Into the Margins of Security

Daniel Goldstein's (2010) “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security” was the starting point for the vitalization and growth of an entire research area in anthropology. His paradigmatic article diagnosed that the analysis of security as a “truly global reality played out in local contexts . . . has not benefited from sustained anthropological attention and that insights drawn from ethnographic research have not been systematically brought to bear on the theorization of security” (Goldstein 2010: 488). While security “lies at the heart of the anthropological discipline as a whole,” it has long been just an “implicit component of the anthropological project” (Holbrad and Pedersen 2013: 3–4). After Goldstein's call, the anthropology of security was systematically surveyed, expanded, and repositioned. A whole series of publications (see later in this article) set out to meet Goldstein's claim of a “critical, comparative ethnography of security [that] can explore the multiple ways in which security is configured and deployed” (Goldstein 2010: 492) and concepts, approaches, and methods were discussed beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Despite the diversity and depth of this research, we argue that two of Goldstein's demands have still not been sufficiently addressed: Firstly, security continues for the most part to be framed “as safety from external attack or internal destabilization and freedom from fear of terrorism or violence” (Goldstein 2010: 491). Secondly, an approach to security based on “studying up” (Nader 1972) and examining the security strategies of the powerful remains dominant in the anthropology of security, which at the same time “marginalizes subordinated groups and alternative voices, including indigenous people, women and the poor” (Goldstein 2010: 492). While anthropological research included non-state security actors such as vigilantes and revolutionary groups (Hagberg 2018; Ivasiuc 2015; Porter 2020), and addressed topics beyond classical security issues, such as bodies, scapes, or aesthetics (Maguire et al. 2018; Maguire and Low 2019; Ghertner et al. 2020), the prevailing concept of security as a top-down, hegemonic project has rarely been challenged. The vision that anthropology “can transform the way security itself is conceptualized” (Goldstein 2010: 499) has so far met with little response. But why is security predominantly associated with relatively powerful actors—with state-like entities that somehow claim sovereignty? Why is it rarely associated with comparatively powerless, subaltern, marginalized individuals and groups? Why are actions and strategies that enforce concrete interests and orders primarily perceived as security practices and not ordinary, casual, non-public strategies, such as daily subsistence strategies, care activities, relation- or kin-making? Why do most security definitions and concepts work with a liberal image of human individuals as the object of security needs and strategies and not with communities, more-than-human collectives, or post-human entities?

We do not claim that anthropological studies have completely missed taking marginalized actors into account (e.g., Goldstein 2012; Grant 2015; Harris and van der Veen 2015). Marginalized actors are invoked, for example, when it comes to criticizing dominant security discourses (on securitization, see Abboud et al. 2018; Bertrand 2018) or studying how these actors appropriate hegemonic security strategies and shift the marginality of their position in the process (on vigilantism, see Ivasiuc 2015; Kirsch and Gratz 2010). What anthropological security studies have failed to do, however, is to take the agency of marginalized actors seriously and to conceptualize their particular security ideas and practices. Interestingly, neighboring disciplines such as critical criminology and some strands of international relations have developed approaches we would like to draw upon (Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017; Jarvis 2019; Jarvis and Lister 2013; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). They focus on “everyday” and “vernacularized” forms of security, which we believe offer points of departure that, combined with the fine-grained ethnographic analysis anthropology has to offer, allow for the conceptual development of a critical anthropology of security.

The aim of this Special Issue is to use ethnographic research to rethink concepts of the “everyday” and the “vernacular” by employing a perspective on and from the margins: We aim to ethnographically conceptualize the security practices of ordinary people, subaltern groups, people in marginalized positions, such as women, migrants, prison inmates, Indigenous people, and peasants. Up to now, anthropological discussions of the agency of marginalized actors in the wider field of security are scattered and fragmentary. This Special Issue sets out to systematize and conceptualize their security ideas and practices with a particular focus on following questions: How do relatively powerless groups speak and act in relation to security? What emic terminologies and strategies do these actors use to express and enact their security needs and objects? Who and what do they count as their community in need of security? What strategies and actions are evidence of “subaltern security conceptions and practices”? To this end, we will first discuss the possibility of conceptualizing the anthropology of security by looking at and from the margins. Next, we provide a brief overview of the field of security anthropology to guide the direction we want to take with this Special Issue. Finally, we illustrate with the contributions in this issue what conceptualizing security dangers, practices, and ideas from the margins entails.

