Analysis of the process in which idelology became a matter of security.

What is it about?

This article investigates how and when ideology was made a security matter (securitized) in US presidential speech. It reveals how securitizing speech justifies methods and targets in the resistance of “dangerous ideologies” that are problematic for democracies. The analysis reveals that the entanglement of oppositional ideologies with security was articulated in the context of the War on Terror. While the original need to see ideologies as an existential threat was necessary to justify the exclusion of the ideologies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2004 and 2005 respectively, the securitization of ideologies then spread to issue areas beyond terror and to geographic contexts outside of these two countries, all the way to US domestic political competition. The need to avoid embarrassment in Iraq and Afghanistan may have thus affected US democracy.

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Why is it important?

If ideology is a security matter, state's security appratus can manipulate and police it. However, democracy means that state is governed by a popular ideological competition between parties and groups that people can create. If the state control's this ideological competition democracy is impossible. In democracy people's ideologies should govern the state, state should not govern people's ideologies.

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