Fears for the future: the incommensurability of securitisation and in/securities among southern African youth

Abstract Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced ‘on the ground’ as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on ‘threats’ in isolation, and seeking to protect ‘society’ as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people’s orientation to the future.

Since 11 September 2001 and the ensuing 'war on terror' , policy-makers internationally have become preoccupied with issues of security and in particular with protection from military and criminal threats. The history of human security discourse, however, extends further into the past, particularly to the 1990s when numerous perceived threats to humanity began to be framed in relation to security. Through global agencies, it has extended beyond its Euro-American origins. In southern Africa, securitisation discourse has manifested most prominently in concerns around food and AIDS. This region has experienced recurrent food shortages and exceptionally high incidence of HIV and AIDS over the past two decades, and much has been written about the framing of these situations as security threats. Less attention, however, has been given to the lived experience of insecurity among southern Africans as subjective and embodied: to security at the scale of the body rather than the world region or the global arena.
In this paper, we explore how marginalised young people in southern Africa experience 'in/security' and the ways in which their felt insecurities connect with the 'securitisation' discourses of governments and international organisations relating to AIDS and food. As such we are responding to work by geographers such as Hyndman (2001) who juxtaposes human security against state security, and calls for a focus on politics at scales other than the nation state, including embodied security. Similarly, Smith (2001, p. 213) argues the case for 'repopulating the landscapes of geopolitics to focus on issues of "human security" in the cross-scale interactions of state, nation, economy, polity, family and the embodied (gendered) subject' .
The paper builds on a growing body of work on youth temporalities (e.g. Ansell, Hajdu, van Blerk, & Robson, 2014) and youth insecurity (Jeffrey, 2008) to show how insecurity, experienced by young people as fear and uncertainty (see Pain & Smith, 2008), is a key way in which young people's lives are oriented to the future. From this perspective, we contribute to social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation in three key ways. First, we draw attention to the disconnect between marginalised young people's experiences of insecurity and the securitisation discourses that inform national and global policy. The former, we demonstrate are much more complex, contextualised and temporally and relationally structured. Securitisation discourse fails to account for the realities of young people's in/ securities which are not compartmentalised (as is securitisation discourse on food or AIDS) but complexly connected. Second, the paper demonstrates how this disjuncture is ordered not merely in terms of scale (global versus bodily) or Security versus security (Philo, 2012) but also in the way in which securitisation assumes an abstract and aggregated 'society' that is far removed from the lived realities of marginalised youth. Third, the paper reveals how connections between temporality and in/security are moulded by social inequalities as well as wider global injustices. Focusing on the temporally oriented experiences and understandings of marginalised youth thereby provides a contextualised understanding of in/securities that may be illuminated through a social justice perspective. The paper is prompted by a research project undertaken by the authors entitled 'Averting "New Variant Famine" in Southern Africa: building food-secure rural livelihoods with AIDSaffected young people' . The project explored the contention that the AIDS pandemic in southern Africa was likely, through its impacts on rural children and youth, to have a harmful impact on future food security. The research was undertaken primarily in two case study communities in Malawi and Lesotho, which are among the countries worst affected by both HIV and food shortages. It employed a variety of largely participatory methods to explore the impacts of AIDS on food insecurity in young people's current and (projected) future lives. The responses of international agencies and national policy-makers were also explored through interviews with key informants and analysis of policy documents and reports. Through these methods, disjunctures between young people's experiences and the discourses and policies addressing food insecurity and AIDS emerged.
We begin by contextualising the research in relation to recent geographical writing on three themes: securitisation; subjective in/securities; and the position of young people in security/securitisation discourse. We then examine how two issues -food and AIDS -have become the focus of securitisation discourse and policy in southern Africa. We draw on our research in Lesotho and Malawi to explore the fears and insecurities of young people in rural southern Africa communities. Finally, the paper reflects on how these felt insecurities relate to securitisation discourses, and what this understanding contributes to the social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation.
While such work has had a predominantly Euro-American focus, a special issue of the Geographical Journal on 'Questioning environmental security' (Mason & Zeitoun, 2013) shifted the focus to other forms of human insecurity that were being framed as security threats -climate change, water, food and energy. Attention has turned to how such framings underlie interventions by global actors in poorer countries. Some have focused on the (military) securitisation of environmental protection (Cavanagh, Vedeld, & Traedal, 2015;Kelly & Ybarra, 2016). Drawing on the example of a nature conservancy on the Mozambican/South African border, Massé and Lunstrum (2016) develop the idea of 'accumulation by securitisation' in which the processes and logics of security enable capital accumulation through land and resource enclosure, and in turn the dispossession of vulnerable communities. Noxolo (2012) presents the example of the post-2010 coalition government in the U.K., which cast security concerns as development concerns, enabling donor agencies to exercise ever greater control over the supposed subjects of development. Pugh, Gabay, and Williams (2013) elaborate how U.K. international development policy now cultivates the image of a chaotic world in order to justify their interventions to their own electors. Similarly, Hyndman (2007) describes how the securitisation of fear in post-tsunami Sri Lanka was used to justify measures such as 'buffer zones' along the coast that served to incite feelings of discrimination, tension and fear. This was supported by provision of aid, premised on vulnerability 'at home' in donor countries to make it politically relevant. Where crises are produced, aid is targeted at what is then framed as a geopolitical threat.
