Political Rhetoric and the Securitization of Mekong-Lancang Water Issues

Political Rhetoric and the Securitization of Mekong-Lancang Water Issues

The essence of international competition is competing for the right to make rules, and after making the rules, one needs to consider how to convince other countries to accept and implement them heartily, and political rhetoric is essentially a skill and ability of persuasive argumentation. Since its inception, securitization theory has attached great importance to the role of discourse in constructing security issues, and political rhetoric theory has further strengthened the explanation of the role of discourse in connecting cognition and practice. Through the lens of political rhetoric, this paper uses the securitization of the Mekong water issue as a case study to demonstrate how the four steps of contextualization, interest mobilization, presumption of responsibility, and action planning operate in the process of securitization. Understanding the theoretical progress of securitization and accurately grasping the operation rules of securitization can help deepen the understanding of the Mekong water resources issue today, and also provide some ideas for optimizing China's security governance strategy and improving its foreign discourse strategy to avoid falling into discursive traps and invalid deconstruction.