Description
Studies of vernacular security have shown the potential of everyday articulations to challenge hegemonic understandings of, and approaches, to (in)security. Such work has obvious normative appeal as an alternative to more traditional – state-centric – forms of security research. At the same, it also risks reifying the linkage between vernacular security expressions and a politics of contestation or resistance. In this article, we therefore theorise a more nuanced understanding of the politics of vernacular security by demonstrating how ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ understandings of security can be co-opted by political and security elites. Analysing the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry – and, particularly, the ‘Every Story Matters’ report – we show how heterogenous vernacular securities can be emphasised, sutured, and narrated in order to further the interests of policymakers and practitioners. Through this process, far from a politics of resistance – whereby variegated knowledges act as ‘cutting tools’ to dissect hegemonic projects – vernacular security becomes a ‘stitching tool’ through which politically useful narratives are woven together from the tapestry of public experience. This demotic security politics, we argue, constitutes a specific, significant strand of contemporary populism, whereby vernacular securities are co-opted the heart of state projects, rather than working toward their contestation, curtailment, or reimagining.
