A politics of living (in)security: The case for decentring security through ethnographic methods in vernacular security studies

Abstract

This article offers a methodological contribution to the vernacular turn in security research via an ethnographically led politics of living (in)security. It argues for a decentring of security expressions that not only recognizes pluralism but also emphasizes the inherently situational nature of insecurities that are, necessarily, time-, space- and person-bound. To decentre security in this way is to reorient vernacular methods away from the seeking out of isolated experiences of security evident in much existing work. Instead, the emphasis here is on waiting: on experiencing, feeling, watching, moving and listening to participants’ encounters of (in)security. Decentring security and allowing (in)security to emerge situationally allows researchers to investigate not just what people say, but how, where and why they say something in a given context. This methodological shift, I argue, opens the possibility for a multiplicity of individuals and experiences to be included in security research even in the absence of explicit security speak. In so doing, I challenge longstanding assumptions in vernacular security studies about what the vernacular is, how it transpires, and the appropriate methodological tools for its access. This, I argue, is necessary for vernacular security studies to truly avoid speaking ‘for’ security’s subject.

Introduction

This article offers a much-needed exploration into the methodological implications of studying (in)security in ordinary life via an ethnographically led politics of living (in)security. Most critical security studies analyse security predominantly as an elite ¹ practice by those ‘historically privileged’ in politics, government or international aid organizations, foregrounding only certain insecurities (Downing, 2021: 3). As this special issue’s introduction notes, vernacular security studies is shaped by a commitment to ordinary expressions, opinions and articulations of (in)security (Jarvis et. al., 2025). In line with vernacular security studies’ criticism of elite-focused security analysis, this article challenges these limits to security knowledge to show how insecurities manifest differently in different contexts, and, in particular, in quotidian life. Building on literature in feminist, postcolonial and everyday security studies, which emphasizes security as contextual, fluid and something individuals engage in (Cuccu, 2023; Enloe, 2011; Huysmans, 2011; Nyman, 2021; Wibben, 2020; Ybarra, 2019), this article offers a methodological critique of existing vernacular security work which focuses on traditional linguistic signifiers of security. Critically engaging the concept of the vernacular, I advance the case for an alternative approach based around decentring security. Drawing on findings from ethnographic fieldwork carried out in northern Jordan, I illustrate the utility of this methodological and conceptual shift by exploring how insecurity is lived. This leads to a distinct understanding of who can talk about (in)security, how (in)security emerges and where, and who identifies (in)security. This portrays the full extent to which (in)security is lived, situated and dynamic.

This prompts a radical rethinking of the vernacular beyond the current focus on language, towards something more akin to communication and embodied acts of living (Ochs, 2013; Sjoberg, 2016; Tazzioli, 2017). I attend to the ‘everyday’ and physical signs of insecurity – movement, gestures and routine – alongside emotional experiences, including pain, non-verbal articulations and bonding (Huysmans, 2011; Mc Cluskey, 2019; Nyman, 2021; Sjoberg, 2016: 58; Ybarra, 2019).

To do so, and in line with other methodological contributions in this special issue, this article embraces the broadening ethos of vernacular research, acknowledging its heterogeneous and unpredictable nature. However, it also reorients vernacular security studies towards where and how stories emerge, and how they are told: through living in context. This approach signifies that space is never neutral, bounded or static precisely because of its ongoing interaction with and entanglement in the everyday sociohistorical and political (Massey, 2005). Incorporating a feminist sensibility to ‘everyday realities’ (Enloe, 2011), I find that space – an office, home, shopping centre or refugee camp – is often conceptualized differently by different actors, and suggest that examining how and why space is understood in certain ways is a fundamental pillar of a vernacular enquiry. As narrative approaches to security have demonstrated, understanding a specific context is a form of meaning making where the narrative is contingent on context (Wibben, 2011). Leaning into this lineage benefits vernacular research: it spatializes the plurality of vernacular experiences, demonstrating how the same site can create ‘completely different maps’, where security cannot be analysed as fixed or detached entities (Harvey, 2006: 122).

Therefore, this article argues that the exploration of the vernacular benefits from an ethnographically informed, grounded study that decentres security. Taking inspiration from postcolonial scholarship, this situates security experiences and articulations within their wider historical, social and political context, to challenge security knowledge considered ‘parochial and peripheral’ (Bilgin, 2010: 619; Hönke and Müller, 2012). As both a conceptual and methodological tool, ‘decentring’ is an opportunity to circumvent elite-driven security narratives, often perpetuating Western-centric accounts (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006; Hönke and Müller, 2012). Connecting to other bottom-up approaches (Enloe, 2011; Wibben, 2011), decentring provides space for alternative security articulations to emerge and investigates not just what people say, but how, where and why they say or do something in a given context. Methodologically, (in)security emerges as something time-, space-, person-bound. It allows researchers to move with participants – to drive, walk or work – in a variety of settings (Kelly, 2008; Sheller and Urry, 2000). To decentre security, therefore, is to reorient vernacular methods to not seek out security in isolation (Nyman, 2021), but rather to wait; to experience, feel, watch, move and listen to participants’ encounters of (in)security. Security transpires as expressions of living (in)security. This engages with wider structures of power in myriad ways, while raising challenges about how (in)security emerges as unfixed and unstable.

Reconceptualizing the vernacular in this way, this approach breaks from other strands that seek to define the referent object of security, whether the ‘ordinary’ citizen or marginalized community (Da Silva and Crilley, 2017; Gupte, 2017; Wibben, 2011). Rather, the referent object is not defined, nor their articulations of security read in relation to the linguistic narratives of others. In theory, identity constructions can be formed by the participants themselves. Investigating vernacular (in)security as emergent through living – as particular choices and movements in a specific space – opens the possibility for a multiplicity of individuals and experiences to be included, which are articulated not only by security speak, but through ordinary life.

