Description
National security strategies have become a commonplace feature of the modern state’s security toolkit. They represent key sites for articulating how states conceptualise and narrate their core values and interests, that which threatens these, and the approaches being taken to counter these threats. Such strategies ‘speak’ in the name of a national citizenry, but their actual engagement with national publics is often limited. The concept of ‘vernacular security’ has the potential to speak to, nuance, and perhaps disrupt these official accounts of national security. Exploring security through the ‘vernacular’ offers the opportunity to allow diverse publics to narrate the threats they face to their security, and the ways they would seek to collectively manage them. This paper sets out an agenda for engaging with vernacular security politics across diverse publics in order to speak to, and potentially broaden, the accounts of ‘security’ present in national security strategies.
