign policies can be recognized that seem to support climate action but if one takes a closer look, they remain questionable. If climate change is portrayed as a danger to security, it supports those who address climate change through conventional security measures and the securitization serves western security interests (Brzoska, 2009). Accordingly, Brzoska (2015) examines military forces and if climate change leads to their increase. He concludes that the ‘general perception of the importance of climate change […] seems to feed the expectation that climate change will amplify already existing priorities of armed forces’ (Brzoska, 2015: 187), while the military is not getting more sustainable. A military upgrade is expensive – this money could be used to invest in mitigation measures for climate change. In addition, if there is a lack of evidence proving the climate-conflict-nexus, more military is not needed for climate change reasons. Nonetheless, the narratives of climate change, combined with an increase of armed forces, help to justify armed interventions. For the U.S. for instance, it is important to maintain military supremacy. For the actors of the national security, it is important ‘to continue to operate in a world where climate change impacts are increasing’ (Brauch /Scheffran, 2012: 6). Hartmann (2010 / 2014) agrees that the threat narratives serve the U.S. as a security actor in Africa. It is argued that AFRICOM[7] is justified officially through economic and political objectives. In a broader sense, the climate change narrative fits to justify military assistance (Hartmann, 2010). It becomes evident that this is not an appropriate answer to climate change. A militarization will not help to reduce greenhouse gases but it will only enforce the security interests of the respective country. In relation to migration, the term ‘climate refugees’ is too simple. The notion ‘climate refugee’ overvalues the ‘role of demographic pressure’ and as with climate-conflict – the reasons for migration are ‘complex and context-specific’ (Hartmann, 2010: 235). Furthermore, ‘framing migration as a threat leads to policies that do little to control migration but that limit the benefits of migration to migrants and their original and destination communities’ (Commission on Climate Change and Development, 2009 in Hartmann, 2010: 241). Hartmann (2014: 769) goes further and states that the ‘causal chain between poverty, overpopulation, environmental degradation, migration, and ultimately political unrest’ serves a ‘Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa’. This helps the enforcement of defense strategies of western countries, as well as the new land enclosures in sub-Saharan Africa, by the depiction of Africans as a threat (Hartmann, 2014). These narratives about climate refugees imply that ‘we’, the western world, depict ourselves as victims. ‘The silenced ‘Other’, with no agency and driven by desperation, easily becomes the unpredictable, wild ‘other’ that threatens ‘‘us’’.’ (Manzo, 2010 in Bettini, 2013: 70). This colonial thinking leads to the depiction of climate refugees as a ‘destitute victim’ instead of a political subject.’ (Bettini, 2013: 70). Subsequently, the narratives around climate refugees have the potential for policies that affect migrants and not climate action. In addition, the securitization of climate change supports the marketization and militarization of nature (Dunlap / Fairhead, 2014). Climate change creates and transforms access to new markets for carbon, biodiversity, biofuels and climate-secure food. Climate security thus entails more than a concern for ‘bad weather’ but generates new climate commodities that produce ‘climate conflicts’. The emerging conflict occurs as political elites ‘grab’ these environmental markets – animated by the securitization of climate threats. In short, ‘Environmental conflicts intensify with the further abstraction of nature as a service provider and the commodification of these services.’ (Dunlap / Fairhead, 2014: 947) That the neo-liberalization of the nature fuels conflicts is for instance already well-documented and described in cases like Indonesia and Kenya during the PES programme UN-REDD+[8] by the United Nations (Dunlap / Fairhead, 2014: 947). Even if the securitization and the alarmism of climate change leads to a rising awareness in the international politics, a causal relationship between conflict and warming, as is claimed in several studies, combined with the worst-case scenarios, raises yet another question: how shall the reduction of greenhouse gas be central to political decisions, if studies do not properly demonstrate that the negative effects of climate change can be avoided through an appropriate installation of measures (Brzoska, 2009)? The impacts of climate change are convincing and fearsome without the inadequate depiction of climate wars and climate refugees. These dystopian narratives and the increase of armed forces fail to lead to a higher degree of cooperation between states and fail to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. The securitization runs into the danger of ‘doing very little – and may even obstruct or distract attention from – the huge challenge of […] stemming global anthropogenic climate change’ (Selby / Hoffmann, 2014: 754), while the dramatizing tone could lead to a militarization (Brzoska 2009: 138), the neo-liberalization of the nature (Dunlap / Fairhead, 2014) and the enforcement of western interests (Hartmann, 2014). As shown above, securitization further leads to a stereotypical depiction of ‘othered’ Africans and to isolation policies of western countries. North African states, like Morocco, already cooperate with European states to bring the ‘phenomenon [of climate refugees] under control’ (Hartmann, 2014: 776). This essays argues for a ‘re-politicisation of academic discourse on climate security’ (Selby / Hoffmann, 2014: 752) and demonstrates that framing climate change as a threat has little potential to combat the effects of climate change correctly while supporting climate action. Conclusion The discourse of climate change and its harmful impacts is omnipresent in society. This essay first explained how the security notion shifted after the Cold War while explaining the theoretical framework behind securitization with the CS and the Paris School. A brief overview of the important literature on the topic is the evidence revealed that the topic is controversial and well discussed by international scholars, with varying levels of agreement. The followed section provided information on what climate action is and which measures would lead to a containment of the emission of greenhouse gases to prove the core part of this essay, which pursued the reconstruction of the crisis narratives that emerge through climate change’s securitization. It showed several findings: First, it highlighted that the narratives are futuristic, dystopian and pessimistic, not fact-driven, while these narratives typically connect climate change to conflict and migration. Second, it demonstrated – with examples of Syria and Darfur – that the common assumption of climate change as a driver for violence and conflict is misguided. Third, it critically examined the consequences of the narratives while evaluating if the narratives help or hinder the support of climate action. As it is proven above, these constructed scenarios do not help tackle climate change appropriately. Furthermore, these scenarios advance western interests – it is showed that military forces will increase through existing climate change rhetoric. Furthermore, climate refugees posed as national security threats for western countries, support isolation policies. In general, I would argue for the securitization of climate change only if it would raise enough political awareness for climate action to be properly addressed – not if it were to produce these conflict narratives. Instead, I do not see any smart moves or more climate action as an outcome of these constructed speculative narratives. The national security of western countries becomes the focus of national states when securitizing climate change and the political economy sees monetary incentives in framing climate change as a threat. Due to scholars who identify drawbacks of climate change securitization, the climate-conflict orthodoxy and its dangers are being questioned in newspaper articles[9] and publications of organizations, like the IPCC. One can only hope, that international policy-makers also become aware of the drawbacks of the securitization of climate change and that such critique leads to a reconsideration of the challenging task of climate action. In the words of Selby and Hartmann (2015): ‘[The international community] should drop the climate war rhetoric. Instead, the focus should be on how climate policy can be a road to the international cooperation required for a rapid transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy systems.’ Even though the current climate-conflict logic becomes questioned more and more, the conflict rhetoric is still worryingly present in contemporary political discourse. For the future, I hope for a shift towards an expedient debate with climate action at its core.

2. Climate change, a problem securitized? Climate change, like any major change in the conditions of human societies, will create and fuel conflicts, affecting the living conditions of many people. In many cases, such change will be for the worse. This may, in turn, lead to violent conflict. The deterioration of the human environment and the resulting violent conflict may induce large numbers of people to migrate, thus also creating conflicts in areas less negatively affected by climate change. Beyond local and regional effects, climate change increases the global risk of violent conflict by adding another element of contention to the competition among major powers. These dangers associated with climate change are by now quite well rehearsed. But how high is the probability that they will occur? How likely is it that climate change will lead to more interstate wars, intrastate wars or terrorism? How much do we know about the links between climate change and violence? Are these dangers ‘real’ in the sense of having a high likelihood of occurring or are they largely fictitious, edge-of-range possibilities that are used to draw attention to climate change, a level of attention that would not be attainable by stressing the more likely, but less spectacular economic and social consequences of the problem? The latter would be understandable but potentially counterproductive. In the literature on securitization it is implied that when a problem is securitized it is difficult to limit this to an increase in attention and resources devoted to mitigating the problem (Brock 1997, Waever 1995). Securitization regularly leads to allround ‘exceptionalism’ in dealing with the issue as well as to a shift in institutional localization towards ‘security experts’ (Bigot 2006), such as the military and police. Methods and instruments associated with these security organizations – such as more use of arms, force and violence – will gain in importance in the discourse on ‘what to do’. A good example of securitization was the period leading to the Cold War (Guzzini 2004 ). Originally a political conflict over the organization of societies, in the late 1940s, the East-West confrontation became an existential conflict that was overwhelmingly addressed with military means, including the potential annihilation of humankind. Efforts to alleviate the political conflict were, throughout most of the Cold War, secondary to improving military capabilities. Climate change could meet a similar fate. An essentially political problem concerning the distribution of the costs of prevention and adaptation and the losses and gains in income arising from change in the human environment might be perceived as intractable, thus necessitating the build-up of military and police forces to prevent it from becoming a major security problem. The portrayal of climate change as a security problem could, in particular, cause the richer countries in the global North, which are less affected by it, to strengthen measures aimed at protecting them from the spillover of violent conflict from the poorer countries in the global South that will be most affected by climate change. It could also be used by major powers as a justification for improving their military preparedness against the other major powers, thus leading to arms races. This kind of reaction to climate change would be counterproductive in various ways. Firstly, since more border protection, as well as more soldiers and arms, is expensive, the financial means to compensate for the negative economic effects of reducing greenhouse gas emission and adapting to climate change will be reduced. Global military expenditure is again at the level of the height of the Cold War in real terms, reaching more than US $1,200 billion in 2006 or 3.5 percent of global income. While any estimate of the costs of mitigation (e.g. of restricting global warming to 2°C by 2050) and adaptation are speculative at the moment,1 they are likely to be substantial. While there is no necessary link between higher military expenditures and a lower willingness to spend on preventing and preparing for climate change, both policy areas are in competition for scarce resources. Secondly, the acceptance of the security consequences of climate change as an intractable problem could well reduce efforts to find peaceful solutions to the conflicts that will inevitably come with climate change. Climate change will have major consequences, particularly in countries where living conditions are already precarious (IPCC 2007, WBGU 2007). The consequences of climate change on some basic foundations of life, such as fresh water supplies, arable land and agricultural productivity in various parts of the world can already be roughly estimated for various global-warming scenarios. There are also more or less well founded predictions of the consequences of reduced availability of natural resources such as arable land and water on hunger and disease, even though such consequences are highly dependent on counter-measures and adaptation efforts in affected regions. There is no inevitability about these consequences. This is even more the case for violent conflict of various types. The links between reductions in resource availability and violent conflict are complex. A deterioration in human security – threats to the ‘vital core of life’ (Commission on Human Security 2003, p. 4) does not necessarily imply an increase in violent conflict. To assume the opposite may lead to the neglect of opportunities for conflict resolution and the prevention of conflict from turning violent. Those who do not accept the ‘securitization’ argument have argued that framing a problem as a security issue does not necessarily have these consequences (Knudsen 2001; Jackson 2006). While raising military preparedness and favouring military over civilian approaches to dealing with conflicts may have been the predominant reaction in the Cold War, this is supposedly not the case any more. It is argued that the rethinking of the best approach to security in the final phases of the Cold War – relevant keywords include Common Security and Comprehensive Security – as well as the expansion of the concept of security to cover a wide range of issues, including the environment and 1 One example of the difficulties is the discussion of the cost calculations in the Stern Review, see economics and culminating in the concept of human security already mentioned, decoupled ‘security talk’ from instruments particularly connected to the military and the police. The issue at stake here is whether the framing of an issue as a security matter can have different outcomes depending on the understanding of security used. Does it make a difference whether those ‘securitizing’ an issue are arguing in terms of ‘hard’ security – of wars, weapons, and armies – or in terms of ‘human security’ – of hunger, disease and refugees? Or put differently, can the ‘exceptionalism’ signified by use of the word ‘security’ have different configurations, for instance, can it be limited to the application of greater attention and more financial resources than ‘normal’, or will it inevitable be linked to the use of violence? While often talking past each other, proponents and critics of the ‘securitization’ argument have had major debates in the past, on environmental security in the early to mid-1990s, and on the development/security link, migration and terrorism in the early 2000s. Neither of these debates has been conclusive. Climate change offers another opportunity to investigate the validity of the claims of the ‘securitization’ critique. In what follows here, I will do this on the basis of four selected recent studies, which all ‘securitize’ climate change, albeit with differing understandings of security. None is limited to a narrow conception of ‘hard’ security, and all include ‘soft’ security concerns. However, they differ in their emphasis, which ranges from a conception of human security that encompasses all threats to human life and well-being, to national security. My question in this paper is whether differences in understanding lead to differences in the presentation of the problem, the analytical instruments and the policy recommendations. These three aspects structure the paper.

