Simultaneous success and failure: the curious case of the (failed) securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom and Scotland

ABSTRACT The “near unanimous focus in the literature on successful cases of securitization” is demonstrated by Ruzicka [2019. Failed securitization: why it matters. Polity, 51 (2), 365–377] to be as problematic as it is untenable. The call to interrogate “failed securitisation” is one this article responds to, focussing on the securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom, and the puzzle of why this securitisation has, in many respects, failed in Scotland. With the normatively troubling securitisation of migration deepening throughout Europe and beyond, this divergence in Scotland requires much greater attention. Exploring both discursive and non-discursive security mechanisms, empirically, the article reveals that whilst some securitisation policies have been enacted in Scotland, the UK Government-driven securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees has not succeeded there entirely and many elements have failed. By attending to devolution, overlapping jurisdiction and multi-level governance, the article sharpens the theorisation of “failed” securitisation, with implications for broader understandings of “success” in securitisation studies, in two principal ways. First, by demonstrating that effective contestation of securitisation, resting on formal authority and policymaking power, can play a key role in securitisation failure, and second, by revealing that binary notions of “failed” and “successful” securitisations are insufficient: securitisations can both fail and succeed simultaneously.


Introduction
Securitisation has been one of the most transformative innovations in security studies, with the concept standing as an invaluable tool in developing our collective understanding of the construction of security politics.Yet, the "nearly unanimous focus in the literature on successful cases of securitization" is demonstrated by Ruzicka (2019, abstract) to be as problematic as it is untenable.Put simply, securitisation studies have produced a biased data set (Balzacq 2011).Consequently, the field is left with a wealth of single-case studies but few cross-case comparisons, an impoverished understanding of the mechanisms which generate failure and success and a missed opportunity to mine insights from failure to unlock new understandings of the comparatively neglected process of "desecuritisation".The call to interrogate "failed securitisation" is one this article responds to.
The securitisation of migration, especially asylum seekers and refugees, has been deepening across Europe and beyond.The United Kingdom (UK) is no exception, with successive UK Governments hardening the state approach to asylum and refuge.The UK Nationality and Borders Act (UKNBA) 2022criticised by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as breaching international lawis the latest move in this direction, contributing to an accelerating erosion of global norms on asylum and refuge.Yet, intriguingly, the "UK" offers an exemplary case to unpick the process of failed securitisation, once we account for devolution, multi-level governance structures and overlapping political jurisdictions between the UK and Scottish Parliaments (see Paterson 2022).Parallel to the UK Government's securitisation, the Scottish Government has pursued a different approach to asylum and refugee (and indeed wider migration) politics.With the normatively troubling consequences of the globe-spanning securitisation of migration, asylum and refuge being well documented (Huysmans 2006, Bourbeau 2011, Skleparis 2016), the bucking of this trend in Scotland requires attention.This puzzle of how, to what extent and why the "UK" securitisation has "failed" in Scotland is the focus of this article.
To explore these questions, asylum and refugee politics are analysed in the UK/Scotland from 1999the year the Scottish Parliament was establishedto present (2022).The lack of a unified, robust conceptualisation of success in securitisation studies (Balzacq et al. 2016) makes it difficult to determine success, and as such, failure.Thus, a pragmatic methodology is constructed, analysing success-failure across three dimensions that speak to the three dominant strands of securitisation theory and analysis: philosophical success (discourses), intersubjective success (audience assent) and success as implementation of security measures (policy and practice).The actions of the UK and Scottish Governments are assessed across each domain.
Empirically, the article reveals that whilst some elements of the UK Government-driven securitisation have been enacted in Scotland, the securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees has not succeeded in its transportation to Scotland entirely and many elements have failed.Overall, bringing the lens of failure into the societal sector and an analysis of "UK" asylum and refugee politics is shown to produce a richer, more comprehensive empirical picture and more nuanced understanding, substantiating Ruzicka's assertion that securitisation studies must learn from failure.By disaggregating the "UK" state, accounting for devolution and focusing on Scotland as a substate actor, the empirical findings sharpen the theorisation of "failed" securitisation, with implications for broader understandings of "success" in securitisation studies, in two principal ways.First, it is revealed that binary notions of "failed" and "successful" securitisations are insufficient: securitisations, accounting for multiple understandings of success and overlapping political jurisdictions, can both fail and succeed simultaneously.Second, the analysis demonstrates that contestation, resting on formal authority and legislative powers endowed through substate actorness, can play a key role in failure.Further investigation of security politics that accounts for state/sub-state dynamics thus offers a promising pathway to study failure, and ultimately refine theoretical and empirical understandings of securitisation processes.
The remainder of this article consists of four sequential steps.The point of departure is the theoretical framework, drawing upon core elements of securitisation theory and exploring the neglect of "failure".The methodology and analytical framework are detailed next, followed by the empirical analysis of the UK-Scotland case.From this, the central implications are excavated in the conclusion.