Living is something all individuals have access to, something that permeates through the commonly held conceptual and theoretical binaries within critical security studies and, in particular, vernacular security studies. Problematizing the entrenched binaries of ordinary/exceptional, elite/lay person or refugee/local, the article, and the special issue more broadly, acknowledges the contestability of such terms yet seeks to problematize these abstract categories as the starting point of analysis. As a methodological approach, decentring unlocks multiple voices and (in)securities, inherently operationalizing the ordinary by situating emergent (in)securities in the context of ordinary living, incorporating messy, fragmented and entangled stories. Doing so is both an ethical and a methodological pursuit – an opportunity to avoid ingrained security assumptions to instead become attentive to specific expressions and contexts. This recognizes the porous nature of security articulations, identities and movements, and encourages further reflection on the methods vernacular researchers employ. This shift contributes to vernacular security studies and security studies more generally by making ‘the vernacular’ a question rather than a given: what is the vernacular, where and how does it emerge, who has access to the vernacular, and whether its current methodological emphasis fulfils the stated aim to avoid speaking ‘for’ the subject (Jarvis, 2019).

The article begins with an overview of the relevant conceptual and methodological work in vernacular security studies and positions my approach within existing security literature. The second section introduces a conceptualization of the vernacular as a contextually bound form of communication to push this scholarship beyond its existing linguistic focus. Drawing on ethnographic work in Jordan, the final section lays out this methodological shift, using vernacular security studies as an instrument through which to study a grounded politics of living (in)security.

Vernacular security: Concepts and methodology

Vernacular security understands security not as a universal concept, but as ‘a political problem [that] is neither unchanging nor semantically homogenous’ (Bubandt, 2005: 276). Similar to other bottom-up critical security work, vernacular research multiplies the voices that can speak security by seeking to hear the ‘political creation of security’ from those historically excluded in favour of elite narratives (Sjoberg, 2009: 277). Stressing the significance of ‘security speak’ (Jarvis, 2019: 108), vernacular security studies allows for ‘ordinary people . . . [to] define, experience and try to ensure their own security . . . be foregrounded’ (Luckham, 2017: 112), drawing on their ‘own vocabularies, cultural repertoires of knowledge and categories of understanding’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 22). In theory, this rejects the distinction between ordinary and exceptional (in)securities (Stanley and Jackson, 2016), suggesting there are a multiplicity of security discourses to be heard, and often, within this plurality, there are discrepancies between insecurities articulated by ‘elites’ and insecurities experienced by ‘non-elites’. This broadens the security agenda to create a well-rounded view of (in)security, threat, exclusion, freedom and belonging (Luckham, 2017: 112). It demonstrates that those experiencing insecurity are ‘not just social categories but real people, groups and communities who respond to, cope with, and challenge the social conditions’ in which they live (Lind and Luckham, 2017: 92). While this positioning risks reinforcing certain entrenched binaries between, for example, elite and marginalized voices, it nonetheless opens a set of questions for studying security ‘as an approach rather than a concept’ (Jarvis, 2019: 118).

In seeking articulations of (in)security and how these become entwined with an individual’s routine, vernacular security studies mirrors bodies of work that focus on the stories of ‘ordinary’ people and the impact of security policy on daily life (Tazzioli, 2017; Wibben, 2020). Huysmans (2011: 380) argues that ‘little security nothings’, ordinary practices and the banal, rather than the decisionist speech act, ‘do the immense work of making and circulating insecurities’. Meanwhile, Cuccu (2023: 750) observes the role of localized security practices in specific temporal and spatial contexts and their relationship to maintaining and shaping ongoing processes of colonial violence. This literature outlines security as situated and meaningful through everyday life. Yet, vernacular security studies approaches the everyday in a distinct way – not by looking at a complex set of routines or ‘the mundane, routine’, as such, but ‘how citizens (sometimes not unproblematically referred to as “ordinary people”) construct and describe experiences of security’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 22).

Therefore, a vernacular engagement draws out conversations around ‘what security means; how security feels; what conditions, objects, experiences, or relationships create security or insecurity; with which values security is associated’ (Jarvis, 2019: 116). This requires an engagement with the context in which it is spoken to provide it with meaning (Wibben, 2011). The ‘vernacular turn’ draws on such a context-driven approach to diversify the meanings of security. Following this lineage, vernacular security studies is linked to the call for a political-anthropological approach to security. For Bigo and Mc Cluskey, security is something people engage in, and this approach should analyse the ‘social forces . . . at a certain period’ and ‘the conditions under which the social and political construction that enacts a process of securitization occurs’ (2018: 121, 117).

By keeping security initially conceptually empty, or at least, as empty as possible, vernacular security studies provides potential to build new understandings of security through an openness to the subject of study or the context or topic (Jarvis, 2019: 118). While potentially problematic, especially within a focus group setting, it is this fluidity that could unlock multiple insecurities in different contexts to portray how insecurity manifests in different environments and circumstances. This openness means the vernacular is ‘capable of being “filled” in a potentially infinite number of ways’ (Jarvis, 2019), inviting a multiplicity of individuals and experiences of (in)security, alongside a conceptual reworking of the ordinary/elite distinction.

The methodological choices made within a vernacular study are important because these choices depict particular decisions regarding what the vernacular is and how it is understood to emerge. The evolution of (in)securities in the vernacular has brought a rich canon of work through its primary methodology of focus groups (Jackson and Hall, 2016; Jarvis and Lister, 2013; Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams, 2018; Makki and Tahir, 2021; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016; Vaughan-Williams, 2021). Additionally, vernacular (in)securities have been identified through ethnographic studies in a range of diverse contexts (Baker and Lekunze, 2019; Bubandt, 2005; George, 2017; Gupte, 2017; Huff, 2017), and are often supplemented with in-depth interviews (Hart, 2022; Oyawale, 2022). Vernacular security studies has used these methods without fully reflecting on their limitations, which are discussed in other fields (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009). Nevertheless, vernacular studies continues to benefit from further diversifying its methodological toolkit.

There is a growing canon of work employing social media platforms, which analyse ‘how members of the public . . . consume, interrupt, understand and comment on such representations’, including foreign fighters and terrorist actors (Da Silva and Crilley, 2017: 165; Downing, 2021; Evans and da Silva, 2023). According to Downing (2021: 5), for example, meme production is ‘the realm of “the people”’, where personal stories allow researchers to follow the ripple effect across platforms. These participatory methods incorporate multiple digital platforms and have extended to visual methods such as body mapping (Badurdeen et al., 2023), digital storytelling (Atakav et al., 2020) and photo-elicitation, providing what Nicole George categorizes as open and fair discussions (George, 2025). Together they raise important questions around ephemeral data, ethics and research participation (Downing et al., 2022). Most recently, to push the boundaries of linguistic constructions of (in)security further, quantitative claims and the ‘constitutive power of numbers’ to signify a threat or security discourse have been given particular attention in relation to focus groups (Jarvis, 2023: 7). While an analytical focus on (counter-)terrorism, radicalization and emergency politics remain, the ‘vernacular turn’ has evolved to include gender and family life (George, 2017; Hart, 2022), environmental security (Huff, 2017) and peacebuilding through sustainable development (Lind and Luckham, 2017).

