When he answered the door to me, Michael was upset, almost infuriated. The sweeping gesture with his arm he made to invite me in did not entirely allay my worry that he could slam the door in my face at any moment, though I had no clue what had made him so angry. In the hallway, I tried to make sense of what he was telling me. I had come to Michael's home in a middle-class suburb in the Cape Town metropolitan area with the intention of joining a local “neighborhood meeting” that, interestingly, had been arranged by a private security company with a strong customer base in the area. The official purpose of the meeting was to bring together residents of this predominantly white area who otherwise had no or little contact with each other. Michael had agreed to host the meeting. But now I learned that, minutes before the meeting was supposed to begin, the participants had decided to change the venue. “One of them said,” Michael told me with contempt in his voice, “that he's having his tea with milk. I don't have milk, f*** it, so we all went to his place, and that's where the others are. They are having a tea party [pretends to hold a teacup while lifting his little finger in an ironic gesture], and I am sure they'll have a nice time chatting away. But after a while, I couldn't help it and I left, because I cannot stand this sort of useless chatter. [. . .] I thought we would talk about security!”
As it dawned to me that I was about to miss the rest of the meeting because I had come to what turned out to be the wrong house, I felt trapped between my curiosity to witness the private security company's tea party personally and my wish to avoid appearing disloyal to Michael, who had made it possible for me to attend the meeting as another invitee. My tacit compromise was to extend my conversation with Michael about what made him so angry about the peculiar social form the security meeting had taken, and later to complement this conversation by interviews with representatives of the security company and with other residents of the area, several of whom had been present at the meeting. Thanks to this process, I had a first inkling of the conceptual ideas presented in this article, which gradually consolidated during my fieldwork in other South African urban contexts.
The case of the neighborhood meeting is helpful in setting the stage for the more detailed discussion of my argument in the sections that follow. The services provided by the security company that had arranged the meeting were basically identical with what its local competitors had on offer. It supplied technological security solutions, such as electric fences and CCTV cameras, and it had an armed-response unit which on occasion was also deployed on patrols. Yet, as a representative of the company explained to me, management had noted that the company's interactions with residents in this suburban setting had revealed a degree of technophobia on the part of its (potential) customers, and that many of them also felt discomfort with the militaristic attitudes that were widely associated with the private security industry.
Against this backdrop, the security company sought to add value to its services in this suburb by banking on its previous experiences in the area. These experiences seemed to suggest that life in the neighborhood was characterized by social anonymity and fragmentation. The company henceforth engaged in community-building by inviting the residents of relatively small socio-spatial units to local “neighborhood meetings” to provide them with a platform on which to socialize and familiarize themselves with their neighbors, talk about the security problems affecting the area, and develop trust and reciprocal relationships with one another. All of this, it was hoped by the company, would boost the residents’ subjective sense of security.
This event illuminates how the notion of “security” can be used to make people relate to and interact with each other who might not have done so before. In other words, the foregoing is an example of how “security” becomes the focal point for the establishment of socialities that revolve around people's attempts to cope with their respective security problématique. In this article, I introduce the concept of ‘securosociality’ to analyze social processes of this kind.
In the introduction to their volume Times of Security, Morten Axel Pedersen and Martin Holbraad argued that, “if . . . we wish to define security as the reproduction of a given social collective over time, we must . . . ask, to what order and form of collectivity does the epithet ‘social’ refer in a given instance?” (Pedersen and Holbraad 2013: 14). Cautioning against equating the notion of “social collective” with “society,” the authors speak of “collectivities in order to refer to any phenomenon in human lives that takes on a distinct social form, and whose survival and reproduction as such are at stake” (ibid.: 16).
In this line of argumentation, security is said to come into play when the survival and reproduction of an existing “social form” is endangered. By contrast, my analytical focus on the formation of securosocialities turns their argument on its head by foregrounding the ways in which vernacular understandings of security partake in bringing forth socialities, some of which are then—but only then, that is, in the second step—felt to be worthwhile reproducing as the social form that is engendered in this way.
As I will argue in this article, applying the concept of securosociality to analyze security-related socialities can help us overcome certain limitations of other approaches in the study of security, such as “security networks” and “security assemblage,” both of which “provide very little insight into the agency of individuals and how their choices and perceptions are related to their actions [and which] remain at present top–down and organization–centric in perspective, and overlook . . . how [individuals] manoeuvre within these [security] landscapes” (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2016: 435).
In what follows, I will first discuss how “groupism” thinking can hamper important analytical insights in the study of security. I will then explain the conceptual framework of my analysis, focusing especially on “vernacular security” and “securosociality,” and outlining how the latter contributes to existing work in the critical anthropology of security. In the second part of the article, I examine a number of empirical cases through the lens of the concept of securosociality, arguing that securosocialities can take on different forms and produce different social dynamics depending on the vernacular understandings of security involved in them.
