Vernacular Securities and Their Study: A Qualitative Analysis and Research Agenda
| Author | Lee Jarvis,Michael Lister |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117812460880 |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Relations
27(2) 158 –179
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117812460880
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Vernacular Securities and
Their Study: A Qualitative
Analysis and Research Agenda
Lee Jarvis
Swansea University
Michael Lister
Oxford Brookes University
Abstract
This article draws on primary focus group research to explore the differing ways in which UK
publics conceptualise and discuss security. The article begins by situating our research within two
relevant contemporary scholarly literatures: The first concerns efforts to centre the ‘ordinary’
human as security’s referent; the second, constructivist explorations of security’s discursive
(re)production. A second section then introduces six distinct understandings of security that
emerged in our empirical research. These organised the term around notions of survival,
belonging, hospitality, equality, freedom and insecurity. The article concludes by exploring this
heterogeneity and its significance for the study of security more broadly, outlining a number of
potential future research avenues in this area.
Keywords
constructivism, critical security studies, human security, insecurity, security, vernacular security
This article contributes to contemporary scholarship on the concept of security. It does so
by highlighting and seeking to address this literature’s propensity to speak for, rather
than to (or, perhaps better, with) ‘ordinary’ people and the conditions of (in)security they
experience, encounter or construct in everyday life.1 Drawing on findings from a recent
series of focus groups, the discussion concentrates on three questions. First, how do dif-
ferent publics understand and discuss security (and insecurity) within the contemporary
Corresponding author:
Lee Jarvis, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK.
Email: l.jarvis@swansea.ac.uk
Article
Jarvis and Lister 159
UK? Second, what does the language of security do when employed in everyday con-
texts? And, third, what might an engagement with these public understandings contribute
to the academic study of this concept?
This article begins with a brief overview of two prominent contemporary themes
within relevant scholarship. The first, associated with human security and ‘Welsh
School’ Critical Security Studies (CSS), concerns efforts to situate the human individual
as security’s referent. Despite their significant differences, we argue these literatures
contribute a powerful ontological and normative justification for escaping the state-
centrism that continues to dominate mainstream studies of security. The second litera-
ture involves explorations of security’s discursive (re)production through social
practices such as language. Associated with constructivist and poststructuralist research,
the significance of this work is in its identification of security’s ontological unfixity. We
conclude the section by pointing to a lack of conceptual or empirical research combin-
ing these insights and outlining the value such work might pose.
This article’s second section begins our effort to address this lacuna. Following a
discussion of the underpinning research project and its methodology, we offer a
detailed, qualitative account of our findings. Here, we explore six distinct images of
security that emerged in our focus groups, in which the concept was organised around
notions of survival, belonging, hospitality, equality, freedom and insecurity. These
images are discussed as examples of that which Bubandt terms, ‘vernacular securi-
ties’.2 These refer to socially specific articulations of security that are contextually and
historically situated. In the discussion below, we seek to demonstrate how these local-
ised conceptions of security take shape in relation to concrete experiences of uncer-
tainty and insecurity, on the one hand, and imagined social and political cartographies,
on the other.3
This article’s third section begins by arguing that the heterogeneity we chart within
public conceptions of security ought to stimulate circumspection towards the universalist
claims traversing much human-centred discussion of this term. We then suggest that
public efforts to speak security are significant for two further reasons: First, because they
contribute to the positioning of the self within external material, social and political
worlds and, second, because they pose potential for revealing hitherto under-explored
functions of this language, including its ability to stimulate efforts at empathy towards
others. This article’s conclusion, finally, argues that academic studies of security might
benefit from further research of this kind for scholarly, policy-related and political
reasons.
Security: referents and realities
The fact that security is a much-contested term in academic debate is something of an
understatement, wherever one stands on the essential nature of this contestability.4
Although beyond the scope of this article to review these ‘bulging archives’5 in their
entirety, this section highlights two strands of research, which point to the importance of
examining ‘lay’ conceptions of security. These are recent attempts to refocus security’s
referent away from the state, and efforts to reconceptualise security as social or discur-
sive construction.
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