Much of this work continues to give primacy to language and the ‘linguistic constructions of (in)security in spoken and written discourse’ (Jarvis, 2023: 4) which, as I will come to argue, risks limiting vernacular knowledge. In relying extensively on focus groups and interviews, for instance, vernacular security studies focuses narrowly on verbal articulations and risks running into drawbacks related to context, silences and oversampling (Hansen, 2000; Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009). Interpretive vernacular focus groups (see Stanley and Jackson, 2016), for example, require individuals to articulate their encounters through pre-structuring the conversation around security registers. While critical focus groups have been deployed where ‘interaction with others’ generates knowledge (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016: 46) and insight on ‘shared ways of making sense of an issue’ (Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams, 2018: 383), participants remain within the context of the research project. As a result, focus groups are often highly structured, artificial and unfamiliar forums where leading questions and universalizing grammars inform conversations (Jarvis, 2019: 121). As Gillespie and O’Loughlin (2009: 679) argue, understanding perceptions of (in)security should include ‘context, which is both spatial and temporal’. While these limitations are not specific to vernacular studies or security research, vernacular security studies’ continued focus on security speak through these methods risks overlooking its foundational commitment to observe ‘the conditions of (in)security they [people] experience, encounter or construct in everyday life’ (Jarvis and Lister, 2013: 158). Rather than recollect experiences verbally, a range of methods would allow vernacular studies to grasp experiences of insecurity beyond the researcher’s framework.

Vernacular studies of social media ease this tension where ‘comments are perhaps less contrived . . . without the provocation of a researcher’ (Da Silva and Crilley, 2017: 166). Digital methods support active participation from a variety of sites. Relatedly, ethnographic enquiries complement the foundations of vernacular security studies to provide thick description and creativity. While bias ‘cannot be entirely eradicated’ (Oyawale, 2022), much like digital platforms, it allows (in)security to emerge and be understood from within its specific sociopolitical context. There is a greater opportunity to understand the particular research context and the transversal possibilities of (in)security operating across local, national and global connections (Bubandt, 2005; Kurylo, 2022).

Nevertheless, as with focus groups and interviews, social media analysis often relies on everyday security talk, and depends on an individual’s ‘linguistic confidence’ (Atakav et al., 2020: 3), as well as their understanding of, and engagement in, security. While social media users reflect a particular diversity, vernacular ethnographies draw on articulations made by those positioned at the ‘margins’ – the ‘end-users of the security arrangements’ (Gupte, 2017: 204) or the local population under duress (George, 2017; Huff, 2017). These experiences of (in)security are analysed in opposition to the state, military or political elite, and emerge as a result of violent extremism, conflict, tension or disagreement (Badurdeen et al., 2023; Oyawale, 2022). In doing so, much like vernacular focus groups, there is a distinct opposition between the ordinary or marginal and the elite, which reinforces assumed binaries. Although more ‘open’ to ‘anticipate[d] plural interpretations and responses’ (Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009: 681), there is a danger of curtailing the topics on offer, while reproducing relational discourses of security, restating and reinforcing harmful connections between, say, migration and threat. Vernacular ethnographies and studies of social media seek out security narratives much in the same way as focus groups, which risks layering certain insecurities onto specific populations.

It is within this context that I argue for ‘decentring’ as a methodological tool. The concept of decentring is not new to security studies. Postcolonial critiques of security have sought to decentre Eurocentric spatial and temporal assumptions and analytical categories to conceive how the ‘peripheral has become central’ (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006: 330). Meanwhile, everyday security scholars have sought to decentre fixed identity categories. Mc Cluskey’s ethnographic study of migration and the far right removes ‘preconceived subjectivity’ to incorporate the ‘constantly shifting formations of these subjectivities as they were happening’ (2019: 15). Her anthropological approach studies the ‘goings-on’ in a Swedish village to ‘build traces’ of everyday life (Mc Cluskey, 2019).

Just like this work, ‘decentring’ highlights the relationship between space, security and identity often underdeveloped in vernacular studies (Brigden and Mainwaring, 2016; Enloe, 2011). Feminist scholars have long advocated for the study of everyday contexts, provincializing ‘corridors of power’ to reveal how ‘power was deeply at work where it was least apparent’ (Enloe, 2011: 447). Through a participatory photographic project, for example, Nyman (2021: 325–326) illustrates security as going ‘far beyond the state and state policy’ to instead be ‘felt and lived through’ in ‘mundane spaces’, ‘routine practices’ and ‘lived experience’. Detailing migrant journeys as multidirectional, unpredictable and opportunistic, Brigden and Mainwaring (2016: 423) show how insecurity is diffused through space, where migrants, when told to enter a hidden compartment, exercised their agency and camaraderie, saving one another from possible suffocation. Meanwhile, Ybarra (2019: 203) documents the racialized securitization of a Guatemalan boy who is profiled in a ‘singular moment’, creating a ripple effect of insecurity within the ‘performativity of belonging’. Performances of security are contextual, captured in fleeting moments and instinctive decisions. As other strands of security studies have shown, a spatial and contextual approach to security provides rich data on experiences and articulations of insecurity, which have not yet evolved in vernacular research.

Exploring the connections between vernacular research and other critical approaches provides a productive opportunity to reconceptualize the vernacular as contextually orientated communication which is lived in ordinary space. Vernacular security studies has the ‘genuine potential to speak to and build upon work within existing paradigms that share a similarly “bottom-up” approach to security as something that concerns – at least at some level – “ordinary” people and their daily existence’ (Jarvis, 2019: 109). A decentring approach pushes this further, to consider a possibility where there are no homogenous security issues, referent objects or securitizing actors, but rather, a constantly evolving, dynamic set of (in)securities which manifest differently in different contexts.

