Abstract
This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw, Powell, & De La Ossa, 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.
Highlights
This paper discusses young people's everyday encounters with politics using the referendum campaign for independence in Scotland in 2014 as an illustrative case.1 We consider the ways in which the campaign for Scottish independence represented hopeful multicultural and democratic aspirations for young people
We argue that the discourse of inclusive multicultural nationalism in Scotland is effective in making some young people ‘feel’ secure in the nation state in spite of its ambitions for discontinuity from the Union
We have argued that the geopolitical scripting of Muslims works to deny the subjectivity of many ethnic and religious minority young people through persistent invalidation
Summary
This paper discusses young people's everyday encounters with politics using the referendum campaign for independence in Scotland in 2014 as an illustrative case. We consider the ways in which the campaign for Scottish independence represented hopeful multicultural and democratic aspirations for young people. The inclusion of youth voices on both sides of the campaign shows efforts made to strengthen youth political participation and recognize youth political agency (BBC News, 2014a; 2014b). The everyday violence of racism in Scotland undermines efforts towards inclusion and multiculturalism, generating ontological insecurity in young people's everyday lives. We begin by reviewing three key areas of scholarship in order to bridge theory on security; Critical Security Studies that have traditionally been limited to scholars of IR, feminist geopolitics, and children's emotional geographies. This discussion is followed by an outline of the methodology used to research young people's everyday geopolitics in Scotland. What is perceived to be ordinary is unlocked from the ‘constitutive binaries of modernity’ (public/private, global/local, inside/outside, normal/exceptional) and re-located at the scale of the intimate and everyday (Cowen & Story, 2013; see ; Cowen & Gilbert, 2008; Enloe, 1990; Puar, 2007). Pain and Smith (2008) see the everyday and the geopolitical as existing in a symbiosis, albeit subject to breaks, conflicts and tensions that are both awkward and enabling with the potential to be transformative (Pain, 2009; cf.; Askins, 2008)
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