Securitisation theory
The Copenhagen School's (CS) securitisation theory is one of the most influential challengers to "traditional" security approaches that rest on realist, state-military foundations. 1  Stripping security of its objectivist content, the CS conceive of security as a socially constructed process of "speech acts" where an issue becomes a security issue "not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as such" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 24).In short, "[b]y uttering 'security,' a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it" (Waever 1995, p. 55).Security for the CS is predominantly conceived as resting on a negative logic of "threat-defense", prone to adversarial Self/ Other relations and characteristics, including urgency and reduced transparency, which transgress "normal", democratic political processes (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 29). 2  Conceptualising security as a political process in which shared understandings of "security" are constructed naturally broadens the security agenda, as technically any issue can be included.To organise this widening, the CS offer "sectors" (Political, Military, Environmental, Economic and Societal) "to facilitate analysis" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 8).Migration sits within the Societal sector, resting upon the concept of "societal security", where the referent object is "largescale collective identities" (Buzan et al. 1998, 22).Crucially, "whether migrants or rival identities are securitized depends upon whether the holders of the collective identity take a relatively closed-minded or a relatively openminded view of how their identity is constituted and maintained" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 23, emphasis added).Here, it is important to note that as a state consisting of four "nations" (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), several devolved legislatures (Northern Irish Assembly, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly) and with "Britishness" understood in very distinct ways in different parts of the UK (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021), there are multiple "societal sectors" in the UK and thus several competing (and overlapping) collective identities and "holders" thereof.
An initial privileging of speech acts and exceptional political procedures as the mechanisms underpinning securitisation has been supplemented by the so-called "Paris School" approach, where non-exceptional, non-discursive mechanisms of securitisation are emphasised, including policy tools, institutional configurations and bureaucratic and technological practices (Bigo 2006, C.A.S.E Collective 2006, Léonard 2010).While there is "no grand theory" of securitisation (Balzacq et al. 2016), an initial adversarial framing in the literature between the two "centres of gravity" (Stritzel 2007) has been recast as a situation in which Copenhagen and Paris offer "complimentary theoretical bricks" to support our understanding of (de)securitisation processes (Bourbeau 2014).
The theoretical ingenuity of the CS, coupled with over two decades of theoretical critique, development and refinement have laid the foundation for a vast quantity of empirical studies and an incredibly rich understanding of the construction of security, and the security-migration nexus especially (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002, Huysmans 2006, Bourbeau 2011, Skleparis 2016).Yet, failure in securitisation studies, including for the issue of immigration, remains under-studied.
2.2.The success of "success" and the failure of "failure" To date, the "nearly unanimous focus" on successful cases of securitisation has left a paucity on failure (Ruzicka 2019, abstract; for exceptions see Åtland and Ven Bruusgaard 2009, Salter 2011, McDonald 2012, Zimmermann 2017, Larsson 2022).Two main reasons explain this imbalance.First, and most significantly, the preference for studying success is built into the CS's theorisation: "security analysis is interested mainly in successful instances of securitization … the successful acts of securitization take a central place because they constitute the currently valid specific meaning of security" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 39).Second, there are epistemological pressures.Whilst it may be true that the dog that did not bark can, on occasion, be of great importance, it is far easier to hear (and see) barking dogs. 3 Yet, in the most recent and comprehensive exploration of the neglect of failure, Ruzicka (2019) demonstrates that the over-emphasistheoretically and empiricallyon cases of successful securitisation is highly problematic.Four points are critical.First, the dominance of success has established case selection bias in the securitisation literature (Balzacq 2011).As comparative political science has underlined, choosing cases based on an outcome (in this instance, "successful securitisation") makes it impossible to draw wider inferences (Geddes 1990), meaning securitisation scholarship has produced a wealth of single-case studies and little cross-case comparison.
Second, the argument that successful cases are best placed to understand "the current valid specific meaning of security" is problematic epistemologically.An understanding of securitisation as a contested process of constructing shared understandings of security means that "the meaning of security cannot be divorced from the process through which it is produced" (Ruzicka 2019, p. 371).Therefore, to understand security construction (not simply what security understanding exists at a single point in time), studies must attend to the process, which allows for much greater focus on competing discourse and practice, alongside analysis of contextual factors that can determine why cases succeed or fail (Ruzicka 2019).
Third, the politically worrisome tendencies of securitisation politics outlined above led the CS (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 29) to originally state that, "in the abstract, desecuritization", broadly conceived as a return to so-called normal politics and an ending of securitised discourse and measures, "is the ideal".From this point of departure, and despite robust challenges (Floyd 2019), a normative preference for desecuritisation has prevailed in the literature.As Ruzicka (2019) notes, the lack of attention to mechanisms of failure, when prevention of new securitisations and reversing many current securitisations are perceived as normatively desirable, is somewhat baffling.
Fourth, with success being all that is studied, the impression from the literature is one of securitisation being ubiquitous and beneficial for actors pursuing it.Yet, both are ultimately empirical questions.On the ubiquity of success, without studying failure, a picture is painted where simply following a standard recipe (the "grammar of security") will lead to securitisation (Ruzicka 2019, p. 372), obscuring the importance of the process and the importance that contextual factors play in enabling success in particular instances.On political benefits, the expectation in the literature is that "thanks to its unique properties, [security] will produce a favourable outcome for an actor wielding it" (Ruzicka 2019, p. 376), concurrently positioning desecuritisation or non-securitising approaches as politically unattractive.It seems unlikely that this is universally true and paints a gloomy picture for the possibility of desecuritisation or alterative political approaches prevailing besides.