Anthropology and the Margins

What do we mean by the margins and marginalized actors and practices? What perspectives can be developed from focusing on the margins? And what could the anthropology of security gain from it? Studying cultural phenomena and social processes from the margins builds on a specific tradition in anthropology (Auyero et al. 2015; Axel 2002; Bošković 2008; Das and Poole 2004; Herzfeld 1989; Johnston 1995; Kleinman 1997; Lamphere 2004; McKinson 2022; Scheele 2021; Tsing 1993, 1994). Yet, the term is used quite differently, for example to locate anthropologists and their research fields within the discipline or to position anthropology within the field of academic disciplines. Or margins are understood as both socio-spatial and conceptual sites. Despite these differences all authors emphasize the special epistemological potential of viewing socio-cultural phenomena at and from the margins.

The relationship between anthropology and marginality goes back to the beginnings of the discipline, which saw anthropologists working in places neglected by other disciplines often located in colonial contexts (McKinson 2022: 3). In addition to pointing out that anthropology has itself merely a marginal voice in science and society (Das and Poole 2004: 4), publications that focus on the role of marginality in anthropology address research fields at the margins of other sciences, such as medicine (Kleinman 1997) or history (Axel 2002), the historically evolved marginal position of non-male and non-white scholars in anthropology itself (Harrison 1997; Lamphere 2004; Lutz 1990), as well as the marginalization of regional and national anthropological traditions outside the so-called four great North Atlantic traditions (Bošković 2008). Features emerging from these “disciplinary” self-reflections are echoed in works that conceptualize margins as empirical and/or conceptual starting points for ethnographic research and insights. They assume that being at the margin is not an essential condition, but—as Anna Tsing argues—the result of socio-cultural and power-political processes of marginalization, “in which people are marginalized as their perspectives are cast to the side or excluded” (Tsing 1994: 5). Although the agents or authors of processes of marginalization can be named, a margin is neither a binary nor a discrete, sharply differentiated opposition, but instead comprises closely intertwined relationships that run correlatively through the marginalized and the marginalizing.¹ This means that margins characterized by exclusion and oppression can also become sites with the creative and emancipatory potential to enact change and transformation—and in our case alternative security concepts and practices (Bošković 2008; Kleinman 1997; Lamphere 2004, McKinson 2022).

Both Tsing (1993, 1994) and Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004) distinguish between margins as socio-spatial and as conceptual sites, albeit they are closely related. At socio-spatial margins, processes of marginalization are visible as concrete empirical phenomena—they are the “spatial and social margins that so often constitute the terrain of ethnographic fieldwork” (Das and Poole 2004: 6). Although territorially locatable, margins do not follow a binary logic of center and periphery. Marginalization in Tsing's (1994) sense can even occur in the midst of political centers, as Das and Poole (2004) and also Judith Scheele (2021) illustrate in relation to the “state.”

As empirically visible results of marginalization, these margins do not express essentialized states or territorial locations, but dynamic and therefore changing, relational positions. This distinction is important in order to avoid the trap of two simplifications: firstly, understanding margins as the binary opposition of whoever or whatever marginalizes, given that these are often a constitutive part of it. Although, for example, people may be marginalized by state policies and practices, the state margins at which their marginalization becomes visible does not lie “so much outside the state, but rather, like rivers, run through its body” (Das and Poole 2004: 13). The second simplification is to conceptualize margins as homogeneous, monolithic and self-contained. Margins do not constitute an essentialized and homogenized place or category of individuals, but positions and people characterized by heterogeneity, their own asymmetries of power, and diverging multiple external relations (Das and Poole 2004: 20; Tsing 1994: 9). To paraphrase Tsing (1994: 17), this calls for a finer, more contradictory specification of marginalized and marginalizing actors and practices, of the actions and discourses of exclusion/inclusion and the struggles surrounding them. Interestingly, the ambivalent forms of marginalization Tsing identifies for her case also seem relevant to the security contexts discussed in this Special Issue. These include “forms of female marginality” as in the articles by Catherine Whittaker and Eveline Dürr and Catarina Frois, “borders as particular kinds of margins” as in the contributions by Daniela Triml-Chifflard and Whittaker and Dürr, and “marginality in relation to particular political cultures and/or socio-economic inequalities” as in Thomas Kirsch and Philipp Naucke's articles. The remarkable thing about margins, apart from their heterogeneity, contradictoriness, and entanglement, is the creative potential attributed to them: “These spaces of exception are also those in which the creativity of the margins becomes visible, as alternative forms of economic and political action are instituted” (Das and Poole 2004: 19). Or as Tsing puts it, “marginality is a source of both constraint and creativity” (1993: 18).

