Strategies of Critique in Vernacular Security Discourse

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in “vernacular security” research, with its emphasis on non-elite discourse on security. Such discourse is often positioned as a “bottom-up” alternative to more traditional forms of security knowledge, with potential to pluralize, and potentially disrupt, hegemonic ways of thinking and doing security. By engaging with non-elite articulations, therefore, vernacular security scholarship is attributed a critical standing shared with other efforts to center unexceptional experiences and expressions of security. In this article, I argue that the critical purchase of vernacular security discourse remains under-theorized, and address this through an original typology of four forms of critique found in below-the-line commentary on the politics of extremism: Objectivist, (De)constructivist, Normative, and Articulations of alternativity. The typology demonstrates the heterogeneity of critical anchors, gestures, and targets within vernacular discourse on (in)security, as well as the mobilization of different critical strategies therein. This plurality—and the absence of any necessary normative orientation within vernacular security speak—suggests, I argue, that scholarship on such discourse may sit more comfortably within broader, non-prescriptive, orientations to critical security studies than within narrow understandings organized around notions of disruption, emancipation, or progress.