A combination of the above factors has spawned only a handful of explorations into "failure".From this limited pool, however, two key insights into theorising failure emerge.First, unsurprisingly, different mechanisms can drive failure, from a lack of social capital in actors making securitising moves (Åtland and Ven Bruusgaard 2009), to the (un)availability and (in)effective deployment of historical narratives (Zimmermann 2017), to constitutional structures and political culture (Larsson 2022).This heterogeneity alerts us to a simple truth: more empirical studies, across issue and context, are needed to reveal the breadth of key mechanisms and unpack when and how they are important.If there may be "sector specific forms of desecuritisation" (Hansen 2012, p. 546), the same may hold true for "failed" securitisation.Thus, studies across various sectors are vitalsomething this article's novel grounding in the societal sector supports.Second, exploring failure is assisted by a disaggregation of "success", accounting for its multiple dimensions (discursive prevalence, "audience" acceptance and the implementation of new or emergency measures).Adopting this approach, Salter (2011) andMcDonald (2012) show that success in one domain does not necessarily ensure success in another, underlining the need to differentiate "success", and demonstrating that success and failure are not necessarily binary. 4 In sum, despite the ocean of securitisation scholarship, there has been limited study of failure, resulting in an impoverished understanding of both failure and successful (de)securitisation.The next section details the methodology and analytical framework for this article's move to redress this neglect of failure.

Learning failure from success: methodology and analytical framework
To explore "failure" we must first comprehend success.Despite countless analyses of "successful" securitisation, this is itself problematic, with "success" lacking a unified conceptualisation.When reviewing the field, Balzacq et al. (2016, p. 520) conclude that "there are no clear-cut boundaries between what qualifies as an instance of securitization and what does not."With the various "centres of gravity" in securitisation studies, the absence of consensus is unsurprising.Generating a unifying conceptualisation of success lies beyond our scope.Instead, to ensure a robust analysis of "failure", a pragmatic approach is adopted, where, like Salter (2011) andMcDonald (2012), the various dimensions of success, rooted in three dominant understandings of securitisation processes, are utilised as an analytical framework: Philosophical, Intersubjective and Measures.
The Philosophical dimension rests upon the CS's conceptualisation of security as a "speech act", where, "[b]y uttering 'security', a state-representative moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it."Here security is understood as a "self-referential practice" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 24) and is argued to rely on an "internalist" or "philosophical" reading (Balzacq 2005, 2011, Stritzel 2007), where security utterances are performatives and the conditions of securitising a referent object by designating a threat are "internal to the act of saying security" (Balzacq 2011, p. 1).
A philosophical, self-referential understanding of security conflicts with the CS's parallel theorisation of security as an intersubjective process, where, "[s]uccessful securitization is not decided by the securitizer but by the audience of the security speech act: Does the audience accept that something is an existential threat?"(Buzan et al. 1998, p. 31).For the Intersubjective dimension then, the "audience" reigns supreme, and acceptance of securitising moves by empowering audiences constitutes "success".Conceptualising the "audience" satisfactorily, however, has similarly vexed the field.The lack of guidance to conceptualise and operationalise the audience in the original theorisation from the CS has provoked a series of efforts to define the audience more concretely (see Côté 2016 for a review).Yet, identifying which audience(s) are important, in what ways, and at what stage of the (de)securitising process, are questions that have not yielded definitive answers.Providing these answers is again beyond our purpose.Instead, the chief point is that scholarly operationalisation of the audience has been heterogeneous, with a plethora of audiences demonstrated to play important, differentiated roles (Côté 2016).As such, a pragmatic choice is made to focus on the general public, as a key empowering audience, particularly in a democratic context (see Roe 2008).
The Measures dimension also engages a further point of theoretical contradiction, this time on the implementation and nature of security "measures".The CS posit that a successful securitisation "has three components (or steps): existential threats, emergency action, and effects on interunit relations by breaking free of rules" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 26).However, it is also stated that, "[w]e do not push the demand so high as to say that an emergency measure has to be adopted" only that there is "enough resonance for a platform to be made from which it is possible to legitimize emergency measures or other steps that would not have been possible" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 25, emphasis added).Whilst the former iteration suggests that implementation of emergency measures is fundamental to successful securitisation, the latter shifts to the mere possibility of their introduction, creating no clear demarcation from the philosophical or intersubjective dimensions.Moreover, the latter iteration's inclusion of "other steps" blurs the necessity of the extraordinary "breaking free of rules"an opening fruitfully exploited by the Paris School.Thus, whilst the nature of measures (extraordinary or ordinary) is debated, the existence of measures is here pivotal to a further form of "success".Crucially, this creates the potential for failure via unequal implementation.
Through identifying these three predominant understandings of success in the field, "how" to study failure is crystallising.Yet before finalising the "how", it is necessary to engage the questions of "who" "when" and "what" to study.Starting with "who", whilst anyone can technically be a securitising actor, security is a "structured field in which some actors are placed in positions of power by virtue of being generally accepted voices of security, by having the power to define security" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 31).As such, powerful substates, such as Scotland, offer a useful terrain to study contestation and failure of securitisations as substate governments are endowed as symbolic "holders of collective identity", possess formal authority, can look and act like a state, and can wield policy levers to "define" security. 5 On the question of "when" to study, the period of analysis spans 1999the establishment of the Scottish Parliamentto 2022.Past securitisation analyses have predominantly, and problematically, been based upon the present, and approached securitisation moves as a single event (Salter and Mutlu 2013).Yet, rather than a single decisive act, securitisation has been convincingly conceptualised as an iterative, competitive process of moves and countermoves (Stritzel andChang 2015, Paterson andKaryotis 2022).Thus "snapshot" analyses of one point in time carry clear limitations.Therefore, an analysis spanning more than two decades allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the securitisation process, and to establish key, enduring trends.Additionally, these two decades capture a vital period in UK migration politics, where an accelerating securitisation culminated in the establishment of the "Hostile Environment" (see Yeo 2020) and immigration concerns played a pivotal role in the 2016 vote for Brexit (Clarke et al. 2017), reshaping European (security) politics and generating fierce contests over "British" identity.
