Towards a Vernacular Theory of (De)securitisation: Xinjiang Cotton, Sanitary Pads and Gendered Resistance

Securitisation theory has been highly influential in explaining how political actors frame certain issues, identities, or practices as existential threats that justify extraordinary measures beyond the realm of ordinary politics. However, the Copenhagen School’s model rests on a set of liberal democratic assumptions—particularly the existence of a functioning public sphere, institutional contestation, and a return to “normal politics”—that limit its applicability beyond liberal contexts. This paper argues that the theory does not adequately account for how securitisation and desecuritisation operate in authoritarian, hybrid, or illiberal settings, where dissent is repressed, deliberation curtailed, and meaning-making tightly controlled. By focusing predominantly on elite speech acts and formal institutional arenas, securitisation theory has overlooked everyday, subaltern, and culturally embedded practices of contestation. In response, this paper proposes a vernacular model of desecuritisation, one that foregrounds informal, affective, and iterative processes through which securitised meanings are reinterpreted and undermined from below. While grounded in the dynamics of authoritarian governance, this model also offers insights into contemporary democratic contexts where the erosion of deliberative space renders the Copenhagen model increasingly inadequate. This theoretical intervention expands the conceptual scope of (de)securitisation theory and makes it more attuned to the complex, plural, and uneven terrains of global security politics.