Problematizing Groupism in the Study of Security
In much social-science research on security, the social units seeking protection from what the people in the respective unit regard as “threats to [their] acquired values” (Wolfers 1952: 485) appear as already existing social collectivities “out there.” This is most pronounced in approaches to security in the field of International Relations, where states are conceptualized as taken-for-granted actors writ large that implement security measures so as to protect themselves from the actions of other states.
Research in the field of the critical anthropology of security runs the danger of following similarly problematic premises when it focuses on the security discourses and practices of what are presented in this research as more or less “given” social groupings, such as a community, an ethnic group, a non-state organization like a vigilante group, or the residents of a specific locality. The problems with this kind of “groupism” (Brubaker 2002) are by now well-known. Criticizing groupism in studies of ethnicity, Rogers Brubaker remarked that “‘[g]roup’ functions as a seemingly unproblematic, taken-for-granted concept, apparently in no need of particular scrutiny or explication” (ibid.: 163). For him, “groupism” denotes “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis” (ibid.: 164).
In the wider thematic context of research on security, social constructivist perspectives have contributed greatly to challenging the naturalization of social categories, such as in the application of “labelling theory” to deviance (Becker 1963), or by elucidating the ways in which select categories of people are being criminalized (Schneider and Schneider 2008) and/or securitized (Gledhill 2018) by dominant actors. In recent decades, proponents of securitization theory have shown how certain categories of people or phenomena, such as migrants (Bourbeau 2011), or even the African continent as a whole (Abrahamsen 2005), have been construed as “threats,” which then influences how these people and phenomena are dealt with by others in practice. However, while this form of security-related Othering has been amply analyzed, the reverse question, namely how people's site-specific aspirations in matters of security can contribute to the formation of new socialities, has attracted much less ethnographic attention.
An exception to this is anthropological research on conflict and violence (Schmidt and Schröder 2001), which has shown that violent conflicts can not only serve the social exclusion or even obliteration of certain categories of people but internally often also give rise to centripetal social dynamics, as in the case of vigilantism (Kirsch and Grätz 2010). What is notable is that some of the most prominent analytical approaches currently (such as the theory of securitization mentioned earlier), which are otherwise lauded for their non-essentialist premises, tend to be somewhat simplistic when it comes to the dynamic and complex nature of the socialities involved in doing security. For example, as conceptualized by securitization theory, security is an illocutionary speech act involving a “securitizing actor/agent” who, in a so-called securitizing move, publicly declares a particular “reference object” to be under threat, thereby seeking to convince a wider audience that the respective threat exists and that something needs to be done against it as a matter of urgency (Buzan et al. 1998). Thierry Balzacq has critically pointed out that this theory, as originally formulated by the so-called Copenhagen School, does not properly account for “the nature and status of [the] audience” (Balzacq 2005: 173). It therefore runs danger of attributing the felicity conditions of “securitizing moves” with some sort of conventionalized automatism. In his reformulation of this theory, Balzacq thus calls for more sensitivity to context, arguing that “the possibility of marshalling the assent of an audience . . . rests with whether the historical conjuncture renders the audience more sensitive to its vulnerability” (ibid.: 182).
My argument in this article goes one step further. Beyond noting that audiences can differ in their reactions to “securitizing moves,” I suggest that different vernacular understandings of security are in effect interpellating different audiences and publics (see also Cooper-Knock et al. 2024), a process that in turn engenders different types of securosocialities. Since some of these securosocialities cut across otherwise existing social divisions and cleavages in a population, they can even blur the boundaries between “the powerful” and people “on the margins,” to use a distinction made in the Introduction to this special section.
Before outlining how the concept of securosociality can help avoid the problem of groupism in the study of security, and then applying it in the comparative analysis of empirical examples from my fieldwork in South Africa, let me first sketch my position on what the literature discusses under the rubric of “vernacular security.”
Vernacular Securities
In anthropology, it was only in the early 2000s that the field of study known today as the critical anthropology of security (e.g., Diphoorn and Grassiani 2015; Goldstein 2010; Low and Maguire 2019; Maguire et al. 2014) took shape and, relatedly, that scholars began to pay closer attention to the existence of site-specific understandings of security, thus questioning universalist conceptions of this notion (e.g., Bubandt 2005; Valverde 2011).