Cyber security is often characterised as fearful, with cyber threats being both permanent and evolving (Ehrlicher, 2021), and cyber attacks being seen as inevitable (Pearlson et al., 2021). The businesses in our study seemed to agree, with cyber threat appearing to be normalised. Participants, both CISO and non-CISO, considered these threats to be enduring and businesses needed to accept that they would be compromised. This implies a “perpetuall cyber warre” (Stevens, 2016, p. 120). These businesses existed in “continuall feare” (Hobbes, 1985, p. 186), threatened by “death, poverty, or other calamity” (Hobbes, 1985, p. 169) arising from something, i.e, cyber security, that was not well understood, even mystical,18 as “perpetuall feare, [is] always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes” (Hobbes, 1985, p. 169-70).19 The role of the CISO may be valued as one “that can make the Holy Water” (Hobbes, 1985, p. 692) that provides protection from fearful things, and, therefore, is motivated to maintain the fear and dread that underpins their value.20 Survival was clearly a concern for these businesses. Cyber security was positioned as a threat to viability by many of these organisations, with fear of regulatory action and associated fines and reputational damage in particular being a prime concern. Such concerns with viability and survival, arguably the primary motivation for businesses (Beer, 1979), are analogous with seeking to avoid punishment that could lead to “pain, and disability” and, ultimately, “death” (Gert, 2001, p. 243). The punishments they sought to avoid were enacted by the larger Leviathan of the state and, as mini-Leviathans, these businesses cascaded this concept, instituting their own mechanisms of punishment for their employees, as we discuss below. Internal experts were positioned by many of these organisations as “guards” that protected them against the various harms that they faced. Cyber security functions were seen as assuagement against threats to business viability and helped these businesses to manage the uncertainty they experienced as a result of these threats and ensure their continued survival. This allowed them to shape their future to a certain extent, aligning with Hobbes’ encouragements towards continued attentiveness to threats (Stevens, 2016), but also provided a resource that articulated and predicted those threats, based on both past, and imagined future, events. 5.1.1. Permanent cyber emergency Many of these organisations played a role in national cyber security, including participating in invitation-only national security working groups. Such fora, in which government intelligence services share details of cyber threats with specific industries, demonstrate the role that governments play in maintaining a state of permanent cyber emergency. They provide a mechanism through which governments can both maintain fear and amplify it. This could be achieved through exaggeration or even fabrication, particularly when considering the reliance of the state Leviathan on the persistence of this fear.21 A permanent emergency offers benefits as a “master narrative” (Smith and Sparkes, 2008, p. 18) that can be invoked to support actions taken by businesses and individuals within that business, whether to justify investment or to justify restrictive controls such as surveillance, as we discuss in Section 5.3. The positioning of cyber security as warfare, which is a narrative repeated by both media and governments (Stevens, 2016), establishes that concept in the minds of all parties to that war, whether attacker or attacked. Adversaries, or even just those who disagree, will respond to the narrative of cyber security-as-war and then treat it as such, focusing on attack and defence, rather than seeing it as anything else, for example, as a collective problem of identifying and addressing weaknesses that threaten all. This could lead to actions that have unintended consequences, such as state purchasing, and hoarding, of vulnerabilities, e.g. Hoeksma (2017). Cyber security-as-collective-problem could be considered a “flattened narrative” (Farley, 2001), with preference instead provided to the cyber security-as-war concept which supports the maintenance of existing power structures. This can also be considered as indexing a “meta-narrative” (Symon et al., 2014, p. 3) of existing or ‘traditional’ enemies (Stevens, 2016), and the “superiority of ...the West” (Neocleous, 2008, p. 172), as suggested by the references to (ex-)communist states22 observed in the data. There is an almost paradoxical relevance of both Foucault’s and von Clausewitz’s perspectives on war, with cyber war being a “mere continuation of policy by other means” (von Clausewitz, 1873, p. 12) and cyber politics being “the continuation of war by other means” (Foucault, 2004, p. 15).23 Each of these also provides economic benefits (Neocleous, 2008), as we discuss below. Positioning cyber security as an existential threat, as a war with “apocalyptic” (Stevens, 2016, p 121) consequences, may also allow for exceptionalism and deviance from existing laws, both national and supranational. Hobbes explicitly permitted defiance of law if motivated “by the terrour of present death” (Hobbes, 1985, p. 345). Such exceptionalism based on existential threat can be observed in modern societies, e.g. Government, Government; USA (2001), including in relation to cyber security threats (Walker, 2006). References to national security also connect with this warfare motif. As the nation is ‘under threat’ then there is a collective sense of conflict and, therefore, a suggestion that everyone has to play their part. The fear generated by these threats propels citizens into “the waiting arms of whoever might be ruling” (Chapman, 1975, p. 88). Such fear may be a “necessity-justification” (Chapman, 1975, p. 89) for enduring power, and, as Chapman suggests, it is straightforward to conceive of such “justification ...[occurring] at the state level, as a function of real or manufactured inter-state crises” (Chapman, 1975, p. 89), particularly with regard to threats that are hard to understand or somewhat ephemeral in nature, such as those related to cyber security. If cyber-security threats result in fearful and bewildered citizens, those citizens are easier to moderate. Educating citizens on, or even communicating the existence of, cyber threats may couple “paranoia with pacification” (Chapman, 1975, p. 90).

In ‘Digital Disaster, Cyber Security, and the Copenhagen School,’ published in 2009, Lene Hansen and Helen Nissenbaum suggest ways in which securitization theory can help us understand the politics of cybersecurity and cyberwar, a complex terrain that brings together a variety of technical and policy challenges that range from individual cybersecurity problems (cybercrime) through to issues of national and economic cybersecurity (anxieties about attacks on ‘critical infrastructure’) (Hansen and Nissenbaum, 2009). Some of the threats point to futuristic ‘black swan’ disasters that result from our high-speed networked society; some of the challenges are traditional problems – abuse and harassment, grooming and recruitment, identity theft and fraud – carried out with new technologies. The cyberterrain is one where there is an anxiety that an individual can become a national security problem in new and dangerous ways – and where cyber techniques and technologies of national security can play out at the level of the individual in new and unprecedented ways, with innovations in the surveillance and monitoring of everyday life: the security state becomes - to use the fashionable management term - increasingly granular. This essay returns to Hansen and Nissenbaum’s article, an article that introduced new complexities, questions and nuances to the study of cybersecurity in security studies and international relations, to think about the changing terrain of cybersecurity in the second decade of the Twenty First Century– and the importance (and problems) of thinking about the ‘non-West’ in research on (cyber)securitization.

Hansen and Nissenbaum are interested in how the collective ‘referent objects’ of ‘the state,’ ‘society,’ ‘the nation’ and ‘the economy’ are presented as being threatened through three types of securitization that ‘tie referent objects and securitizing actors together’(Ibid, p.1163): hypersecuritization, everyday security practices and technifications. On this view, hypersecuritzation refers to the expansion of a security problem into a realm where there is the danger that threats can be exaggerated, resulting in excessive countermeasures: these hypersecuritizations, according to Hansen and Nissenbaum, always ‘mobilize the spectre of the future’ while also using ‘the past as a legitmating reference’(Ibid, p.1164). In the public threat horizon of future threats and dangers, proponents of cyber fears often use historical analogies of ‘electronic pearl habors’ or ‘cyber 9/11s’ in speculations on new types of threats: for the securitization theorists, the ‘re-animation’ of past events works to give a ‘form’ or credibility to future threats that have yet to occur – or are yet to be imagined.

Third, in connection with the above paragraph, the domestic inward-looking nationalistic trend that securitization has created hinders China’s realization of global leadership. To lead AI in the global arena, China must provide public goods and win support from others through successful partnerships. It must play a key role in promoting global governance and, as a global leader, act according to common interests rather than solely national interests. However, a security focused, inward-looking, nationalistic AI discourse is helpful to neither global governance nor common interests. For example, it can foster the rise of inward looking national AI policies that prioritize national interests over those of the globalized world. This is in direct contrast to global governance goals, i.e., to build a shared future through global solidarity. Indeed, many of the problems that AI has created, such as those relating to ethics, represent collective challenges to humankind that require a globally concerted response. Inward-looking national AI policies may contribute to a fragmented global governance structure, and thus obstruct concerted global actions to address AI problems. Fourth, the securitization trend has reinforced technological rivalry at the expense of the potential for global AI cooperation, and will likely exacerbate the United States–China confrontation. This is not to deny the existence of United States–China cooperation in the field of AI. However, by speaking of AI in the language of security and a global race, the relevant security AI discourse emphasizes competition over cooperation and destruction over creation. This may produce a real security threat, and perhaps an actual global AI race, thus undermining the space for cooperation from which both the United States and China can benefit. In other words, the rivalry discourse adopts a zero-sum geopolitical angle for understanding AI innovation that is inevitably to the latter’s detriment in both countries. 127 More importantly, securitization may push AI further into the hard security area by virtue of its military applications. The securitizing actor tends to exaggerate the security threat to achieve a successful securitization, so enhancing the strategic risks of AI military practices and increasing the likelihood of war, and of escalating ongoing conflicts. In this regard, a highly securitized AI politics may set China and the United States on a dangerous path towards a catastrophic confrontation that imperils everyone’s interests and security. In the worst case scenario, as in all arms races, blithe assertions about the inevitability of AI-enabled war are a self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecy. In this regard, the aforementioned Fu Ying’s call to regulate AI’s military application merits more attention. Lastly, by strengthening state involvement in China’s AI industry, securitization may undermine the interests of Chinese AI companies. The boundary between the state and the market is always far less defined in China than in other countries, due to China’s political environment. Making AI a national security matter justifies the necessity for heavier state involvement, if not control. Although a blessing in the Chinese domestic market, close ties with the state are a burden on the global stage. Take the aforementioned civil-military integration as an example. Although helpful in gaining China’s AI companies and research institutes more state funding, it undermines their global access. Close relations with the Chinese government have caused certain Chinese AI companies, including members of the “national AI team of China,” to be subjected to punishment, in the form of the aforementioned American sanctions. In this regard, securitization could hinder the access of China’s AI companies to the global market, and hence their future development. It also remains to be seen whether heavier state involvement in the AI industry hinders market efficiency. Above all, a key critique of the Copenhagen School of security studies is its Europe-centric approach to security. For the community of international relations, China’s rise is a topic that truly international relations theories cannot and should not avoid. This article contributes to the development of the Copenhagen School’s global agenda by studying the Chinese case. To find the explanatory power of securitization in a Chinese context is a challenging but necessary step for the Copenhagen School of security studies. This article shows that securitization theory can be helpful in studying the security politics of AI in China. Although legitimacy and authority operate very differently here, the central government nevertheless needs rigorous security discourses to convince domestic actors and thus realize its AI agenda. But difficulties do arise when applying securitization in China’s authoritarian context. As this article shows, the challenges lie in measuring the exact impact of securitization in light of China’s statesociety relations, because differentiating such impact from state coercion and other economic-political incentives can be difficult. Moreover, given AI’s growing importance, it deserves greater attention from critical security analysts. This article mainly focuses on the Chinese domestic securitization of AI, i.e., how China labels AI as a Chinese domestic security matter. Securitizing China’s AI, however, also has an international dimension. As mentioned, China’s ambitious AI plan has produced popular policy discourses on the global stage about its potential implications for others, for example, a forthcoming Chinese AI supremacy, or a global AI race. In this regard, a China threat security agenda with regard to AI is clearly emerging on the global stage. How, for example, are actors in the United States and Europe labeling China’s AI advancement as a security threat and thus requesting AI’s strategic prioritization? With AI’s rapid development—not least its use in warfare—and increasingly competitive geopolitics, AI’s securitization trend merits more attention.

Here, the China threat issue is securitized in a value-laden manner that is qualitatively different from the scientific mode. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime commentator on China, does not simply state that China is threatening because it is not democratic; rather, he pursues the more nuanced argument that increasing nationalism in China is a major source of potential conflict with other nations. Yet even a careless reader of the above text may notice that the author adeptly links the alleged threat posed by China with the historical precedents of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the past century. Drawing such analogies between history and the present constitutes a securitization act. Using this mode of analogical reasoning, the China threat argument is structurally incorporated into a higher level of security discourse, situated among the “macro-securitising discourses” of political ideology,55 which involve certain ethical and subjective sets of doctrines, ideals, and worldviews about the governance of human societies, usually a blueprint for a specific social order. It is important for poststructuralist discourse analysts to bear in mind the perspective on social goods communicated in this use of language.56 Kristof attributes the possibility of a China threat to the Chinese government’s ill-intentioned promotion of “ferocious nationalism.” As one of the West’s veteran commentators on China, Kristof noticed the country’s vigorous rise much earlier than many others. Twenty years ago, in his early Foreign Affairs essay “The Rise of China,” he warned that although China is neither a “villain” nor a “renegade country,” it is “an ambitious nation.”57 In this and other works, he has sought to define the possible China threat arising from Chinese nationalism. Such arguments involve the politics of identity. The poststructuralist approach to identity formation emphasizes the dualism that structures human experience, particularly the “interior/exterior (inside/outside) binary, according to which the inside is deemed to be the self, good, primary, and original while the outside is the other, dangerous, secondary, and derivative.”58 However, when one tries to build one’s own identity, the outside is always central to the composition of the inside. Conversely, when one builds an antagonist identity, the inside is essential to the construction of the outside. An interior/exterior binary is exactly what authors like Kristof seek to achieve in their securitization of the China threat issue. Kristof’s argument fundamentally, if not overtly, differentiates China from the democracies of the West. Linking China with Nazi Germany and militarist Japan in the first half of the 20th century lends weight to his criticism of the Chinese government and its deliberate instigation of “ferocious nationalism” among the Chinese people. In this way, China is depicted as different from “normal” Western countries, which are represented as right, good, proper, and valuable. Within the broader context of political ideology, the mode of normative analogy requires an appropriate episteme terrain. In other words, securitizers must use the right language in the right contexts to successfully articulate China’s threat to the world at large through analogy. Unlike securitizers speaking in the scientific mode, whose audience comprises academics and policy analysts, normative-analogy securitizers address an attentive, well-informed, and usually well-educated public. Therefore, successful securitizers in the latter mode are usually those well placed to communicate with the relevant audiences in the correct venues and in the appropriate language. Kristof, for example, writes for 158 Weiqing Song the New York Times, a widely circulated newspaper with well-informed and well-educated readers in the United States and other Western countries. His essays appear in Foreign Affairs, a scholarly journal published by an important U.S. think tank that focuses on foreign policy and provides an international forum for new ideas, analysis, and debate regarding significant world issues. The audience of Foreign Affairs includes government officials, academics, business leaders, and the representatives of nongovernmental groups such as human rights organizations, all of whom need to communicate with their own audiences using appropriate linguistic styles and registers. Historical analogies are an effective means of communicating with such audiences, who usually find concrete examples and precedents from history to be rhetorically persuasive.59 Kristof is not alone. The same securitizing role is played by many opinion leaders with wide influence in their respective social groups. For example, John Ikenberry, a well-known IR scholar, has expressed concerns about China’s rise due to its different political system, although he believes that China can eventually be absorbed peacefully into a West-dominated and institutionalized world.60 Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist, shares Kristof’s view that China’s rise will not be peaceful on the grounds that it is not willing to be “integrated” into the liberal world system.61 Although these opinion leaders offer different policy recommendations, all of them define a real or potential Chinese threat to both U.S. security and the security of the world at large. In the analogical mode, the substantial modality of the threat posed by China to the outside world is largely concerned with the political sphere. Political threats are usually defined in terms of “constituting principles” such as sovereignty and ideology.62 The referent objects under threat are units that include the nation or the state but may exceed these designations, as in the cases of the military and strategic spheres. The referent objects may be states with similar political systems, such as the so-called “democracies” or the “free world.” In their political warnings against the “China threat,” securitizers such as Kristof discursively construct the Chinese identity by linking it with bellicose Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, thereby differentiating it from the identity of the “peace-loving” Western democracies.63 Securitizers working in the normative-analogy mode conduct “conversations” with their audiences in which they relate major themes, debates, or motifs that are familiar to the social groups concerned.64 Securitization of the “China Threat” Discourse: A Poststructuralist Account 159 This approach is more likely to result in the audience absorbing maximum knowledge, which in turn leads to a more effective excision of power. Kristof, for example, constructs the possibility of a China threat by focusing on Chinese nationalism in his “conversations” with educated and well-informed readers in the United States and other Western countries. This is a judicious strategy, as such audiences are more receptive to nationalism, the promotion of democracy and other forms of ideological reasoning. As Buzan suggests, existential threats in the political sector may also be ideologically defined.65 Therefore, the arguments of opinion leaders can contribute to the act of securitizing the alleged impending threat: “Yet what worries me about China isn’t its upgrade of its nuclear arsenal and its military acquisitions to project power beyond its borders. … No, what troubles me, as one who loves China and is rooting for it to succeed, is the growing nationalism that the government has cultivated among young people.”66 Unlike the scientific mode, in which securitizers reason deductively, the normative-analogy mode has an inductive logic, as it reaches its conclusions on the basis of a number of historical and contemporary examples.