A politics of living investigates where people build their lives, where they choose to go and whom they choose to interact with, incorporating the power dynamics, tensions and hierarchies present in any space. This approach does not seek to ‘find’ or ‘locate’ (in)securities, nor pursue spaces understood to be sites of security – detention centres, checkpoints or borders, for example (Nyman, 2021). This is a deliberate shift away from studies of ‘non-elite’ or marginalized groups, such as refugees, who are often fixed to certain protection and security spaces – for instance, a refugee camp – and who are routinely understood as in need of security or securitizing. The three decentring moves that I outline below open an opportunity for scholars to include these groups but in alternative ways, reorienting those conceived at the margins (Barkawi and Laffey, 2006) to instead focus on living in a space. This invites certain methods of study, including ethnography, mobile methods and participant observation, calling for deep listening and thick description of the experiences of insecurity through individuals’ own ‘category of understanding’ (Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams, 2018: 391). This approach allows for the site to grow and change, and the subject to be unstable, temporary and mobile.

Rethinking vernacular methodologies through decentring

To allow (in)security to emerge as something time-, space- and person-bound, ‘decentring’ proceeds in three core moves. First, similar to vernacular security studies, decentring security provides an innovative opportunity for security narratives to form away from elite or professional voices. Second, decentring becomes a particular way to render the ‘ordinary’, where (in)securities are embedded in everyday life, rather than fixed to ‘ordinary’ subjects and language. Third, decentring through space rather than a pre-structured selection of individuals allows for (in)securities to emerge situationally, within any given context.

Decentring security narratives

As discussed, a benefit of vernacular security studies is its potential for conceptual emptiness to the subject of study, the context or topic (Jarvis, 2019: 118). The conceptual emptiness promised by this approach is believed to ‘spotlight the plurality of ways in which “security” is given meaning’ (Jarvis, 2019: 120). However, through the initial framing of focus groups and social media studies, researchers themselves risk ‘filling’ the subject matter. Vernacular focus groups require participants to share cultural resources or an existing, basic knowledge of certain elite-constructed discourses: terrorism, borders or Islamophobia. The logic behind vernacular focus group framing suggests an ‘inevitable hierarchy of importance’ (Jarvis, 2019: 117) – that of terrorism, citizenship or borders. This limited discursive space, therefore, places something within a certain policy framework or discourse, resulting in a potential ‘threat’ defined through ‘modulating practices’ (Huysmans, 2006: 4). For example, if ‘asylum’ is placed within a framework of ‘policing and defence’, there occurs an unavoidable link to threat (Huysmans, 2006). This positions individuals directly into a security framework constructed around predetermined discourses of (in)security and risks preventing alternative narratives to come to the fore. In turn, by focusing on traditional narratives of security, preconstructed dynamics of security are reformed. This is counter-intuitive to a vernacular agenda founded on an assumption of no ‘premeditated starting points for security research matters’ (Jarvis, 2019: 118).

I do not want to deny that these methods are suitable for a study on the vernacular. Rather, I want to suggest that the recruitment and placement of participants into a predetermined research ‘context’ prescribes certain understandings of vernacular speech (Jarvis and Lister, 2013: 163). Participants are required to contribute to this dialogue, positioned as ‘the audience’ to elite security speak (Downing, 2021: 242).

Several vernacular focus groups have tried to counteract this shortcoming in the pursuit of the common assumption underpinning these exchanges: that conversation within a group dynamic reflects the flexible and intersubjective nature of security. Rather than replicating or reproducing dominant security talk, vernacular focus groups have either combined a range of qualitative methods (Badurdeen et al., 2023) or encouraged ‘naturalistic conversational encounter[s]’ (Jackson and Hall, 2016: 295). Through tailored critical focus groups, Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams (2018) employ a ‘de-securitising ethos’, in the hope of decentring premeditated meanings associated with (in)security. Problematizing the elite discursive framing of Europe’s ‘migration crisis’, their study on the meaning of borders aims to rethink the open/closed binary, in favour of adopting ‘open-ended discussion prompts’ featuring ‘words, images, and feelings’ (Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams 2018: 392, 393). Counter-narratives emerged based on positive reactions towards migrants, such as ‘dancing, creative and visual arts, and food’ (Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams, 2018: 399). While this approach created a rich and diverse understanding of migration, framings of this type still suggest an uneasy binary balanced between ‘elite’ negative articulations and positive reflections deemed alternative.

There is, therefore, a limit to our understanding of security knowledge – who can speak security and what security means to different people – which continues to be harnessed by elite voices. Vernacular work seeking to understand how ‘lay’ or ‘ordinary’ people experience (in)security is based on the consequences of ‘security discourses, practices and technologies’, rather than the different and complex way a variety of people live their everyday lives with insecurities, but not centred on them (Jarvis, 2019: 116).

These efforts to seek ‘ordinary’ expressions of security show that the choice of vernacular method is crucial for what is reproduced as vernacular security language. In vernacular focus groups and semi-structured interviews, prominent discourses of security still emerged despite a ‘non-securitising ethos’, suggesting security itself should be decentred and not sought out in relation to prevailing security narratives. This is not to suggest that ‘ordinary’ people cannot relate to ‘elite’ narratives, but rather, it highlights an important limitation that emerges within current methodological assumptions in vernacular literature. This prompts us to reconsider how the vernacular can appear, what form it takes, and how the referent object forms vernacular narratives.

Decentring the ‘ordinary’

Vernacular studies prioritize a ‘bottom-up’, positive research agenda away from ‘elite’ voices. These choices have operationalized the ordinary in an effort to provide in-depth insights into the security articulations of ‘ordinary’ individuals.

By design, vernacular scholars often imply a distinct opposition between the ‘layperson’ and the ‘elite’, in terms of the way security is spoken about and experienced. The vernacular has come to be understood as the main language type emanating from the ‘ordinary’ citizen, becoming everything besides the elite, raising the question of how one can methodologically limit it. Vernacular researchers have ‘filled’ the category of ‘ordinary’ with little analytical exploration, reconstituting the ordinary as a preselected group represented as non-elites. In rendering the ‘ordinary’, there has been a tendency to seek participants away from security apparatus and employ individuals from a variety of geographical sites, age groups, genders, socio-economic backgrounds, occupations, ethnicities and faiths, for the purpose of ‘diversity’ (Atakav et al., 2020; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016: 46). These methodological choices depict an important nexus between the ‘ordinary’ and the vernacular, and propose an expectation that representation of social dynamics affects security talk. This suggests that only certain people have access to vernacular security language, which opens important ethical and methodological questions about constituting the ‘ordinary’ through diversity. The choices made in samplings of this type show there has been a tendency to understand how individuals speak security based on who they are, or ‘have been socialised to be’, overlooking how people are ‘positioned in interaction with various contexts’ (Cameron, 1995: 41).