From this, we return to and round off the question of "how" to study success and thus failure.For the Philosophical dimension, discourse analysisthe "obvious method" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 176) to study security in the original formulation of securitisation theorywas utilised on these key interventions into major asylum and refugee debates by Governments (or senior governmental figures) at Westminster and Holyrood.We again follow the CS (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 176-177) instruction, avoiding "sophisticated linguistic or quantitative techniques" as "the technique is simple: Read, looking for arguments that take the rhetorical and logical form defined here as Security." As audience ascent is pivotal to the Intersubjective dimension of success and failure, a variety of data sources were utilised to explore broad perceptions of the general public in the UK and Scotland, as key empowering audiences in a democratic context (Roe 2008).With audience opinion readily "detected through surveys, polls or elections" (Hansen 2011, p. 360), two proxies are used to capture audience perception.One, voting behaviour across UK, Scottish and EU elections and referenda, and two, the rare comparative public opinion surveys exploring Scotland against the rest of the UK. 6 Although imperfect, public opinion surveys align with understandings of "moral" support for the designation of an issue as a threat.To be clear, mirroring previous scholarship, "our analysis does not permit any causal inferences to be made", however, "based on securitisation theory's top-down understanding of security, it is reasonable to assume that […] public understanding […] is likely to reflect the dominant […] elite frames on this issue" (Paterson and Karyotis 2022, p. 116).Such an understanding also opens up the possibility of elite framing being accepted in one jurisdiction and rejected, or partially rejected in another.Electoral behaviour, whilst also another marker of moral support, by providing political parties with power to govern and implement their political agenda, also impacts on "formal" support, that is, support to "grant or deny a formal mandate to public officials" to actually implement security measures (Balzacq 2005, p. 192).
Finally, for the Measures dimension of success and failure, the chronological approach and concentration on "major" moments outlined above were again utilised to manage the potentially vast corpus of data, with major and agenda-setting asylum and refugee policy and legislation from Westminster, alongside both the response or alternative approach in Holyrood, being examined.This also encapsulated the resulting and/or inter-related practices of governing asylum seekers and refugees from the examined policy and legislation, with analysis focused on the presence of logics of securitisation (threat-based, exclusionary, rights-denying) or alternative logics (non-threat-based, inclusive, rights-enabling) of policy and governance.
4. Simultaneous success and failure: the (failed) securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK and Scotland

Contextualising the case: political jurisdiction in the UK and Scotland
To contextualise the empirical analysis, we briefly detail Scottish political jurisdiction within the UK.As a previously centralised state, with devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, the UK evolved into a complex and asymmetric devolved state.Regarding the relationship between Scotland and England, or Holyrood and Westminster, the retainer model determines that all that is not specifically devolved to Holyrood is de facto reserved to Westminster.Immigration policy falls under the latter.Who is allowed into the country and under what circumstances is largely reserved to the UK Government.However, what happens once people arrive, is broadly devolved to the Scottish Government (see Hammar 2006). 7 The crossover in policy competences creates opportunity for sub-national variance.As the empirical analysis will show, the UK Government's inimical approach toward asylum is a longstanding one, preceding the formal "Hostile Environment" of 2012, although policy did harden then, with the language and practices of security since becoming endemic.While devolution creates space for the Scottish Government to either accept or attempt to reject the securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees, given the transversal nature of this policy, it is also possible that some aspects of securitisation are successfully implemented by the UK Government in Scotland while others are not, hinting that "either or" answers to questions of success and failure are oversimplifications.A core difference between Holyrood and Westminster that is of central importance here concerns their respective approaches to legal status.The UK Government have been explicit over many years that they do not wish for the settlement and "integration" of those in the asylum system.Instead, it is only when asylum seekers are recognised as refugees that the UK Government's approach, for example around access to social goods, changes.This is a key contrast with the Scottish Government which have always endorsed a position of "integration from day one", meaning that where they have the power to do so, asylum seekers should, just like refugees, be integrated into all aspects of Scottish society.
The potential for deviation in Scotland from the UK Government approach is the focus of the next three subsections.Each prong of the three-fold analytical framework is addressed in turn.