This creative potential leads us to margins as a conceptual site. Although Das and Poole and others use the term conceptual margins, it is Tsing who is most articulate about it. She uses the term to indicate “an analytical placement that makes evident both the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group's existence. Margins [. . .] are sites from which we see the instability of social categories” (Tsing 1994: 279). Conceptual and socio-spacial margins are not strictly separated. In fact, it is the features of socio-spatial margins previously described that give way to the edges of discursive and conceptual stability, where contradictory discourses intersect and different ways of meaning-making converge. This is precisely where there is an opportunity to evolve, transform, or develop alternatives to the very concepts in which we think about the world (Kleinman 1997: 5), or in the case of this Special Issue, about security. While Tsing goes so far as to postulate that “marginality becomes key to reformulating cultural theory” (1993: 13), our goal is to offer some conceptual inspiration to the anthropology of security. To this end, we take these margins as starting points for reflection on the security concepts, ideas, and practices of marginalized actors and subaltern groups. Here we understand margins as socio-spatial sites that are heterogeneous, relational, and entangled, where the product of the socio-cultural and power-political process of marginalization can be experienced, and as conceptual sites where the solidity of concepts and categories disrupt and the creative potential for transformation emerges. We argue that this also holds true for classic conceptions of security.

Anthropology of Security

This section summarizes the seminal works and key developments in the anthropology of security that fostered the idea for this Special Issue. We build on existing overviews (Maguire and Low 2019; Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017) and highlight empirical and theoretical developments that, as we argue, have led to the rare perception of marginalized actors as independent and self-determined security actors in anthropological security research. Although there are individual exceptions and attempts (Goldstein 2012; Grant 2015; Ivasiuc 2022), in our view the non-recognition of marginalized people as security actors and the non-conceptualization of their security ideas and practices remains a blind spot in the anthropology of security, one we would like to shed light on with this Special Issue.

Since Goldstein's call, a wide range of edited volumes, Special Issues, and articles have been published on the anthropology of security (Albro et al. 2011; Diphoorn and Grassiani 2015, 2018; Eriksen et al. 2010; Ghertner et al. 2020; Grassiani and Diphoorn 2017; Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Hurtado and Ercolani 2013; Kirsch and Gratz 2010; Maguire et al. 2014; Maguire et al. 2018; Maguire and Low 2019; Maguire and Westbrook 2020). In reviewing these contributions, it seems striking that they primarily (though not exclusively) address empirical cases and phenomena where relatively powerful actors or actor constellations (are expected to) enforce and implement practices and forms of security. Among the most prominent topics are certainly policing, counterterrorism, border control, private security, surveillance, vigilantism, and securitization. The discourse on these topics has changed and advanced in recent years. This ties in with a diversification of theoretical perspectives (which we will address in a moment), rather than a shift in the empirical focus or a renewed understanding of security. Most contributions focus on recognizably specialized and (self-)empowered, mostly state-like actors² or the state itself, tasked with heightening security using purpose-designed methods and instruments, rather than on ordinary people and their everyday practices. This observation coincides with the four anthropological approaches to security that Limor Samimian-Darash and Meg Stalcup identify in their overview (2017), namely “violence and state terror”; “military, militarization, and militarism”; “para-state securitization”; “security assemblages,” all of which see ordinary people and minorities playing no more than a marginal role.

As mentioned, theoretical perspectives on this topic have changed and developed. The first anthologies were concerned with uncovering the roots of security anthropology in the history of the discipline.³ Their perspectives were strongly influenced by concepts from political science, such as “human security” (Eriksen et al. 2010), “security industries, technologies and complexes,” or “securitization” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2012; Maguire et al. 2014). Not long afterwards, ethnographic work in security contexts was reflected at the theoretical level. Attempts were made to account for the diversity and hybridity of security actors and actor constellations by applying concepts such as “security assemblages,” “security blurs,” “private security,” and “twilight policing,” all of which directed the analytical gaze toward ambiguous and sometimes contradictory security practices (Diphoorn 2016; Diphoorn and Grassiani 2018; Grassiani and Diphoorn 2017; Higate and Utas 2017; Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017). More recently, a revival of well-established anthropological concepts has been observed. These are now being applied to the field of security and the associated phenomena: Mark Maguire, Ursula Rao, and Nils Zurawski (2018), for example, emphasize the role of the body, bodily practices (Mol 2008), and bodily technical connections (Latour 2007) that are relevant to security issues through biometrics, forensics, and technoscience. Mark Maguire and Setha Low (2019) apply Appadurai's idea of “scapes” and label the various security-relevant space-time configurations and their dynamics of imagination and materiality “securityscapes.”⁴ Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann and Daniel Goldstein (2020) also highlight the role of materiality and, especially, aesthetics, since they understand security as a form of power that operates through aesthetic registers and finds its expression in, for example, distinguishable tastes, status symbols, and infrastructural forms. These developments have undoubtedly broadened the focus of research by including non-state security actors such as vigilantes and protest or revolutionary groups (see, e.g., Hagberg 2018; Porter 2020; Wilson and Bakker 2016) and adding corporal, spatial, and aesthetic perspectives to the conventional issues of policing, border control, vigilance, and surveillance systems. That said, however, conceptualizations of security relevant to marginalized actors, such as subsistence and food security, livelihood and living conditions, or buen vivir, are largely missing from theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of security literature.

