Regulating NGO funding: Securitizing the political

Securitization theory (ST) has succeeded in putting the relation between politics and security at the forefront of research in security studies. Despite this success, little attention has been given to the way states themselves produce the boundaries of legitimate political activity, particularly in relation to the boundaries between civil society and the state and between the foreign and domestic. This article is concerned with how states see the boundary between the political and the non-political as a matter of security. It investigates this question by examining the international and national efforts to restrict the financing of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society actors. It demonstrates that these entities are deemed threatening to the established boundaries of legitimate political activity and thus subject to harassment, increased regulation, and eradication. This is done by the depiction of their activities as political, rather than humanitarian/cultural/social, demonstrating that the concepts of politics operative in the ST literature are already delimited through processes of securitization and depoliticization. Continued research into the relation between politics and security must therefore consider the ways that the political itself is securitized.