The productiveness of this pluralist non-normative approach to security becomes visible in Prashan Ranasinghe's ethnographic study of security discourses and practices in an emergency shelter for the homeless in Ottawa (Canada). Ranasinghe demonstrates that there are different understandings of security among the people working in this shelter, with management being mainly concerned with “physical safety from violence and other types of bodily harm” (Ranasinghe 2013: 92), while the staff think about it in much broader terms, such as by including work-related health issues within its scope. Ranasinghe argues that these divergent conceptions leave a lot of space for mutual misunderstandings. His research exemplifies the polysemy of security and makes it clear that an actor's vernacular notion of security is influenced by his or her position in the wider social field. However, the latter should not be taken to mean that Ranasinghe subscribes to “security groupism,” as previously problematized. Instead, his study shows that, while certain social collectivities might tend toward certain understandings of security, there can also be appropriations of other people's discourses on security. References to “security” then assume the role of boundary objects that are “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs . . . yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across (social) sites” (Star and Griesemer 1989: 297). In Ranasinghe's case study, the shelter management's discourse on security was occasionally appropriated by staff to endow their personal concerns with an air of urgency in interactions with management, thus bridging what on other occasions took the form of irreconcilable conflicts of interest.
My use of the phrase “vernacular understandings of security” is not confined to the vastly different ways in which situated social actors define “security.” Nor would my analysis be complete if I merely expanded the application of this notion to a range of empirical phenomena that had previously not been considered as belonging to the scope of research on security, as is the gist of the concept of “human security” (Eriksen et al. 2010). I am mainly interested in people's more or less implicit assumptions that inform and become manifest in their particular ways of doing security. In the empirical examples explored in this article, such assumptions revolve around questions such as the following: Should security practices be based on an uncompromising attitude, or should they be open to compromise and social negotiation? Are the security skills acquired in one social context transferable to an entirely different one? Do different approaches to security have enough common ground to allow the people pursuing them to cooperate in matters of security?
I hold that questions like these lie at the heart of what people do in the name of security. What is more, the site-specific answers to questions like the foregoing and the ways in which these answers are discussed, weighed against each other, legitimated, contested, and made to manifest themselves in one way or the other contribute to the particular social form a securosociality takes. I shall now turn to the latter.
Securosociality
When coining the term “biosociality” in the 1990s, Paul Rabinow sought to “name the kinds of socialities and identities that are forming around new sites of knowledge” (Gibbon and Novas 2008: 3). In Rabinow's own research, this site of knowledge was the rapidly innovating field of genomics, as epitomized by the Human Genome Project (Rabinow 1996), which shaped how previously unconnected actors formed social ties with one another in the light of their shared experience of a genetically influenced illness.
The term “securosociality” is loosely inspired by the foregoing. Representing a compound of the words “security” and “sociality,” I understand “securosociality” to consist in those forms of sociality people engage in through their micro-practices when they seek to practically address what they perceive to be a security problématique affecting them.
In using the notion of a problématique, I aim to capture the complex and dynamic nature of doing security in present-day South Africa. In this country, a fluid field of security-related discourses and practices is infused with numerous different understandings around questions such as those examined in the present article, summarized above, but also a number of other questions like the following: What is security? Who is in charge of whose security? What do the challenges in reaching a state of security consist in? What can be done to attain and maintain it? How to know when security has been realized?
Seen in this light, the security problématique is a constantly changing, contested, and open-ended process that revolves around the notion of security without at the same time being based on a stable and unanimously shared answer to the question of what security is. The latter question is itself part of the problématique.
What follows from the preceding is that, while securosocialities have “security” as their key concern, this concern is itself a moving target, meaning that the actors involved in a securosociality are largely relying on conjectural thinking when addressing their respective security problématique. Thus, contrasting with how Rabinow's concept of “biosociality” has been described, securosocialities do not form around “sites of knowledge,” but instead around “sites of partial knowledge,” or on occasion even “sites of non-knowledge.”
Second, my use of the term “sociality,” as in securosociality, subscribes to the observation by Nicholas Long and Henrietta Moore that this notion is “appealingly processual” and therefore “promises to overcome many of the drawbacks associated with the more static and bounded objects of enquiry that dominated many branches of 20th century social science, such as ‘society’, or formal patterns of ‘social relations’” (Long and Moore 2013: 2; see also Strathern et al. 1996). Adapting a well-known dictum by Bruno Latour, one can moreover say that “sociality” is “not what holds us together, it is what is held together” (Latour 1986: 276) by those engaging in it. As I understand it, socialities can take vastly different forms; they can be of an informal and transient nature or be formally institutionalized in one way or another, the latter of which can lend it a certain permanence over time.
When the term “securosociality” is used in a non-normative way, as in this article, it can be applied for analytical and comparative purposes to a variety of different socialities in South Africa, such as the residents of a gated community; the spontaneous companionship of protection-seeking women walking home together from a taxi rank at night; the agreements between residential neighbors to keep an eye on each other's property; the variegated social relationships in a private security company; the specific arrangements within a family to protect its members; and even the fleeting social ties involved in what is sometimes called “mob violence.”
