Rita Floyd

Université de Birmingham

Department of Political Science and International Studies
Professor of International Security and Ethics

Professor Floyd researches and teaches in security studies. She is interested in the ethics of emergency politics, in security theory and climate/environmental security. Floyd also has a general interest in IR theory, especially the English school.

Floyd is the originator of Just Securitization Theory. Her 2019 book The Morality of Security: A theory of Just Securitization (Cambridge University Press) combines insights from the just war tradition and securitization studies to provide a theory of morally permissible security practice. This book was shortlisted for the Susan Strange Best Book Prize in 2020. A symposium on the book was published in the European Journal of International Security in 2022.

In 2024, Floyd published The Duty to secure: From just to mandatory securitization, also with CUP. This book builds on top of the Morality of Security. It considers when securitization is not ‘merely’ morally permissible, but morally required of actors and different levels of analysis. 

Floyd has been in Birmingham since April 2012 when she was appointed Birmingham Fellow in Conflict and Security. Before then she was a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick and before then an ESRC post-doctoral fellow. She received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Warwick. Her PhD was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press as Security and the Environment: Securitisation theory and US Environmental Security Policy. It appeared in paperback in 2014, and it was translated into Chinese in 2021.