Description
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ‘vernacular security’ with its emphasis on non-elite discourse on security. As an explicit alternative to more traditional forms of security research, such work is typically situated alongside other ‘bottom-up’ approaches to critical security studies with shared ambitions of disrupting hegemonic ways of thinking and doing security. In this article, I argue that existing work on vernacular security gestures at, rather than fully articulates, its criticality, with more attention needed to the status, meaning, and functions of critique therein. In order to address this lacuna, I present an original typology of four types of critique found in vernacular security discourse on below-the-line news media commentary on the politics of extremism: Objectivist, (De)constructivist, Normative, and Articulations of alternativity. This typology, I argue, demonstrates the heterogeneity of critical anchors, gestures, and targets within vernacular discourse on (in)security, as well as the mobilisation of different critical strategies therein. This plurality – and the absence of any necessary normative orientation within vernacular security speak – suggests that research on such discourse may sit more comfortably within broader, non-prescriptive, conceptions of critical security studies, than within narrow understandings organised around notions of disruption, emancipation, or progress.