Given these examples, it is unsurprising that the language and practices of securitisation have been critiqued for undermining social justice. Securitisation often represents a manipulation of narratives by political elites (Verhoeven, 2011). Narratives are deployed to justify practical interventions which are technocratic and sometimes oppressive: framing an issue in terms of securitisation can evoke a militarisation of policy responses (Ahmed, 2011) and ordinary rights and liberties may be suspended (Selgelid & Enemark, 2008). In relation to AIDS, for instance, the US imposed a travel ban on HIV-positive individuals that lasted 22 years (Frowd, 2014). Fear is produced and framed to justify exclusion and hatred. Conflicting interests and power relations between richer and poorer countries are exposed (Jin & Karackattu, 2011), social groups are othered and regions of strategic global importance problematised (Ahmed, 2011). Securitisation discourse and policy thus both reflect and drive anxieties (Mason & Zeitoun, 2013). It is the relationship (or lack thereof ) between securitisation and felt insecurities that is the focus of this paper.

Rethinking in/security: temporalities and injustices
Like securitisation, security and insecurity are concepts that have recently been interrogated by geographers. They are closely connected with notions of vulnerability and risk, with danger and perceived threats, and with experiencing unanticipated or unpredictable events. They are functions of the individual's orientation to the world as well as the ways in which the world ingresses on the individual. Waite, Valentine, and Lewis (2014) conceptualise insecurity as the capacity to hurt -to be or feel hurt or the act of hurting others. They refer to a range of insecurities: 'psychological hurt (fear of being cheated), material hurt (unjust allocation of resources), spatial hurt (threat of change to communities) and bodily hurt (fear of violence and defilement)' (p. 325). Philo (2014), too, places insecurity in the interactions between bodies or selves and the world they encounter. He suggests that 'secure' implies bounded, coherent, self-contained. Yet, he observes, all selves/bodies challenge this vision and today seem particularly insecure, battered and buffeted by the world around them. Drawing on RD Laing's notion of ontological insecurity -the idea that in some circumstances individuals cannot establish secure identities - Waite et al. (2014) note a growing sense of precariousness or insecurity associated with the uncertainties of late modernity in which identities are frequently unfixed (see also Ansell, 2004). Insecurity may relate to a specific danger or perceived threat, or simply a sense of not knowing what needs to be done in order to get by, or a sense of powerlessness associated with inability to predict outcomes (Waite et al., 2014).
An important dimension of this felt in/security that has received little attention is its temporality. In/security can be understood as an orientation not only to the immediate context but to the future (both immediate and long-term). Indeed, the perceived or sensed future is part of a body's context. While absent from most discussion of in/security, this temporal dimension is apparent, though not explicitly interrogated, in securitisation discourse. Global security threats are often constructed in relation to uncertain or undesirable futures, as well as challenges in the present. Barnett and Adger (2007), for instance, write that 'climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods' . It is on the basis of specific envisioned futures that present-day actions are justified (Anderson & Adey, 2011). Concerns lie both with the likely future impacts of present day activities and the possibilities for shaping alternative, more desirable futures and also with how people feel about and are able to live their lives today, in relation to uncertain futures. Recognising the diversity of approaches to security, Holbraad and Pedersen (2013, p. 1) ask 'what visions of the future are at stake in people's potentially divergent concerns with security: what, and when, is the time of security?' Yet the temporal aspects remain under-theorised. Balzacq, Guzzini, Williams, Waever, and Patomäki (2015, p. 96) have questioned: 'if securitization commands that leaders act now before it is too late, what status has temporality therein?' Understanding in/security as a temporal orientation draws attention to insecurity as uncertainty and fear. Its relationship to fear was recognised by UNDP (1994) which outlined two main components of human security: freedom from fear and freedom from want. Philo (2012) discusses the argument that security stems from a metaphysical desire for certitude, wherein the desire for security is a desire to draw boundaries, to fix or fasten. An uncertain future is a future that impresses upon bodies in the present through the affect of fear (Anderson & Adey, 2011). Despite being painted as real and calculable in securitisation discourse, insecurity operates through the domains of feeling, sentiment, emotion and affect. A sense of insecurity is fundamentally a feeling of fear towards the future.
Fear is produced in part through, or in relation to, the geopolitical (Pain & Smith, 2008). While purportedly concerned with freeing people from fear, securitisation discourse arguably does the opposite, playing upon and feeding fear among populations. Foucault (2008) suggested that in the modern world people are conditioned to experience their lives -present and future -as containing danger. Such feelings of fear, he asserted, are part of the way in which liberalism functions through security apparatuses. Anxiety is cultivated as a tool of governance by drawing attention to lurking threats which legitimate and justify action in the name of security (Anderson & Adey, 2011). Even where unintended, however, measures to reduce fear can provoke it (Pain & Smith, 2008).
Fear is an emotion that is complex, situated, social and embodied: it cannot be understood only in relation to securitisation and geopolitics. As Pain and Smith (2008, p. 5) note, '[g] eopolitical and everyday accounts often do not map onto each other. Everyday accounts tend to suggest it is the same old longstanding local fears which are most prominent in people's lives … the new "global" fears simply do not figure that highly in everyday lives … or else they have more indirect impacts' . There is thus a need for a nuanced and grounded approach that attends to micropolitics of fear and the ways in which it is experienced in everyday life (Pain & Smith, 2008). Fears, as Lemanski (2012) points out, are related to everyday practices and subjectivities as well as physical and financial security, and are experienced in embodied ways (Hyndman, 2001;Smith, 2001).
