Strategic desecuritization under asymmetry: from security opportunity to security trap

Abstract

Why do actors that use security framing to elevate an urgent issue later soften, narrow, or recalibrate that framing, even when the threat remains acute? This article develops a theory of strategic desecuritization under asymmetry. We argue that securitizing moves can generate both security opportunities and security traps. They create opportunities by raising salience, securing recognition, and attracting resources. Yet under power asymmetry and geopolitical competition, they may also draw in stronger external actors whose security logics reshape governance and erode initiators’ agenda control. Security opportunities can thereby become security traps. To mitigate these traps, weaker actors may pursue strategic desecuritization: a discursive and institutional strategy that preserves urgency while narrowing security framing, limiting external strategic intrusion, and reasserting authority over issue governance. The article illustrates this mechanism through Pacific climate diplomacy, tracing the trajectory from the 2018 Boe Declaration to the 2025 Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration and the Pacific Resilience Facility. The argument contributes to securitization theory by distinguishing securitizing moves, full securitization, and security effects; reconceptualizing desecuritization as a strategic response to security framing’s autonomy-eroding consequences; and showing how institutional substitution enables weaker actors to reassert agency under geopolitical competition.