Philosophical "success": discourses
The first area of analysis focuses on the Philosophical dimension of success.Organised to account for the main changes in parliamentary power at Westminster and Holyrood over the 20-year timeframe, the Philosophical dimension centres on the content of discourses and speech acts surrounding "major debates" regarding significant policy and political events, representative of the prevailing political approaches of the UK and Scottish Governments.Beginning with the UK Government, the focus here is on the numerous ways that successive UK Governments sought to de-legitimise the right to claim asylum by characterising such claims as a threat.Economic frames, centring on welfare, and the criminal-migrant nexus were particularly significant (see Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002).From the outset of our period of analysis, the first New Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, in a debate on the 1999 Act, deliberately conflated people seeking asylum and economic migration and justified their removal from "normal" welfare provision: "We need a system that reduces the incentive to economic migration, and recognises that the genuine asylum seeker needs food and shelter, not a girocheque" (HC Debate 1998).The assumed non-genuineness of people's asylum claims from this point, the so-called culture of suspicion, has been the key continuity in UK Government approaches and was increasingly tied into issues of security.The presentation of these "non-genuine" claims as a threat to the welfare system saw creation of a separate social security system for those in the asylum process, where refugees and especially asylum seekers were presented as parasitic abusers of the British state.
While all Labour Home Secretaries adopted this type of discourse, Labour's John Reid epitomised the approach, stating, "[i]t is unfair that foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits, steal our services like the NHS and undermine the minimum wage by working" (BBC 2007).This type of rhetoric was enthusiastically adopted by the incoming Conservative Government, who made immigration control the key plank of their 2010 election campaign.By 2012, Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May catalysed what came to be known as the "Hostile Environment" where "the aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration" (Kirkup and Winnett 2012), a sentiment captured clearly in the UK Government's initial response to increases in so-called irregular sea crossings in 2015, including Prime Minister David Cameron's dehumanising-language of "a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean" (BBC 2015).As policy increasingly created illegality by restricting the right to seek asylum, those falling into this illegalised category increased, while the impacts also became more severe for those so categorised, including restrictions to housing, health and other social goods.Discourses around abuse of the system and of criminality continue to be evident in more recent announcements, with Home Secretary Suella Braverman likening small boats crossing the English Channel to an "invasion" (HC Debate 2022).The UKNBA stipulates that those arriving "illegally" will not be permitted to apply for refugee status in the UK, the epitome of a securitising discourse, where there is no such thing as an asylum seeker, just illegal immigrants and a small number of refugees recognised as such before arrival.
In sum, discourses underpinned by a logic of threat-defense where an inferior Other is framed as an enemy to "us" have dominated UK Government messaging.Securitisation at the level of UK Government discourse can, broadly speaking, be said to have succeeded. 8 In contrast, debates within the Scottish Parliament about migration generally and asylum seekers and refugees in particular have tended to be far less hostile, and a different tone is evident even where there was party congruence.For example, in 2002, the then Labour dominated Scottish Executive at Holyrood established the Scottish Refugee Integration Forum (SRIF) that explicitly included those still in the asylum system, at the same time as the UK Labour Government's regressive Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 was making its way through Westminster.Scottish Executive Minister for Communities Margaret Curran commented that, We can learn much from the broad range of people who come from different countries.We can learn from each other and from all those who live within our borders.With the opportunity to live, without fear or persecution, asylum seekers and refugees have the potential to contribute greatly to the diversity and prosperity of Scotland.(SRIF 2002) As Hepburn and Rosie (2014) point out, while the 2010 UK general election was characterised by increasingly hostile rhetoric on migration, the 2011 Scottish election, fought in a context where party congruence had ended and SNP-led Government began, saw a consensus that immigration was positive, laudable and necessary.As the Hostile Environment was being developed, so too was the Scottish Government white paper on Scottish independence, which argued for a new and humane asylum system as part of an ambition to become "a progressive, welcoming and inclusive state" (Scottish Government 2013).Similarly, the foreword to the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy (2018-22), the Scottish Government's flagship policy on refugees and asylum seekers, which builds directly upon the first iteration of "New Scots" (2013-17), states, New Scots recognises that refugees and asylum seekers face challenges which can limit their inclusion in our society, but it also recognises that refugees bring strength, knowledge and skills.They are assets to our communities and, as they rebuild their lives here, they help to make Scotland stronger, more compassionate and more successful as a nation.(Scottish Government 2018) This is indicative of a Scottish Government approach that eschews the threat-defence logic and views refugees, including asylum seekers, as it does other migrants, as cultural assets and productive units of labour.
More recently the difference between Governments is also evident in relation to the UKNBA 2022, outlined above.Whilst the Bill at Westminster was passed by 298-231, at Holyrood, despite having no powers on this issue, a symbolic vote was held.This saw 94 voting against with only 29 in favour, with Social Justice Secretary Shona Robison stating the Bill "puts Scotland's reputation as a country of welcome and refuge at serious risk," while Europe Minister Neil Gray said the Scottish Government "condemns the bill and the U.K. Government's inhumane 'hostile environment' to immigration" (Scottish Parliament 2022).
In sum, the prevailing discourses of the Scottish Government, as key holders of collective identity, have avoided a logic of threat-defense and have at times explicitly contested the preponderant threat-defense discourses from Westminster.Instead, a positive framing of asylum seekers and refugees, resting on a logic of welcome and enrichment, but also neoliberal economics, has dominated.Thus, discursively speaking, UK Government securitisation has not been accepted by, and thus failed to be implemented by, Scottish Governments in Scotland.Yet, with the Scottish political discourse being embedded within the overarching successful discursive securitisation by the UK Government at the "UK level", the simultaneity of discursive success and failure emerges.

Intersubjective success: audiences
The second area of analysis focuses on the Intersubjective dimension of success, centring on "audience" (again, here operationalised as the general public) acceptance, or not, of securitising moves, and is detected by the two aforementioned proxies: electoral behaviour and public opinion.