Importantly, also, while the affective geopolitics of fear may be globally pervasive, it does not shape a universalised sense of insecurity. As Sharp (2011) elaborates, fear is experienced differently by those on the margins of the dominant geopolitical imagination. Yet geographers have paid relatively little attention to fear as part of everyday life in poorer 'riskier' countries (Pain & Smith, 2008). As noted in the section above, securitisation often serves socially unjust outcomes, framing some groups and societies as fear-inducing. Part of the function of security affects is to differentiate valued from devalued lives (Anderson & Adey, 2011). As Radcliffe (2007) has observed, being represented as a security threat can induce fear in, for instance, indigenous peoples. It is thus important to explore how those who are most marginalised (in this instance rural southern African youth) experience in/ security, and the ways in which their experiences relate to politics and practices of securitisation.

Youth, securitisation and in/securities
While geographers have been attentive to both securitisation and in/security, there is relatively little geographical literature relating explicitly to youth and securitisation. Some attention has been paid to how the private security industry manages the presence of youth in shopping malls (O'Dougherty, 2006) and young people's exclusion from the streets through securitisation measures in relation to mega-events (van Blerk, 2011). Wright (2013) has addressed the more extreme situation in Mexico where youth have been killed under the auspices of the government's declared war on organised crime.
While it may have received little attention, securitisation discourse has certainly incorporated youth in various ways that relate to how youth and risk are co-constructed in Western society. Historically, youth was viewed as a life phase involving few social responsibilities, and thus young people were permitted, even encouraged, to take risks (Plant & Plant, 1992). Today, however, youth is more commonly viewed as a time in which people are 'at risk' , both from external causes and individual behaviours such as drinking, drug-taking and (unsafe) sex (Ansell, 2017;France, 2000;Plant & Plant, 1992;Schoon & Bynner, 2003;Turnbull & Spence, 2011) and thus in need of protection through securitisation. At the same time, young people are represented as risks themselves -a potential threat to society (van Blerk, 2013). They are popularly viewed as 'trouble' -deviant and subversive, involved in gangs, crime and violence (Valentine, Skelton, & Chambers, 1998). This twin perspective is not purely a Western notion. Abebe (2008) describes how child beggars in Ethiopia are constructed by local populations both 'as risk' and 'at risk' . In responses to such risks, the temporalities of security discourse are particularly evident. Youth securitisation is often explicitly founded on fears about risks to young people's own future lives, or the future of society. Importantly, securitisation discourses that position young people either as 'risks' or 'exposed to risks' encourage policy responses that intensify control over them (Besley, 2010), whether this be through technologies (Harrikari, 2013), or policed urban policies (van Blerk, 2013).
While securitisation discourses that cast young people as threats to their own futures and those of others are problematic, in/securities are nonetheless significant to young people. A focus on young people's insecurities demands attention to their orientations to the future. Only recently have geographers become interested in youth temporalities. The 'new social studies of childhood' that has framed children's geographies since the 1990s deliberately neglected young people's futures (Ansell et al., 2014;Cole & Durham, 2008). Work in this genre critiqued earlier academic research for focusing on children only as 'human becomings' -as adults in the making (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). The consequence was a spate of empirical studies of children as 'human beings' , living lives of significance in the present. Yet as Uprichard (2008) has commented, young people are always both 'being and becomings' . Their lives are constructed through an iteration between present and future (Ansell et al., 2014). Young people's future orientation shapes their lives in the present, and how they feel about their lives, while present lives inevitably impinge on the future. Thus, young people's trajectories over time relate to their own current and future needs and desires, as well as those of other people, notably their families and friends.
A range of concepts help illuminate young people's orientation to the future. Much research has focused on vulnerability -of young people in general and of particular groups. Securitisation discourses often seize on this perspective, emphasising the potentially harmful future effects of risks young people are exposed to at the present time. Vulnerability has been criticised as a lens through which to understand young people as it casts them as passive and dependent on the actions of others (Boyden & de Berry, 2004;Panter-Brick, 2004). There is also a growing body of research into aspiration (see, for instance, Punch & Sugden, 2013), looking at how young people develop positive orientations to the future and the ways in which hoped for futures shape their attitudes and activities in the present. In/security relates in different ways to both of these concepts. Vulnerability and risk are associated with insecurity, while aspiration and hope may connect with security. However, aspirations may be precarious, and where young people are frustrated in pursuing them, the outcome may be a sense of insecurity (Punch & Sugden, 2013).
There has been little explicit attention to young people's embodied experiences of insecurity. Gough, Chigunta, and Langevang (2016) have recently explored youth employment insecurity as a process experienced at, and influenced by processes operating at, a range of scales from the body, through local, national and global arenas. While youth unemployment is viewed as a threat to human security, Gough et al. (2016) demonstrate how it is also experienced as a manifestation of insecurity. The research we report below also explores young people's embodied insecurities, contrasting their perspectives with the representations of global institutions. We focus, in particular, on how such fears shape young people's orientations to the future.