1. Introduction: Is the China Threat Real or Illusory? The concept of the “China threat” is not new; its history in the West is more than a century long. Initially, the implications of the term China threat were primarily cultural and social: the Chinese people and their traditions were portrayed by popular Western writers as malevolent, alien, and threatening to Western culture.1 This depiction remained in the Western imagination and later expanded to include the political realm, in which China was represented as brutal and belligerent, especially during the heyday of McCarthyism or the “Second Red Scare” following China’s regime change in 1949. 2 In recent decades, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the so-called China threat has become a topical issue within contemporary international relations (IR).3 The concept has taken on a more prominent role in Western political discourse—especially, but not exclusively, in the United States—over the past two decades. It not only has been introduced into the public sphere by journalists and other opinion leaders, but has entered the domain of policy through the work of policy analysts and politicians.4 Those concerned by the China threat argue in essence that a rising China poses an increasing, imminent, and real threat both to its neighbors and to far-distant countries. Moreover, this threat is perceived to be comprehensive, with security-related, military, economic, and environmental implications. Naturally, this hotly debated topic has also received scholarly attention. Most researchers have taken either a positivist or a normative approach to the issue of the “China threat.” Positivist studies emphasize causal factors, whereas the aim of normative research is to refute or support a given thesis from a historical and ideological perspective. Both positivist and normative researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into the study of the alleged “China threat,” together with recommendations for dealing with it. Roy, one of the first scholars to address the issue of the China threat from an IR perspective,5 provides a survey of the major arguments on both sides of the debate, including a literature review of neorealist and neoclassical–realist theories of the threat posed by China and policy recommendations for Western governments. Notable original research on the China threat topic has continued to emerge over the years. Taking a more liberal approach, Li argues that the challenge posed by a fastgrowing China to stability in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region depends on the expectations of Chinese policy makers, who operate in a highly economically interdependent environment.6 They are more likely to use peaceful means to settle disputes with neighbors and others if they perceive economic benefits to arise from such a strategy. Other scholars use realist-IR theory (particularly power-transition theory) to contend that the so-called China threat has emerged in the political discourse of the United States and other Western countries in response to the rise of China.7 In another review article, Jeffery argues thought-provokingly for the danger of creating a real China threat through “historical analogies” with previous challenger states.8 For instance, power-transition theorists in the realist-IR school compare China’s threat with that of 19th-century Germany, and adherents of the successor state image theory draw analogies with the Soviet Union. Most of the Chinese scholars involved in this debate take a normative approach to the issue. They focus on two major questions: why the issue of the China threat exists and how to cope with it. Chen argues that from a legal and historical perspective, the China threat allegations made by U.S. politicians, defense officials, and academics are nothing but a reincarnation of the “yellow peril” conspiracy theory promulgated by Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany in the late 19th century.9 This view is echoed by Shi, who takes a postcolonial approach to interpreting the position of the China threat within Western discourse.10 More directly, Luo challenges the China threat thesis on the grounds that the nature of the international threat posed by China depends on its foreign policy strategy rather than on its growing power; as Chinese policy makers have exhibited little inclination to challenge international peace and stability, the China threat argument is unfounded.11 In terms of policy recommendations, Chinese scholars such as Chen, Feng, and Jiang suggest that the Chinese government should win trust from other states by making its peace-loving foreign strategy clear and participating more actively in the international community.12 A few researchers diverge from the mainstream response to this issue. Oliver Turner, for example, highlights the ideational rather than material factors in the processes of representing the China threat complicit in the U.S.–China policy.13 He argues that the main purpose of these processes is to create a threatening Chinese identity, foreign to that of the United States, to trigger actions that reinforce the binary opposition between the two countries. Before Turner and in the same vein, Pan takes a poststructuralist discursive approach to interpreting the role of the China threat within the U.S. political discourse. He focuses on the “discursive construction of otherness” by which China is fashioned as a “threatening, absolute other” to the “US-led evolutionary scheme.”14 Much of Pan’s discussion of this issue is devoted to real policy implications, namely the risk that considering “theory as practice” in U.S. policy will give rise to a real “China threat.”15 He further expands his scope of enquiry by deconstructing the Western representation of China’s rise. To him, dominant Western perceptions of China’s rise tell us less about China and more about Western self-imagination and its desire for certainty. The present research takes an additional step in its approach to the West’s China threat discourse by drawing on poststructuralist securitization theory. The primary focus of this study, like that of similar existing research, is not to determine whether the so-called China threat is real, but to examine the articulation and performance of the China threat discourse in the West. In comparison with previous similar research, however, this study takes a more explicit and sophisticated poststructuralist approach that distinguishes itself from related approaches with which it is often confused, particularly social constructivism. The special contribution of this study lies in its identification of several major methods of securitization by which the China threat is fashioned in Western discourse. It mainly argues that different securitizers perform the China threat acts in their respective discourse communities. These acts aim to inspire various issues of the China threat thesis through communication, despite pointing to different referential objects, focusing on different target audiences and referring to different social spheres. The article proceeds as follows. The next section presents the poststructuralist securitization framework used to analyze the concept of the “China threat,” followed by one section on each of the three modes of securitization identified: scientific, normative, and mythical. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings. 2. A Poststructuralist Securitization Analysis According to poststructuralist IR theory, which offers an alternative to mainstream positivist theories of international politics, “every discussion and everyday understanding of international politics depends upon abstraction, representation and interpretation.” 16 This assertion challenges the ontological foundations of positivism on the grounds that “the world” (in Foucault’s sense of the word) does not present itself to us in the form of ready-made categories, theories, or statements.17 Arguably, therefore, identity itself is problematized by its systematic dissociation at the ontological level. Following this reasoning, poststructuralists warn that people should “avoid substituting causes for effects.”18 In other words, poststructuralism does not treat identity or agency as given, but seeks to account for the forces that underwrite apparent sources of identity or agency. In a nutshell, identity is an effect to be interpreted, not assumed. In epistemological terms, accordingly, the poststructuralist IR approach challenges the conventional understanding of international issues by problematizing the given objects such as meaning, identity, and reality. Foucault makes it clear that poststructuralism has “an ethicopolitical purpose in problematising prevailing identity formations which appear normal or natural.”19 Poststructuralism rejects the very dichotomy of reality and narrative. Rather than a simple representation of some previous event, narrative is the means by which the status of reality is conferred on events. In a sense, the subject and the object are mutually constitutive. In this process, the knowledge and power nexus is crucial, as the power of particular discourses/knowledge materializes elements into comprehensible forms with political effects.20 Consequently, in adopting a poststructuralist approach, the present research does not join the debate on whether China poses a real threat, or the nature of that threat, but focuses on how the China threat has been discursively constructed and performed in the West. The presentation of the China threat discourse naturally draws the researcher’s attention to securitization theory, as the China threat is considered a typical example of “securitization.” Studies of the securitization process are designed to gain “an increasingly precise understanding of who securitises, on what issues (threats), for whom (referent objects), why, with what results and, not least, under what conditions (i.e., what explains when securitisation is successful).”21 According to this definition, securitization theory has two key components: the securitizing actor and the referent object.22 The former refers to an actor who securitizes an issue by “declaring a referent object existentially threatened.”23 The latter refers to the object perceived to be “existentially threatened” and at the same time to have “a legitimate claim to survive.”24 Securitization theory has several other important dimensions, including the subject (or audience). Securitization is not exclusively a poststructuralist domain, as it arises within other theoretical approaches, especially social constructivism. The relationship between poststructuralism and social constructivism is “complex and ambivalent.”25 The two theoretical systems are often confused because both poststructuralists and social constructivists challenge the mainstream positivist ontological and epistemological position of treating existential objects as given. Furthermore, “social constructivism” is a broad category encompassing a range of variants, some of which resemble poststructuralism in key respects.26 Despite these similarities, however, poststructuralism is distinct from socialconstructivist theory. Like other positivist theories, conventional constructivism is causal and explanatory, whereas poststructuralism is interpretative and postpositivist. For example, social constructivists emphasize the importance of reconstruction in identity formation, whereas poststructuralists highlight the “presence of deconstructive play.”27 Social constructivists are more interested in the normativity of linguistic construction, while poststructuralists value language for its “performativity”—that is, for the power of speech acts. To put it simply, poststructural securitization focuses on performative acts of language, whereas social constructivism focuses on language as a means of interaction. In IR, constructivist securitization theory holds that a securitizer must operate independently of a given context.28 In contrast, poststructuralist securitization theory addresses the issue of “external reality” as internal to discourse. Discourse is an important area of enquiry for poststructuralist securitization theorists in the field of IR. Poststructuralists regard discourse as “a specific series of representations and practices” and a process in which “meanings are produced,” “identities constituted,” “social relations established,” and “political and ethical outcomes made more or less possible.”29 In other words, discourses are defined by poststructuralists as “performative” in that they “constitute the objects of which they speak.”30 Discourse is regarded by poststructuralists as something that constitutes both subjects and objects, rather than something used by subjects to describe objects. Poststructuralist securitization theory is not simply a synthetic endeavor, combining poststructuralist approaches with securitization theory. Rather, it emerges from a careful reading of the seminal works of Barry Buzan and Ole Waever. Tracing the intellectual genealogy of Buzan and Waever’s securitization theory, Hansen reveals that a poststructuralist understanding of discourse is central to their theorization of security as a speech act. For instance, a security issue is constituted by “a self-referential practice.”31 Hansen makes another important contribution to the field by identifying three paths that link poststructuralism to the study of security: “structural incorporation,” “episteme terrain,” and “substantial modality.”32 “Structural incorporation” describes a broad context that no longer appears to be limited to “security.” However, it is within this broad context that the specific content of discursive formation is recruited to assign “security” to a given event, case, or process. There are three mechanisms of structural incorporation: “layered discursive structures” through broad concepts; the use of “macro-securitising discourses to structure other security discourses”; and “basic discourses derived from the representations and policy options that are available within a particular political field.”33 “Episteme terrain” refers to the arena “upon which securitisations are constituted.”34 Citing Buzan, Hansen suggests that successful speech acts require compliance with both the internal and the external conditions of the speech act. With regard to the internal conditions, securitizing actors must ensure that their securitizing acts have the correct grammar and plot structure and also conform to “the particular dialects of the different sectors.”35 The “external conditions” of a speech act are essential to the social capital and authority of the securitizing actor.36 Finally, “substantial modality” refers simply to “the social sphere” within which “a security issue is said to be situated.”37 Table 1: A Typology of the Major Modes of Securitization Mode of securitization Structural incorporation Episteme domain Substantial modality Way of reasoning Scientific theory Science Academics/elites Military/strategic Deductive Normative analogy Ideology The attentive public Political Inductive Political myth Culture/ civilization The general public Comprehensive Intuitive In the present research, the three specific modes outlined by Hansen are used to identify the various ways in which the China threat issue is discursively performed and to determine how this process relates to policy making. Language is an essential component of successful securitization, and is thus key to the formation and performance of the China threat discourse. However, language is deployed in various specific social situations, each associated with a distinct style, status, and register. A useful way of classifying social situations is domain analysis. In sociolinguistic terms, a domain is defined by three characteristics: place, role– relationship, and topic.38 A domain is a discourse community comprising a group of people who subscribe to the conventions that define a particular kind of language use. In practice, this communicative relationship is inseparable from, and always overlaps with, power relations wherein individuals’ actions are exercised upon other individuals.39 Each individual belongs to a different discourse community (or communities) within society, according to his or her education, status, ideological affiliation, and so on. Therefore, the success of a securitization act relies on the ability of an authoritative agent to deploy language that is appropriate to its audience in terms of both style and content. Therefore, securitization acts relating to the so-called China threat are effective only if the relevant authoritative agents perform in the correct discourse communities or domains. Authoritative agents may struggle to convey convincing and compelling interpretations of international issues in their securitization acts. Three major communities can be identified in human society, along a continuum from general to specific: the general public, the attentive public, and social elites. Each of these communities uses language and knowledge differently, and thus requires a particular securitization mode. As shown in Table 1, each of the three modes of securitization—scientific theory, normative analogy, and political myth—has a different logic and operates differently in terms of structural incorporation, episteme terrain, and substantial modality. It is worth noting that the three modes are ideal types that are not clear-cut, but overlapping. For example, although the scientific mode is dominated by the method of scientific theory, it may also be complemented by the methods of historical analogy and political myth. The following sections are devoted to detailed discussion of the three modes. Three classic texts are chosen to illustrate these modes, each performed by relevant authoritative agents of power in their respective domains of knowledge.

As part of its hostile turn towards China, the United States has increasingly conflated its “national security” with “economic security”. This equation has been explicitly enshrined in US foreign policy by the Trump and Biden administrations, which have proclaimed that “economic security is national security”.14 Scholars of international law have broadly recognized this as a significant expansion of the meaning of “national security”, being driven by US concerns about its relative global economic decline in the face of China’s growing economic competitiveness.15 “Even though the United States enjoys technological supremacy in many areas, surges in Chinese research and development funding and recent breakthroughs in areas like AI have stirred US concerns”, Roberts, Moraes and Ferguson have noted, arguing that the Washington, “has an interest in defending its existing technological dominance, hobbling the technological ambitions of its upcoming rival and doubling down on its own technological advancement to ensure it retains its innovative edge”.16 Kho and McNamara similarly contend that the US has adopted “an excessively broad definition of national security that encompasses the maintenance of economic advantages” and “ensuring that the US maintains its economic and trade pole positions in all industries”17 Meanwhile, Lee describes the trend as a “misuse of the national security argument for a commercial purpose”, that “creates hostile international dynamics”.18

Washington’s new interpretation has been key to its export control strategy, which has been justified as necessary “to protect US national security and foreign policy interests”.19 Tellingly, US export controls against China have utilized an obscure blacklist of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) that was initially published in 1997 to prevent the diversion of exports towards the production of weapons of mass destruction.20 Even within the heart of the US political establishment, this invocation of “national security” as a fig leaf for waging economic warfare.

Western understandings of critical infrastructure (CI) play an intrinsic role in the contemporary China Threat Discourse. Examinations of foundational tenets of CI serve to illustrate how understanding security requires widening the conversation in ways traditional realists argue risk ‘making both scholarship and state policy incoherent’ (Hameiri & Jones, Citation2015, p. 17). Leif C. Jensen states that ‘one must now “speak security” across an ever-widening array of thematic contexts’ (Citation2013, p. 94) and Hansen successfully demonstrates through her ‘case plus study’ in Security as Practice how one can use a poststructural approach to security to widen the conversation without making it boundless. Widening the field allows us to explore discursive relationships, including the ‘complex of critical systems that are vulnerable to catastrophic disruption’ that constitute critical infrastructure (Collier & Lakoff, Citation2015, p. 20). Claudia Aradau notes that ‘“critical infrastructure” is generally considered a new coinage that goes back to US developments in the mid-1990s’ and CI is ‘predominantly about the role of things in society, their functioning as well as their resilience’ (Citation2010, p. 492). It is essential to note that CI refers both to public services as well as private companies (Moteff & Parfomak, Citation2004) because this draws out the fact that audience acceptance of security concerns is necessary in order for governments to have ultimate domain over assets that can, in essence, be private. Although lists of critical infrastructure can differ significantly – for instance, the US currently lists 16 sectors (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, Citation2019), while Australia lists eight (Department of Home Affairs, Citation2018) – two assets are central to any conception of critical infrastructure: energy and telecoms/cyber.

