Sounds of (In)Security: Listening Otherwise to Everyday Governance

Abstract This article develops an acoustic approach to (in)security by examining how sound performs relational, affective, and spatial labor in everyday life. Drawing on auto-ethnographic material from Spain's 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, it traces how mundane sonic encounters—from megaphones and hovering drones to nature, neighborly conversations, and coughs—reconfigure space, perception, and bodily orientation. Rather than treating sound as symbolic or representational, the article theorizes acoustic ontology as a material and affective force through which security becomes ambient, intimate, and infrastructural. Methodologically, it introduces acoustic auto-ethnography as a listening practice that resists codification, attending instead to resonance, atmosphere, and sensory governance. In doing so, the article contributes to international relations and critical security studies by expanding sensory methodologies, unsettling representational logics, and foregrounding sound as a constitutive dimension of (in)securities.