The ‘ordinary’, in other words, has been operationalized as a separate realm devoid of constitutive power, entrenching further an ‘elite’/‘ordinary’ separation. If we accept that the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ people are ‘infused with exceptionalist logics’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 21), each cannot be thought of as independent from security practice. Vernacular enquiries, therefore, risk separating the two realms as fundamentally opposing, fixed analytical entities.

Conceptually, the vernacular can be an inclusive concept, beginning with the ‘diverse experiences and worldviews of people – rather than with (those seen to be) the disposed, disenfranchised, or marginalized’ (Jarvis, 2019: 117). Sketching out ‘potentially promising avenues of inquiry’, Jarvis (2019: 120) queries whether the current ‘starting assumption’ – drawing on the ‘local’ or ‘ordinary’ – not only incorporates potential bias, but whether these starting points are even applicable. Identity categories blur as people oscillate between, for example, being private citizens and social care workers, while remaining a military reserve (Hart, 2022). Is it not possible that ‘authoritative actors and their employees’ develop their own vernacular (Jarvis, 2019: 120) or foster overlapping vernaculars? This approach, therefore, not only reinforces this chasm between ‘ordinary’ and ‘elite’, but denies any engagement in the informal lives of security personnel. Put differently, in fixing people to identities or ‘realms’, it removes any potential to engage in multiple vernaculars, which intertwine, fracture or emerge simultaneously in daily living.

By ‘refusing to prioritize particular populations by virtue of their identity or socio-political position’, vernacular focus groups imply that they avoid the ‘problematic binaries . . . between rich and poor, north or south, insecure or secure’ (Jarvis, 2019: 107, 118). While ‘identity claims’ made by individuals themselves are assumed within a vernacular study (Löfflmann and Vaughan-Williams, 2018: 383), this approach overlooks the complexities of identity construction. In doing so, vernacular expressions are understood in particular ways: fixed expressions attached to unchanging referent objects. Vernacular security studies requires a methodological rethinking when focus groups and interviews are constructed around ‘identity claims’.

Taking inspiration from the anthropological work of Tobias Kelly (2008), I operationalize the vernacular as ‘ordinary living’ within a situated ethnography. Kelly (2008: 353) pushes the concept of the ordinary to include ‘living an ordinary life’: reproducing a sense of the ordinary through the ‘practical obligations of kinship’. Therefore, rather than rooted in a person’s status, the ordinary is embedded in the practice of daily activities: going to work, buying food, or celebrating family occasions such as weddings – ‘the outward appearance . . . of making their living’ (Kelly, 2008: 359). This approach opens the possibility to recognize how (in)security is ‘understood, experienced and grappled with’ everyday (Kelly, 2008: 353). Therefore, I theorize the ordinary as taking part in the banal activities of life – in living. A situated study takes living seriously, endeavouring to decentre security and to reveal how vernacular insecurities are embedded in lived experiences, rather than the everyday being driven by security itself.

This approach tackles how the exceptional manifests in ordinary life, showing that experiences of (in)security are not inherently attached to security knowledge produced by elite actors. Rather, when violence, insecurity or threat do occur, they appear not in some independent exceptional realm, but in living an ordinary life, becoming absorbed into the ‘ordinary’ and anchored by the everyday (Das, 2006: 7). Just like feminist work, the exceptional takes place in everyday activities (Enloe, 2011). However, my approach also enables ordinary living to take place against the threat of extraordinariness. For instance, displacement and forced migration are often exceptionalized due to the security apparatus that shapes lives. However, as the final section depicts, the everyday dynamics of displacement and (re)settlement often revolve around banal activities where feelings of (in)security and the consequences of refugee/security/humanitarian policy manifest in daily life. There is rarely a ‘suspension of the everyday’ (Kelly, 2008: 359). Rather ‘ordinary living’ becomes ordinary through repeated exercises, which continue to take place against a backdrop of instability. Yet it is precisely this continuity that opens the possibilities to re-examine the exceptional (Das, 2006), where emergency or violence is ‘embedded in people’s day-to-day activities’ (Badurdeen et al., 2023: 2; Kurylo, 2022).

Centring ‘attempts to live what passes for “ordinary lives”’ incorporates, not only the ‘often very different notions of “ordinary life”’, but facilitates a re-examination of the ordinary in relation to the insecure or exceptional: the ‘movement between the “is” and the “ought”’ (Kelly, 2008: 353–358). In short, this framing collapses the distinction between the ‘ordinary’ and ‘exceptional’, to start with context and perceive only that which people live, acknowledging the ‘ordinary’ as a fluid category. While ordinary life in practice can change between individuals, all share a commonality: the driving force behind their ordinary is the possibilities of living, despite violent conditions or the possible absence of choice.

Therefore, I take vernacular expressions as bound to space rather than a selection of subjects. Rather than assume what ‘types’ of citizens articulate security based on identity fillers, this approach decentres the notion of the ‘ordinary’ subject by means of opening up the category of the ordinary to include living in a space.

Decentring through space

To decentre security through space is to allow a variety of (in)securities to emerge in different contexts, where, fundamentally, these contexts are taken seriously. This acknowledges the vernacular as something unfixed and subject to change.

Another limitation of vernacular security studies, indeed, is that they place participants into a set context – a physical or discursive space designed and chosen for the purpose of exploring vernacular speech. Doing so risks removing this speech from a wider sociopolitical context, seemingly reifying the vernacular as a fixed entity. Put differently, if we are to take seriously Bubandt’s suggestion of ‘local histories’ and the importance of an (in)security that is both time- and space-bound, we must consider whether communications of living (in)securities would change within different contexts. Luckham (2017: 114, 115) writes:

[B]y itself vernacular understanding is not enough. Whilst the dramas of insecurity and violence play out at grass roots, they are also shaped by hierarchies of power, by political marketplaces and by economic transactions extending far beyond the local level. However, there is a wide gap in our understanding of how local, national and global insecurities interconnect.