One’s understanding of security inherently impacts how one reads critical infrastructure. Buzan and Waever claim, ‘security is what actors make of it’ which suggests that out of a world of potential threats the ‘security’ label locates and prioritizes specific threat(s) based on a set of criteria (Citation2003, p. 48). This article examines what actors perceive security to be and it eschews notions of objective threats, aiming, instead, to explore how security is represented in dominant American policy discussions. Fundamentally, the US reads security in the negative sense in that value is placed on insulation from insecurity (Gjorv, Citation2012, p. 836). This has become intrinsic to notions of critical infrastructure where security is defined by resilience against potentially catastrophic disruption to complex, large-scale systems (Collier & Lakoff, Citation2015, p. 27). Energy fears stem from discontinuity so that ‘definitions of energy security focus on the continuity of commodity supplies’ (Winzer, Citation2012). This is equally true with telecoms/cyber security wherein ‘anxieties about risk and resilience’ prioritize the maintenance of secure information flows (Herrington & Aldrich, Citation2013, p. 299).

As China’s national strength and international status rises, some Western politicians and media have been ramping up the “China threat” theory. Jan-Boje Frauen assesses the theory and finds that it has no scientific basis but is actually a narrative created by some people about what they regard as threats from China.

CNS: How did the “China threat” theory develop in the West?

This article examines the relationship between privilege understood within a global frame and the discursive construction of the ‘China threat’ in the context of the ‘New Cold War’. Drawing on discourse theory and privilege studies, it investigates how the hegemonic discursive construction of China as a threat interacts with the material conditions of ‘global privilege’ in a diversity of spheres (political, military, economic, technological, cultural and academic). The article contends that the ‘China threat’ narrative is markedly informed by the global privilege, coupled with the fear of losing it, enjoyed by the countries of the ‘Global North’, particularly the United States. These findings have significant implications for our comprehension of how discursive practices impact our understanding of global affairs. They underscore the necessity for self-reflection on privilege, a critical examination of unequal international relations and the importance of empathising with those perceived as the ‘enemy’ to foster peaceful coexistence.

Introduction

In accordance with the reflectivists, exiles, and dissidents in the ‘Third Great Debate’ of the mid-to-late 1980s and the later post-structuralists, narrative approaches to IR studies highlight the contingency of meaning by problematizing the sense-making process. In other words, the meaning of things and events is constituted through narratives rather than a given, inborn, and objective one held by rationalists and thus potentially open to multiple interpretations. The interface between narrative and IR studies lies in identity formation. Originally borrowed from sociology, there are two broad categories of identity in IR scholarship: one is the pre-social and pre-political essentialist category, typified by ‘the essential state’ proposed by Alexander Wendt; the other, though much more diverse in form, is a discursive one.17 The narrative approach to IR studies embraces the latter one, that is, the ‘narrative identity’ developed by Paul Ricoeur and Margaret Somers.18 This narrative identity presupposes that narrative possesses both epistemological and ontological value. Specifically, we make sense of the world through narratives and in that process acquire our identity; that identity, in turn, serves as the premise for what to do, which further leads to new narratives and actions. Narrative, identity, and actions are hence in a constant, mutually constitutive process, and identity formation turns out to be a narrative construction process.

In this self-other articulation process, we argue that the construction of national threats follows the logic of storytelling. Above all, national threats are narratively constructed rather than having inborn, self-evident, and purely objective existences and are understood in a storied way. We rely on narratives to make sense of the world and create a sense of order, coherence, and certainty to anchor the Self by structuring objects and events in a temporal, spatial, and relational manner. National security narratives ‘weave present challenges, past failures and triumphs, and potential futures into a coherent tale, with well-defined characters and plot lines’.19 Meanwhile, as facts do not speak for themselves and their meaning is contingent, they can be emplotted into different stories, and it is difficult to conclude whether one narrative is more legitimate than another.20 By highlighting certain facts and ruling out other irrelevant ones, narrative makes events meaningful and understandable through the employment devices and skills of a story like characterization and causal explanations and their significance in the whole story.21 In this highly selective appropriation and suppression process, national security narratives are usually autobiographical, with the emplotted self as the hero and the antagonistic one as the villain.22 These narratives often present themselves as pure knowledge, claiming that the threat posed by the villain is real and objective. But their truthfulness cannot walk beyond the stories themselves, for it is just a temporal and spatial configuration of events. Their given meaning in one story can be opposite to that in another one. Just as Chengxin Pan illustrates, the China threat argument, which has typically presented itself as verifiable knowledge, is actually autobiographical in nature. It tells more about the US Self imagination than China itself and has different framings, as China’s rise can be either an opportunity or a threat to the USA.23 Thus, the perceived threats a rival poses largely depend on the rival’s configuration in the national security story, and a national threat occurs when the other is narratively antithetical to the Self. Thus, the debate on national security is essentially a competition between security narratives competing for dominance of the social understanding.

From a popular perspective, intellectual property' has gone from being, until recently, a niche area of dry legal practice to a hotly contested mainstream subject. Aside from topical debates such as the role and ethics of pharmaceutical companies and issues of generic drug accessibility in developing nations, arguably the most publicised topic of discussion relates to copyright, and its exploitation in the digital economy. This debate is highly emotive and divisive, resulting in heated arguments between those who wish to further strengthen copyright law and those that wish to see it relaxed, with neither party conceding a common ground. Based on on-going legal developments in the field of copyright, it would appear that proponents of the former viewpoint have the upper hand. International, European and even national levels are seeing increases in intellectual property protection measures, despite numerous academics frequently criticising these moves2 . Intellectual property law has traditionally been considered as part of civil law, regulating the relationship between private parties and the rights and penalties to be applied in cases of infringement of copyright. The legal protection given by copyright has intended to rectify a “market failure” by providing incentives that encourage the production and dissemination of works...'(providing) a legal means by which those who invest time and labour in producing...goods can be confident that they will not only be able to recoup that investment, but also reap a profit proportional to the popularity of their work3 '. Until relatively recent legal developments, copyright protection has not been considered an area requiring criminal law regulation. Why is it, then, that copyright appears to be moving inextricably in the direction of stronger and broader protection? Why are different concepts such as counterfeiting and copyright infringement being inextricably linked and the terms used interchangeably? Why is the act of infringement of copyright now being associated with serious criminal issues such as the creation and distribution of child pornography, or the facilitation of organised crime and terror? More importantly why, when protection has always been discussed in terms of author incentives and rewards, is copyright now being discussed in terms of security? It must be stated that the question of whether copyright should be increasingly strengthened, and the imbalance perceived in copyright have been frequently written about from a legal perspective. The objective of this article is not to re-tread this well-trodden ground, but to contribute to the debate by re- evaluating this trend through inter-disciplinary means. While the study of Law and Economics is increasingly used in the analysis of intellectual property law, the purpose of this article is to seek assistance from the field of International Relations, and more specifically, Critical Security Studies. Whereas traditional legal analysis can explain what legal changes are occurring, and what impact these changes may have, the use of securitisation theory may help us to more effectively explain 'how' these changes have come to occur. Securitisation theory can be a useful tool in analysing the importance of discourse and language in the development of law, and the role that non-legal actors can have in the development of a particular policy. In the opinion of the authors, whilst it is indeed possible from a 'pure' legal perspective to consider the role of actors in legislation, and to consider issues such as vested interests, securitisation theory can provide a deeper and more thorough understanding of how legislation which may appear to be counter-intuitive can nevertheless be presented as being so essential that there is no choice but to take such a course of action. In order to explore how the securitisation framework may be a valid approach to a subject such as copyright law and to determine the extent to which the latter may be said to have been securitised, this article will begin by explaining the origins and main features of securitisation theory, and its applicability to legal study. The authors will then attempt to apply this framework to the development of the area of copyright, by focusing on the security escalation it has undergone, developing from an economic issue into one of international security. The analysis of this evolution will be mainly characterised by the securitisation moves taking place at national, European and international levels. Finally, a general reflection will be carried out on whether the securitisation of copyright has indeed been successful and on what the consequences of such a success could be. 1. The concept of securitisation and its applicability in law The concept of securitisation was introduced to Security Studies by a school of thought which came to be known as the 'Copenhagen School', originally developed in the context of the Conflict and 3 Peace Research Institute of Copenhagen, with perhaps the most influential of the works being 'Security: - A new framework for analysis'4 . The concept of securitisation migrated from the world of finance to the world of International Relations – originally the concept dealt with a riskdistribution process and the 'ring-fencing' of assets in order to limit potential loss and reduce the risk of bankruptcy should a particular asset or section of the business fail5 . In International Relations, securitisation refers to the process by which an issue is acted upon following its presentation as posing a very serious threat to security6 . 'Security is about survival. It is when an issue is presented as posing an existential threat to a designated referent object (traditionally, but not necessarily), the state, incorporating government, territory, and society'7 . Where the Copenhagen School differed from traditional security studies analysis was that the authors proposed a new framework for understanding security by widening its classical military concept to nontraditional security issues, such as the environment, the economy, politics and society. In other words, 'security' is not perceived as being limited to issues of conventional State military violence, but can refer to security threats posed by non-State actors against the State or other non-State actors. This can include the risk of great economic harm, or, to take a more recent example, the multiple threats posed by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This threat has environmental elements, with estimates of 40,000 barrels of oil a day leaking from the broken pipe8 , which have significant effects on the ecosystem and wildlife in the Gulf and surrounding wetlands, in addition to political and social effects stemming from the fishermen unable to work in the area. In addition, security threats may be posed to public health, from the known and unknown effects of the hazardous substances poisoning the area. This attempt to enlarge the concept of security and what it means to be secure or insecure is directly linked to the Copenhagen School’s proposal that security is not 'out there' waiting to be discovered as an objective reality. Instead, security is developed as a social process and therefore depends heavily on perception. In this sense, the Copenhagen School has a social constructivist take on security: - 'Security is...a self- referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue - not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as such a threat'9.

