RP8: Counter-Communities' Protection Practices and Security Utopias in Catastrophic Times
This project examines how marginalized communities create alternative forms of protection as liberal democratic institutions fail them. While marginalised communities – including women, racial minorities, and migrants – have never been fully included in the liberal state’s promise of protection, they now face the systematic dismantling of even limited existing safeguards. In response, some communities are developing “security utopias”: transformative frameworks that combine immediate protective practices with prefigurative experiments in creating different security futures.
The research focuses on feminist, Black-led, and migrant organizations that have built autonomous protection where state institutions have failed or become hostile. We examine these communities in three urban contexts representing distinct patterns of liberal erosion. In Oakland, abolitionist and mutual aid networks respond to acute institutional crisis under aggressive federal enforcement. In Milan, feminist and migrant movements navigate gradual democratic backsliding through Meloni’s constitutional reforms. In London, communities draw on sustained organizing experience to address long-term institutional retrenchment.
Through participatory methods, we examine three dimensions of security transformation. Security practices encompass concrete protective mechanisms like rapid response networks and community accountability processes. Security imaginations explore how communities reconceptualize protection beyond state-centered frameworks. Security relations trace the reconfiguration of responsibility from state monopolies to collective care networks.
The project advances critical security studies by moving beyond documentation of exclusion to theorizing innovation from the margins. Working with communities, we produce both peer-reviewed scholarship and practical resources, facilitating knowledge exchange between sites. This contributes to understanding how alternative security frameworks emerge, sustain themselves, and prefigure more inclusive futures in catastrophic times.