Youth in the security agenda: rethinking (in)security through young people

Security, or securitisation as to emphasise the process in which something is made a security concern, has drawn, and continues to draw, scholarly attention across disciplines including human geography and international relations. Yet, despite the well-established field of research, research on security discourses and practices specifically targeting young people remains scarce. To address this research gap, the project will investigate how young people, evidently becoming a more crucial group of security measures in Finland and elsewhere, are inserted into current discourses and practices of security. The project’s theoretical-methodological framework brings together feminist approaches to security studies and geographical approaches to youth studies. This framework will enable the exploration of the interconnections between broader geopolitical events and young people’s everyday lives and spaces. To this end, the project will combine textual analysis of documents and other representations of security with ethnographic methods involving participant observations and in-depth interviews with young people and practitioners in the field. The research design includes two cases studies through which to investigate young people in Finland as targets of “external” and “internal” security measures within the national framework of “comprehensive security”. The first case concerns security-related courses in upper secondary education that are currently being tailored for young people, where young people are identified as a key resource for national defence capability and the advancement of external security. The second concerns prevention measures against urban youth crime, where young people are identified as a potential threat to internal security. The project will situate these case studies in their broader historically and geographically specific contexts and consider the implications of the securitisation measures of young people for the understanding of security.

https://koneensaatio.fi/en/grants-and-residencies/youth-in-the-security…