The report of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive provided the data for the President’s February 2013 national strategy to deal with the theft of U.S. trade secrets (and is attached at the end of the President’s document). Focused on industrial and economic espionage, the President’s February 2013 report tells the public that the full scope of the U.S. administrative infrastructure will be deployed to fight against IP theft. Gone are the days when the FBI had bigger criminal plots to unravel than intellectual property theft—this is now central in the FBI mission.6 The report’s analysis is limited to trade secrets instead of constructing and using a generic concept of “intellectual property” as a foil against which to pitch an argument for increased cybersecurity. That being said, what constitutes a trade secret in the context of this report and of course in the U.S. assessment of damage done to American industry and national security is everything that might be held on a computer. Thus, no matter how banal or irrelevant, as long as it is on a computer, it is a trade secret and must be protected against theft.7 While Russia is considered a serious offender in terms of industrial espionage, the reports on trade secrets and cybersecurity all point to China as the most aggressive cybersecurity threat. According to Schmidt and Sanger, recent federal indictments of Chinese hackers were directed at positioning U.S. claims about intellectual property theft at the center of United States–China diplomacy (Schmidt and Sanger 2014). In 2011, Bloomberg reported that at least 760 companies had been hacked, primarily by Chinese sources, calling China’s efforts an “undeclared cyber war” (Riley and Walcott 258 D. HALBERT Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 2011). While the reporting was short on specifics, Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, noted, “We’re talking about stealing entire industries.” He said, “This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen” (Riley and Walcott 2011, online para. 16).8 The issue of state-based Chinese hacking emerged again in March 2012 when the Department of Defense issued a press release on what it called “the greatest wealth transfer in history.” According to this press release, this wealth transfer resulted from the Chinese hacking of critical resources in U.S. industry, universities, and government (Daniel 2012). Here the security firm Mandiant noted that while it may be possible that the Chinese hackers acted without state sponsorship, by far the most likely scenario is that they were deployed by the Chinese state to appropriate U.S. intellectual property (Mandiant Intelligence Center 2013). The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property recommended that the national security advisor be designated as the “principle policy coordinator for all actions on the protection of American IP” (Blair and Huntsman 2013, 4). While cybersecurity is already within the scope of the National Security Council mandate, such a designation would shift some of the interests in intellectual property protection from its civilian host in the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’s office, itself only a few years old, to a new position within the National Security Council. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also in the picture when issues of cybersecurity and intellectual property converge. While the DHS is a vast federal bureaucracy with widespread duties from border control to domestic terrorism, its recent report to Congress did not leave out the threats posed by intellectual property theft. Acting Secretary Rand in his report to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on the State of the Homeland told the committee that the cyberworld is fraught with dangers: This is critical, time-sensitive work, because we confront a dangerous combination of known and unknown cyber vulnerabilities, and adversaries with strong and rapidly expanding capabilities. Threats range from denial of service attacks, to theft of valuable trade secrets, to intrusions against government networks and systems that control critical infrastructure. These attacks come from every part of the globe, every minute of every day, and are continually increasing in seriousness and sophistication. (Beers 2013, online para. 66) Other aspects of the threat to the homeland included hackers testing our networks, the sale of counterfeit goods via the Internet, and ongoing attacks on the network from foreign and domestic sources alike (Beers 2013). These dangers were part of the justification used by the Acting Secretary to request additional funding for DHS in the next fiscal year. Other reports come closer to linking national security and the protection of American lives to IP theft. Attached to the 2013 report by the Obama administration about trade secret theft is yet another report about the importance of protecting U.S. intellectual property. This report for 2012, part of a yearly endeavor by the Defense Security Service, begins by stating that: The stakes are high in the battle against foreign collection efforts and espionage that target U.S. technology, intellectual property, trade secrets, and proprietary information. Our national security relies on our collective success at thwarting these persistent attacks. Every time our adversaries gain access to sensitive or classified information and technology, it jeopardizes the lives of our warfighters, since these adversaries can exploit the information and technology to develop more lethal weapons or countermeasures to our systems. Our national security is also at risk in the potential loss of our technological edge, which is closely tied to the economic success of the cleared contractor community and the well-being of our economy. (Defense Security Service 2012, 5) The language equivocates between stolen national secrets and whatever is meant here by intellectual property, where trade secrets and proprietary information are separate categories. However, with each report linking intellectual property to the national security state, the importance of intellectual property is enhanced, even as what constitutes intellectual property is never clarified. The Center for a New American Security also issued a 2013 report on cybersecurity that further enforces the growing link between cybersecurity, national security, and intellectual property theft. The new turn, as the report author Irving Lachow notes, is that an active cyberdefense (ACD) is necessary because the threat now comes from state-sponsored spies and sophisticated criminals who create what he calls an advanced persistent threat (APT) (Lachow 2013, 2). These new threats focus on “stealing intellectual property and defrauding individuals and businesses” (Lachow 2013, 2). It is exclusively the threat to intellectual property that Lachow uses to justify his ACD system in the cyber-engagement zone (CEZ), a system where security forces seek to actively intervene in cyberinvasions as they are happening (Lachow 2013). Space does not allow me to continue to trace the ongoing development of intellectual property as a security concern and its theft as increasingly central to the U.S. security discourses. One last point must be made. In a TED talk via remote computer, Edward Snowden discussed his reasons for disclosing the scope of NSA spying and his perspectives on U.S. national security. As someone who has advocated for civil liberties and privacy rights for the individual, Snowden argued that protection of intellectual property justified rejecting NSA efforts to install backdoors in Internet systems. When asked whether we became less secure as a result of such backdoors, he said: If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can’t get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they’re not only putting the world at risk, they’re putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we’re going to be paying for it for years. (Snowden, 2014) Protection of United States IP has become the rallying cry for a secure network. The world understood through these reports is not an open system where knowledge is shared for the sake of learning, poverty alleviation, or economic development, but instead one where knowledge is owned and controlled by industrial and state actors and its existence as a secret must be preserved and protected at all costs. In fact, higher education is being reimagined as a national security threat. The National Bureau of Asian Research’s Report on the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property argued that immigrants coming to study in the United States return home to use their “IP knowledge” to compete against the United States (Blair and Huntsman 2013). These students turn into “walking IP” and “take trade secrets with them when they leave” (Blair and Huntsman 2013, 13). More nefarious are foreign students who come to Western higher educational institutions to act as spies for their home countries. The open space of the university may need to be rethought when educating students becomes a threat to national security. However, before we collectively agree that the theft of IP by foreign states is a significant national security threat of the information age, as the reports in this section have claimed, it might be worthwhile to know exactly what is meant by IP and how it has been stolen. The new face of IP and national security The previous section sought to demonstrate that the concept of intellectual property has now been built into the national security discourse justifying a U.S. security role in cyberspace. This section interrogates the inclusion of IP in these reports. To remake IP theft into a security issue, the report authors do not delve into the technical differences between intellectual property regimes such as copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets, they do not discuss that this is primarily an economic doctrine designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and they do not discuss that copyright and patent law deals with infringement in the context of unauthorized copies or use of an idea, not theft. Instead, these documents reference an abstract notion of “intellectual property” located within the national sphere of the U.S. state. There is little clear thinking or analysis presented that distinguishes between economic threats to private industry and hackers stealing government secrets. Intellectual property itself is never defined in any meaningful detail. The specifics of the actual damage done (given that what is taken is a copy) and how it has impacted innovation or progress are not articulated. Rather, there is an assertion that what has happened constitutes a significant threat to American national security. That threat blurs the distinction between protection of private economic interests and that of the nation-state. First, the concept of intellectual property is a misnomer that implies something has been stolen when it has not. The scholarship critical of expansion and restrictive control of intellectual property has been well established and the concept itself is contested, including the language of theft associated with it (Lessig 2005; Lessig 2006; Lessig 2002; Doctorow 2008; Stallman, Lessig, and Gay 2002; Halbert 2005; May 2000; Boyle 2003; McLeod 2007; Penalver and Katyal ~ 2010; Boyle 1996; Bollier 2002; Hemmungs Wirten 2004; May and Sell 2006; Drahos 2003; Correa 2000; Boldrin and Levine 2008; Stallman 2006; Bettig 1996; Vaidhyanathan 2001). It is difficult to know why the report authors remain ignorant or nonresponsive to the IP policy field they have appropriated, given that the relevant literature has existed for decades. One explanation is that they intentionally equivocate about the different types of IP to enhance the perception of the threat. Looking more critically at the theft of IP claim, if intellectual property can be stolen, then its theft means some sort of loss has occurred for its owners. However, IP laws protect nonrivalrous goods. Unlike tangible property, multiple people can use IP simultaneously. At its worst, the IP discussed in these reports are copies of work produced by others, but the victims of theft have not been deprived of their original works, unless there is malicious erasing. IP exists to create scarcity in information by imposing limited monopolies on otherwise intangible and easy-to-share expressions and ideas. Thus, the larger question remains, what has been stolen when a “theft” of IP has taken place? Basically, it is the theft of a temporary monopoly over how ideas are shared or, in 260 D. HALBERT Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 some cases here, classified works. Such a vague construction of intellectual property must be challenged. IP theft is substantively different from other forms of theft and the use of the word property to describe these actions conceals as much as it reveals. If the specific legal codes that fall under the general umbrella term intellectual property were used instead, then it would be possible to determine more clearly what was “stolen.” IP is simply a quick way of referring to the multiple legal codes that protect the distinct legal regimes of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The notion that one could aggregate these disparate rights into a single concept and claim it to be of such significance that our national security depends upon its protection is deeply problematic. By contrast, if what is stolen is trade secrets we might have a better idea of the problem. If, on the other hand, the appropriation is of a trademark and related works, then the national security implications seem unclear. Disaggregation of the “theft of IP” into what type of IP has been threatened can help us better understand what in fact was copied. Second, as a body of law, IP is primarily economic and public in nature and thus should not be conflated with government secrets or other forms of classified information. In other words, it cannot be divorced from a public process, as the FBI agent who deposited a copy of a secret interrogation manual after registering it with the copyright office found out (Baumann 2013). With the exception of trade secrets and the extension of copyright to unpublished works, IP law grants a limited monopoly to the author or inventor of a work in exchange for public disclosure of the creative work. Secret military documents are valuable to national security, but to call them IP in the conventional sense of this word is inaccurate. In fact, to register a copyright, a copy of the document must be filed with the U.S. copyright office (though copyright is automatically attached upon the fixation of something in a tangible form and without registration, so technically one could call all written work copyrighted). Patents and trademarks go through similar public processes. While inventions can be classified as secret if they are deemed to risk national security, classifying them in such a manner means that the patent is not awarded. Here, while the technology is kept secret, economic potential may be lost. Ironically, if policymakers link economic security to national security, the resulting rendering of some inventions secret could have a significant negative economic impact in the United States (Schulz 2013). Trade secret laws exist to provide companies with a way of protecting their private knowledge from theft. However, industrial espionage predates the security concern over hackers using computers to steal IP. In the reports analyzed, the examples of industrial spying did not involve hackers but rather the theft of materials by employees—the conventional method of industrial spying. Third, given the critique of theft in the preceding section, it is unclear how one assesses the economic damage when what is “taken” is intangible and technically not lost. These reports claim that billions of dollars have been stolen as a result of intellectual property theft. For example, in the recent New York Times coverage of the Chinese indictment, the Attorney General claimed that the hackers stole 700,000 pages of e-mails from one company, which sounds significant (Schmidt and Sanger 2014). However, how many of these e-mails were of any “value”? How do you assign value to e-mails? Would only the e-mails including technical details count as valuable? It may be that after sifting through 700,000 e-mails, a Chinese innovator will be able to use whatever technical processes have been distilled to create a competitive advantage. The same could be said of the thousands of old scientific articles “stolen” from public libraries in the United States. However, as Thomas Rid argues, “Tacit knowledge is a major challenge for espionage, especially industrial espionage” (Rid 2013, 84). Since taking knowledge is much easier than putting it to use, theft of trade secrets has had a relatively limited impact on competitive economic development (Rid 2013). However, though illegal, theft of trade secrets does not limit the company from which the information was stolen from pursuing its own innovative path. The underlying assumption in these reports is that foreign governments steal our ideas but then take these ideas and make superior products before we can. Perhaps instead of feeling threatened, it might be worthwhile to ask why American businesses are not bringing their innovations to market more quickly—this is, after all, the entire point of a free-market competitive system. Finally, while this type of “theft” may be of economic concern, blurring it into a national security threat is problematic. These types of distinctions are absent from the policy analysis presented in the statements made about how much the theft of IP costs the United States. What becomes clear when looking at the confluence of reports and statements from public figures and the relevant think tanks is that without any critical nuance, intellectual property theft has achieved a level of political valence akin to the elusive threat posed by the war on terror. It is likely we can never know what has been “stolen” when the government claims China is stealing our intellectual property, in part because it may be classified information and in part because the vagueness of the claim allows any number of otherwise innocuous items to be counted as stolen. However, there are reasons we THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 261 Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 should be concerned about such claims and challenge the wholesale use of the concept of IP to justify national security efforts in cyberspace. Why we should care about the securitization of intellectual property theft Intellectual property has grown in importance since the mid-1990s when it became clear that the networking possibilities of the information age were changing the way people communicated, did business, shared information and much more. As discussed earlier, commercial interests, especially entertainment companies, were among the first to recognize the threat to their business models posed by the Internet. They embarked upon a now decades-long effort to preserve their way of doing business using all possible strategies, from changing the law to educational campaigns advancing a framework of cybernorms that suited their commercial interests. While it is arguable that the industry has lost anywhere near the amounts of money it claims, what has been successfully accomplished is the uncritical acceptance of the IP theft narrative at all levels of American government as a truth. The Copenhagen School initially developed securitization theory in the 1990s as a form of critical security studies. A security threat, according to the Copenhagen School, does not exist “naturally” but is instead narrated into being (van Munster 2005, 2). Such an understanding of securitization “follows the recognition that security is socially constructed and politically powerful” (Browning and McDonald 2011, 236). To qualify as a securitizing act, according to the Copenhagen School, three criteria must be met: (a) existential threats to the survival of some kind of referent object that (b) require exceptional measures to protect the threatened referent object, which (c) justify and legitimise the breaking free of normal democratic procedures. (van Munster 2005, 3) Furthermore, to become securitized, an actor must make a securitizing move that is accepted by a target audience and justifies actions that “break the normal political rules of the game” (Buzan et al. 1997, 24). Over the last two decades, several critiques to the original Copenhagen School paradigm have emerged. Specifically, some argue that a focus on existential threats is too limiting. For an issue to meet the mandates set by securitization theory, an “existential threat” through which new and extraordinary measures must be taken outside conventional politics must exist (Williams 2003). As van Munster points out, while the original articulation of securitization focused upon existential threats, the ongoing war on terror helps us to understand securitizing moves as also articulating the risk of potential threats (van Munster 2005). Cybersecurity is another such threat. According to Hansen and Nissenbaum, the Copenhagen School rejected the need to theorize cybersecurity as an autonomous security issue in the 1990s (Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009, 1156). Yet the potential risk posed by cyberwar and the underlying and associated risks posed by IP theft are now playing a central role in how the United States articulates its security policy. How the state, accompanied by private security-based actors, constructs a discourse of security surrounding the protection of IP and shifts the security agenda to reflect the new socially constructed threat is important to analyze. Thus, the securitization of IP as traced in the reports discussed here takes an unconventional security threat and translates it into a threat that can be understood using very conventional security language. Cavelty says of cybersecurity that while it may not have been successful as a securitizing move, “what has evolved, however, is a new logic of security (Cavelty 2007, 137). This new logic of security, where cyberspace generally is seen as a national security threat and the theft of intellectual property is understood to be a significant justification for further defending cyberspace, is why we should take the claims made in these reports seriously. Cavelty is interested not in the securitization move itself, but in the nature of the measures drafted as a result—how a securitizing move leads to policy decisions and countermeasures. This is the focus of “threat politics,” which pushes security studies to the next stage (Cavelty 2007, 26). In the case of cyberspace and IP theft, it is worth remarking that state actors have assimilated IP into their justification for defending U.S. territory, this time in cyberspace. This section uncovers why the articulation of IP as a security threat matters in the context of threat politics. Ultimately, by shifting IP into a national security frame, the lines between theft and information sharing are increasingly blurred and the U.S. government positions itself even closer to using cyberspace as a justification for war (virtual or conventional). One possible justification for the securitization of IP is that it can help mobilize U.S. efforts to enhance military budgets. For example, the Department of Defense now has a “cyber strategy” requiring a buildup of cyber resources and personnel to address the growing threat posed by the cyber domain, including the theft of intellectual property from state and nonstate actors (Carter 2015). In a March 2012 press release, the Department of Defense (DOD) called for increased funding (to $3.4 billion for FY 2013) for a coordinated approach to cybersecurity that involves the DOD, the Department of 262 D. HALBERT Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 Homeland Security, the FBI, and private industry (Daniel 2012). According to General Keith B. Alexander, “Cyber is a team sport, it is increasingly critical to our national and economic security. … The theft of intellectual property is astounding” (Daniel 2012, online para. 8). Thus, IP theft within the new cyberdomain can help justify ongoing defense budgetary allocations. Despite these efforts to shore up military budgets, cybersecurity is an uneasy fit with the conventional understanding of national security threats. While the reports just described assert unequivocally that the theft of IP is a national security threat, to position IP theft as a national security threat is questionable. For example, the Chinese hacking incident(s) has been instrumental in helping justify increased cybersecurity to protect intellectual property. As Clarke and Knake argue, “Even if a major cyberwar involving the U.S. never happens, Chinese cyber espionage and intellectual property war may swing the balance of power in the world away from America. We need to make protecting this information a much higher priority, and we need to confront China about its activities” (Clarke and Knake 2010, 237). What “intellectual property war” might be in this context is a matter of speculation. What information needs protecting is also unclear, but the concept is broad enough to establish any Chinese knowledge acquisition as a threat. It is argued that the data theft undertaken by the Chinese is specifically designed to improve their military and technological capacities to better compete with the United States (Eun and Abmann 2014). This particular threat is not based upon superior weaponry, but upon superior use of information. In other words, the fear is that China may be smarter than the United States and that the vast downloading of information from U.S. computers will help them achieve international dominance. More significantly, and what makes the securitization of IP a new rhetorical move worth remarking upon and raising concern about, the Chinese state is now the culprit in this new narrative of IP war. The United States has pointed to China’s intellectual property pirates for decades (Halbert 1997; Neigel 2000; Yu 2006; Yu 2005; Mertha 2005). However, the focus has been on the lax enforcement of intellectual property rights that allowed Chinese pirates to make illegal copies of U.S. movies, music, software, and designs. The shift from a failure of the Chinese state to protect U.S. intellectual property (movies, software, music, etc.) to the public accusation by American officials that the Chinese government itself is responsible for intellectual property theft is an important new dimension in the evolution of international intellectual property conflicts. The state as IP pirate makes for a different set of possible responses in the context of a threat politics—diplomatic and military—and requires a far more vigilant system of surveillance on the part of the United States. If the rhetorical effort to establish IP theft as a concern for American national security is to be taken seriously, where does this logic lead us in terms of future international relations? If virtually all policy treatments of cybersecurity point to the theft of IP as a significant justification for more security, less sharing, and more national vigilance in protecting “our IP,” then what kind of future battles does such logic set up? Among the first to call theft of information a type of warfare was computer scientist Dorothy E. Denning, who included IP theft in her hierarchies of offensive operations that could be conducted in cyberspace (Denning 1998). However, there remain serious questions about whether “cyber” fits the concept of war at all. There is an ongoing debate in security circles on the potential of cyberwar and what it really means (Gartzke 2013; Gjelten 2013; Ophardt 2010; Rid 2012; Farwell and Rohozinski 2012; Sharma 2010; Stevens 2012; Stone 2013; McGraw 2013; Ventre 2011; Singer and Friedman 2014). Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins argue that cyberwar is primarily hype produced by the growing cybersecurity industrial complex, and they suggest that more clear definitions of the threat and more realistic assessments need to be made (Brito and Watkins 2011). Rand senior policy analyst Martin C. Libicki also downplays the significance of what remains primarily a theoretical threat (Libicki 2007). Rid argues that the concept of cyberwar is highly problematic and that, in fact, cyberattacks actually significantly diminish violence instead of enhancing it (Rid 2013). International law requires a state-actor as the instigator of an act of war, which may not be discernable in a potential cyberwar (Ophardt 2010). The territory under attack, as well as the territory from where the attack originates, may also be unclear, a divide that distinguishes cybercrime from cyberwar in contexts where the two are not deliberately blurred (Hollis 2011). According to Ophardt, we are already seeing glimpses of tomorrow’s cyberwars in the dynamic between industry-hired mercenaries and file sharers. The fact that file sharing is being used as an example of the wars of the future does not bode well for demarcation of IP in future conflicts. We have not yet gone so far as to claim IP theft as an act of war. In the aftermath of the Chinese hacker scandal, the Pentagon issued a report on cybersecurity in which it recommended that some cyberattacks could be considered acts of war, but noted that “routine theft of intellectual property” was “generally” not considered to be in that category (Michaels 2013). The widely discussed Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare also explicitly excludes protection of private intellectual property from consideration as an THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 263 Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 activity governed by the law of armed conflict (Schmitt 2013). It sees the law of armed conflict applicable only when state–state actions are involved. Despite the implications intellectual property theft has for national security, Schmitt does not think it belongs in this domain (Schmitt 2013). However, given that the shift in discourses over the threat to the national security of American IP comes from other states, the lines between protection of commercial and government IP assets are getting ever more blurry. Given the incessant ramping up of the threat posed by IP theft, it is likely that claims regarding IP theft as an act of war are not too far in the future. Of additional concern is the fact that by making IP theft a national security threat without being clear about what actually constitutes intellectual property, not only does the U.S. government create a new reason for a militarized Internet, but it also sets the stage for companies to assert that a range of other activities from file sharing to producing counterfeit DVDs threaten national security and require further state intervention. Already, private industry has sought to link IP theft to terrorism in an effort to deploy the U.S. security state to defend its business practices (Treverton et al. 2009; Donahue and Hirschmann 2008). Whatever form IP theft might take in the national security configuration, from the unauthorized download of an internal departmental memorandum to counterfeit food production to illegal song downloads, the framing of the policy documents discussed here provides justification for further restriction of the openness of the Internet. Conclusion This article sought to raise concerns about appropriating the concept of IP as a national security issue and using it to justify the protection of cyberspace. The question remains open, however, as to what the U.S. response should be, not only to possible cybercrime but also to cybersecurity more generally. As Clarke and Knake warn, “Countries need to recognize that cyber espionage can easily be mistaken for preparation of the battlefield and that such actions may be seen to be provocative” (Clarke and Knake 2010, 236). Given the fact that the Obama administration reserves the right to respond with force to any credible threat to its security, even in cyberspace, the possibility of military escalation is there. Despite the current popularity of using the language of IP theft to justify enhanced national security in cyberspace and to expand U.S. military oversight of cyberspace, other justifications for such actions should be sought and IP should remain in the civilian and economic realms. Ultimately, the implications of securitizing IP are significant. As a result of the threat to American national security created by this framing of the theft of IP, more sophisticated cyberdefenses, public/ private information sharing, and Internet surveillance are justified. The lines being blurred to promote IP theft as a threat could undermine the basic connective capacity of the Internet itself. Utilizing the Internet to fight an offensive information war will encourage the already existing trend of Internet Balkanization that has been in part motivated by American online spying, as other countries seek to protect themselves from potential cyber threats. Instead of heightening tension between states over information sharing and setting the stage for future cyberwars over the theft of IP, there could be other possible ways to work through issues of information exchange and possible theft outside the national security/military paradigm. Hollis, for example, suggests that because it is so difficult to identify the origin of a cyberattack, the focus should instead be on constructing a duty to assist in the event of such an attack (Hollis 2011, 209), rather than focusing on the origin of the attack. Such a perspective sees the Internet as a common “international” space, rather than the sovereign domain of nation-states. While the debate over what possible international cybernorms might govern cyberspace is ongoing and few issues have been resolved (Hurwitz 2015), considering an approach where at least minimum international standards not dictated only by U.S. security interests prevail is another possible avenue to diffuse the securitization of IP currently underway. In other words, possibilities other than understanding IP theft as a threat to U.S. national security exist, possibilities where the exchange of information and the benefits of an open Internet still prevail, even when discussing the potential threat China plays (Lindsay 2015). I have sought to argue that the securitization of IP should be of significant concern, and yet the academic literature on securitization studies may not acknowledge its importance because of the limited way in which that literature defines securitization. One path forward is to engage more critically with the academic literature on securitization studies. While Cavelty’s work on threat politics helps provide new avenues for articulating new threats, more can be done in this area. Securitization studies were intended to be critical of mainstream international relations; however, their commitment to theorizing within the constraints of their definitional model limits the application. Thus, one way forward includes a more robust theory of securitization that allows for the discussion of new types of threats in cyberspace. 264 D. HALBERT Downloaded by [University of Hawaii at Manoa] at 12:01 01 June 2016 An additional path forward is to use the analysis of securitizing IP developed here to delve more deeply into the specific cybersecurity examples used by advocates of the securitizing IP school of thought and determine much more clearly what the implications of massive copying of intellectual property are. This article is intended to raise awareness of how the “theft of IP” language is being appropriated to justify enhanced cybersecurity, but space limitations preclude more detailed analysis. Such analysis would build upon the documentation provided here regarding the evolution of a securitizing discourse surrounding the theft of IP. Finally, understanding the implications of this rhetorical move has very real world applications. These securitizing moves are not academic, but will have real consequences for how the national security state moves forward in cyberspace, how surveillance is justified, how military budgets are constructed, and much more. To that end, the type of information society we wish to inhabit in the future is implicated in the struggles this article has attempted to make visible, and more can be done to articulate the vision of a more positive future regarding how information is shared across national boundaries. The struggle between open access and proprietary knowledge has been raging for as long as intellectual property laws have existed. The securitization of intellectual property takes the debate to the next level. As the language of national security colonizes the debate about intellectual property, those who would advocate for open access, free sharing of information, and even technology transfers will find themselves with even more limited ground upon which to stand if this narrative move is not resisted. The future is not a bright one when anything shared on a computer might now violate the national security of the United States.

