Description
When a drone strikes during breakfast, injuring your children while ISIS and Al-Nusra attack on the ground, where is safety? Critical Security Studies cannot answer this question because it lacks frameworks for analyzing how civilians maintain alternative worlds under simultaneous, overlapping violence from multiple actors. This paper introduces layered insecurity—a condition where aerial bombardment, ground attacks, sleeper cells who are your neighbors, and state surveillance converge in everyday spaces, making survival inseparable from cultural persistence.
Through ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish civilians in Jazira (Cizîrê) region using object biographies, photovoice methodology, and participant observation, I demonstrate how technologies designed to eliminate Kurdish ontologies paradoxically become infrastructure for their preservation. This technological hybridity challenges CSS assumptions that militarization destroys indigenous ontologies. Instead, Kurdish civilians transform threat technologies into survival infrastructure through indigenous relationality. Connected terraces enable rapid escape and traditional gatherings. Weapons protect bodies and the seasonal ceremonies, collective deliberations, territorial relationships that constitute Kurdish being-in-relation. Defensive architecture preserves rather than fragments cosmic practices when organized through relational rather than strategic principles.
Through this I show, first, how multiple actors deploying different elimination technologies across generations create conditions requiring constant material navigation rather than political resistance or accommodation. Second, technological hybridity shows the same infrastructures serving strategic survival and cosmic maintenance simultaneously, operating through embodied practices rather than ideological claims. Third, civilian experiences reveal ontological persistence as creative transformation of threat technologies rather than cultural preservation against them—communities sustaining alternative worlds through rather than despite militarization under conditions designed to ensure impossibility.
