Christopher Daase, National, Societal, and Human Security: On the Transformation of Political Language [Abstract]

The article traces the extension of the concept of security over roughly the last fifty years. It differentiates between four dimensions of conceptual change: the referent object, the issue dimension, the spatial dimension and the dimension of perceived danger. The process of conceptual extension is explained not only as securitization, i.e. the result of voluntary speech acts, but as a macro-social process of the dissociation of state and society and the prevalence of liberal values.