As we will see in this article's ethnographic explorations, the concept of securosociality builds on and complements existing approaches in the critical anthropology of security. For example, while allowing us to explore the ways in which security practices are “based on an intermixing of actors, objects, goals and roles” (Grassiani and Diphoorn 2019: 2), thus giving rise to “security blurs” (ibid.: 1), the concept of securosociality can also heighten anthropological sensitivity to ethnographic contexts where local actors insist that certain approaches to security should not be blurred or hybridized. In addition, acknowledging that research on “security networks” (Dupont 2004) has engendered important analytical insights, the concept of securosociality incorporates the study of networked security practices while realizing that one can also find ways of doing security that are not organized in the socio-spatial form of a network. In one of my ethnographic explorations, the security arrangements of street hawkers pertained to a bounded urban space, beyond which their arrangements had no ramifications or validity. Finally, while sharing the interest in the composite nature of security, the concept of securosociality differs from prevalent uses of the term “security assemblage” (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011; Higate and Utas 2017) in that it does not look mainly at relations between formal institutions, corporate organizations, or already existing social collectives, but instead at the micro-practices by which social actors at the ethnographic grassroots level are forming and/or negotiating security-related socialities. Moreover, in contrast to much of what has been written from the “security assemblage” perspective, the latter implies that the concept of securosociality is not mainly concerned with state/non-state relations or the public/private distinction. It can be applied to a vast range of different security-related socialities, both within a particular sphere of everyday social life and across different spheres.1
In addition to the foregoing, securosocialities are not necessarily mutually exclusive; one and the same actor can at the same time participate in more than one securosociality. As I will show in this article, some securosocialities are formed as single-purpose alliances. Alternatively, existing social formations of other types can be rededicated by also including security concerns in their fold, thus converting them, inter alia and at least temporarily, into a securosociality. This, for example, is what the “neighborhood meeting” described in the introductory section aimed to achieve, if only with modest success: turning the residents of a loosely defined urban area into a securosociality.
Finally, securosocialities are not necessarily coextensive with conventional group categories, whether they are defined in terms of ethnic or racialized categories, class, gender, and so on. Instead, what we find in many securosocialities are “cross-cutting alliances” (see Gluckman 1940), that is, diverse forms of security-related consociation that cut across otherwise existing social divisions and cleavages.
Ethnographic Explorations
The history of doing security in South Africa is complex and politically fraught. In present-day South Africa, security issues have an almost all-pervasive presence in everyday life, and they often become politicized, which is due largely to the conflictual nature of the transformation processes in this country (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016; Hentschel 2015; Murray 2020; van Riet 2022). The South African Police Service (SAPS) is the most prominent security actor, yet it is a contested one, in part because its security provision is considered by many as insufficient and/or as being informed by political biases in problematic ways. Further, there exists a multitude of non-state actors in the field of security, ranging from private security companies to civil society initiatives and vigilante groups, some of which compete with the SAPS while others cooperate with it in one form or another.
It is impossible to do justice within the scope of this article to the many things which would need to be said about the multifarious ways of doing security in South Africa. The empirical contextualization of the five ethnographic explorations that follow can therefore only be rudimentary and will be incorporated into my descriptions and analyses of these cases.
Ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa was conducted intermittently between 2003 and 2016. I pursued multi-sited fieldwork in urban contexts in the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces and employed participant observation, non-directive interviews and situational conversations as my main research methods. Focusing on everyday discourses and practices by non-state actors in the wider field of security, I interacted with a wide range of different securosocialities. In doing so, I subscribed to a polyphonic approach with a strong interest in my interlocutors’ vernacular understandings of security and their varied ways of doing security (see also Kirsch 2019).2
In the Making
Informal street trading is almost omnipresent in South African urban life. Most traders belong to impoverished sections of the Black population and depend on this precarious and politically contested form of small-scale trading as an everyday livelihood practice. Insofar as they go unhampered by police harassment or the enforcement of municipal by-laws, their trading activities are pursued in public spaces, most prominently in mobile forms or by making use of makeshift stalls on the sidewalks of streets frequented by potential customers.
In the township of Mdantsane, one of my research sites in the Eastern Cape Province, one finds a particularly high density of informal trading in the commercial hubs. In some streets in these areas the traders’ sales stands are densely lined up along the sidewalks. While competing with each other economically, many of these traders also cooperate, for example, by temporarily taking care of another street trader's goods when the latter is taking a break.
One particularly pronounced field of cooperation concerns the problem of crime, which affects all street traders, as they are at constant risk of becoming victims of petty theft. Also, regular pedestrian congestion on the sidewalks makes these informal trading zones an ideal location for pickpocketing. As a consequence, worried that customers might stay away, several of the street traders I met in Mdantsane had started to engage in informal acts of “sousveillance,” here defined as “watching from below” (Mann and Ferenbok 2013: 19), in order to make sure that customers do not become victims in the traders’ immediate surroundings.