The widespread neglect of marginalized actors in research and concepts of security anthropology coincides with the dominant definitions of security in this field. Most authors are cautious about defining security, usually pointing out that concepts of security are vague and wide-reaching (Eriksen et al. 2010), implicit and unsatisfactory (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013), or elastic and context-dependent (Maguire et al. 2014). While Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski argue in almost cultural relativist terms that “one must understand security as always emergent within specific material, historical and socio-economic conditions” (2014: 1), Maguire, Rao and Zurawski (2018) reject a definition outright, arguing that “security is a semantically vacuous term that refuses definition”—a kind of “essentially contested concept” (2018: 9). Others reproduce the security definitions of political science or international relations, such as Catherine Lutz, who understands security as a “mode of power, or an authorizing and coercive regime of governance” (Lutz 2020: vii), or Zoltán Glück and Setha Low, who—almost paraphrasing the Copenhagen School—describe security as a “modality of constructing danger, enemies, fear, and anxiety, and the measures taken to guard against such constructed threats” (Glück and Low 2017: 282). Understanding security as a “mode of power” or “regime of governance” obviously leaves little room for actors whose power and potential to govern is comparatively limited. Nevertheless, there are definitions we feel might be useful when it comes to developing a perspective on “security from the margins.” Here we find Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen's “working definition of security as a set of discourses and practices concerned with a given social collective's reproduction over time” (2013: 14) particularly inspiring, as is Kirsch's argument that “it is difficult to speak out against security without becoming enmeshed in complex questions of what a desirable social life should look like” (2016: 5). Tessa Diphoorn and Erella Grassiani's approach adds to that “security as a performance; as an act that is identified, both by the actors doing it and those affected by it, as a form of ‘doing security’” (2018: 6). Our impression is that the security issues of marginalized actors and subaltern groups are frequently about securing reproduction and continuity over time. Their security concepts tend to be guided by normative ideas and practices aimed at securing or achieving forms and dimensions of a “tranquil” or “dignified” life in and from unstable positions of marginality (see Triml-Chifflard and Naucke, this volume). Security at the margins is often a matter of “doing security,” which may lead to new securosocialities (see Kirsch, this volume), although—unlike Diphoorn and Grassiani—it is, if at all, barely perceived as such by all social actors involved, including anthropologists.

It should be stressed that we do not want to obscure the fact that marginalized actors have gradually become a topic of anthropological security research. As we see it, this occurs notably in three ways. Firstly, marginalized positions have been invoked to critique dominant theoretical approaches such as securitization theory (Abboud et al. 2018; Bertrand 2018; Hansen 2000) from feminist and decolonial positions, showing that securitization does not work for marginalized actors, but failing to analyze the specific security practices these actors apply. Secondly, marginalized actors have been analyzed in terms of their appropriation of hegemonic security practices such as vigilantism (Ivasiuc 2015; Kirsch and Gratz 2010), which demonstrates the relationality and changeability of marginalized positions (see Section 2), but scant attention is given to the fact that marginalized actors develop alternative security practices of their own, apart from and possibly prior to appropriating hegemonic strategies. Thirdly, few anthropological works have focused on marginalized actors and their security practices. They either analyze them with conventional security concepts such as “human security” (Harris and van der Veen 2015) or derive specific concepts that stress the dimensions of individual cases such as “quiet insecurity/agency” (Grant 2015) or “provincializing security” (Ivasiuc 2022). With security from the margins, this Special Issue suggests a concept that is open to multiple dimensions of security and can be effectively applied to various (in)security situations.

We are aware of the possible objections to and criticisms of this approach to security issues: that it could weaken the concept by extending it too far beyond recognized security actors and practices; or that it might reproduce dominant narratives that place security at the center of concerns and render other concepts irrelevant.⁵ It seems to us that in times of increasingly complex (in)security situations, where climate change, financial crises, pandemics, environmental destruction, so-called migration crises and much more are condensed into a kind of “polycrisis” (Henig and Knight 2023) or “metacrisis” (Hedlund 2023), dangers and insecurities, and therefore security ideas and strategies, are diversifying. When climate change, extractivist economies, or neoliberal working conditions threaten the foundations of life and reproduction of marginalized communities, practices of food security, livelihood, symbolic kin-making, and cooperation can become elementary security strategies. While conventional security concepts have so far struggled to address the dangers and threats to marginalized communities, these alone will not suffice if we are to grasp the growing complexity of (in)security situations that marginalized actors face in the present. In our opinion, it calls for concepts that take into account the specific situation of marginalized actors. We do not advocate making the (in)security situation of marginalized actors the subject, for example, of securitization processes, thereby reproducing dominant security narratives. Instead, we are concerned with recognizing marginalized actors and conceptualizing ideas and practices aimed at the reproduction of marginalized communities living in insecure situations. We are likewise aware that these might be understood as resistance or survival, but we argue that threats to existing security practices from the margins can lead to resistance and that this resistance can evolve into a strategy to sustain or expand security options from the margin. Existing security options from the margins always offer alternatives. In a sense they are strategies of excess and hence contribute to but also go beyond mere survival. What justifies conceptualizing marginalized actors and their security practices as security from the margins vis-à-vis concepts such as resistance, survival and conventional security is that these strategies are usually not merely reactive when it comes to resisting, overcoming, or averting threats, but proactive in maintaining and generating viable livelihood options and a surplus of alternative strategies, thereby increasing survival opportunities for the community (a point we will discuss in more detail later in this article). For these reasons, recognizing marginalized people as security actors and utilizing their potential to the benefit of security anthropology and its advancement seems necessary.

