BIPSS Research Assistant Nabib Bin Zahid  on his recent commentary titled “When Security Becomes Everything: Rethinking Security in an Era of Expanding Threats” builds on the Copenhagen School’s securitization framework to argue that “security” is not just a descriptive category—it’s a speech act that removes an issue from ordinary democratic deliberation and places it under exceptional authority. That’s a serious move, and it should require serious justification: an existential threat to a referent object, a genuine case for emergency measures, and an audience that accepts the framing. What we’ve seen instead is the label being applied wherever it carries rhetorical or budgetary advantage. Bangladesh’s own Digital Security Act is one of the cleaner illustrations of this—security framing adopted not because the existential-threat criterion was met, but because the exceptional legal license it confers proved useful for purposes the ordinary law would not have supported.