In one Mdantsane street in the early 2000s, street traders decided to form an anti-crime initiative they called Hawkers against Crime. As I came to learn, this institutionalization of what had previously been sporadic and contingent sousveillance practices went along with a reorientation in how the traders socialized with each other. Firstly, new informal traders on this street were urged to commit themselves to the anti-crime initiative, its objectives and principles. Secondly, the existence of the initiative was used discursively as a marketing device to advertise the respective informal trading zone as a “secure” one. Thirdly, in order to gain public legitimacy, members of the anti-crime initiative were instructed in relevant state laws, such as those concerning self-defense and citizen's arrests. The latter was an attempt to ensure that the anti-crime initiative would not acquire a reputation for self-justice.
Taken together, using the concept of securosociality to analyze this example allows the establishment and institutionalization of new security-related social ties on the micro-level to be examined with special attention to the specific forms these social ties took. As a securosociality in the making, Hawkers against Crime pooled the previously scattered forms of mutual cooperation between individual street traders in a shared framework of security-related interactions. This securosociality had a discernible socio-spatial form, as it extended along the sidewalks of a certain stretch of that particular street. In this way, it became a spatially bound “security enclave” rather than a “security network.” It also had its own temporality, since its existence was confined to business hours: once the street traders had set off for home after a long day's work, their securosociality was suspended until the beginning of the next business day.
At the same time, the framework of interactions in the initiative was not informed in any substantial way by a group-specific vernacular understanding of security that preceded the initiative. Prior to Hawkers against Crime, there was nothing akin to a distinct and consensually shared culture of security among the street traders. Instead, though consisting exclusively of non-state actors, the initiative drew on state legislation, thus adopting key aspects of what the founders of the initiative understood to be the South African state's vernacular notions of security (see also Kirsch 2010). As noted earlier, this, it was hoped, would provide the initiative with public legitimacy. But it also ensured that newly incoming street traders could be flexibly integrated into the local securosociality without tiresome debates about the definition of “security” and the legal ways of achieving it. The initiative simply referred to what was laid down in the respective state laws. In this way, a securosociality formed by people “on the margins” (the street traders) was infused with vernacular understandings of security by the most prominent and powerful security actor in South Africa (the state), implicitly blurring the boundaries between the two.
Across the Threshold
One day during my research, I was in the process of interviewing the owner of a retail store in Mdantsane about his deployment of security personnel when he was approached by a member of staff who asked him whether it was now time “to bring our friends a [bottle of] Coke.” The shopkeeper answered in the affirmative, following which I realized in amazement that the “friends” were three street traders who had set up their sales stands squarely in front of the shop's windows. I was surprised because I had assumed that the relationship between the shopkeeper and the street traders must be tense, given the fact that both were in the business of selling clothes.
The shopkeeper explained to me that he had made an arrangement with the street traders, which he described as a “win-win” situation. For his part, he had promised to turn a blind eye to their trading activities in front of his store, even though they caused him a financial loss. This basically meant that he abstained from harassing them, such as by threatening to call his “friends” at the police and have them removed by force. For the street traders, the opportunity to sell clothes informally in the direct vicinity of a retail store for the same type of goods, which drew customers on a regular basis, was economically attractive. Also, they felt that the physical presence of the security personnel reduced the likelihood of their becoming victims of petty crime themselves. As a consequence, they had promised to assist the shopkeeper in keeping the shop crime-free. More particularly, they kept a close eye on the people entering the retail store, tipping off the security personnel at the shop's entrance when they suspected someone of being a shoplifter. Also, they had successfully apprehended suspected shoplifters as they were leaving the shop's premises.
While there was a large measure of reciprocity in this arrangement, it was also characterized by asymmetries. In contrast to the security personnel, who were free to move in and out of the shop, the street traders were discouraged from crossing the threshold into the shop. In addition, the forms of cooperation between the two parties were often unequal. For instance, the security personnel were generally hesitant to enter into a physical confrontation with suspected shoplifters, leaving the “dirty work” of apprehending them to the street traders. Yet, when it came to handing trespassers over to the police, the security personnel took center stage, and they subsequently even took the credit for detaining them. After all, the shopkeeper remarked, his arrangement with the street traders had to remain unofficial.
Given the informal nature of this arrangement, the securosociality described in this section was a precarious constellation that bridged the otherwise existing social and economic cleavages between the parties involved and that developed a socio-cultural life of its own, whose characteristics should be analyzed in their own right. Security concerns in a retail store resulted in security-related cooperation between the shopkeeper as a member of the middle classes on the one hand, and informal traders belonging to a socioeconomically vulnerable section of South African society on the other. Most importantly, their shared securosociality was framed in the idiom of friendship, which points to its voluntary nature and reciprocal qualities, and which requires goodwill and continuous relationship work on both sides. However, as the shopkeeper's remark about his “friends” in the police makes clear, friendships are neither exclusive, nor does a friendship with one category of people (e.g., street traders) necessarily preclude a friendship with others (e.g., policemen), even if the two are potential adversaries. At the same time, this specific securosociality was made possible by a vernacular understanding of security that saw enough commonalities between institutionalized forms of private security and informal ways of doing security at the grassroots level to permit their cooperation. Being “friends,” for both parties “security” meant helping each other out to make sure that neither would become a victim of crime.
