Description
For critical security scholars, the notion of national security has largely taken a pejorative meaning as something that is, at best, too distant from the everyday concerns of ordinary people and, at worst, too dangerous for their rights and liberties. Nonetheless, the recent self-organisation of ordinary Ukrainians in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion calls attention to the local processes of mobilisation in the name of national security. Drawing on a vernacular contextual approach to security, this paper calls for the need to study the concept of national security in context and from the perspective of non-elite agents. I draw on over 30 semi-structured interviews with Ukrainian civil society groups, social media research and hermeneutic textual analysis to explore the understandings of national security among grassroots actors. I find that national survival was understood to be imperative for emancipation, and emancipation was imperative for national survival. To explain the intertwinement of these two meanings of security, I emphasise their embeddedness in the anti-colonial politics inaugurated by civil society in rejection of Russian colonialism. Engaging with agents’ everyday meaning-making contributes to critical security scholarship – namely Vernacular and Everyday Security Studies – by illuminating alternatives to the dominant, normatively negative conception of national security.