Looking beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries to critical criminology and some strands of international relations and their discussions on “vernacular” and “everyday security” seems helpful in this case (Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017; Jarvis 2019; Jarvis and Lister 2013; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams 2016; von Boemcken 2019; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016).⁶ Here, the focus on state, elite and hegemonic security discourses, and strategies has been critiqued quite openly, and—usually with reference to Nils Bubandt (2005)—the authors aimed to examine “how citizens (sometimes not unproblematically referred to as ‘ordinary people’) construct and describe experiences of security and insecurity in their own vocabularies, cultural repertoires of knowledge and categories of understanding” (Croft and Vaughan-Williams 2017: 22). Interestingly, political science researchers in this field do not shy away from identifying conceptualizations such as “survival,” “belonging,” or “hospitality” as everyday understandings of security (Jarvis and Lister 2013: 164). Methodologically, however, most of the work is confined to interviews and focus groups that provide insights into security conceptions, situations and needs, but do not focus systematically on security as a practice of “ordinary people” in the sense of “doing security” (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2018). In our eyes, these works offer promising directions, but lack the methodological means to fully embrace the chosen path. We believe that anthropology, with its fine-grained ethnographic research, offers methodological tools to pursue this direction to a fuller extent and deepen reflections on and conceptualizations of the security situations and practices of people at the margins.

Security from the Margins

To address the conceptual gap in the anthropology of security and its neglect of marginalized actors’ concepts and practices of security, we understand security from the margins as a set of discourses and practices concerned with the social reproduction of collectives who are marginalized, in which normative notions of a “good life” worth living are negotiated and become visible in their performances and actions. Valuing interdisciplinary exchange, we take ideas of “vernacular and everyday securities” as starting points to rethink security from the margins in an ethnographically informed and grounded way. The conceptual contribution of such an attempt in this Special Issue revolves around two points: Firstly, we propose a clearer delineation between vernacular and everyday security and security from the margins, which in turn allows us to distinguish and relate it to concepts such as security blurs, assemblages, or scapes. Secondly, with positionality, temporality and (in)visibility, we identify key dimensions of security from the margins, which bring actors, practices, concepts, and threats into focus that are rarely at the center of conventional approaches to anthropological security research. The added value that a perspective of security from the margins contributes to the critical anthropology of security is that in periods of increasingly complex (in)security situations, the goal of security concepts and practices, especially those of marginalized actors, is not simply to minimize or avert security threats, but above all to expand alternative security options and create more beneficial living conditions.

Surveying contributions from critical criminology and international relations, the terms “everyday” and “vernacular” seem to be used almost synonymously and interchangeably (see, for example, Crawford and Hutchinson 2016: 7–8; Jarvis 2019: 116–117; Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016: 43–45) in referring to lay concepts of security, even if the original emphasis was different. From an anthropological perspective and despite their overlaps, these terms have a different conceptual history and refer to different phenomena. In the understanding of Adam Crawford and Steven Hutchinson, for example, “everyday security” concentrates on vernacular processes of how “security projects and measures are interpreted, felt, understood, adapted to and resisted by different individuals and groups, as well as people's own perceptions and understandings of such measures” (2016: 1190). Only as a second dimension do they add “mundane and quotidian practices and habits that are understood or characterized by people and groups as being ‘about security’, and which are crafted and carried out on a regular (everyday) basis, namely the production of ‘security from below’, [. . .] such as installing home security systems or instilling certain habits in their children (such as avoiding certain places after dark)” (Crawford and Hutchinson 2016: 1190–1191).