Securitisation in southern Africa: framing the threats of AIDS and food security
In southern Africa, there are two key issues that have been securitised in the twenty-first century and which have been at the centre of our research. The region has witnessed the world's highest HIV prevalence rates: in 2002, 2 prevalence in the 15-49-year age group was estimated at 15.0% in Malawi, 31.0% in Lesotho and 38.8% in Botswana (UNAIDS, 2002). Southern Africa has also experienced frequent food shortages, particularly since the turn of the century, with food emergencies declared in each of Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe in four or more of the years from 2000 to (FAO, 2006. These recurrent shortages have not abated significantly in the past decade and once again in 2016 the World Food Programme categorised the southern Africa region as a Level 3 Corporate Response -its highest level of emergency. Several southern African countries including Malawi and Lesotho therefore experienced both high HIV prevalence and recurrent food shortages. Both AIDS and food shortfalls have been met with attention from global as well as national actors. UN agencies and bilateral donors turned their attention to HIV in the 1990s, establishing local offices of UNAIDS, persuading national governments to institute National AIDS Commissions, advising on national policies and funding interventions. Similarly, the World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation launched initiatives, sponsored Famine Early Warning Systems and Vulnerability Assessment Committees and national governments have renamed agriculture ministries and rewritten agriculture policies to frame them in terms of food security. Moreover, AIDS and food shortage may not be unrelated. de Waal and Whiteside (2003) hypothesised that AIDS, through its influence on household livelihood activities, was contributing to the severity of food shortages, causing what they termed 'New Variant Famine' . Many initiatives have therefore sought to respond to hunger with HIV-related interventions.
These AIDS and food-focused initiatives need to be understood in relation to global securitisation discourse. Although geographers have examined securitisation mainly in relation to the responses to perceived threats from terrorism since 11 September 2001, in the 1990s all manner of challenges to human well-being were understood and addressed in relation to human security. UNDP, for instance, focused its Human Development Report of 1994 on the theme of Human Security. While terrorism and militarised responses dominated for a few years from 2001, the global financial, food and fuel crises of 2007-2008 led to a revival of securitisation as an approach to more diverse global issues (Havnevik, 2016). Below we consider how AIDS and food have come to be framed as issues of global security, how southern Africa has become emblematic of these threats, and how they are addressed through policy and practice in the region.

AIDS
Concerns about the security implications of AIDS were first expressed as early as 1987 (McInnes & Rushton, 2010) but came to the fore more than a decade later, when the virus had taken hold globally, and in particular across much of Africa. In 2000, UN Security Council Resolution 1308 officially designated HIV/AIDS a threat to international security. Al Gore, then US Vice-President, called AIDS 'a global aggressor that must be defeated' , using explicitly militaristic language. The International Crisis Group (2001) described the pandemic in similar terms: AIDS is raging much as a military conflict might, inflicting similarly devastating effects with no end in sight. Since it began, now two decades ago, 22 million men, women and children have been killed, a death toll that far exceeds the military casualties from the wars of the twentieth century combined. 38 million people are now fatally wounded, and 16,000 more fall victim everyday. If urgent and more adequate actions are not taken immediately, it is projected that by 2005, more than 100 million people will have been caught in the crossfire, and by decades end, more than 40 million children will be left orphaned.
The securitisation of AIDS needs to be seen in relation to the wider (and ongoing) framing of global health threats. These are understood to be associated with globalisation; with the increased mobilities of people, commodities and pathogens across national borders (Brown, Craddock, & Ingram, 2012). Revealingly, diseases are described as 'new' or 'emerging' once they appear to threaten Western countries, even where they have been prevalent in parts of the world for many years. For Brown (2011, p. 324), this indicates that 'the stated desire to achieve global health security appears to be skewed in favour of the national security concerns of powerful western nations' .
The securitisation of AIDS was, nonetheless highly effective in mobilising resources to address the spread of HIV in (as well as from) Africa (Selgelid & Enemark, 2008). As Campbell (2008) observes, securitisation discourse problematises issues in ways that makes them available for particular forms of action, gives them a sense of threat and urgency, puts them on the political agenda and brings into play national and international bureaucracies. Yet policy responses do not necessarily serve the interests of poor people. Kearns and Reid-Henry (2009) argue that public health policies promoted in poorer nations are designed to serve the interests of those in richer societies, notably by protecting them from contagion.
