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Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge
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Vaughan-Williams , Nick and Stevens, Daniel (2016) Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge. Security Dialogue, 47 (1). pp. 40-58. doi:10.1177/0967010615604101 ISSN 0967-0106.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0967010615604101
Abstract
Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies (NSS) and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritised do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate: 1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct, and narrate 'security threats'; and 2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with, and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalisations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes, and stories reproduce the police order in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticise the grounds on which national security agendas are authorised, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | J Political Science > JZ International relations | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | National security -- Surveys -- Great Britain, National security -- Citizen participation -- Great Britain, Terrorists -- Security measures -- Great Britain, Cyberterrorism -- Security measures -- Great Britain, Natural disasters -- Government liability -- Great Britain | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Security Dialogue | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd. | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0967-0106 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 1 February 2016 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 47 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 40-58 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/0967010615604101 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 22 December 2015 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 22 December 2015 | ||||||||
| Funder: | Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC) | ||||||||
| Grant number: | ES/J004596/1 |
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