Feminist vernacular security expertise and its aftermath: A dialogue during war

Abstract The article analyzes the emergence of an epistemic community of local feminist experts on disarmament. Drawing on a five-year action-oriented ethnography, it documents the learning process initiated by Life Without Guns, a joint Jewish-Palestinian feminist group of activists in Israel. The ethnographic materials demonstrate how feminist grassroots activists, defined as non-traditional security actors, use transnational vernaculars to position themselves as experts and practitioners in contested national security debates. It traces how this community established its expertise and diversified over time in terms of data, scope, language, and issues, as well as its development into a space of solidarity in which Palestinian and Jewish women in Israel can engage jointly with security-related issues. Writing amidst war, the authors present excerpts from a recorded dialogue (February 2024) on the learning community’s aftermath. As such, the article is an act of recognition, translation, and mediation of endangered knowledge that is silenced and devalued. Reflecting on the paradox inherent in the concept of ‘vernacular experts,’ the authors draw on their dual positionality as Jewish scholar-activists to critically assess the transformative potential of vernacular security expertise, as they navigate the unstable interface between institutional knowledge and political silencing.