Securing disunion : young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland
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 literatures 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 et al., 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.
Citation
Botterill , K , Hopkins , P , Sanghera , G S & Arshad , R 2016 , ' Securing disunion : young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland ' , Political Geography , vol. 55 , pp. 124-134 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.09.002
Publication
Political Geography
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-6298Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Description
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/K000594/1).Collections
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