Description
The burgeoning field of Everyday Security Studies is one of the most important developments in International Relations. Its requirement to go beyond state-centrism demands enquiry prioritises the experiences of silenced publics but further, this paper argues, recentres the central purpose and object of study to be the agentic capacity of these publics to co-produce security. Yet, as we welcome this emergent literature, there remains a failure to sufficiently engage with the subsequent conceptual messiness which emerges. We are yet to successfully unpack what we mean by ‘publics’, whose ‘ordinary’ experiences is it we want to capture? And what are the implications of those we deem to fit within these categories? The issues raised by these questions become heightened and potentially dangerous within the study of terrorism and counter-terrorism, where the language prioritised by broader studies on the everyday – ‘public’ ‘ordinary’ ‘citizens’ and ‘banal’ amongst others - are grounded in the very state discourses this scholarship seeks to unpack. This paper deals with these challenges and proposes a means to obtaining conceptual clarity, championing the field of Everyday Security Studies as a welcome and necessary development in the study of International Relations.