While not undermining the idea of listening to marginalized individuals and groups, Luckham’s call echoes that of other critical security agendas employing ethnographic methods (Mc Cluskey, 2019; Nyman, 2021), highlighting the need to incorporate the constantly shifting, developing and unstable experiences of living that unfold in sociopolitical contexts, integrating local histories and their relationship to wider state and global narratives within space.

Therefore, decentring through space investigates not just what people say, but how, where and why articulations and expressions emerge in a given context. This acknowledges that people cannot be consistent in their talk (Jackson and Hall, 2016), and draws out the wider sociopolitical power dynamics at play within any given space. Vernacular literature acknowledges (in)security as ‘particular and contested’ in different times and spaces (Lind and Luckham, 2017: 95), yet methodologically, the choices made in vernacular focus groups, digital spaces or interviews have not always provided room for this scope. Understanding (in)securities as time-, space- and person-bound requires a methodology that responds to fluctuating everyday contexts and their effects on how people respond, move, make choices and articulate in relation to a specific space. It requires security to be studied as messy, non-verbal, felt and lived.

A vernacular study therefore needs to be approached from within the context in which insecurities are produced, enacted or emerge, taking seriously the shifting dynamics unfolding in everyday contexts. In giving primacy to ordinary living in spaces where insecurity emerges, this agenda pursues the logic that ‘security neither means nor does the same thing in different contexts’ – incorporating the diversity of situated (in)securities within everyday life (Jarvis, 2019: 116). It argues that if insecurities are highly situated, they too should be studied in situ. It is this fluidity of vernacular security studies that has the potential to unlock multiple insecurities in different contexts to portray how insecurity manifests and is lived.

Drawing on these three moves, the next section offers an example of how the vernacular appears within a politics of living (in)security framework. Working through these shifts, I incorporate the study of spaces where living (in)security occurs, thinking through how an expanding, fluctuating and unfixed vernacular emerges as a form of communication. I reconceptualize the vernacular as context-, topic- and participant-dependant – something that people move within.

Towards a politics of living (in)security

Over the course of eight months, I conducted vernacular-led ethnographic research in the rural refugee-host village of Zaatari, adjacent to the extensive humanitarian infrastructure of Zaatari camp, in northern Jordan. The choice to study a village rather than a camp, and a variety of residents as opposed to refugees as distinct from locals, is a deliberate methodological choice which seeks to decentre both the subject of security and security itself. The link between space and (in)security is not forced by the researcher but rather the subject connects their own experiences of security. In other words, this is not the researcher’s space or their selection of potential insecurities; it is the space of the subject and goes some way to avoiding much of the pre-structuring of traditional vernacular studies.

These choices were often ethical or practical decisions made in relation to studying emerging (in)securities in the ordinary lives of those affected by displacement. I did not seek out (in)security, but rather watched and participated in living. This generated questions around (im)mobility, class, gender and spatial management. Within the systems of power I was interrogating, as a white, middle-class researcher based at a university in the Global North, I had vastly different experiences, which had an effect on how interlocutors perceived me and how I perceived the everyday. This not only highlights the disparity between different vernacular experiences, but working with refugees or groups who experience threat as part of their ordinary lives drives an additional concern for the ‘ethical and political implications’: to observe how a ‘sense of the ordinary’ is created despite this context (Kelly, 2008: 352, 353). This was an ongoing process of being open with myself about research design and implementation, and my interlocutors and friends, opening discussions about the research process, design and analysis.

In Zaatari Village, many self-settled Syrians did not classify themselves, or circumscribe their position as refugees because of alternative histories and prewar cross-border social relations. Some residents disregarded national identity markers such as Syrian or Jordanian, prioritizing instead their membership of the Bani Khalid tribe. Identity categories are complex and this approach allows for conflicting conceptualizations and removes pre-given assumptions of social categories. Rejecting the notion of a fixed referent object, weaving in a multiplicity of voices emergent in a space, is a springboard to start a critical enquiry into vernacular security, (re)introducing the possibility of resistance to dominant, power-laden understandings of who gets to speak and know (in)security.

Mohammad, ² a municipal employee, has worked to support the resource-strained community for over 20 years, and oscillates between multiple vernaculars when in the office, at home or in the community. These various vernaculars cannot be neatly separated from one realm to another. Rather they shift and merge, contingent on location, conversation topic or audience. I first met Mohammad in his office, where he was surrounded by junior staff eager to make a good impression. We discussed the changes in the village since his childhood, his sentences considered and hand gestures purposeful as he spoke about budget cuts, border violence and potholed roads. This demeanour softened when it was just the two of us, as we walked to his car where a child’s car seat, biscuit wrappers and juice boxes adorned the back seats. This triggered a wide smile and our conversation changed as he recounted stories of his youngest, who had recently started nursery. Together we drove east and pulled up on the side of the road, opposite a set of white arches informing us we had reached Zaatari Camp Department. After only a couple of minutes Mohammad was eager to move on, seemingly nervous of the three men dressed in police uniforms under the corrugated metal awning.

My conversations with Mohammad frequently dipped in and out of various linguistic and embodied vernaculars, reflecting an intersubjective world of communicative practice dependent on overlapping identities and contexts. Rather than represent a stark binary between elite/ordinary, Mohammad’s reaction shows that living in the ordinary is to oscillate between the ordinary and extraordinary, bringing out the everyday through its recognition of the extraordinary as synonymous with all life (Das, 2006). During our multiple interviews, traditional ideas of insecurity in the community arose, from a lack of fresh water to overcrowding in clinics and schools. Personalizing these anxieties, he would relate them back to his own family; his daughter had diabetes and had to travel to Amman for healthcare check-ups because the village did not have capacity. This only increased as I began to meet various relatives. On several occasions, Mohammad would send video clips documenting his drive to work and I travelled virtually with him over roundabouts and freshly paved roads. As we toured, he would quietly sing along to the radio or point to derelict buildings that lay half-built, and the sparse landscape, embroidered with shrubs, rubble and small patches of green, which gave way to residential houses. He showed the wedding halls and car wash stations, and he chatted about local businesses and how they grew as a result of Syrians. This visual, virtual introduction to Zaatari was the catalyst that allowed me to explore how people move around the village, where people went, and how days were filled.

