Description
Vernacular security has expanded our understanding of security, yet empirical studies have mainly focused on citizens. This risks reinforcing state-centric hierarchies over who can legitimately produce security, and it obscures how non-citizens challenge dominant, exclusionary security paradigms and prefigure desirable security futures.
To think vernacular security anew for the future, I propose a theoretical framework that highlights the relationship between knowledge and prefiguration by connecting feminist and performative approaches to citizenship with questions of knowledge and knowability as developed by Mignolo (epistemic disobedience) and Glissant (right to opacity). I illustrate the usefulness of this approach using ethnographic material generated in 2019-2020 with asylum seekers and refugees in Berlin and Vienna, highlighting also non-linguistic and embodied forms of knowledge.
Reflecting on this fieldwork, I then discuss how the sensitivity of security issues, especially for highly securitized people, also raises methodological-ethical questions about how to study alternative security practices under conditions of securitized surveillance. It requires us to reconsider the stakes of (in)visibility involved in security and our own research practices. I discuss participatory research as an approach to mitigate these challenges and to investigate the potential of non-citizen security knowledge as a democratic innovation from below.