In anthropology the “vernacular” or more precisely “vernacularization” refers to processes of adaptation, appropriation, translation, and transformation of global and international logics and regimes through local contexts by means of localization. In anthropology, as Bubandt (2005) wrote, these processes have been addressed in works on globalization, which showed that global modernity is always site-specific (Appadurai 1998). On the other hand, works in the field of legal anthropology have problematized how global and universal legal frameworks, for example, human rights, international humanitarian law, and transitional justice, was appropriated, adapted, and transformed by local communities (Englund 2006; Merry 2006). In this sense, vernacular security would have to address processes and dynamics whereby global or universal security logics and regimes are adapted and transformed to national and local contexts, and to focus, as Bubandt argued, on the “complex processes of accommodation, rejection and reformulation (that) take place in the interstices between global, national and local representations of the problem of security” (2005: 276). The notion of the “everyday” in anthropology is strongly associated with the works of Michel de Certeau and James Scott, among others. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau examines the modes of action through which the majority of the population reappropriates spaces organized by techniques of socio-cultural disciplining and surveillance (de Certeau 1988: 16). He distinguishes between strategies used by subjects who have their own basis to organize their relations with the outside world and the calculated tactics of those who cannot rely on their own basis. For de Certeau, everyday practices have a tactical character consisting mainly of beautiful gimmicks, multiple simulations, lucky tricks, feints, pranks, and dissimulations (de Certeau 1988: 23-24). Scott examines resistance practices of relatively powerless groups and individuals in extremely power-asymmetrical relationships and refers to them as everyday when they are ordinary, require little or no planning, make use of tacit knowledge and informal networks, represent a form of individual self-help, and avoid direct confrontation (Scott 1985: xvi). In this sense, everyday security would describe the security practices, habits, and routines of security actors who tend to be relatively powerless, that is, casually practiced, unplanned, non-confrontational, and quite invisible.

Security from the margins differs from vernacular and everyday security in the specific use of these concepts. While vernacular security should address processes and dynamics in which global or universal security logics and regimes are adapted and transformed to national and local contexts, security from the margin perspective asks about the extent to which vernacularization transforms the specific contours of the margins, what consequences it entails for marginalized actors and their security concepts and practices, and what alternatives, practices, and concepts are being established in the process. In the same vein, since everyday security would be in itself an ethnographically worthwhile perspective, an approach that considers security from the margins is interested in the “mundane and quotidian practices and habits that are understood or characterized by people and groups as being ‘about security’ . . . on a regular (everyday) basis” (Crawford and Hutchinson 2016: 1190–1191), but would nevertheless focus on everyday practices relevant to rendering the ambivalent qualities of margins visible, their relationship to violence and conflict traceable, and the tension of exclusion and empowerment perceivable—anchoring and evidencing the instability of social categories and “unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability” (Tsing 1994: 279).

Hence, although security from the margins may well be vernacularized and quotidian, it differs and is characterized by three principal dimensions. The first refers to the dynamic and moving positionality of marginalized actors, which in turn enables and conditions different or—seen from the perspective of mainstream security studies—unconventional security practices and strategies, such as care, relationship maintenance, and the strategic use of mobility. As Whittaker and Dürr's article (this volume) on female migrants and Frois's article (this volume) on prison inmates demonstrate, care and relationship maintenance seem to be a gendered security practice in line with the specific position of marginalized women. The second concerns the temporality of security practices and strategies associated with maintaining and achieving versions of a good life, because these security practices and strategies serve not only to counteract immediate dangers and threats but also to realize the reproduction of marginalized actors over time. As we will see, the temporality of security practices at the margins can range from the question of producing new securosocialities (Kirsch, this volume), to prisoner relations and their continuities between past neighborhoods, the current prison community and their future prospects (Frois, this volume), to the historic, long-term reproduction of Lakou security across national borders (Triml-Chifflard, this volume). The third dimension relates to the (in)visibility of security practices and strategies, as visibility is not necessarily present or even desirable given the positionality and temporality of marginalized actors. Authors such as the aforementioned Scott (1985) and more recently Marc von Boemcken (2019) have shown that the invisibility of certain practices and tactics, such as simulation, deception, and mimicry, is crucial to the ability of relatively powerless actors to pursue their goals and secure their lives over an extended period of time. Marginalized actors such as women who cross the border from Mexico to the United States informally (Whittaker and Dürr, this volume) or from Haiti to the Dominican Republic (Triml-Chifflard, this volume) are not in a position to openly oppose the border regimes that marginalize them and hence resort to inconspicuous networks and mimetic practices to survive. Multiple practices and strategies are applied, shifts between them are not only possible but customary. A contributing factor here is the number of security practices marginalized actors carry out implicitly, based on knowledge that is habitual, embodied, and tacit.

