Reimagining Security from Below: Participatory Method, Abolitionist Alternatives, and What Non-Elite Imagination Can and Cannot Do

Join us in welcoming Nina Perkowski, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Violence and Security at University of Hamburg, Germany. There will be tea, coffee and snacks in the seminar room of the Centre for Criminology, in the law faculty (St Cross Road). You can also join online. Please register so we have a sense of numbers for in-person attendance and for receiving the link if you join online! The link will be sent around shortly before the event.

Abstract: Security has become a battleground over the future of democracy.
Critical Security Studies has persuasively demonstrated how governing
migration, protest, or welfare through the lens of security produces
exclusion, violence, and democratic erosion, yet the field has stopped
short of asking how security might be reconfigured differently. This
question has been pursued more seriously within abolitionist thought,
which has long insisted that dismantling carceral and bordering
infrastructures requires - among others - cultivating the collective
capacity to imagine otherwise. The stakes are urgent: far-right
movements successfully weaponise security discourse from the US to the
UK and Germany, while planetary crisis exposes the inadequacy of
frameworks centred on control, containment, and punishment.
This paper reports on a participatory project designed to create spaces
for radical imagination not within abolitionist organising, but with
‘ordinary’ urban residents. Drawing on Aradau and Huysmans’ (2014)
argument that methods can function as acts, i.e. interventions that
rupture dominant orderings of knowledge and make space for subjugated
subjects and expertise, the project used the Ketso mind-mapping toolkit
in ten workshops with 125 Hamburg residents, centrally including people
with disabilities, migrant women, and LGBTQI* communities, to create
structured spaces for collective reimaginations of what a "secure city
for all" might mean.
The paper develops two contributions. The first is methodological.
Participants independently articulated alternatives long cultivated by
abolitionist organisers, including social-work-staffed crisis response,
expanded Housing First, drug consumption rooms, and mutual
responsibility in place of surveillance. Yet not all imaginations were
emancipatory: the same workshops at times also produced calls for
expanded surveillance, harsher sentences, and in rare cases even the
death penalty. The value of participatory reimagining therefore does not
lie in reliably producing emancipatory visions, but in creating rare
structured spaces for people to consider collectively what actually
makes them safe.
The second contribution is substantive. Accessibility – physical,
linguistic, informational – emerged across workshops as a cross-cutting
dimension of security that concerned people with disabilities,
non-native speakers, women, queer people, youth, and people with prams
alike. This reframes security away from protection through exclusion and
toward building enabling infrastructures that allow diverse lives to
move through and encounter one another in shared spaces. Together, these
contributions raise a question for abolitionist and critical security
scholarship alike: how can we open up and repoliticise the meaning of
security in contemporary debates, and what role might participatory and
imaginative methods play in that endeavour?