Moors at the Coast!securitizing Migration in Spain: Discourse Analysis

After the signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and the subsequent dismantling of the internal boarders among the EU member states, -Moors at the coast!- or the contemporary equivalents such as -flood- or -invasion- have become a part of a discourse, in which migration is constructed as a security threat. In the late 90s, the Copenhagen School suggested a framework to study security discourses, to identify the actors and the different elements of the securitizing grammar, and to understand how different issues become a security problem. However, this framework has never been tested and no case studies have been done to verify whether securitization indeed happens as suggested. Is securitizing grammar universal? Can everything be securitized? Can securitization happen if one or several of the components of the securitizing logic are not present? In this book, we will look at the case of migration in Spain to find these answers and see how and whether migration has been succesfully converted into a security problem. Students of IR should find this work intriguing as a constructivist approach to the study of migration in one of the EU countries.