Cross-Cutting Ties
It has repeatedly been argued that the increasing importance of private, that is, non-state forms of security provision has led to a momentous neoliberal shift from security practices that are (at least ideally) oriented toward the “common good” to privatized security regimes that follow sectional interests and often a capitalist market logic (Abrahamsen and Williams 2011; Berg 2002; Gumedze 2007; Higate and Utas 2017).
In the practical work of staff deployed by the South African private security industry for the provision of security in the retail sector, such sectional interests are manifest in company regulations that strictly confine the company's services to the premises for which the security contract has been made out. For security personnel in this sector, this also implied that they were expected to keep their distance from the security personnel of neighboring shops unless the latter were employees of the same company. Mutual support among security staff belonging to different companies was even expressly discouraged. Nevertheless, many of the security personnel I talked to clandestinely entertained friendly relationships with colleagues working in the vicinity. In doing so, they sought to reduce their personal vulnerability in a stressful working environment that demanded total professional commitment, even to the point of being ready to sustain bodily injury, but that offered little in return in terms of monetary rewards or a meaningful safety net.
An analogous avoidance rule was in place concerning shoppers and people passing the shop. Open displays of friendship and ties of kinship while on duty exposed security personnel to suspicions of corruptibility and were thus avoided in the presence of one's superiors. However, this entailed a dilemma for security personnel because relatives and friends were essential for the provision of security in their private lives, where informal security arrangements based on reciprocity and mutual trust played the central role. They thus found themselves in a double bind of contradictory loyalties that was sometimes hard to balance (for comparable findings, see Diphoorn 2016a).
In contrast to the case of the shopkeeper discussed in the previous section, who claimed to be simultaneously involved in two different friendship-based securosocialities (having “friends” among both street traders and policemen), which enabled him to draw on either of them depending on the situation, what the social constellations sketched out in this section have in common is the assumption that certain types of securosocialities should have no overlaps. For those hiring security personnel, the work of the security guards had to be devoid of the influences of ties of kinship and friendship. They did not oppose the existence of these relations, per se, but held that the security staff's private securosocialities ought to be strictly confined to their private lives.
The latter position is in part due to the fact that the security personnel's involvement in their professional and private securosocialities is based on different vernacular understandings of security. Those that are supposed to be confined to their private lives rely to a large measure on a readiness to compromise and find everyday arrangements with kin, friends and neighbors, even if one does not agree with their particular life choices and approaches to security. By contrast, the security personnel's professional ethos calls for an uncompromising attitude in these matters, pushing them to draw a red line between themselves and anything supposed to be illicit or illegal.
The concept of securosociality enables us to explain the relationship between vastly different social forms of doing security within one and the same analytical framework and to compare them. Among other things, this makes visible the existence of unequally distributed power potentials for dealing with the coexistence of different securosocialities. Shopkeepers and security companies tended to enforce their separation; street-level security personnel faced the challenge of balancing the two by keeping them separate on certain occasions and secretly allowing them to coincide on others.
However, while the official priorities were on separation, the security personnel's private securosocialities had a stabilizing effect on the respective security companies because they gave their work an enabling, though largely unacknowledged infrastructure. After all, staff working in insecure conditions would most certainly engender insecurities. The foregoing constellations thus exemplify the hierarchization of securosocialities, and they also illustrate how certain types of securosociality are rendered invisible by powerful actors.
Repercussions
During my fieldwork in the city of East London (Eastern Cape Province), I conducted participant observation in a training course for people seeking employment in the private security industry. The course provided instructions in elementary security routines and the regulatory framework of the rights and duties of security personnel (for the latter, see also Berg 2007; Diphoorn 2016b). Taken by surprise by the large number of female participants, I was told by the course instructors that they had recently begun to notice an increased interest by Black women in the security profession.
One of these women, with whom I spent time during tea breaks, invited me to pay her a visit at home. A mother of four children, Candace has been unemployed for most of her life. When a friend told her that she was planning to work as a security guard, Candace was intrigued by the prospect of doing the same and eventually joined her on the training course. Besides increasing their chances on the job market, the women hoped that they might somehow benefit in their private lives from the safety and security skills acquired in the course, thus reducing their personal vulnerability to violence, especially sexualized crime, which was a problem endemic to their neighborhood.