U.S. national security (as opposed to economic security) is relatively new and only tangentially discussed in the literature on intellectual property (which is primarily focused on legal analysis) or the literature on cybersecurity (which deals with the concept of IP uncritically). The discourse that advances IP as a national security issue makes two important narrative moves. First, it blurs the lines between domestic economic innovation and the production of classified information. Second, it asserts that other states (with a focus on China) are responsible for the theft of IP, and not just hackers, criminals, and commercial enterprises. Contrary to the uncritical acceptance that the theft of IP constitutes a national security threat, this article interrogates treatment of IP as a national security issue and thereby a justification for enhancing security in cyberspace. It argues that despite lack of clarity on the part of security analysts and government officials about what IP actually is, the theft of IP is being used to legitimize the presence of U.S. national security interests in the new “operational domain” of cyberspace (Uzal et al. 2014, 407). In making this argument, this article does not question the threat of cyberattacks (or the threat of attacks) on U.S. computer infrastructure; such attacks are well documented and of concern (Deibert 2013; Deibert and Rohozinski 2010). It instead argues that use of IP to justify enhanced cybersecurity should be examined critically. The politics of creating a new “discourse of danger” (Campbell 1998) will have long-term ramifications for open access to knowledge and alternative models of innovation. The theft of intellectual property framed as a national security issue allows the U.S. government to justify enhanced surveillance and control over the Internet in the name of protecting American information assets, now defined as intellectual property. Such a framing, however, has consequences for future information exchange on the Internet, as well as for the future of U.S. diplomatic relations around the globe. More broadly, in building up the moral panic around IP theft and using this theft as a justification for enhanced national security measures in cyberspace, the U.S. government endorses a way of thinking about information, development, and nationalism that sees almost all exchange of information as threatening. Manjikian observes that where the utopian, and to some degree the liberal, approach to the Internet sees information sharing as a larger good, the realist sees information sharing as a threat (Manjikian 2010). In making IP a security threat, the realists are establishing the rhetorical stage for the dominance of their interpretation of cyberspace. This article is structured as follows. The next section traces the articulation of IP as a national security issue by examining the available public documents, including cybersecurity reports issued by the White House, security agencies, and other players. The subsequent section unpacks the concept of IP and shows why it is problematic to treat it as a national security threat. The final section situates this discourse in the larger debate on U.S. cybersecurity and investigates the implications of treating IP theft as a national security threat. The convergence of intellectual property and national security Ronald Reagan’s National Security Decision Directive 145 noted that “Government systems as well as those which process the private or proprietary information of US persons and businesses can become targets for foreign exploitation” (Reagan 1984). While it does not carry the language of intellectual property that is central to cybersecurity claims today, this early directive advances the convergence of private industry and public national security. In 2003 the Bush administration issued the first “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” report, the document that set the stage for merging issues of cyberspace with those of national security.1 It focused primarily upon the potential harms caused by insecure networks and security flaws, especially in computerized systems controlling our nation’s critical infrastructure (The White House 2003). While intellectual property was mentioned, it was not yet central to the articulation of cybersecurity in a post-9/11 world. Toward the end of the Bush administration, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) issued a “Report to the 44th President of the United States on Cybersecurity.” This report raised the crucial cybersecurity issues the next president of the United States would need to address. It noted that as of 2008, despite over a decade of evolution and growth of the Internet, its national security implications had yet to be fully discussed or developed. Specifically, “America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration that will take office in January 2008” (Langevin et al. 2008, 11). Thus, recommendations to the new president set the stage for a more comprehensive approach to national cybersecurity. To emphasize the importance of IP, the authors argued that: The immediate risk lies with the economy. Most companies’ business plans involve the use of cyberspace to deliver services, manage supply chains, or interact with customers. Equally important, intellectual property is now stored in digital form, easily accessible to rivals. Weak cybersecurity dilutes our investment in innovation while subsidizing the research and development efforts of foreign competitors. In the new global competition, where economic strength and technological leadership are as important to national power as military force, failing to secure cyberspace puts us at a disadvantage. (Langevin et al. 2008, 11) The report never provides a definition of intellectual property in use except to say this “property” is stored on computers and thus more vulnerable than before.2 What is significant is that intellectual property generally described, which is vital to our economic strength, is deemed as important as military force.3 The report goes even further, saying this is “a strategic issue on par with weapons of mass destruction and global jihad” (Langevin et al. 2008, 15). Here we see just how far the policy discourse on IP moved from early economic concerns to those of national security. The CSIS report, including language on the importance of intellectual property, was cited in one of President Obama’s first forays into cyberspace policy—his 2009 “Cyberspace Policy Review” (The White House 2009). President Obama took up the call of cybersecurity and has made addressing the theft of intellectual property a top priority. In the May 2011 report “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” the follow-up to the 2003 Bush administration report, Obama details the threat facing the United States in this integrated and networked world.4 The report lists several principal cyber threats to national security—cyberattacks that disrupt service; criminal behaviors such as fraud, identity theft, and child exploitation that undermine trust in the digital world; and theft of intellectual property that “threatens national competitiveness and the innovation that drives it” (Obama 2011, 4). According to the report, these challenges emerge because the anonymity of the Internet creates “safe havens” for criminals who pose cybersecurity threats that can even “endanger international peace and security” (Obama 2011, 4). In other words, the anonymity of the Internet, which is celebrated in many quarters, is now also a threat to the U.S. government. In contrast to those calling for collective determination of cyber norms premised upon prevailing social norms (Mueller, Mathiason, and Klein 2007; Hurwitz 2015; Svensson and Larsson 2012; Larsson 2013), this report establishes government mandated international norms that respect intellectual property. Furthermore, the report goes on to outline the U.S. response should the norms now articulated be violated. Specifically, the United States will first continue to pursue diplomacy, it will also work to dissuade potential actors from engaging in norm violating behavior, and, finally, the United States will seek to deter any possible threat to its national and economic security (Obama 2011). The report is clear that violence is an acceptable response to threats to U.S. cybersecurity. It notes that: THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 257 When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country. All states possess an inherent right to selfdefense, and we recognize that certain hostile acts conducted through cyberspace could compel actions under the commitments we have with our military treaty partners. We reserve the right to use all necessary means— diplomatic, informational, military, and economic—as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law, in order to defend our Nation, our allies, our partners, and our interests. (Obama 2011, 12) Also in 2011, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive issued its report to Congress covering acts of economic espionage for the 2009–2011 period (Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive 2011). This report provides specific examples of industrial and economic espionage and defines what constitutes the theft of trade secrets. While often overlooked in discussions of intellectual property (that focus primarily on copyrights, patents, and trademarks), trade secrets are a protected form of IP nationally and internationally via the TRIPS (The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement; Pooley 2013). The 2011 report focuses upon industrial espionage in cyberspace instead of the general cybersecurity threats discussed in other documents and provides additional justification for government intervention to make the Internet a secure place for business and government. The report noted that it is difficult to assign value to things stolen from industry computers. After all, how much value should be placed on an internal memo listing business talking points (Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive 2011, 3)? That being said, the report offers several insights into how both industry and government entities perceive IP as a national security issue. First, the report recounts that in a 2010 conference hosted by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCE), it emerged that industry actors did not see a significant difference between “cybercrime—for example, identity theft or the misappropriation of intellectual property such as the counterfeiting of commercial video or audio recordings—and the collection of economic or technology information by intelligence services or other foreign entities” (Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive 2011, 1). In effect, industry saw the theft of their intellectual property as the same thing as the theft of state secrets. Second, the report discusses what the authors consider to be non-cyber methods of generating valuable knowledge through economic espionage, including the use of open source materials—meaning published information in scholarly journals and websites. Given that increasingly these materials are available via online sources, often with some sort of pay-wall, it is not a huge step to see how the U.S. government could reconfigure hacking an academic database, such as JSTOR, into a crime of industrial espionage.5 More broadly, however, the notion that even acquiring knowledge through opensource materials can be interpreted as a threat to U.S. economic security implies a significantly different approach to scholarly production than what is found in the academy and the growing open access movement. Finally, to capitalize on the “hactivist” threat posed by Wikileaks, the report argues that future threats may come from activists seeking to make a lifesaving drug available more cheaply or antiwar activists interested in averting the deployment of a new U.S. weapons system. In either scenario, these activists would leak proprietary information to the public and thus undermine U.S. economic and/or national security. In other words, potential security threats are threats coming from intellectual property violations. These activists, along with the emergence of possible regional state actors, are perceived as possible “game changers” in the increasingly complex world of industrial espionage and U.S. national security The report of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive provided the data for the President’s February 2013 national strategy to deal with the theft of U.S. trade secrets (and is attached at the end of the President’s document). Focused on industrial and economic espionage, the President’s February 2013 report tells the public that the full scope of the U.S. administrative infrastructure will be deployed to fight against IP theft. Gone are the days when the FBI had bigger criminal plots to unravel than intellectual property theft—this is now central in the FBI mission.6 The report’s analysis is limited to trade secrets instead of constructing and using a generic concept of “intellectual property” as a foil against which to pitch an argument for increased cybersecurity. That being said, what constitutes a trade secret in the context of this report and of course in the U.S. assessment of damage done to American industry and national security is everything that might be held on a computer. Thus, no matter how banal or irrelevant, as long as it is on a computer, it is a trade secret and must be protected against theft.7 While Russia is considered a serious offender in terms of industrial espionage, the reports on trade secrets and cybersecurity all point to China as the most aggressive cybersecurity threat. According to Schmidt and Sanger, recent federal indictments of Chinese hackers were directed at positioning U.S. claims about intellectual property theft at the center of United States–China diplomacy (Schmidt and Sanger 2014). In 2011, Bloomberg reported that at least 760 companies had been hacked, primarily by Chinese sources, calling China’s efforts an “undeclared cyber war” (Riley and Walcott 258 D. HALBERT 2011). While the reporting was short on specifics, Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, noted, “We’re talking about stealing entire industries.” He said, “This may be the biggest transfer of wealth in a short period of time that the world has ever seen” (Riley and Walcott 2011, online para. 16).8 The issue of state-based Chinese hacking emerged again in March 2012 when the Department of Defense issued a press release on what it called “the greatest wealth transfer in history.” According to this press release, this wealth transfer resulted from the Chinese hacking of critical resources in U.S. industry, universities, and government (Daniel 2012). Here the security firm Mandiant noted that while it may be possible that the Chinese hackers acted without state sponsorship, by far the most likely scenario is that they were deployed by the Chinese state to appropriate U.S. intellectual property (Mandiant Intelligence Center 2013). The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property recommended that the national security advisor be designated as the “principle policy coordinator for all actions on the protection of American IP” (Blair and Huntsman 2013, 4). While cybersecurity is already within the scope of the National Security Council mandate, such a designation would shift some of the interests in intellectual property protection from its civilian host in the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator’s office, itself only a few years old, to a new position within the National Security Council. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also in the picture when issues of cybersecurity and intellectual property converge. While the DHS is a vast federal bureaucracy with widespread duties from border control to domestic terrorism, its recent report to Congress did not leave out the threats posed by intellectual property theft. Acting Secretary Rand in his report to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on the State of the Homeland told the committee that the cyberworld is fraught with dangers: This is critical, time-sensitive work, because we confront a dangerous combination of known and unknown cyber vulnerabilities, and adversaries with strong and rapidly expanding capabilities. Threats range from denial of service attacks, to theft of valuable trade secrets, to intrusions against government networks and systems that control critical infrastructure. These attacks come from every part of the globe, every minute of every day, and are continually increasing in seriousness and sophistication. (Beers 2013, online para. 66) Other aspects of the threat to the homeland included hackers testing our networks, the sale of counterfeit goods via the Internet, and ongoing attacks on the network from foreign and domestic sources alike (Beers 2013). These dangers were part of the justification used by the Acting Secretary to request additional funding for DHS in the next fiscal year. Other reports come closer to linking national security and the protection of American lives to IP theft. Attached to the 2013 report by the Obama administration about trade secret theft is yet another report about the importance of protecting U.S. intellectual property. This report for 2012, part of a yearly endeavor by the Defense Security Service, begins by stating that: The stakes are high in the battle against foreign collection efforts and espionage that target U.S. technology, intellectual property, trade secrets, and proprietary information. Our national security relies on our collective success at thwarting these persistent attacks. Every time our adversaries gain access to sensitive or classified information and technology, it jeopardizes the lives of our warfighters, since these adversaries can exploit the information and technology to develop more lethal weapons or countermeasures to our systems. Our national security is also at risk in the potential loss of our technological edge, which is closely tied to the economic success of the cleared contractor community and the well-being of our economy. (Defense Security Service 2012, 5) The language equivocates between stolen national secrets and whatever is meant here by intellectual property, where trade secrets and proprietary information are separate categories. However, with each report linking intellectual property to the national security state, the importance of intellectual property is enhanced, even as what constitutes intellectual property is never clarified. The Center for a New American Security also issued a 2013 report on cybersecurity that further enforces the growing link between cybersecurity, national security, and intellectual property theft. The new turn, as the report author Irving Lachow notes, is that an active cyberdefense (ACD) is necessary because the threat now comes from state-sponsored spies and sophisticated criminals who create what he calls an advanced persistent threat (APT) (Lachow 2013, 2). These new threats focus on “stealing intellectual property and defrauding individuals and businesses” (Lachow 2013, 2). It is exclusively the threat to intellectual property that Lachow uses to justify his ACD system in the cyber-engagement zone (CEZ), a system where security forces seek to actively intervene in cyberinvasions as they are happening (Lachow 2013). Space does not allow me to continue to trace the ongoing development of intellectual property as a security concern and its theft as increasingly central to the U.S. security discourses. One last point must be made. In a TED talk via remote computer, Edward Snowden discussed his reasons for disclosing the scope of NSA spying THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 259 and his perspectives on U.S. national security. As someone who has advocated for civil liberties and privacy rights for the individual, Snowden argued that protection of intellectual property justified rejecting NSA efforts to install backdoors in Internet systems. When asked whether we became less secure as a result of such backdoors, he said: If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can’t get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they’re not only putting the world at risk, they’re putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we’re going to be paying for it for years. (Snowden, 2014) Protection of United States IP has become the rallying cry for a secure network. The world understood through these reports is not an open system where knowledge is shared for the sake of learning, poverty alleviation, or economic development, but instead one where knowledge is owned and controlled by industrial and state actors and its existence as a secret must be preserved and protected at all costs. In fact, higher education is being reimagined as a national security threat. The National Bureau of Asian Research’s Report on the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property argued that immigrants coming to study in the United States return home to use their “IP knowledge” to compete against the United States (Blair and Huntsman 2013). These students turn into “walking IP” and “take trade secrets with them when they leave” (Blair and Huntsman 2013, 13). More nefarious are foreign students who come to Western higher educational institutions to act as spies for their home countries. The open space of the university may need to be rethought when educating students becomes a threat to national security. However, before we collectively agree that the theft of IP by foreign states is a significant national security threat of the information age, as the reports in this section have claimed, it might be worthwhile to know exactly what is meant by IP and how it has been stolen. The new face of IP and national security. The previous section sought to demonstrate that the concept of intellectual property has now been built into the national security discourse justifying a U.S. security role in cyberspace. This section interrogates the inclusion of IP in these reports. To remake IP theft into a security issue, the report authors do not delve into the technical differences between intellectual property regimes such as copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secrets, they do not discuss that this is primarily an economic doctrine designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas, and they do not discuss that copyright and patent law deals with infringement in the context of unauthorized copies or use of an idea, not theft. Instead, these documents reference an abstract notion of “intellectual property” located within the national sphere of the U.S. state. There is little clear thinking or analysis presented that distinguishes between economic threats to private industry and hackers stealing government secrets. Intellectual property itself is never defined in any meaningful detail. The specifics of the actual damage done (given that what is taken is a copy) and how it has impacted innovation or progress are not articulated. Rather, there is an assertion that what has happened constitutes a significant threat to American national security. That threat blurs the distinction between protection of private economic interests and that of the nation-state. First, the concept of intellectual property is a misnomer that implies something has been stolen when it has not. The scholarship critical of expansion and restrictive control of intellectual property has been well established and the concept itself is contested, including the language of theft associated with it (Lessig 2005; Lessig 2006; Lessig 2002; Doctorow 2008; Stallman, Lessig, and Gay 2002; Halbert 2005; May 2000; Boyle 2003; McLeod 2007; Penalver and Katyal ~ 2010; Boyle 1996; Bollier 2002; Hemmungs Wirten 2004; May and Sell 2006; Drahos 2003; Correa 2000; Boldrin and Levine 2008; Stallman 2006; Bettig 1996; Vaidhyanathan 2001). It is difficult to know why the report authors remain ignorant or nonresponsive to the IP policy field they have appropriated, given that the relevant literature has existed for decades. One explanation is that they intentionally equivocate about the different types of IP to enhance the perception of the threat. Looking more critically at the theft of IP claim, if intellectual property can be stolen, then its theft means some sort of loss has occurred for its owners. However, IP laws protect nonrivalrous goods. Unlike tangible property, multiple people can use IP simultaneously. At its worst, the IP discussed in these reports are copies of work produced by others, but the victims of theft have not been deprived of