Insecurity and the invisible: The challenge of spiritual (in)security

Abstract

The search for security has become an almost permanent feature of the contemporary lived experience and what Brian Massumi has called an ‘operative logic’ for states across the globe. The modern study – and practice – of security has, nonetheless, been largely concerned with the protection, preservation and sustaining of the material, the tangible and the visible. For many people around the world, however, feelings of security also derive from understandings of an individual or community’s relationships with invisible and spiritual forces. Religious devotion and divine protection represent a central plank of security for many, just as fears of divine retribution, demonic possession or witchcraft feature as a central dimension of insecurity for many others. This remains, however, a significant blindspot in much of security studies – and, indeed, often eludes and challenges state authority as much as it intersects with and enhances it. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in northwestern Uganda, this study reflects critically on the provenance and implications of this blindspot and argues for an expanded understanding of what ‘counts’ as (in)security. In doing so, the article emphasizes the global character of spiritual (in)security and the challenges an understanding of (in)security that encompasses this pose to longstanding scholarly and practitioner associations of (in)security with state authority.

Registers of security: The concept of tryghed in Danish politics

“…The concept of registers allows us to pull together wide-ranging cases of security politics under a common theoretical framework and more systematically theorize about the role of emotion. Other examples could be recent work on the spiritual sources of (in)security in Northwest Uganda (Fisher and Leonardi, 2020) and the very different dynamics of 'Indigenous' securitization of environmental hazards amoung Inuit and Sápmi in the Arctic (Greaves, 2016). These registers of security come with their own highly specific meanings, political contexts, and emotional overtones.…”

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“…Even in the most terrible of situations, spiritual security may bring a sense of calm and protection. Indeed, for some, the more severe the situation, the more important this aspect of security becomes (Fisher & Leonardi, 2020).…”