While biosecurity measures focus particularly intently on pandemics (Barker, 2012;Füller, 2016), it is not only infectious diseases that are now the target of global public health but also obesity, cancer and diabetes (though some health issues remain obscure where the populations affected are not prioritised) (Brown et al., 2012). Responses to both infectious and non-infectious diseases often take the form of surveillance measures which focus on vulnerable populations and places, imposing constraints and casting them as 'risky' in ways that stigmatise. Early AIDS interventions in southern Africa, for instance, prioritised 'risk groups' , notably those engaging in transactional sex. There has been some move away from this language but Lesotho's National Prevention Strategy (Government of Lesotho, 2011) still focuses on 'at risk populations' . Securitisation also reframes issues as societal rather than subjective in their outcomes. Malawi's National HIV/AIDS Policy (Government of Malawi, 2003), for instance, frames AIDS as a threat to the nation's 'very survival' (p. vi). Moreover, the emphasis of policy documents on national statistical data (prevalence rates, incidence rates, etc.) and the marshalling of resources and strategies to modify these represents a biopolitical response that seeks above all to control. AIDS in Africa has often been understood as a threat to social stability rather than health, although empirical evidence for such consequences is weak (McInnes & Rushton, 2013;O'Keefe, 2011O'Keefe, , 2012. Ingram (2010) similarly exposes how the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has merged geopolitical agendas with governmental management of populations. The policy prescriptions, notably the favouring of 'abstinence only' approaches, have been rooted in ideology and religious principles rather than the realities of people's lives. Biomedical and behavioural initiatives are deployed in the name of prevention in Lesotho's AIDS strategy (Government of Lesotho, 2011). This strategy includes social behavioural change communication programmes (mass media campaigns, life skills curricula in schools, peer education and community engagement activities) which have been criticised for oversimplifying human behaviour and thereby potentially stigmatising those whose behaviour does not change. Moreover, while Lesotho's AIDS policies have for the past decade stressed a human rights approach and need to avoid stigma and discrimination, the Prevention Strategy proposes 'the roll out of post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) in facilities where there is the potential for exposure through occupational hazard and sexual assault' (Government of Lesotho, 2011) but says nothing about those whose exposure might be considered their own fault.
Securitisation of AIDS has outcomes for people's lived experience. Interventions inspired by securitisation often involve commercialised technologies, although these may have deleterious consequences when used to address health crises in contexts of poverty and global inequality. Provision of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) to Mozambicans in situations of hunger, for instance, provokes intense social competition for scarce resources. Those on ARVs have a much higher requirement for food as well as accounting for a disproportionate share of the health budget. In such situations, inadequate attention to hunger fuels conflict, competition and suspicion and risks undermining both social solidarity and capacity to address the pandemic (Kalofonos, 2010).

Food
The concept of food security has existed at least since the First Global Food Summit in Rome in 1974 which established an intergovernmental Committee on World Food Security (Havnevik, 2016). As with AIDS, concerns often focus less on people's direct experiences of hunger than on the societal consequences. Food-for-work schemes deployed in post-Asian financial crisis Jakarta, for instance, may be understood as responses to a perceived security threat, designed not only to address hunger but to provide work that would diminish the likelihood of urban mob violence and the spread of radical Islam (Essex, 2009(Essex, , 2012. Such work was intended to discipline the hungry, enlisting them into the development process, deterring them from terrorist recruitment and incorporating them into national security strategies. The use of food policy to tame dissent is not new. Cullather (2010) discussed the birth of food as an instrument of development/security policy in Asia. The 'Green' revolution, he argued, was intended to stop a 'Red' revolution among hungry peasants. Hunger was seen as a potential cause of war that could be solved by changing the way people grew food. Scientific agriculture was envisaged to produce modern citizens that would resist communism. As Lang and Barling (2012, p. 321) comment, talk of food security 'put[s] food into the same policy language as the military and "national interests"' .
Also as with AIDS, securitisation discourse frames the way people think about food provisioning, and can obscure alternative ways of thinking. The discourse tends to exceptionalise each food crisis (Taylor, 2009), demanding a response to the particular instance, rather than an explanation of why shortages -or hunger -occur, often repeatedly. Food security discourse simply demands that more food be made available. The FAO (2002) claims food security 'exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life' . While this definition is an advance on earlier ones that focused exclusively on global food supplies, it nonetheless supports policy prescriptions that primarily emphasise increasing agricultural production.
The means of increasing production are not specified by the FAO, but free market advocates including IMF, World Bank, WTO and commercial sector lobbyists use the discourse to advance their own agendas (Havnevik, 2016). Philanthropic organisations, too, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, are concerned with containing threats from population growth, peasant insurgency and communism and seek to manage the pace and direction of national and global social change for this purpose (Nally & Taylor, 2015). As Sommerville, Essex, and Le Billon (2014) note, food security is framed geopolitically in ways that 'extend and deepen neoliberal models of agro-food provisioning' . The G8, for instance, reinforced by support from philanthropic institutions including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, promoted rhetoric around a 'Global Partnership on Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition' which advanced the idea of large-scale foreign agro-investments, despite a lack of evidence that they can address hunger. Evidence in fact suggests that smallholder agriculture produces higher yields, employs more labour, is less damaging to biological diversity and climate change, and is better able to address food security over time than large-scale agriculture (Havnevik, 2016). A recent G-8 initiative, the 'New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition' , does purport to support smallholder farmers in Africa, but strives to do so through corporate-controlled high-input biotechnological fixes: measures through which smallholders are progressively losing power and influence over seed production (Havnevik, 2016). Nally (2011) interprets these trends through the lens of biopower, drawing on Foucault (2007) whose account centred on the history of food provisioning in Europe. Foucault describes how, in early modern times, food scarcity shifted from being understood as reflecting bad fortune or divine intervention to a governmental problem attributable to inefficient functioning of the market. This evoked a prescription for a new and less paternalistic form of provisioning economy in which anti-scarcity systems were dismantled and legislation passed to place grain markets in private hands. The corollary today is the use of food security discourse to facilitate corporate control over agrarian systems, converting them into vehicles for capital accumulation (Nally, 2011).
