In this article, we shed critical light on the theory of securitization as developed by the « Copenhagen School » in security studies by interrogating its tendency to avoid questions pertaining to reciprocal violence, physical coercion and war. More specifically, we try to assess under what conditions a fruitful debate could be engaged between the « Copenhagen School » and an international political sociology of violence and war. One of the main problems, we argue, is that research inspired by the Copenhagen theory of securitization has avoided empirical subjects displaying interactions between securitizing moves and strategies of coercion, both involving performative utterances, in the social construction of security problems. These interactions are however crucial from the point of view of the sociology of conflicts as well as for the historical sociology of the state.