9 - Postscript: Towards a Research Agenda on Security Practices

Summary

Introduction

This book has followed an explorative approach to detect securityscapes, which we understand as imaginary concepts that reveal themselves in everyday practices and highlight the spatial as well as conflictive dimensions of security. This explorative character is underscored by the high number and wide variety of case studies discussed in this volume. Our aim has been to study security from ‘below’ by putting the practices of the individuals concerned at the centre of our research approach. We have described and analysed different types of securityscapes of people who perceive themselves– for different reasons– as marginalized in their own society. Our intention here is to understand how individuals manoeuvre their everyday life through situations perceived by them as risky and insecure. We have explored a wide variety of insecure situations, ranging from vague and amorphous feelings of uncertainty, to concrete and explicit exposure to physical harm. Confronted with such security threats, our interest has been to understand security practices that find their expression in common routines of avoiding, separating, mimicking, hiding and so on.

Through a collection of individual case studies, we present and discuss the security practices of diverging social groups. We included minority ethnic groups such as Uzbeks and Lyulis in the city of Osh, and socially marginalized groups such as the LGBT community, but also young females and interethnic mixed couples. As a general finding, our research detected diverging sets of repertoires of security practices and securityscapes for different social groups and communities. A key conclusion is that everyday security practices are framed, above all, by the positionality of the actors and very much depend on the very specific context of (in)security.

The conceptual pathway of our research was pre-structured by two distinct decisions: first, we chose the state of Kyrgyzstan as the common point of reference for our research; and, second, we focused on the everyday security practices of marginalized groups. Both decisions were necessary to make our different case studies comparable. However, we are aware that such decisions meant that our research excluded certain other aspects of security practices that might be of interest for future research.