Twenty years of vernacular security research

By Security Dialogue Guest Editors, Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister, and Akin Oyawale

The concept of security is a complicated, and much contested, one. Does it entail survival, freedom, the absence of fear, a predictable future? Is it a property of states, of individuals, of groups, of collective identities? And how do we go about evaluating – or even attempting to rank – the importance of threats to security when those threats might be as different as climate change, great power war, domestic violence, pandemics, and terrorism?

Our article offers a new engagement with twenty years of research into ‘vernacular security’: an increasingly prominent framework for engaging with the security understandings and constructions of those individuals, groups and communities traditionally neglected by security studies. The appeal of this framework, for many working in this area, lies in its combination of ontological emptiness, such that security is taken to mean whatever its subjects believe it to mean, on the one hand. And, on the other, its shifting of the research gaze away from the military and political elites on whom the field has traditionally focused its attention.

These contributions are helpful, we argue, because they help to address some of the conceptual ambiguities around  vernacular security, while pointing to ways in which research in this field might develop going forward. Our approach is one in which vernacular security might be best conceptualised as a relational term, referring to articulations of security that are not placeless or detached; not generalised or universal; not formal or officially sanctioned; not radically new or inauthentic; and not elite or hegemonic. In other words, we see vernacular security as “thick” and rooted in specific communities and places. Such an approach helps to shed light on how vernacular securities may differ from everyday securities, precisely because of the latter’s emphasis on generalised spaces and the security practices they generate.

The remainder of the special issue engages with conceptual and methodological questions such as these while pushing vernacular security research into exciting new directions. Its contributions include work on the use of smartphone applications for criminal purposes in France; on familial violence in the Pacific Islands; on small arms activism by groups in Israel/Palestine; on Ukrainian civil society resistance to Russian aggression since 2014; on public ignorance around migration within the UK; on rural refugeeism in Jordan; and on gendered dimensions of terrorism and counterterrorism in Nigeria. These articles, together, throw up new interdisciplinary connections between vernacular security scholarship and work in other field such as anthropology and gender studies. They also, importantly, highlight the value of methodological creativity for those looking to engage with vernacular securities, while encouraging new reflection on the positionality of researchers working in this area.

Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister, and Akin Oyawale