When I arrived at her home, Candace introduced me to her family; then she excused herself and went off to prepare dinner, leaving it to her husband, Isaac, to take care of me. As it turned out, Isaac was not happy with his wife's professional aspirations. He told me that men like him find it difficult to accept their wives seeking employment. In Candace's case, he said, things were even worse because of the specific type of job she was looking for: “This is not something women should do. In our African tradition, men are the ones who are protecting the community. [. . .] I don't want to see her [Candace] in a uniform, patrolling some street corner. It would be a disgrace.” He was also adamant that family life had to be unaffected by Candace's plans.
The next morning the training course resumed, and I had another chat with Candace and her friends, who asked her teasingly what kind of food she had prepared for the strange white visitor. Candace laughed, and then complained that she found it increasingly difficult to soothe her husband's worries that she was trying to usurp the male role in the family. To avoid conflicts, she therefore felt it necessary to put more effort in typically female household activities since having enrolled for the course. The other women chimed in wholeheartedly. One of them commented that her husband had started to control her movements even more than before, insisting on his male authority to be the protector of the family. They agreed that their shy ventures into private security had inadvertently engendered a return to more “traditional” gender roles at home.
Among several other things, this is an example of a looming conflict over the question of which category of person might legitimately be part of a given securosociality. From the point of view of Candace's husband, and no doubt for many other South African men with a leaning toward patriarchy, certain types of securosocialities, such as the private security industry, ought to be reserved to members of the male gender status category. In cases like these, public acknowledgment of legitimate membership to a securosociality depends at least in part on criteria that were established and that have a wide currency outside the specific securosociality.
Also, similar to what we have seen in the previous section, Candace's husband considered the two securosocialities—that is, his wife's incipient involvement in the private security industry and the family's domestic securosociality—to be incompatible with each other. Claiming sole authority in all matters concerning his family's security, he thus insisted on keeping these securosocialities separate, while Candace saw some advantage in combining them. The arguments he used to make his point drew heavily on “traditional” understandings of complementary gender roles. Eventually, the prospect of a new securosociality (employment in a security company) affecting the domestic realm led to the reaffirmation and strengthening of the validity of another securosociality: that of “the man as the protector of the household.”
The looming tensions between Candace and her husband illustrate how social actors at the grassroots level navigate a field of different securosocialities, weighing them up against each other and seeking to determine their compatibility with other forms of sociality. Their conflict revolved around two different vernacular understandings of security. Candace hoped that some of the security skills she was acquiring in the training course would prove transferable from one context to another, from a formal institution to the domestic realm of her family. Her husband conceived of his family's security as being intricately embedded in the family's intimate social relationships and complementary gender status roles, which should not be “contaminated” by outside influences. Thus, what was at stake here was the question of whether different types of securosociality can be “blurred” (see Grassiani and Diphoorn 2019) or instead whether they are distinguished by different “inner logics,” informing their mutual incompatibility.
Reconfigurations
At this point I return to the case of the private security company in the Cape Town metropolitan area that had arranged the local “neighborhood meeting” discussed in the introduction to this article. As I came to learn in the days following this meeting, the security company had underestimated the density of the social contacts that actually existed in this part of town.
Many of these contacts were of a casual nature, whereby immediate neighbors sought amicable coexistence without becoming deeply involved in each other's lives. Some residents wanted to stick to this non-committal form of contact. For them, infusing neighborly relations with a shared engagement in the field of security was going too far, because they feared it might inadvertently draw them into more demanding social reciprocities. Another group, which likewise stayed away from the meeting, were residents who felt that amicable social relations were by nature irreconcilable with what they considered to be a hallmark of security, namely a cultivated sense of distrust toward more or less everybody else. Still others, like my interlocutor Michael, were initially open to exploring shared security concerns with their neighbors, only for them to shy away from this when they realized that it would imply subscribing to a “soft” approach to security, which for Michael was epitomized in the ridiculous image of a tea party. From his perspective, “true” security had to be “hard” security as provided by private security companies.
Those who did attend the meeting embraced the idea of imbuing neighborly relations with added value. For them, the challenge consisted in embedding security concerns into the otherwise relaxed modes of interaction among neighbors. They were worried that an overemphasis on feelings of insecurity and the formalization of security-related interactions between them could lead to mutual estrangement. Casually drinking tea together was therefore welcomed as a way to neutralize the alienating potential inherent in exposing one's personal security concerns and aspirations in this context.
The foregoing example is another case of a securosociality in the making. However, in contrast to the street traders’ anti-crime initiative, examined in a preceding section, the efforts made to create this securosociality originated from an outside agency, namely the security company. Also, the “neighborhood” concerned was not a self-evident socio-spatial unit, and residents of the area would disagree over the location of its actual boundaries. In practice, these boundaries were determined in the run-up to the meeting by representatives of the security company. Their policy of inviting people to the meeting started out from a particular cluster of the company's customers and came to include other residents of the area with which the company had not (yet) made a contract. The contingencies involved in the decisions by certain residents of the suburb to make a contract with this particular security company thus had an influence on what at a later stage was treated as an existing social unit based on residential proximity—a “neighborhood.”