their original works, unless there is malicious erasing. IP exists to create scarcity in information by imposing limited monopolies on otherwise intangible and easy-to-share expressions and ideas. Thus, the larger question remains, what has been stolen when a “theft” of IP has taken place? Basically, it is the theft of a temporary monopoly over how ideas are shared or, in 260 D. HALBERT some cases here, classified works. Such a vague construction of intellectual property must be challenged. IP theft is substantively different from other forms of theft and the use of the word property to describe these actions conceals as much as it reveals. If the specific legal codes that fall under the general umbrella term intellectual property were used instead, then it would be possible to determine more clearly what was “stolen.” IP is simply a quick way of referring to the multiple legal codes that protect the distinct legal regimes of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. The notion that one could aggregate these disparate rights into a single concept and claim it to be of such significance that our national security depends upon its protection is deeply problematic. By contrast, if what is stolen is trade secrets we might have a better idea of the problem. If, on the other hand, the appropriation is of a trademark and related works, then the national security implications seem unclear. Disaggregation of the “theft of IP” into what type of IP has been threatened can help us better understand what in fact was copied. Second, as a body of law, IP is primarily economic and public in nature and thus should not be conflated with government secrets or other forms of classified information. In other words, it cannot be divorced from a public process, as the FBI agent who deposited a copy of a secret interrogation manual after registering it with the copyright office found out (Baumann 2013). With the exception of trade secrets and the extension of copyright to unpublished works, IP law grants a limited monopoly to the author or inventor of a work in exchange for public disclosure of the creative work. Secret military documents are valuable to national security, but to call them IP in the conventional sense of this word is inaccurate. In fact, to register a copyright, a copy of the document must be filed with the U.S. copyright office (though copyright is automatically attached upon the fixation of something in a tangible form and without registration, so technically one could call all written work copyrighted). Patents and trademarks go through similar public processes. While inventions can be classified as secret if they are deemed to risk national security, classifying them in such a manner means that the patent is not awarded. Here, while the technology is kept secret, economic potential may be lost. Ironically, if policymakers link economic security to national security, the resulting rendering of some inventions secret could have a significant negative economic impact in the United States (Schulz 2013). Trade secret laws exist to provide companies with a way of protecting their private knowledge from theft. However, industrial espionage predates the security concern over hackers using computers to steal IP. In the reports analyzed, the examples of industrial spying did not involve hackers but rather the theft of materials by employees—the conventional method of industrial spying. Third, given the critique of theft in the preceding section, it is unclear how one assesses the economic damage when what is “taken” is intangible and technically not lost. These reports claim that billions of dollars have been stolen as a result of intellectual property theft. For example, in the recent New York Times coverage of the Chinese indictment, the Attorney General claimed that the hackers stole 700,000 pages of e-mails from one company, which sounds significant (Schmidt and Sanger 2014). However, how many of these e-mails were of any “value”? How do you assign value to e-mails? Would only the e-mails including technical details count as valuable? It may be that after sifting through 700,000 e-mails, a Chinese innovator will be able to use whatever technical processes have been distilled to create a competitive advantage. The same could be said of the thousands of old scientific articles “stolen” from public libraries in the United States. However, as Thomas Rid argues, “Tacit knowledge is a major challenge for espionage, especially industrial espionage” (Rid 2013, 84). Since taking knowledge is much easier than putting it to use, theft of trade secrets has had a relatively limited impact on competitive economic development (Rid 2013). However, though illegal, theft of trade secrets does not limit the company from which the information was stolen from pursuing its own innovative path. The underlying assumption in these reports is that foreign governments steal our ideas but then take these ideas and make superior products before we can. Perhaps instead of feeling threatened, it might be worthwhile to ask why American businesses are not bringing their innovations to market more quickly—this is, after all, the entire point of a free-market competitive system. Finally, while this type of “theft” may be of economic concern, blurring it into a national security threat is problematic. These types of distinctions are absent from the policy analysis presented in the statements made about how much the theft of IP costs the United States. What becomes clear when looking at the confluence of reports and statements from public figures and the relevant think tanks is that without any critical nuance, intellectual property theft has achieved a level of political valence akin to the elusive threat posed by the war on terror. It is likely we can never know what has been “stolen” when the government claims China is stealing our intellectual property, in part because it may be classified information and in part because the vagueness of the claim allows any number of otherwise innocuous items to be counted as stolen. However, there are reasons we THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 261 should be concerned about such claims and challenge the wholesale use of the concept of IP to justify national security efforts in cyberspace. Why we should care about the securitization of intellectual property theft Intellectual property has grown in importance since the mid-1990s when it became clear that the networking possibilities of the information age were changing the way people communicated, did business, shared information and much more. As discussed earlier, commercial interests, especially entertainment companies, were among the first to recognize the threat to their business models posed by the Internet. They embarked upon a now decades-long effort to preserve their way of doing business using all possible strategies, from changing the law to educational campaigns advancing a framework of cybernorms that suited their commercial interests. While it is arguable that the industry has lost anywhere near the amounts of money it claims, what has been successfully accomplished is the uncritical acceptance of the IP theft narrative at all levels of American government as a truth. The Copenhagen School initially developed securitization theory in the 1990s as a form of critical security studies. A security threat, according to the Copenhagen School, does not exist “naturally” but is instead narrated into being (van Munster 2005, 2). Such an understanding of securitization “follows the recognition that security is socially constructed and politically powerful” (Browning and McDonald 2011, 236). To qualify as a securitizing act, according to the Copenhagen School, three criteria must be met: (a) existential threats to the survival of some kind of referent object that (b) require exceptional measures to protect the threatened referent object, which (c) justify and legitimise the breaking free of normal democratic procedures. (van Munster 2005, 3) Furthermore, to become securitized, an actor must make a securitizing move that is accepted by a target audience and justifies actions that “break the normal political rules of the game” (Buzan et al. 1997, 24). Over the last two decades, several critiques to the original Copenhagen School paradigm have emerged. Specifically, some argue that a focus on existential threats is too limiting. For an issue to meet the mandates set by securitization theory, an “existential threat” through which new and extraordinary measures must be taken outside conventional politics must exist (Williams 2003). As van Munster points out, while the original articulation of securitization focused upon existential threats, the ongoing war on terror helps us to understand securitizing moves as also articulating the risk of potential threats (van Munster 2005). Cybersecurity is another such threat. According to Hansen and Nissenbaum, the Copenhagen School rejected the need to theorize cybersecurity as an autonomous security issue in the 1990s (Hansen and Nissenbaum 2009, 1156). Yet the potential risk posed by cyberwar and the underlying and associated risks posed by IP theft are now playing a central role in how the United States articulates its security policy. How the state, accompanied by private security-based actors, constructs a discourse of security surrounding the protection of IP and shifts the security agenda to reflect the new socially constructed threat is important to analyze. Thus, the securitization of IP as traced in the reports discussed here takes an unconventional security threat and translates it into a threat that can be understood using very conventional security language. Cavelty says of cybersecurity that while it may not have been successful as a securitizing move, “what has evolved, however, is a new logic of security (Cavelty 2007, 137). This new logic of security, where cyberspace generally is seen as a national security threat and the theft of intellectual property is understood to be a significant justification for further defending cyberspace, is why we should take the claims made in these reports seriously. Cavelty is interested not in the securitization move itself, but in the nature of the measures drafted as a result—how a securitizing move leads to policy decisions and countermeasures. This is the focus of “threat politics,” which pushes security studies to the next stage (Cavelty 2007, 26). In the case of cyberspace and IP theft, it is worth remarking that state actors have assimilated IP into their justification for defending U.S. territory, this time in cyberspace. This section uncovers why the articulation of IP as a security threat matters in the context of threat politics. Ultimately, by shifting IP into a national security frame, the lines between theft and information sharing are increasingly blurred and the U.S. government positions itself even closer to using cyberspace as a justification for war (virtual or conventional). One possible justification for the securitization of IP is that it can help mobilize U.S. efforts to enhance military budgets. For example, the Department of Defense now has a “cyber strategy” requiring a buildup of cyber resources and personnel to address the growing threat posed by the cyber domain, including the theft of intellectual property from state and nonstate actors (Carter 2015). In a March 2012 press release, the Department of Defense (DOD) called for increased funding (to $3.4 billion for FY 2013) for a coordinated approach to cybersecurity that involves the DOD, the Department of 262 D. HALBERT Homeland Security, the FBI, and private industry (Daniel 2012). According to General Keith B. Alexander, “Cyber is a team sport, it is increasingly critical to our national and economic security. … The theft of intellectual property is astounding” (Daniel 2012, online para. 8). Thus, IP theft within the new cyberdomain can help justify ongoing defense budgetary allocations. Despite these efforts to shore up military budgets, cybersecurity is an uneasy fit with the conventional understanding of national security threats. While the reports just described assert unequivocally that the theft of IP is a national security threat, to position IP theft as a national security threat is questionable. For example, the Chinese hacking incident(s) has been instrumental in helping justify increased cybersecurity to protect intellectual property. As Clarke and Knake argue, “Even if a major cyberwar involving the U.S. never happens, Chinese cyber espionage and intellectual property war may swing the balance of power in the world away from America. We need to make protecting this information a much higher priority, and we need to confront China about its activities” (Clarke and Knake 2010, 237). What “intellectual property war” might be in this context is a matter of speculation. What information needs protecting is also unclear, but the concept is broad enough to establish any Chinese knowledge acquisition as a threat. It is argued that the data theft undertaken by the Chinese is specifically designed to improve their military and technological capacities to better compete with the United States (Eun and Abmann 2014). This particular threat is not based upon superior weaponry, but upon superior use of information. In other words, the fear is that China may be smarter than the United States and that the vast downloading of information from U.S. computers will help them achieve international dominance. More significantly, and what makes the securitization of IP a new rhetorical move worth remarking upon and raising concern about, the Chinese state is now the culprit in this new narrative of IP war. The United States has pointed to China’s intellectual property pirates for decades (Halbert 1997; Neigel 2000; Yu 2006; Yu 2005; Mertha 2005). However, the focus has been on the lax enforcement of intellectual property rights that allowed Chinese pirates to make illegal copies of U.S. movies, music, software, and designs. The shift from a failure of the Chinese state to protect U.S. intellectual property (movies, software, music, etc.) to the public accusation by American officials that the Chinese government itself is responsible for intellectual property theft is an important new dimension in the evolution of international intellectual property conflicts. The state as IP pirate makes for a different set of possible responses in the context of a threat politics—diplomatic and military—and requires a far more vigilant system of surveillance on the part of the United States. If the rhetorical effort to establish IP theft as a concern for American national security is to be taken seriously, where does this logic lead us in terms of future international relations? If virtually all policy treatments of cybersecurity point to the theft of IP as a significant justification for more security, less sharing, and more national vigilance in protecting “our IP,” then what kind of future battles does such logic set up? Among the first to call theft of information a type of warfare was computer scientist Dorothy E. Denning, who included IP theft in her hierarchies of offensive operations that could be conducted in cyberspace (Denning 1998). However, there remain serious questions about whether “cyber” fits the concept of war at all. There is an ongoing debate in security circles on the potential of cyberwar and what it really means (Gartzke 2013; Gjelten 2013; Ophardt 2010; Rid 2012; Farwell and Rohozinski 2012; Sharma 2010; Stevens 2012; Stone 2013; McGraw 2013; Ventre 2011; Singer and Friedman 2014). Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins argue that cyberwar is primarily hype produced by the growing cybersecurity industrial complex, and they suggest that more clear definitions of the threat and more realistic assessments need to be made (Brito and Watkins 2011). Rand senior policy analyst Martin C. Libicki also downplays the significance of what remains primarily a theoretical threat (Libicki 2007). Rid argues that the concept of cyberwar is highly problematic and that, in fact, cyberattacks actually significantly diminish violence instead of enhancing it (Rid 2013). International law requires a state-actor as the instigator of an act of war, which may not be discernable in a potential cyberwar (Ophardt 2010). The territory under attack, as well as the territory from where the attack originates, may also be unclear, a divide that distinguishes cybercrime from cyberwar in contexts where the two are not deliberately blurred (Hollis 2011). According to Ophardt, we are already seeing glimpses of tomorrow’s cyberwars in the dynamic between industry-hired mercenaries and file sharers. The fact that file sharing is being used as an example of the wars of the future does not bode well for demarcation of IP in future conflicts. We have not yet gone so far as to claim IP theft as an act of war. In the aftermath of the Chinese hacker scandal, the Pentagon issued a report on cybersecurity in which it recommended that some cyberattacks could be considered acts of war, but noted that “routine theft of intellectual property” was “generally” not considered to be in that category (Michaels 2013). The widely discussed Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare also explicitly excludes protection of private intellectual property from consideration as an THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 263 activity governed by the law of armed conflict (Schmitt 2013). It sees the law of armed conflict applicable only when state–state actions are involved. Despite the implications intellectual property theft has for national security, Schmitt does not think it belongs in this domain (Schmitt 2013). However, given that the shift in discourses over the threat to the national security of American IP comes from other states, the lines between protection of commercial and government IP assets are getting ever more blurry. Given the incessant ramping up of the threat posed by IP theft, it is likely that claims regarding IP theft as an act of war are not too far in the future. Of additional concern is the fact that by making IP theft a national security threat without being clear about what actually constitutes intellectual property, not only does the U.S. government create a new reason for a militarized Internet, but it also sets the stage for companies to assert that a range of other activities from file sharing to producing counterfeit DVDs threaten national security and require further state intervention. Already, private industry has sought to link IP theft to terrorism in an effort to deploy the U.S. security state to defend its business practices (Treverton et al. 2009; Donahue and Hirschmann 2008). Whatever form IP theft might take in the national security configuration, from the unauthorized download of an internal departmental memorandum to counterfeit food production to illegal song downloads, the framing of the policy documents discussed here provides justification for further restriction of the openness of the Internet. Conclusion This article sought to raise concerns about appropriating the concept of IP as a national security issue and using it to justify the protection of cyberspace. The question remains open, however, as to what the U.S. response should be, not only to possible cybercrime but also to cybersecurity more generally. As Clarke and Knake warn, “Countries need to recognize that cyber espionage can easily be mistaken for preparation of the battlefield and that such actions may be seen to be provocative” (Clarke and Knake 2010, 236). Given the fact that the Obama administration reserves the right to respond with force to any credible threat to its security, even in cyberspace, the possibility of military escalation is there. Despite the current popularity of using the language of IP theft to justify enhanced national security in cyberspace and to expand U.S. military oversight of cyberspace, other justifications for such actions should be sought and IP should remain in the civilian and economic realms. Ultimately, the implications of securitizing IP are significant. As a result of the threat to American national security created by this framing of the theft of IP, more sophisticated cyberdefenses, public/ private information sharing, and Internet surveillance are justified. The lines being blurred to promote IP theft as a threat could undermine the basic connective capacity of the Internet itself. Utilizing the Internet to fight an offensive information war will encourage the already existing trend of Internet Balkanization that has been in part motivated by American online spying, as other countries seek to protect themselves from potential cyber threats. Instead of heightening tension between states over information sharing and setting the stage for future cyberwars over the theft of IP, there could be other possible ways to work through issues of information exchange and possible theft outside the national security/military paradigm. Hollis, for example, suggests that because it is so difficult to identify the origin of a cyberattack, the focus should instead be on constructing a duty to assist in the event of such an attack (Hollis 2011, 209), rather than focusing on the origin of the attack. Such a perspective sees the Internet as a common “international” space, rather than the sovereign domain of nation-states. While the debate over what possible international cybernorms might govern cyberspace is ongoing and few issues have been resolved (Hurwitz 2015), considering an approach where at least minimum international standards not dictated only by U.S. security interests prevail is another possible avenue to diffuse the securitization of IP currently underway. In other words, possibilities other than understanding IP theft as a threat to U.S. national security exist, possibilities where the exchange of information and the benefits of an open Internet still prevail, even when discussing the potential threat China plays (Lindsay 2015). I have sought to argue that the securitization of IP should be of significant concern, and yet the academic literature on securitization studies may not acknowledge its importance because of the limited way in which that literature defines securitization. One path forward is to engage more critically with the academic literature on securitization studies. While Cavelty’s work on threat politics helps provide new avenues for articulating new threats, more can be done in this area. Securitization studies were intended to be critical of mainstream international relations; however, their commitment to theorizing within the constraints of their definitional model limits the application. Thus, one way forward includes a more robust theory of securitization that allows for the discussion of new types of threats in cyberspace. 264 D. HALBERT An additional path forward is to use the analysis of securitizing IP developed here to delve more deeply into the specific cybersecurity examples used by advocates of the securitizing IP school of thought and determine much more clearly what the implications of massive copying of intellectual property are. This article is intended to raise awareness of how the “theft of IP” language is being appropriated to justify enhanced cybersecurity, but space limitations preclude more detailed analysis. Such analysis would build upon the documentation provided here regarding the evolution of a securitizing discourse surrounding the theft of IP. Finally, understanding the implications of this rhetorical move has very real world applications. These securitizing moves are not academic, but will have real consequences for how the national security state moves forward in cyberspace, how surveillance is justified, how military budgets are constructed, and much more. To that end, the type of information society we wish to inhabit in the future is implicated in the struggles this article has attempted to make visible, and more can be done to articulate the vision of a more positive future regarding how information is shared across national boundaries. The struggle between open access and proprietary knowledge has been raging for as long as intellectual property laws have existed. The securitization of intellectual property takes the debate to the next level. As the language of national security colonizes the debate about intellectual property, those who would advocate for open access, free sharing of information, and even technology transfers will find themselves with even more limited ground upon which to stand if this narrative move is not resisted. The future is not a bright one when anything shared on a computer might now violate the national security of the United States.