While driving in his car, a variety of alternative insecurities emerged in situ, different from those discussed in interviews or in his office. Steering the car down a clear, empty road, we intermittently pass single-storey homes made from white breeze blocks. He stops at a crossroads, now at the eastern side of the village. Two dogs run past the front of the vehicle and remind Mohammad of another problem the municipality faces: stray dogs and their propensity to attack young children. Unable to take an accurate measure of how many dogs roam the village streets, he thanks God that no child has been attacked recently, as people take extra care nowadays. When I asked him about this clip a few days later, he could not remember this scene. These insecurities were triggered by the car and the ordinary act of driving, as he was reminded of these problems when physically moving through the village.

On numerous occasions while driving with interlocutors, gestures were triggered by people on the street – cyclists who would swerve their bikes across the wide roads or pedestrians who would walk out into the road without checking for cars. At other times, the drives evoked offhand comments about the fluctuating landscape, prompted by construction lorries, waste piles or makeshift tented settlements at the side of the road. These were seldom part of the ongoing conversation, but one- or two-word comments in response to scenes on the streets – from queues outside shops to vehicles going to and from the formal refugee camp filled with day labourers. On one such occasion, Umm Ahmad and I were being driven by her son Karim to the shop. I was staying with the family for the week and she wanted to make pizza for the day’s lunch. In Karim’s beat-up saloon, I looked out towards the windscreen, when three boys, perhaps only teenagers, darted in front the of the car on their bikes.

. . . their brains! [Moving his hand up to the windscreen, pointing to the Syrian boys on bikes.] I am not friends with Syrians. They are stupid. (Interview 1)

Emotions or expressions of insecurity are not only verbally narrated but manifest as physical symptoms – shaking or twitching – to become an all-encompassing embodiment like an ‘outer “layer of skin”’ (Ochs, 2012: 76). Reacting to these near collisions by rubbing a hand on their forehead, swearing through hand signals or beeping the horn was a communicative tool – a subconscious, contextual reaction that justified annoyance at their neighbours. Enacting stereotypes and discriminatory comments about Syrians largely occurred in the car, after the immediate hand signals and when reminded of this group. Travelling together in this space provided an opportunity to follow-up on these ideas in context, provoking feelings that had not been apparent in the formal spaces of offices or restaurants, nor would they be appropriate conversation in the family home. Previously, I had spoken with Karim about his experience growing up in the village against the backdrop of Syrian displacement. He had shrugged and been quite matter-of-fact about the situation. Now driving, with Syrians physically in front of the car, his instinct towards this group could not be explained through words alone. There was an impulse to criticize the young boys, where views had been internalized as deeply held personal feelings.

A politics of living concentrates on the contextual conditions and possibilities of living which constitute or construct a political individual or community, and draws out the ‘noninstitutionalized, everyday forms of political life: small scale efforts at making claims and seeking to make a change in the conditions of one’s existence’ (Feldman, 2012: 157–158). It is not a unified paradigm, but rather engages multiple interpretations of sociopolitical governance, its related power dynamics and the co-constitution of decision making in living. I engage in a politics of living as a ‘discursive framework’, which creates ‘an opportunity for multiple perspectives, demands, and values to coexist . . . [while] it illuminates and structures a range of contestations over precisely these questions’ (Feldman, 2012: 169). This vernacular-led agenda takes account of the ways in which ‘constantly interpenetrating political forms of management of threat and (un)certainly’ conjure, imagine and live security (Bubandt, 2005: 277).

Pivoting on the intersections of movement, choice and space – each contingent on one another – this triad draws out the constitutive power of living in a specific space, emphasizing the messy relations that produce space. This approach opens the category of space for analysis on the politics and power dynamics of governance, (in)security, and the stories that shape ‘a sense of self’ (Feldman, 2012: 165). If we accept the vernacular as contextually bound, and we recognize this as being emergent in situ, we need to analyse what space is, means and does socially and politically. Illustrating the centrality of space for understanding how the ‘ordinary’ emerges, the vernacular becomes something that people move within.

Space and the vernacular

In giving primacy to a particular site, such as a refugee-host community, (in)securities are shown to manifest in a range of spaces, during different activities, which effect individuals differently. This shift investigates how, why and where the vernacular transpires and changes in a specific space, opening the possibility for a vernacular study to emerge from within the context in which insecurities are produced, enacted or developed. Space, as a conceptual tool, analytical category, or lens from which to study living (in)security, therefore becomes crucial, because it captures the ways a space can trigger verbal and non-verbal expressions and shape responses to insecurity. Vernacular researchers can ask: How do different understandings of space affect those entangled with the site? How is living shaped by, and shaping of, space? And when a space becomes the empirical site, how does this challenge an understanding of vernacular (in)security? When space, location and infrastructure are conceptualized and understood differently by a number of actors, various effects can occur. Those who occupy, control, live or work in a space – and how this is associated with (perceived) belonging or identity – interplays and intertwines with (in)securities, and often emerges organically in living. Decentring security, therefore, provides an opportunity to incorporate the sociopolitical context and the contextual non-verbal gestures and movements, bridging the relationship between security and space.

Abdulrahman is a refugee camp guard who gained the low-wage but stable employment through a friend after months of precarious jobs. He has extended family inside the walls he guards – grandparents who were once friends – and lives among relatives in Zaatari Village. Those living on both sides of the barbed wire fence shop, commute, pray and socialize in many of the same spaces. His close friend inside the camp must undertake illegal work in order to make a wage and is forced to leave the camp without the correct paperwork. Space is experienced differently by different people, and these experiences are contingent on politics, time, financial position, transport and location.

Abdulrahman’s story reinforces how individuals oscillate between vernaculars that are not tied to certain domains, but travel through living. A politics of living framework is an exercise to understand how this vernacular is generated and incorporates the historically, socially constructed, gendered and classed dimensions of security which are fundamental to experiences of living as space- and security-making practices. It takes space as shaped not only by policy – local, national or international – but through history, forms of legitimacy, belonging, refugeeness and social experiences attached to memory and practices of living; to see space not as static, but living through choice and movement, with possible futures (Massey, 2005).