Securitisation discourse depicts southern Africa as faced by short-term food crises requiring technical fixes. Poverty is endogenised, the crises seen as inherent to Africa; causesparticularly those that might lie outside Africa -are not probed. The emphasis on urgent response masks any analysis that attributes insecurity to power relations between dominant and marginalised regions and people (Havnevik, 2016). Effectively, '[t] he language of food security [has] neutralised social class and inequality as framing issues' (Lang & Barling, 2012, p. 321). Leese and Meisch (2015) argue that the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference, which put forward an integrative approach to water, food and energy with a security framing, transformed the discourse around sustainability from a focus on distributional justice to a matter of survival, thereby (intentionally) sidelining the interests of the poorest.
Initiatives such as the (philanthropy-led) Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the World Economic Forum's New Vision for Agriculture serve to remove food policies from democratic discussion, casting them as issues for technocratic decision-making and the privatised administration of global food provisioning (Nally, 2016). Yet the solutions proffered are profoundly political. Securitisation discourse reaches far into policy-making in many countries. Malawi's latest National Agriculture Policy (2016) declares that it is aligned with the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and frames low agricultural productivity as the key threat to food security. It 'seeks to sustainably transform the sector from a subsistence to a market-orientation in order to increase agricultural production, marketed surpluses of commodities, and real incomes' (p. xi).
Securitisation is particularly disempowering of the poorest. Through biotechnical innovations such as commercial fertilisers, irrigation and transgenic seeds, food systems are commodified and control over the means of production is progressively wrested from the poor. Equally, efforts to 'rationalise' African farm holdings are likely to drive peasants from their farms. In Sudan, the food security discourse has facilitated the launch of a dam programme and agricultural investment that are claimed to address African food scarcity but which will benefit Sudanese elites and foreign investors while undermining local community livelihoods (Verhoeven, 2011). Lesotho's Food Security Policy (Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, 2005) includes a commitment to 'block farming' in order to '[i] ncrease agricultural production by making more effective use of available resources, particularly land and labour' . This involves the aggregation of small farms into larger units through sharecropping or leasing arrangements whereby farmers perceived to be less efficient cede their land to those that are more commercially oriented. The priority objective here is increased production rather than the security of the less productive smallholders. As Nally (2016, p. 558) argues, food security is often 'a way of subjugating the poor under the pretence of doing them good' .
Also hidden in securitisation discourse is the extent to which the neoliberal policies it tends to support have themselves contributed to the production of southern African food crises. The Malawian Government, for instance, dismantled its provisioning system and sold its strategic grain reserve in response to IMF advice, thereby contributing in large part to the fact that the 2001/2002 food deficit turned into a famine where larger previous deficits had not (Devereux, 2002;Tiba, 2011). Capitalist agriculture displaces insecurity onto marginalised populations (Taylor, 2009) in ways that arguably make it highly unsuitable as a strategy for addressing hunger.
Securitisation is not, however, a singular discourse or process (Mason & Zeitoun, 2013;McDonald, 2013). In 1990s, the term food security was identified as being used in nearly 200 different ways (Smith, Pointing, & Maxwell, 1993). Havnevik (2016) traces its history from the early years when the emphasis was firmly on food supply and the building of grain reserves to the 1980s when issues of access and entitlement came to the fore, particularly influenced by the work of Sen (1981). Some have recently adopted a more nuanced food systems approach, but the apparent urgency of global hunger since the 2007/8 crisis has provoked a resurgence of productionist discourse (Lang & Barling, 2012). Securitisation discourses and practices do, however, differ between international organisations and NGOs (Fischhendler & Katz, 2013), and states have responded differently to international securitisation discourses (Vieira, 2011). Some nations with their own visions of progress have long rejected internationally prescribed agricultural reforms (Cullather, 2010). Others embrace the terminology, but attach different meanings to it. Malawi, for instance, has responded to food insecurity with a Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP) that provides subsidised fertiliser and maize seed to smallholders. This contravenes free market principles and was condemned initially by many donors, but is highly popular with Malawi's rural population and is generally assessed to have had favourable impacts on rural livelihoods (Chirwa & Dorward, 2013). In its 2016 National Agriculture Policy, the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development continues to argue that the FISP has increased maize productivity but declares its commitment to reforms that would leverage it to 'increase the commercial provision of farm inputs' and 'encourage smallholder farmers to use improved seeds, irrigation, integrated soil fertility management techniques, and other modern farm technologies' (p. 20) (thereby aligning more closely with global food securitisation discourse). It is noteworthy that in some contexts food security is associated with more radical views. In Colombia, for instance, it is deployed by activists to challenge the government's free-market policies (Nussio & Pernet, 2013).

Young people in southern Africa's AIDS and food insecurity narratives
Youth play a part in securitisation discourses associated with both AIDS and food security in southern Africa. In terms of AIDS, young people are at times depicted as vectors of disease, posing an immediate risk to others. More commonly, though, they are viewed as victims in the present, at risk of becoming social threats in the future (Ansell, 2016). One widely recognised consequence of the AIDS pandemic has been to deprive many children of their parents. By 2001, there were ten African countries in which more than 15% of children had lost one or both parents, around half of them due to AIDS; in some countries the number of children who had lost both parents increased 10-fold in the 1990s (USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS, 2002). Within the moral economy of childhood, orphans are symbolic of vulnerability, and a focus for security fears (Ansell, 2016;Fassin, 2013). Mass orphanhood was cast as potentially destabilising of future society. UNICEF, 2003 report on 'Africa's orphaned generations' declared that 'The orphan crisis in sub-Saharan Africa has implications for stability ' (p. 43), suggesting that children may react to stress through aggressive and anti-social behaviour. Bray (2003) has outlined the chain of causality through which South African society came to envisage the production of a generation of anti-social children that would precipitate a breakdown in the social fabric.