6 CRISPR-CAS SYSTEMS: A PRECISION GENOME EDITING TOOL FOR MEDICINE

The CRISPR Cas systems offer a novel approach to both RNA interference and genome editing (Mahato et al., 2024). When genetically engineered, CRISPR-Cas systems serve as a valuable tool for controlling gene expression in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Approximately 90% of archaea and 40% of bacteria possess CRISPR-Cas systems to provide resistance to foreign DNA elements (Barrangou et al., 2007). Some of these systems have been adapted as genetic engineering tools for medically important human cell lines (Mahato et al., 2024). In particular, the Class 2 Type II CRISPR-Cas9 system from Streptococcus pyogenes has been utilized for a variety of genetic purposes in a wide range of organisms, from bacteria to humans (Cho et al., 2013). The wild-type system contains a nuclease protein (Cas9) that cuts specific DNA sequences based on a single guide RNA (sgRNA) that specifically interacts with the Cas9 proteins and the DNA sequence it targets. Conversely, nuclease-deactivated CRISPR–Cas (dCas) systems, which do not cut DNA, can be used to modulate transcription in cells and organisms (Qi et al., 2013). An alternative approach to bypass the limitations of double-stranded break DNA knock-out-based protocols is to induce mRNA knockdown at the target site (i.e., silencing the expression of the target gene instead of knocking out the gene). Several Cas12 and Cas13 proteins have been shown to possess RNA-guided RNase activity in a manner analogous to RNA-guided DNA targeting CRISPR-Cas9 effectors (Nie et al., 2023). Performing mRNA knockdowns instead of gene knockouts (in which the gene is irreversibly deleted) is very useful for genes that cannot be completely removed because they are essential for cell viability. In any case, because the CRISPR-Cas platform is concise and self-contained (and the sgRNA can be easily customized), it has the potential to be adapted for different purposes, such as performing gene knockouts, knock-ins, the addition of tags, or controlling the expression of a gene of interest (Barrangou et al., 2007). The emergence of CRISPR-Cas technology in the biomedical field marked an important milestone in the challenging goal of finding targeted therapies for complex diseases such as cancer or other genetic disorders (Mahato et al., 2024). A further advancement in the CRISPR-Cas systems is the use of CRISPR-associated transposase systems (CAST) found in certain specific microorganisms, such as certain cyanobacteria. For example, the natural CAST system from cyanobacteria Scytonema hofmanni (ShCAST) consists of Tn7-like transposase subunits (TnsB, TnsC, and TniQ), a CRISPR array trans-activating RNA, and a Cas12k protein. ShCAST catalyzes RNA-guided DNA transposition by unidirectionally inserting segments of DNA 60 bp downstream of the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) (Strecker et al., 2019). The PAM motif is a specific and variable (depending on the respective CRISPR-Cas system) 2–6 bp DNA sequence immediately following the DNA sequence targeted by the sgRNA-Cas nuclease complex (Barrangou et al., 2007). When the natural ShCAST system was heterologously expressed in E. coli, the genetically developed system was shown to integrate DNA into specific targeted sites of the E. coli genome with frequencies of up to 80% (without positive selection markers or additional requirements such as DNA repairing templates) (Strecker et al., 2019). Therefore, the CAST system constitutes an excellent tool for performing precision DNA insertions (“knock-ins”) in targeted genes with few additional requirements. In summary, CRISPR-Cas and its derivative systems have emerged as revolutionary platforms in medicine, providing an unparalleled, finely-tuned gene editing tool for both DNA and RNA targeting, functional genomics, gene therapy, disease modeling, and cancer research, among other applications (Zhou et al., 2023). The key applications of CRISPR-Cas systems in medicine are outlined below.

Sven J.R. Bostyn 24, Associate Professor of Innovation Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. He also lectures at the Institute for Information Law (IVIR), 6/13/24, “Chapter 15: Patenting plants, plant variety protection and inclusion of plant breeders: Is it achievable?”, Research Handbook on Intellectual Property Rights and Inclusivity, kcab

Breeders’ Exemption is a Built-In Solution?

Last month, the venerable Economist newspaper published an editorial decrying the state of the patent system. They rightly condemned the “parasitic ecology of trolls” that has bruised the patent system in recent years. But then the Economist went much further, claiming that while “today’s patent regime operates in the name of progress, instead it sets innovation back.”

This is hardly surprising for a publication that throughout the 19th century openly called for the abolition of the patent system. They did so, mind you, even as the patented inventions of Matthias Baldwin, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison were unleashing the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and electrical power industries and transforming the face of human society.

Learning 2: A licensing platform needs to include a mandatory “give ’n take” provisions. Parties who want to take licenses have to make similar technologies available to other platform members. Such “pull-in” needs to be support by a sufficiently attractive core.

Learning 3: Selection inventions can always occur. A constraining effect on the FTO of a clearing house can never be completely mitigated. However, the likelihood of such effect can be reduced by attracting the majority of the related industry sector to the platform. Platform members are discouraged to file blocking patents as the blocking effect is lost by the mandatory “pull-in” effect. A singular non-member player could theoretically block individual assets of the platform but would face opposition by the strong platform community.