There are obvious differences between Scotland and England in electoral politics.While the Conservative Party have long been the dominant force in Westminster parliamentary politics, with a few electoral exceptions, they have not had a majority in Scotland for 70-years, with Labour electorally dominant from the 1950s until 2007 when the SNP usurped them.This lack of Scottish support for an increasingly anti-immigration Conservative Party at the UK level, is matched by a similar disparity in support for anti-immigration parties (namely UKIP and the British National Party) (de Casanova 2014).Instead, Scotland tends to vote for parties that are pro-immigration, within quite tight parameters, whilst the SNP have been labelled the most pro-immigration of all major parties in the UK (Hepburn and Rosie 2014).Yet, as alluded to above, it is also true that the difference between Holyrood and Westminster existed at the time of party congruity in Westminster andHolyrood (1999-2007), where the parties in Holyrood appeared more liberal than their mother parties in Westminster (Hepburn and Rosie 2014).These party votes are buttressed by the Brexit vote, where Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU (62% remain), whilst a majority in England and Wales voted to Leave (53%), with immigration a strong driver (Clarke et al. 2017).This broad electoral behaviour signifies that at a UK-level, audience support has been sufficient to "grant" a "mandate" (Balzacq 2005) to parties committed to governing asylum seekers and refugees through securitisation, whilst the same is not true in Scottish domestic politics.
Turning to public attitudes, despite voting behaviour perhaps suggesting otherwise, Curtice and Montagu (2018) point to long-term and widespread similarities in views about immigration in Scotland and the rest of the UK, though survey questions tend to focus on macro issues, such as whether overall immigration should be reduced, or whether immigration generally is good for the economy.Yet, even here, in the rare data which enables Scotland-UK comparisons, there is some evidence of important disparity.For example, on issue prioritisation (higher in England than in Scotland) and considerations of migration as determinantal to the country (lower in Scotland than in England and Wales) (Migration Observatory 2014).Thus, according to McCollum et al. (2014) aggregate social attitude figures suggest that Scotland is less opposed to immigration than elsewhere in Britain.
On attitudes towards refugees specifically, in the even rarer existing comparative data, some significant differences emerge.Work by Crawley et al. (2019), for example, which looks at regional variations in attitudes, finds Scotland and London to have more positive views of asylum than all other areas of the UK.While the diversity of London is one explanatory factor for views there, Scotland stands out as a far less diverse place with comparatively positive views of asylum.Moreover, later Ipsos Mori research for British Futures (2021), found that the main differences in immigration attitudes between Scotland and other parts of the UK explicitly focusses on asylum, where "[i]n Scotland there is majority support for an asylum system that prioritises fairness over deterring applicants, by 53% to 29% (+24), a wider margin than the 43% to 36% (+7) who agree across the UK".
Thus, whilst a chasm in public attitudes or "moral support" between Scotland and the rest of the UK, regarding shared understanding of asylum seekers and refugees as a security threat requiring an exceptional response, is not found, there is small to moderate variation: variation which reflects the incongruence in dominant elite frames from Holyrood and Westminster.This dovetails with disparities in electoral behaviour, a key plank of "formal" support, which at the UK-level has been facilitating the governing of asylum seekers and refugees through securitisation, whilst the reverse is true in Scotland.Thus, by disaggregating the public "audience" to account for devolution and the multiplicity of societal sectors within the UK state, we can again detect elements of simultaneous success and failure.

Success as measures: policy and practice
Turning to the third and final dimension, Measures, analysis, again organised to account for the main changes in parliamentary power at Westminster and Holyrood over the period of study, concentrates on "major" governmental policies and related practices that are illustrative of the prevailing modes of governing asylum seekers and refugees.
At the UK level, legislative activism has been omnipresent, with nine major Acts of Parliament since 1999 and countless pieces of secondary legislation creating a "ratcheting effect" (Geddes and Tonge 2005, p. 283), where legislation creates attention which increases salience, generating further attention, policy and salience.This ratcheting is joined by another circular process, whereby UK Governments start from the premise that most asylum applications are illegitimate, thus legislate to make it harder to be recognised as a refugee, meaning fewer applicants fall immediately within this narrowed refugee category, leading to further claims of illegitimacy and a further tightening.
More specifically, the aforementioned "Hostile Environment", first aired under the Labour Governments (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) and accelerated by Theresa May in 2012, was implemented via Parliamentary Acts and bureaucratic rules and regulations that aimed to restrict access to social goods.These policies have created a separate and less generous social security system for asylum seekers, removed the right to work, paid social support in the form of vouchers, increased the use of detention and deportation, removed and limited options to appeal, and have been joined by numerous attempts to ensure applicants cannot reach the UK in the first place (see Yeo 2020).
Despite the "Hostile Environment" being officially dropped (replaced by the "Compliant Environment") the same logic remains foundational, as the recent UKNBA 2022, criminalising asylum seekers by illegalising arrival and thus contravening international law, underlines.This Act has been accompanied by both the so-call Rwanda Resettlement Scheme, where UK asylum claimants are to be deported and settled in Rwanda (UK Government 2022a), and an increasingly militarised response to migrant sea crossings between Northern France and the south coast of England, with the establishment of a new "Clandestine Channel Threat Commander" and the Ministry of Defence given maritime primacy over the response to Channel crossings (UK Government 2022b).Overall, Westminster has sought to fully securitise the act of seeking asylum through a complex web of policy and practice, being highly "successful", by effectively removing any right to do so.