It was also feared that through orphanhood, children would be deprived of the resources required to feed themselves and their societies in the future. de Waal and Whiteside (2003), in their elaboration of 'New Variant Famine' , attributed the coincidence of high HIV prevalence and recurrent food crises in part to children's failure to inherit assets and skills from their parents, who were sick or dying. Others postulated further ways in which AIDS' impacts on children might contribute to food insecurity in the future. Many children, for instance, were said to lose property when their parents die, livestock and equipment being sold to fund medical and funeral costs, or misappropriated by relatives (Kimaryo, Okpaku, Githuku-Shongwe, & Feeney, 2003;Munthali & Ali, 2000). Those inheriting land might be too young or inexperienced to farm it. As a consequence, they could lose usufruct rights, leaving them landless as adults (Slater & Wiggins, 2005;White & Robinson, 2000). If traditionally children acquire livelihood skills by working with parents and siblings, orphanhood might interrupt intergenerational knowledge transfer (Hlanze, Gama, & Mondlane, 2005;Loevinsohn & Gillespie, 2003;Mphale, Rwambali, & Makoae, 2002;White & Robinson, 2000). In situations where knowledge is traditionally differentiated by age and gender, these difficulties could be exacerbated (Alumira et al., 2005;Haddad & Gillespie, 2001). In practice, however, there is little evidence that AIDS-affected youth have contributed to societal insecurity (Bray, 2003), or are even particularly at risk (Parikh et al., 2007;Sherr et al., 2008). Nor are the proposed mechanisms by which AIDS' impacts on young people might translate into food insecurity supported by persuasive evidence (Ansell et al., 2014).

The research
The remainder of this paper draws upon empirical research that was conducted in two case study villages, one in rural southern Malawi and the other in Lesotho's Maluti Mountains. These were selected to be broadly typical of rural communities in the two countries. Neither had been explicit targets of development policies or programmes beyond those with national reach. They were also selected as contrasting examples of southern African rural settings. The Malawi village is in a densely populated, impoverished area of Thyolo District in which most households are supported by a combination of subsistence agriculture, casual employment, petty trade and sometimes work on the agricultural estates that occupy much of the fertile land in the region. The Lesotho village is more remote, with households surviving on subsistence farming, livestock rearing and remittances from members engaged in employment elsewhere. Although, in both communities, many young people remain in school until their late teens, few complete their primary education, as they are required to pass exams each year in order to progress. While in school, young people generally express aspirations to enter white collar employment -as teachers, nurses, doctors, policemen, for instance -but once they leave school they resign themselves to the realities of their rural environments and pursue livelihoods in the local economy or, in some cases, migrate to work in town or in locations that present better opportunities. Religion is important in shaping young people's perspectives. The majority of families in the Lesotho village are Roman Catholic, although the nearest church is more than an hour's walk away (and associated with the nearest primary school), while people in the Malawi village belong to an array of mainly Pentecostal churches.
Securitisation policies penetrate these communities in only limited ways. In Malawi, the FISP is significant to rural dwellers as applying fertiliser increases yields, although there are often delays in delivery and rumours about the programme coming to an end. In Lesotho, the mountains are not prioritised for agricultural investment as commercial farming is not considered viable, so food security measures are largely absent and in situations of drought or potential famine, humanitarian assistance is provided through food aid and food for work programmes. In relation to AIDS, young people are exposed to prevention messages through schooling (if they advance to the higher classes of primary school), and exhortations to participate in voluntary testing and counselling -to 'know your status' . In the Lesotho village, these messages are received by young people mainly via the radio, while in Malawi a homebased care group supported by the Department of Social Welfare, National AIDS Commission and Medecins sans frontieres put up posters and encouraged young people to go for testing. The young people also acted out dramas with highly moralistic messages about sexual fidelity.
A set of qualitative research methods were employed to collect data. Following community and household profiling exercises, participatory activities were conducted with groups of young people in each village. There were four groups per village, to which young people allocated themselves on the basis of gender and age/marital status (roughly dividing into 10-17-and 18-24-year olds). More than 30 young people from each village participated in these activities. The participatory research was supplemented by interviews with key informants, in-depth life history interviews with young people aged 18-24 and participatory feedback and dissemination workshops.
In what follows, we draw mainly upon one particular participatory research activity, undertaken towards the end of the research when the young people had become more comfortable with discussing sensitive issues with the researcher. The young people were invited to draw emotional storyboards. Each was given a sheet of A3 paper divided into six squares. These squares were to be used to draw pictures depicting their saddest time, happiest time, greatest disappointment, greatest success, fear for the future and hope for the future. They then discussed their pictures, either individually with the researcher or with the remainder of the group. We also draw upon the individual interviews in which young people were invited to discuss their expectations and aspirations for the future.
The young people's pictures and descriptions of their fears for the future offer some insight into their feelings of insecurity. It must be acknowledged that what the young people selected to draw might not have been their greatest fear. Fears are, after all, emotive and not necessarily easy to talk about openly. Using a drawing exercise in this way allowed the young people to draw something they would feel able to talk about, and thus protected them from having to reveal things they were not comfortable discussing. It is important to acknowledge that asking about fears for the future can only capture a partial picture of young people's insecurities (see Ansell, Hajdu, van Blerk, & Robson, 2012).

