Situated Meaning, Security and Risk in International Sanctions

In reflexive security studies it was successfully argued for a contextualisation of meaning in securitization and for variation of rationalities, for example in terms of risk. This poses a whole new range of challenging questions. How does a security communication travel from one place to another? And how is communication distorted by situatedness of initiator and addressee? This paper argues that one source of meaning emergence as security or risk is provided by the context of communication in conflict episodes and makes the case for taking into account the social construction of relational positions as meaning translators. There are various effects of relational positions and the social processing of meaning in communication that are not intended by an actor. The paper outlines a theoretical framework that takes meaning of sanctions in conflict episodes between states as contingent and dynamic and develops a social theoretical model that links securitization as a model of the processing of meaning in conflict episodes to elements of Modern Systems Theory such as Niklas Luhmann's distinction between risk and danger as a way to account for social process more broadly. The paper makes the case for differentiating sanctions into negative, positive and combined sanctions strategies reflecting a multivariate logic.