What are the consequences of such a perspective on and from the margins, and what does this perspective contribute to the critical anthropology of security? The three security dimensions from the margins outlined earlier bring actors, practices, concepts, and threats into focus that are rarely at the center of conventional approaches to anthropological security research. A perspective on security from the margins repositions relatively powerful actors, hegemonic practices, or dominant concepts by emphasizing the ambivalences and alternatives at their margins and by including the security perspectives and strategies of non-hegemonic actors as particularly relevant. This clearly shows that marginalized security strategies are not merely reactive in nature—an attempt to minimize security threats and risks—but are geared toward creating and sustaining multiple security practices for a normatively framed notion of a “good life.” They become proactive when alternative strategies are created in order to secure living conditions and increase opportunities for survival. Hence, security practices from the margins are usually not a mode of power (in the sense of Lutz 2020) but constitute a frequently invisible stock of options, strategies, and resources to secure ways of living at the margins.

Marginalized actors face concrete physical threats, such as physical harm, para-state and gang violence, displacement, dispossession, repression, and persecution. That said, they are not just victims but apply their own strategies to deal with these obstacles. Beyond this, the dominant socio-political structures and cultural-hegemonic orders loom large as a threat to marginalized actors. National migration policies and militarized border regimes threaten border populations who depend on crossing those borders for survival, not solely at the Haitian–Dominican border (Triml-Chifflard, this volume). Lack of opportunities for social and economic participation in societies not only drives some marginalized actors to commit “crimes of subsistence” but also makes prisons seem like safe places (Frois, this volume). Excluding or discriminatory state policies and programs—often mirroring vested interests, corruption, or clientelism—threaten the livelihoods of marginalized actors, for example, when it concerns access to and use or ownership of land for the peasant population (Naucke, this volume). In addition, numerous marginalized actors are exposed to patriarchal structures, machismo, male gaze, and male violence, circumstances that are even more significant in contexts of intersectional exclusion and discrimination, for example, illegal border crossings or informal employment (Whittaker and Dürr, this volume).

While these threats and dangers may indeed be evident from such perspectives as “security assemblages,” “security blurs” or “securityscapes,” a further strength of the perspective from the margins lies in its capacity to name and describe more precisely what is actually and generally at risk for marginalized actors. From the latter's perspective, it is not just the physical integrity of particular individuals or the general public order that is in jeopardy but also crucial aspects pertaining to the reproduction of their communities, neighborhoods, and (extended) families. These relate to highly specific livelihood sources such as food security and access to the means of subsistence, such as land and trade (Kirsch, Triml-Chifflard, Naucke), social and economic participation (Frois), but also more generally mental health and physical well-being (Whittaker and Dürr), self-determination and autonomy or spirituality, and the future of one's own community (all contributions).

Being able to identify threats and threatening aspects to the continuity or survival of marginalized actors allows for practices and strategies to be perceived as relevant alternative acts of security that may not appear as such from the perspective of “security assemblages”, “security blurs,” or “securityscapes.” These security alternatives at the margins may rely on social networks and the making of symbolic kin (Triml-Chifflard, this volume) or imply relationship maintenance and gendered forms of care (Whittaker and Dürr, this volume), be based on strategies that guarantee food autonomy, access to land, and self-determined forms of social organization (Naucke, this volume), or actually produce new forms of “mutual support” in terms of “sousveillance” defined as “watching from below” or even new security-related socialities (Kirsch, this volume). Others might be closely linked to state institutions that provide forms of social support, security, and assistance when survival strategies include “crimes of subsistence” and offenders (are) move(d) to prisons as institutions that, on the one hand, control agents of insecurity but can, on the other hand, become sites of security for the inmates themselves (Frois, this volume).

It is striking that most of the security strategies of the marginalized actors described here and in the contributions to this Special Issue are not aimed exclusively at minimizing insecurity risks. Since the security strategies of marginalized actors are linked to normative ideas of a decent or “good life,” they not only focus reactively on averting and reducing danger but also proactively on shaping a better future and expanding options for action. By expanding options for action, resources, and social strategies, they go beyond what is immediately necessary and create a surplus, a stock of options over and above mere survival. The availability of secondary possibilities and alternatives for coping with hazards and reducing or neutralizing their consequences creates forms of security at and from the margins. The availability and transfer of resources (including knowledge and skills, economic resources, social relations and forms of organization, common goods) for the purpose of potential and real protection against hazards transforms these into security options and resources. By analogy, one could say that security from the margins relates to conventional security concepts in a similar way to Johan Galtung's “positive” and “negative peace.” Whereas conventional security concepts focus on reducing danger, security from the margins is concerned with creating “positively defined [living] conditions” (Galtung 1969: 183), whatever the stock of secondary alternatives that create a sense of security empirically contains. A state of positive security as freedom from threats, risks, and dangers is imaginable in visions of a good life and could even become the driving force for the construction and rearranging of worlds worth living in, but in reality will remain an unattainable ideal.

