Description
Critical Security Studies cannot adequately theorize contexts where communities maintain alternative worlds under conditions designed to ensure their impossibility. This paper charts new directions for CSS by examining Kurdish experiences in Rojava, demonstrating how interdisciplinary frameworks can address contexts where existing analytical categories structurally fail.
Through ethnographic research with local civilians navigating daily security decisions, I theorize layered insecurity—a novel framework for analyzing contexts where multiple actors simultaneously deploy contradictory security logics. Interviews reveal how communities navigate external elimination pressures from technologically superior forces (Turkish drones, ISIS networks, Syrian state apparatus) while managing complex dependencies on international coalitions whose advanced weapons enable defense while constraining political autonomy. Participants describe keeping basic weapons at home while depending on coalition military technology—a technological asymmetry forcing engagement with actors who simultaneously protect and control. This reveals CSS's inability to theorize how technological asymmetry compels communities to position themselves simultaneously as partners, threats, and autonomous actors.
I advance three new directions for CSS. First, layered insecurity as analytical framework for contexts where multiple technologically asymmetric actors create overlapping contradictions. Second, protective militarization—reconceptualizing military organization as infrastructure for defensive worldmaking when communities lack technological capacity for autonomous defense. Underground networks serve dual functions: bomb shelters during drone strikes and spaces for cultural transmission. As one participant explained: "Every morning I leave home saying goodbye as if I won't return. Not dramatic—practical." Third, interdisciplinary methods integrating anthropological ontological frameworks, decolonial scholarship, and multi-scalar ethnography to center local perspectives on navigating technological dependence and political autonomy.
These directions enable CSS to theorize security realities its current state-centric, technologically-naive frameworks cannot comprehend—opening pathways for analyzing how communities sustain alternative worlds while navigating contradictory relationships shaped by technological asymmetry.
