The Duty to Secure: From just to mandatory securitization

States have social contractual duties to provide security for their people, but what measures are morally required? Should states be morally obligated to address real/objective existential threats via securitization (i.e., by using threat-specific, often liberty defying, rigorously enforced and sometimes forcible emergency measures)? And what of non-state actors or international organizations, can such actors have a moral duty to securitize? If so, why, when, and to whom? Notably, do such duties pertain ‘only’ to selves (e.g., populations of one’s own state) or also to others (e.g., people in other states)? This book offers answers to these and other questions. Building on Floyd’s Just Securitization Theory, it sets out a rigorous theory of morally mandatory securitization that examines the duties of actors at all levels of analysis. Morally mandatory securitization has practical implications, including for NATO’s Article 5 and the responsibility to protect norm, both of which currently take account of only a narrow range of threats.