Rita Floyd

Dr Rita Floyd

Mid-Career Fellow 2019

Emergency Politics: Security, Threats and the Duties of States

This project works at the interface between moral/political philosophy and International Relations/security studies with the aim of answering the curiously ignored, yet pertinent question: When, if ever, are states morally obliged to treat putative threats as a matter for emergency politics and address them using exceptional measures?

More information

Research outcomes

Floyd, R. (2024).

The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization. Cambridge University Press.

Floyd, R. (2019).

States, Last Resort, and the Obligation to Securitize. Polity, 51(2), 378-394.

Floyd, R. (2019).

Evidence of securitisation in the economic sector of security in Europe? Russia’s economic blackmail of Ukraine and the EU’s conditional bailout of Cyprus. European Security, 28(2), 173-192.

Floyd, R. (2025).

Teaching Security Studies. Edward Elgar

Floyd, R. (forthcoming in 2025)

Regulating security policy and practice via a norm of just securitization The Handbook on Norm Research edited by Antje Wiener, Phil Orchard and Sassan Gholiagha, Oxford University Press.

Areas of interest

Peace and Conflict Studies Security International Relations Environmental Security Ethics Moral Philosophy Just War Morality

Cohort

MCF4

Biography

Rita Floyd (PhD, University of Warwick 2007) is Professor of International Security and Ethics in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and co-editor-in-chief of International Affairs. She is the author of numerous articles and three research monographs: Security and the Environment (2010), The Morality of Security: A theory of Just Securitization (2019) and The Duty to Secure: From Just to Mandatory Securitization (2024), all published with Cambridge University Press. In 2025, Floyd published Teaching Security Studies (Edward Elgar). This book is aimed at scholars teaching security studies. It draws on Floyd’s lived experience as a teacher and researcher. Floyd continues to develop and refine her work on just and mandatory securitization through numerous publications. Including: Floyd, R (2023) Solar geoengineering: The view from just war/securitization theories, Journal of Global Security Studies, Volume 8, Issue 2, June 2023, ogad012, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogad012 and Floyd, R. (forthcoming in 2025) ‘Regulating security policy and practice via a norm of just securitization The Handbook on Norm Research edited by Antje Wiener, Phil Orchard and Sassan Gholiagha, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Biographical details correct as of 13.08.25