In our view, the emic terminology used by marginalized actors to frame their security situations, their security practices, and their conceptions of security deserves further attention. The terms used serve as empirical starting points to think further about theoretical conceptualizations from a security-from-the-margins perspective. “Being trucha”, for example, as a form of counter-watchfulness of female Mexican migrants in the United States (Whittaker and Dürr 2022), “lakou security” as a long-term construction of symbolic kinship of the Haitian–Dominican border population (Triml-Chifflard), Colombian peasant notions of a “quiet life” or “dignified life” (Naucke), but also the sense of “feeling at home” through the care and relationship maintenance of Portuguese prison inmates (Frois) are all expressions of the normative concepts of marginalized actors and the way in which a good life and the socio-cultural practices involved are imagined.

Closing Remarks

From the margins, we need to ask about the extent to which the anthropology of security is in reality reproducing the marginalization of certain individuals and groups of people. What mechanisms cause anthropology to lose sight of the perspectives of relatively powerless groups? And does this not reproduce marginalization at the theoretical and conceptual level? By selecting and conceptualizing its empirical fields, the anthropology of security tends to focus on actors and practices that are explicitly and exclusively considered to be security specific. Self-defined or designated security actors implement purpose-bound security practices to ward off concrete and identifiable threats. While we have argued that security issues and practices of subaltern groups tend to be less specifically purpose-bound and are instead associated with notions of continuing or establishing a good life in and from situations of marginality, such strategies are rarely perceived by all social actors as relevant to security. Thus, the difficulty of speaking out against the implementation of hegemonic security practices (Kirsch 2016) due to the lack of a positively connotated antonym is complemented by the invisibility of alternatives that are rarely perceived in purpose-specific security terms. This invisibilizing of security strategies at the margins is not only inscribed in classical approaches such as “securitization theory,” which has been criticized for its stance (Bertrand 2018; Hansen 2000). Concepts like “securityscapes,” “security assemblages,” and “security blurs” popular in the anthropology of security are likewise not immune to a narrowing of the perspective on the entanglements of state, private security enterprises, and self-defined security actors.

Securityscapes were originally conceptualized in state-centered terms and concentrated on expert communities and knowledge circles (e.g., Albro et al. 2011) and even “a synonym for the US national security apparatus” (Maguire and Low 2019: 10–11). New conceptualizations of the term also build on vernacular and everyday notions of security but lead, in contrast to our priority, to highly individualized scapes, foregrounding “the agency and creativity of individual people in security making” (von Boemcken and Ismailbekova 2020: 5). The concept of security assemblages also focuses on security formations built on state and private actors and their international relations (Abrahamsen and Williams 2010) or on different sectors such as “US counterterrorism in the domains of policing, biomedical research and federal-local counter-extremism” (Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017: 62f). Finally, security blurs define security as a practice that must be perceived as a security practice by all participants (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2018: 6). Contrary to focusing on the lowest common denominator in the perception of security among the heterogeneity of different security agents, a perspective on security at the margins would focus on different security perceptions and practices and ask what their divergence and disjuncture means for social dynamics and hierarchies at the margins. In this way, central concepts developed and used by the anthropology of security have in a sense internalized and normalized Laura Nader's call for “studying up” to a degree that impedes the pursuit of and invisibilizes concepts and practices of security of other actors, ordinary people, or marginalized groups. We wonder whether Goldstein's call for a “critical anthropology of security” could and should perhaps be read and understood as a call to focus more closely on actors who are on the margins of state and institutional formations of security.

In this introduction, we have conceptualized an approach to security from the margins in interaction with our Special Issue contributions, which put forward ethnographic cases from marginalized actors ranging from women and migrants to prison inmates, street vendors, and peasants. Analysis of the security situations of these actors through a security-from-the-margins lens highlights the diversity of actors, practices, concepts, and threats of (in)security that are rarely in the focus of conventional security approaches. A perspective of security from the margins repositions relatively powerful actors and hegemonic practices by emphasizing the ambivalences and alternatives at the margins and including the security perspectives of non-hegemonic actors as particularly relevant. It makes clear that marginalized security strategies not only seek to minimize security threats but are oriented toward maximizing security options aimed at social reproduction. We have argued that periods of increasingly complex (in)security situations call for concepts that can capture the growing diversity of security risks and security strategies. With the ethnographic cases in the contributions to this Special Issue, we have taken a first step in this direction. At the same time, we believe that the potential of an approach to security from the margins goes beyond this: intersecting and reinforcing phenomena such as climate change and environmental degradation, ongoing wars and violence, pandemics, and precarious economic conditions threaten not only human communities. Equally marginalized and threatened, if not more so, is the reproduction of non-human, post-human, and more-than-human entities, of flora and fauna, and of various geophysical and metaphysical forms of being. This begs the question of how to go about understanding and analyzing security threats to and practices of, for example, forest spirits, rivers, or the Pacha Mama. We believe that an approach to security from the margins creates openness and has the potential to develop a transhuman perspective that will allow us to grasp and analyze such more-than-human security situations and challenges in the future.