At the same time, in the South African context, calling a gathering of the residents of an area a “neighborhood” meeting has racialized connotations. While social collectivities on the part of Black people in South Africa are commonly referred to in public discourses as “communities,” using the term “neighborhood” in relation to Black social collectivities is far less common. It should therefore come as no surprise that those attending the “neighborhood meeting” had the implicit understanding that Black domestic staff living on the premises of white residents would not participate.3
Last but not least, the divergent preferences regarding the topics and forms of interaction during the meeting revealed the existence of different vernacular understandings of security. For some residents, security should ideally be approached in a straightforward manner. Others felt uncomfortable with the prospect of direct discussions about security in this context. Nor did they find them necessary because, for them, interactions between neighbors represented in and of themselves a way of doing everyday security. In a way, for them, drinking tea together was doing security.
Concluding Remarks
A key strength of the concept of securosociality lies in making visible and, most importantly, analytically comparable what otherwise tends to fall between the cracks of long-standing conventions of categorizing social collectivities in the field of security. These conventions make it difficult for scholars to analyze in their own right the micro-practices involved in forming and/or negotiating hybrid securosocialities between otherwise unlikely bedfellows, like the shopkeeper's cooperation with street traders examined in one of my ethnographic examples. Moreover, applying this concept not only when studying informal ways of doing security, but also in research on formally organized institutions, such as the private security industry, can help us to see hybrid arrangements as an integral part of social life in these institutions. At the same time, my ethnographic explorations have made it clear that one also finds empirical contexts where social actors are actively trying to avoid security blurs (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2019), instead aiming to maintain boundaries and distinctions.
Insights like these are made possible by the openness of the notion of sociality. It highlights the versatility and processual nature of how people form social ties with one another, thus allowing social collectivities in the field of security to be studied without falling into the groupism trap by presupposing that these collectivities are necessarily and automatically already “out there.” Accordingly, two of the empirical examples explored in this article—the local neighborhood meeting and the street traders’ anti-crime initiative—can be considered securosocialities in the making, whose emergent socio-cultural specificities are worth examining in detail.
In addition, the concept of sociality does not preclude the analytically important observation that a person can be a member of different securosocialities simultaneously, even if they appear incompatible in certain regards. As I demonstrated with the example of the shop owner's alliance with street traders, some types of securosociality even bridge what are otherwise considered to be social divisions and cleavages.
The specific type of socialities this article has focused on are securosocialities. I suggest that this thematic focus does necessarily imply that all members of a given securosociality share the same understandings of security. Instead, the challenges in coming up with a workable definition of “security” are themselves part of the processual dynamic in which these socialities are formed.
The concept of securosociality enables us to determine the role of vernacular understandings of security in how grassroots social actors form security-related social ties with one another. Work on these understandings therefore also constitutes work on the boundaries of the respective securosociality, as discussed earlier in the case of a disagreement between neighbors about whether or not the practice of “drinking tea together” can be considered an acceptable form of doing security. Social tensions, such as those between security trainee Candace and her husband, can also arise when people navigate a field of competing securosocialities, which brings up vexing questions about legitimate membership in and the mutual compatibility of different (securo)socialities.
Of course, this article can only scratch the surface of what a more comprehensive inquiry into securosocialities would require. For example, it would be interesting to study in detail how other types of sociality are transformed once they are turned into a securosociality and the ways in which certain types of securosociality dominate others that can culminate in a security regime. Also, it would be important to assess the role of “imagined communities” in securosocialities, that is, whether and if so in what respects and on what scales securosocialities imagine themselves to be part of wider social collectivities. Another field of inquiry is the question of involuntary membership. For instance, by what power dynamics are the vernacular understandings of security held by a coalition of powerful actors in a securosociality made obligatory for all of its members, possibly even against their will? Also, research needs to take account of the external perceptions of securosocialities. As in the case of gangs, which provide protection for the people associated with them and simultaneously pose a threat for those who do not, there is often a marked difference between how securosocialities describe themselves and how they are judged from the outside. Questions like the foregoing invite further investigation.
Notes
Two further differences between “securosociality” and “security assemblage” should be noted. Firstly, while several researchers (e.g., Lippert and O'Connor 2003) have discussed “security assemblages” within the framework of governmentality studies, “securosociality” is not necessarily tied to a Foucault-inspired heuristic. Secondly, contrary to scholars such as Peer Schouten (2014), who have included material aspects in their analyses of “security assemblages,” the concept of “securosociality,” as developed in the present article, focuses exclusively on human actants (but see Kirsch 2019).
The names of my interlocutors have been anonymized.
For analyses of non-state security practices in white suburbs in Durban, see Cooper-Knock 2016 and Diphoorn 2016a.
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