Introduction

The securitisation theorist's inability to say something meaningful about the moral value of different securitisations and desecuritisations is matched by his inability to theorise why actors securitise. Unlike the first shortcoming, however, the latter is an intentional choice on behalf of the Copenhagen School. Yet it is a choice that rests on an overlooking of the philosophical distinction between ‘motives’ and ‘intentions’. To explain this, consider the following passage by Wæver: ‘Discourse analysis works on public texts. It does not try to get to the thoughts or motives of the actors, their hidden intentions or secret plans. […] What interests us is neither what individual decision makers really believe, nor what are shared beliefs among a population […] but which codes are used when actors relate to each other’. This passage quite clearly ignores that intentions are what an actor aims at or chooses to do, whereas motives are what determines an actor's aim or choice. The distinction between the two concepts is vital, because whereas an analyst cannot get at what determines an actor's aim or choice (for instance, we cannot know for sure why Al Gore became interested in environmental issues as opposed to economic issues), we can know what an actor aims at in doing something (for instance, making the environment a security issue as opposed to not doing this). Let us consider another example, this time one adopted from the late Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.