In his highly anticipated new book, Vernacular Border Security, critical border scholar Nick Vaughan-Williams provides a new way of interpreting and understanding Europe’s “migration crisis.” The book rejects the typical focus on elite narratives and perspectives when it comes to understanding the politics of borders, and instead engages with the perspectives offered by everyday citizens of European Union (EU) countries. In doing so, Vaughan-Williams seeks to unravel a series of perplexing paradoxes that arise in the context of contemporary migration politics. From the outset, he recognizes that there is wide awareness that the protracted international conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have resulted in unprecedented numbers of forced migrations of refugees from these areas. The insecurity, precarity, and suffering experienced by these refugees and migrants has similarly been well documented. Despite this knowledge about refugee movements and their causes, however, Vaughan-Williams observes that it has been the secure, established, and comparatively wealthy populations of the EU that have somehow been cast as the “threatened majorities” (p. 3). Further, while the response of EU nations has been to create ever more restrictive immigration, asylum, and border regimes, this has not resulted in EU citizens feeling more secure. Quite the opposite, increased border controls and wall building has resulted in heightened feelings of anxiety about the border. Faced with these paradoxes, Vaughan-Williams asks: “Why is it that the intensification of EU border security appears to have heightened rather than diminished border anxieties among EU citizens?” (p. 3).

Vaughan-Williams argues that to understand this disjuncture between the promise of “tougher border security” and heightened feelings of “border anxiety” one must move beyond elite statements on or narratives about migration, borders, and security. This is important because political elites typically justify increased restrictions on migration and intensifications of border security on the findings from public opinion data, and so claim legitimacy to their policy by invoking the will of “the people.” Vaughan-Williams, by contrast, joins a chorus of critical scholars from political science, anthropology, political geography, and other fields to eschew the trappings of elite knowledge and instead develop “bottom-up” investigations about migration, borders, and security. In other words, Vaughan-Williams is interested in revealing how the dominant narratives about border security are mobilized, received, reproduced, and contested by EU citizens in everyday life. Hence, the title of the book: a “vernacular” approach to understanding the politics of border security.

Vernacular approaches to studying border security begin with the recognition that neither political elites nor academic researchers have a monopoly on knowledge about migration, borders, or security. Instead, regular citizens narrate and make sense of their own experiences of security and borders in their daily lives. The great advantage of focusing on nonelite voices and experiences is that they may “render visible existing alternative ways of living with strangers” (p. 4). Vaughan-Williams gathered a wealth of original material for this study, which he expertly mobilizes to provide highly contextual, nuanced, and politically engaged analysis. The “vernacular” data for this book came from qualitative focus group discussions held with EU citizens in 11 cities across five states (Germany, Hungary, Spain, Greece, and the United Kingdom). A total of 24 focus groups involving 179 participants were held between 2015–17. An important source of innovation in this study is that Vaughan-Williams does not subject the findings from these focus groups to the established analytics of discourse theory or speech acts. Instead, he analyzes these discussions as conversations, holding on to—rather than smoothing over—all their messy, engaged, intersubjective, and collective aspects. Conversations emerge in this study as key sites where collective understandings of borders and security are produced, reproduced, mobilized, and contested. These conversations animate each of the substantive chapters and allow for the reader to understand more fully how nonelite actors generate everyday cultures of security and in security, inclusion and exclusion, belonging and abjection.

The book is well written in an accessible style and the argument is tightly structured into six chapters. The first chapter introduces the main themes and research questions of the book and situates the study within broader debates within the fields of security studies and border studies. It is here that the idea of the “vernacular” is introduced, theorized, and applied to the study of border security. Chapter 2 consists of an extended critical reflection on the idea of the “crisis” and maps out the various ways in which Europe’s “migration crisis” has been politically constructed and deconstructed, politicized and securitized. Chapter 3 takes on the issue of populism and “posttruth” narratives that portray migration as out of control and in need of a strong governmental response. These narratives are accompanied by the claim that only by strengthening border controls and intensifying walling and other deterrent security measures will societies be able to “take back control” to protect “the people.” Chapter 4 shifts the focus away from elite narratives of migration, crises, and borders and moves to consider the vernacular knowledges of these issues as revealed in the focus group discussions. What is so interesting in this chapter is how vernacular knowledges are revealed as dynamics that refuse to embrace and instead problematize elite narratives, noting the various “information gaps” and their demands for higher quality and more accessible information about migration. Chapter 5 continues the examination of vernacular narratives about migration and borders, this time by unpacking discourses about ontological security. Here, Vaughan-Williams productively engages with recent developments in psychoanalytical theory to make sense of the paradoxes that come from the demand for more intensive bordering to alleviate feelings of insecurity, but which nonetheless produce only more anxiety. Finally, chapter 6 provides a conclusion to the text by revisiting many of the counternarratives about borders, security, and migration.

Vernacular Border Security is innovative on many levels. It is original both in the empirical subject matter it deals with and the theories it uses to interpret this material. Indeed, there is a seamless integration of deep qualitative field research and high-level theorizing. For example, early on Vaughan-Williams points out that etymologies of the word “vernacular” establish important linkages between that term and the institution of slavery. The “vernacular” has its origins in the Latin root for “a slave born on his master’s estate” (p. 8). Historical movements against slavery have progressively delegitimized and abolished this practice. Vaughan-Williams returns to the theme of abolition later in the book by investigating the vernacular positions on “no border” politics in a way that does not reproduce the either/or binary of no borders versus securitized borders. He concludes with a politically generative engagement with the work of Julia Kristeva and her notion of an “ethic of strangeness” as a way of “refusing the terms of existing debates” and offering instead “an alternative paradigm for living with others” (p. 169).

Vernacular Border Security represents a major contribution to the burgeoning field of vernacular security studies and will be of immense interest to scholars looking for alternative conceptualizations to understand the contemporary politics of migration, borders, and security.