Description
The limited scholarship examining populism through securitisation theory emphasises the discursive power of the securitising speech act and how 'the people' are constructed as the referent object of security. Yet such approaches marginalise securitisation audiences as political actors by treating them as passive recipients of securitising moves and obscure their responsibility in the construction of exclusionary populist narratives. Drawing on affect theory and feminist scholarship on vulnerability as relational and politically generative, this paper recenters the audience by theorising the role of affective vulnerability in populist securitisation discourses. Vulnerability does not diminish agency but rather enables the audience as an affective participant in the securitisation process, whose shared sense of vulnerability is rooted in experiences of marginalisation, constitutive exclusion, and uncertainty. Crucially, centering audience vulnerability is not an exculpatory move. Audiences make substantive political contributions through their affective engagement and circulation of securitisation discourses. These contributions are neither neutral nor inevitable. Vulnerability enables rather than excuses their role in reproducing exclusionary politics. We draw upon the reception of recent securitisation of small boat arrivals in Wales to reveal how audience affect conditions the emergence and resonance of populist securitisation discourses surrounding anti-migration.