The control and protect remit of the UK Home Office provides part of the institutional explanation for this ratcheting.Throughout the twentieth century a bipartisan consensus coalesced in the Home Office to keep immigration to an absolute minimum, an agenda that permeated all aspects of the Home Office's work (Consterdine 2020).Conversely, core responsibility for asylum seeker and refugee issues in Scotland lies with the department for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioner Rights, having previously been situated within External Affairs and International Development, but led by the Equality Unit.The closest equivalent to the Home Office in Scotland, the Justice department, holding jurisdiction over the courts and having control and protect agenda, has had no locus in migration issues.It is important to reiterate that a key differentiation here concerns the population encompassed in Scottish Government policy, where they seek to include rather than exclude those still in the asylum system, meaning, for example, that integration measures are aimed at both.Despite these bureaucratic differences, it is important to be clear that much of the hostile, securitised UK-Government policy that undermines basic human rights of asylum seekers and has ongoing effects on refugees (prevention of arrival, detention, the ban on work, etc.) apply in Scotland.Given that immigration powers are reserveddespite the Scottish Government having long argued for devolved control (Hepburn and Rosie 2014)we must therefore look to marginal policy variation to make a wider point.The fact that the Scottish Government possesses other formal, legislative powers is crucial.
Beginning with integration, Scotland has adopted a practice from the beginning of asylum dispersal in 2001 (and embedded in "New Scots" since 2013) where those in the asylum system should begin to integrate on their day of arrival, in contrast to Westminster where that process should only begin on being recognised as a "legitimate" refugee.What this means in practice is that those in the asylum process in Scotland enjoy some social rights that those in England do not, the right to study for example.These extra rights are also evident once people are recognised as refugees, such as the right to apply for social housing in any local authority area and to apply to university as a home student, avoiding fees.Governmental difference in these forms has been increasingly embedded through both iterations (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021)(2022) of the "New Scots" refugee integration strategythe timing of such again showing the acceleration of difference following the end of party congruence between Westminster and Holyrood.As Mulvey (2018) suggests, it is the exclusion of asylum seekers and refugees from social access in England set against their partial inclusion in Scotland that has created divergence.These overarching strategies have placed the rights of both asylum seekers and refugees into governmental decision-making, creating obligations on public services whilst also setting a symbolic difference between Holyrood and Westminster.More recently, political rights have been extended, with the Scottish Elections (Franchise & Representation) Act 2020 enfranchising refugees to vote in Scottish national and local elections.These moves towards enhanced inclusivity chime with the Scottish Government's efforts to ensure a disproportionately large role in taking refugees through the UK Government's 2015-2021 Syrian resettlement programme (Howarth 2019), alongside recent moves to become a "Super Sponsor" to increase the quantity of Ukrainian refugees able to be settled in Scotland (Scottish Government 2022).
Overall, on the Measures dimension of success, at the UK-level, policy and practice of governing asylum seekers in particular, but with effects also on refugees, has become increasingly securitised, resting on a logic of threat-defense and hostile exclusion that undermines access to fundamental human rights.With immigration officially "reserved", vast swathes of this hostile, securitised policy also applies and impacts in Scotland.Yet, whilst it would be true in some respects to say that securitisation in the form of measures has been successful in Scotland, it would obscure key differences in the prevailing policy direction, with Scottish Government policy and practices of governing asylum seekers and refugees not resting on a securitising logic, and jurisdiction being spread across departments with responsibility for a variety of social policies.This divergence has generated a failure of UK Government securitisation measures to be uniformly enacted and fully implemented in Scotland, especially from 2010 onwards.We are again, therefore, met with a process of simultaneous success and failure, and one which rests on the Scottish Government's possession of formal policy powers which can be wielded to both contest the implementation of established policies and enact alternative policies to those of Westminster.

Securitisation failure: insights from Scotland
From the above empirical analysis of the securitisation of asylum and refuge in the UK, disaggregating the "UK" to explore differentiation in Scotland, two important theory-pertinent insights emerge.First, it is evident that labelling securitisation "successful" in the UK is overly simplistic.Once we account for devolution, we see simultaneous success and failure, or to put it another way, implementation and non-implementation.A divergent approach from Scottish Governments has created significant "failure" of the UK Government securitisation in Scotland, discursively, intersubjectively and across policy and practices of governing.A finding that also problematises prevailing assumptions about the innate advantageousness of drawing on the unique magic of "security": clearly securitisation is not always politically alluring.Yet, and this is the second key insight, it is not simply that any contestation occurred.The crucial point is that this desire to pursue a different political approach was underpinned by formal authority and legislative powers.On formal authority, if we accept that discourse "does things" and that cultural capital is critical, the platform offered to substate actors to speak (or not speak) security with formal authority as "holders of collective identity" cannot be overstated.With security politics a "structured field" (Buzan et al. 1998, p. 31), the agenda setting power of substate governments to construct a prevailing message to shape a dominant public, "common sense" understanding of an issue, make these actors especially well-placed to impact, contest and diverge from central state policies.This is particularly pronounced if we consider Stritzel's (2014) work on translations, which has "underline [d] the central importance of local actors and their local discursive strategies to successful localizations".Complex overlapping nationalisms (British, English, Scottish), create a situation where the main referent object at the UK level (British borders/identity), does not easily translate to large swathes of the Scottish population and where the UK Government is both "us" and "them", diluting the cultural capital of the UK state.The Scottish Government is by definition more "local", and due to its status as the Government of Scotland with strong electoral support can more easily claim to "legitimately" speak for "Scotland" as a country.Such a process chimes with a swathe of social policy research, which suggests that the real direction of divergence has been from Westminster, with Scotland clinging to vestiges of the post-1945 welfare state settlement while Westminster moves away from it (Béland and Lecours 2008). 9Yet, although significant, the cultural capital held by the Scottish Government would have been restricted to a robust discursive contestation, if legislative powers across relevant, yet oft indirect, policy domains did not exist.It is well established that policy and legal tools are a key mechanism of securitisation (Huysmans 2006, Basaran 2008).Naturally, therefore, and as this case shows, a key part of contestation and subsequent failure of the UK Government securitisation in Scotland rests upon the capacity of devolved Governments in Scotland to wield policy and legal tools that can construct alternative responses that circumvent, mitigate or lessen securitisation measures.