In the rural, conservative village of Zaatari, on the whole, women remained in the home – whether their own or their relatives’ – while men embodied practices of movement for economic and social reasons. In general, cars remained the intimate spaces of men and exposed personal details through their choice of music, a CD wedged inside the car door, or the steering wheel cover or upholstery. Ownership of any car in the village represents a form of privilege and wealth. The car reifies gender and class dynamics and national identity markers, as only Jordanians are able to obtain a licence and legally drive in Jordan. However, despite being able to legally possess a licence, many Jordanians are unable to afford the running costs of a vehicle. The act of driving, therefore, exposes a strong dichotomization between Syrians and Jordanians, not seen with such prominence in other everyday spaces. This binary manifests publicly and in overtly visible ways as wealthier Jordanians drive past walking Syrians.

Hence, the car and its driver became not only a symbol of social class, but a signifier implicated in ‘the production of national identities’ (Sheller, 2004: 18). In Zaatari, the car, unlike the home or other consumer purchases, is only afforded to Jordanians belonging to a certain social class, and therefore represents a form of collective identity. The capacity to drive has important implications for economic opportunity, as Jordanians are able to drive in private cars to different cities to find work, or more remote locations for agricultural labour. Those who do not drive in an area where car travel is possible are ‘often cut off from cheaper out-of-town shopping, from many public facilities accessible only by car, and from a host of job opportunities in urban fringes’ (Sheller and Urry, 2000: 749). Zaatari Village is a rural settlement with one high street possessing only a handful of shops. To not have access to a car in this space is to involuntarily limit one’s possibilities of movement, choice of goods or access to opportunity. Together these affect an individual’s ability to live securely. This illustration depicts the nuance and alternative perspectives that arise when studying a spatial entity, where ordinary experiences, routines and spaces incorporated into a study of living shape feelings of security.

Many of the Syrian women I met in Zaatari Village did not actively engage in their refugeeness, Rather, it was their homemaking ability and shared daily experiences with other residents that fostered a sense of belonging and security. It is a ‘life lived in common’ (Khalili, 2016: 592) emerging from the home that became the emotional pulse of life in displacement. Put differently, while the village has experienced immense physical change over the past decade – new roads, pharmacies, food stores and car washes – as a result of Syrian migration, the women in southern Zaatari are largely excluded from this arena, falling physically and financially outside of this micro-economy, as an onlooker, visitor or consumer. The women and their routines are based around the home, family and friends – the intimate circles occupied daily, which have become their source of security. Thinking outside of this framework is rarely relevant or part of their everyday conversations. They do not seek comfort from the outside world, rather their perspectives draw inwards as they largely try to recreate their lived routines from Syria. The feelings of belonging are thus not associated with securing a ‘relatively stable self-identity’ attached to particular referent objects (Jarvis, 2019: 114). Nor do they emphasize an ‘ontologically secure individual’ as operating in a ‘cocoon that protects and filters out dangers to the self in everyday life (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 15). Rather, while there remains some level of continuity in routine or trust in relations (Croft, 2012), security here is expressed as sharing commonalities with those around them to feel secure: living a life in common.

Analytically, starting from ordinary living in space moves away from pursuing direct articulations of (in)security, rejecting the view that the everyday is driven by (in)security. This reorients how we may see or know security. This approach takes into account the mess of everyday life, acknowledging that people are made up of multiple experiences from different places, people, contexts, politics and media, that influence them in numerous and diverse ways (Squire, 2013). The vernacular thus evolves from something rooted in language – a linguistic biographical map of an individual and created through social interaction – to a form of communication that is person-, time- and space-bound.

Conclusion

This article has offered a sustained methodological critique of the emphasis on language, security narratives and subjects within vernacular security research. By arguing for a grounded study that decentres security, I demonstrate that vernacular (in)securities emerge as something living in context. Vernacular security studies holds the potential to unsettle many elements in security studies. A vernacular approach opens an opportunity to listen to how people ‘construct and describe experiences of security’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 22) and reorients security speak and knowledge away from elites towards a focus on ‘citizens in the context of daily life’ (Jarvis, 2019: 109). Vernacular scholarship shows a diverse and complex array of understandings of (in)security emanating from fixed, politically determined categories and discourses, depicting how vernacular narratives both disrupt and reproduce ‘elite’ logics.

Identifying these key limitations, this article argues for a revised vernacular approach to the study of (in)security, to include a grounded study decentring security itself in favour of focusing on the practices of living and communicative strategies in a specific space. I develop two key moves. First, I critically engage how the literature on the vernacular makes a clear analytical distinction between elite – voices and production of knowledge – and ordinary – the people and their narratives (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens, 2016). Investigating what the vernacular actually is, I consider this an unfixed, messy entity and something all people can engage in. I do this not to remove the hierarchies of power or systems of repression, but to shift the focus towards a space, removing the assertion of ‘realms’ or vertical relations, in favour of seeing how (in)security is enacted and entangled in context (Guillaume and Huysmans, 2018: 283). Second, I reorient a vernacular enquiry from vernacular language of security towards a politics of living (in)security. This is an ethnographically led methodological shift that incorporates a grounded study of a space, to demonstrate how (in)security is lived, rather than a static entity. This shift recognizes (in)securities as time-, space- and person-bound, to incorporate how people respond, move, encounter and act in fluctuating everyday contexts. This opens the possibility for a vernacular study to emerge from within the context in which insecurities are produced, enacted or developed.

A politics of living (in)security draws on vernacular security studies’ contributions to security studies but also takes it further. It invites an analysis of the political components that follow a diverse range of people in their everyday lives and into the spaces where they reside, move, work and socialize. A politics of living (in)security incorporates structural discriminations while giving primacy to the lives lived and the agency within life. This vernacular approach allows researchers to remove predetermined identity categories attached to referent objects, to consider all people within a space as having access to the vernacular. This reveals how individuals have multiple vernaculars which transpire in relation to particular settings and activities. Acknowledging the vernacular in such terms unlocks the potential for a multiplicity of (in)securities to transpire that overlap and manifest differently for different people, depicting the textures of complex social worlds. Furthermore, this approach pushes the vernacular to include not just linguistic expressions, but other communicative strategies that create an ordinary life. This reconceptualization of the vernacular paves the way for a grounded study of living (in)security which pivots on the intersections of movement, choice and space. Together they maintain and construct the vernacular, showing this type of communication as context-specific, opening an opportunity to understand the connections between space and (in)security.