Conclusion
In a context where the securitisation of migration, asylum seekers and refugees has been accelerating across Europe, the contrasting approach to asylum and refuge being crafted in Scotland is intriguing.This article aimed to address this puzzle of how, to what extent and why this apparent "failure" of securitisation has occurred in Scotland, and in doing so, respond to Ruzicka's (2019) call to investigate "failed securitisation".Analysing asylum and refugee politics in the UK/Scotland from 1999-2022, an analytical framework was constructed to explore success-failure across three dimensions that speak to the three dominant strands of securitisation theory and analysis: discursive dominance (Philosophical), audience acceptance (Intersubjective) and implementation of security policy and practices (Measures).
The empirical analysis revealed that although many elements of the UK securitisation of asylum seekers and refugees apply to Scotland, others have simultaneously failed.
Discursively, UK Government messaging, resting on a logic of threat-defense, where asylum seekers and refugees are framed as dangerous Others, failed to be mirrored in Scotland, with dominant discourses of the Scottish Government resting on a logic of welcome and where asylum seekers and refugees were framed as positive assets to society.Turning to the general public "audience", UK public opinion and electoral behaviour demonstrated sufficient support to detect a shared understanding that has permitted the governing of asylum seekers and refugees through securitisation.Yet, disparities in public opinion and electoral behaviour indicate a failure to establish a similar shared understanding in Scotland, with a non-securitised, neo-liberal economic and rightsbased approach to governing asylum and refuge being enabled within Scottish politics.Finally, on the implementation of securitisation measures, many elements of the securitised UK Government policy and practice that are detailed do apply in Scotland.Yet, despite this "success", within the confines of devolution, limited but impactful deviations in policy and practice from the Scottish Government can be identified, demonstrating the failure of UK Government securitisation measures to be uniformly enacted and fully implemented in Scotland, once more showcasing a degree of simultaneous success and failure.
In bringing the lens of failure to an analysis of "UK" asylum and refugee politics, a richer, more comprehensive empirical analysis and nuanced understanding is achieved, substantiating Ruzicka's proposition that securitisation studies can and must learn from failure.Beyond the empirical merits of the approach, this study of failure in the societal sector sharpens the theorisation of "failed" securitisation in two main ways.First, it is revealed that binary notions of "failed" and "successful" securitisations are insufficient: securitisations can both fail and succeed simultaneously.Moving forward then, in addition to exploration of "pure" failure, even when analysing apparently "successful" instances of securitisation, scholars would benefit from disaggregating "success" and asking, "successful everywhere and in uniform ways?" Doing so will help identify any (partial) failure and account for the simultaneity of success and failure in processes of securitisation.To take the recent controversy over abortion in the United States as an illustrative example, it would appear overly simplistic to say that abortion has been successfully securitised or that securitisation has failed.More accurate would be to note that it appears to be succeeding in some dimensions (in some jurisdictions) and failing simultaneously in alternate dimensions (in others), which opens a far richer agenda for study, inviting exploration of the shape, extent and key mechanisms (federal-state legislation dynamics, "elite" discourses, religiosity, etc.) facilitating success or failure in each context.
The second implication for our understanding of "failure" is that the analysis demonstrates that effective contestation of securitisation can play a key role in generating "failure", especially when contestation rests upon formal authority and legislative powers.Disaggregating the UK "state", accounting for devolution and focusing on Scotland as a substate actor was pivotal to unlock this study of failure.Further study of security politics that accounts for state-sub-state dynamics, especially where there is political/ ideological/national deviation from central states (Catalonia/Spain, Quebec/Canada, etc.), and carefully disaggregating large political entities (for example, the "EU") offers a fruitful pathway to study failure, and ultimately hone theoretical and empirical understandings of securitisation success and failure.Whilst it may be true that studying an absence, or dogs that do not bark, is challenging epistemologically, the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time" analogy is limiting for guiding the study of failure: investigating failure can also be about a recasting of the dogs one pays attention to.In our case, neglect of devolution and Scottish politics would have missed the elements of failure uncovered here: dogs barking, but scholars not listening in the right places.Overall, it is hoped that this initial response to Ruzicka's call to redress the neglect of failure in securitisation studies encourages scholars to further explore failure across sector, issue and context.