Young people's fears for the future
Despite their marginalised situations, many young people expressed few concerns and had an optimistic outlook on the future. However, there were many others that expressed a range of fears at different stages in the research. These young people revealed how insecurity is experienced in deeply contextualised ways that relate to aspects of their precarious settings. The young people expressed specific fears about what might happen in their future lives, some of which related explicitly to food security or AIDS, though seldom in the simplistic ways in which these are expressed in securitisation discourse. A significant number of young people described fears that related in some way to their prospects of accessing food or to wider issues of livelihoods, and others expressed fears concerning their likely future health, some of whom made reference to AIDS. In other cases, however, the fears were more complex, related to interrelated aspects of their current and future contexts, as well as their relationships with others. Many young people demonstrated not specific fears but discomfort with uncertainty about the future. We discuss the young people's fears below: those relating to food security, to disease, and fears that did not fit neatly into these categories, but are nonetheless revealing of insecurities.

Food security and livelihoods
Young people in both communities expressed concern about access to food in the future. One of the Lesotho boys depicted a sad future as one in which he suffered hunger. Some young people expressed concerns about being able to grow food. Brenda in Malawi, for instance, worried about not having enough fields to support herself in the future, while Aleya was concerned that she might lack money to pay for expensive fertiliser. All these fears map in some respects onto the concerns that are addressed by those engaged with food security policy and may indeed be influenced by media and public discourse. They are clearly focused on food and the means through which it might be secured, and while policy may or may not seek to make land and fertiliser available to rural youth, it does consider these questions.
Other young people were less explicit about accessing or growing food, but their primary concern nonetheless was being able to support themselves. For some, the fear focused on access to employment (see Gough et al., 2016). Makwete, in Malawi, remarked 'I don't see how I can get a job' , and as a consequence felt he would not have an opportunity to earn money to live the life he wanted. Moreover, he was discouraged by rumours of retrenchment from factories, and reluctant to make the effort to go physically in search of factory work. Other young people also referred to a pervasive fear of asking for a job in an environment where little employment was available. Echoing Philo's (2014) description of insecure selves/ bodies buffeted by the world around them, these young people's reluctance to expose themselves to the risk of rejection evokes Waite et al. 's (2014) definition of fear as capacity to hurt. Significantly, the young people's insecurities were materially affecting their willingness to take action in support of their own livelihoods, further entrenching their insecurities.
Some young people felt uncertainty about their access to assets that would enable them to generate an income. For Edison in Malawi, insecurity about future prospects related to his sense of inability to access sufficient education. Others, such as Emily, felt their future would depend on access to capital to invest in business. Emily described her efforts to start a business, revealing 'I just want to but I am failing, and if I say I will get it I would be lying' . One young man in Malawi talked of his fear that he would be unable to purchase the sewing machine on which his hopes for a relatively lucrative future livelihood rested. Other young people referred to the possibility of failure in the small-scale artisanal activities in which they were engaged, such as making baskets, bowls, wire cars or brooms for sale. Those who do accumulate money fear losing it. For this reason, Irene used the money she had saved to buy a cow, in the hope that it would prove a secure investment. The purchase of a tangible item may represent a means of diminishing uncertainty (viz Philo, 2012), though even a cow is a far from certain investment, where drought and disease pose frequent threats. Some food security policy prescriptions, drawing on Sen's entitlement theory, demonstrate an awareness that food is accessed through diverse and often precarious livelihood strategies. In Lesotho, for instance, this perspective was being pushed by DFID at the time of the research. However, while the Food Security Policy defines food security in relation to both availability and access, an economic planner in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security interviewed for the project strongly emphasised the need to increase national supply through initiatives such as block farming rather than support for the livelihoods of the most marginalised. Most securitisation discourse is far removed from the livelihood-related fears expressed by the research participants.
For many young participants, livelihood hopes and fears centred not only on survival but also lifestyle. Far from fearing a future in which they could not grow food, several young people in Lesotho feared having to continue in an agricultural livelihood. They feared lives occupied by hoeing, fetching wood, going to the fields and herding livestock. In Malawi, Jackson was afraid that 'I will not manage because what I want needs a lot of money' . His desires included 'an iron-roofed house, a TV, a cassette player and I also wish I had a bicycle' . In many respects their fears rested on not being able to become the persons they wished to be. In contexts where the images of success that circulate through schooling, advertising and the media are increasingly tied to consumer commodities, young people find themselves insecure insofar as the secure identities they desire remain elusive (Philo, 2014;Waite et al., 2014).
However, the young people's livelihood insecurities related not only to themselves. A theme that ran through many of the young women's depictions of their fears related to marriage. In Malawi, Margret was afraid that her husband would leave her. Sharon equally declared that she was not hopeful about the future, as she felt she could not depend on her husband: 'I can't have hope as -you know modern husbands -so I can't rely on him and he might want to marry again and I will still be in problems' . For young women in Malawi, living in a matrilineal society, husbands were a source of labour on their land as well as close companions. Yet the husbands had relatively little vested in their households or communities. If they left, they could take little with them, but although they could not take their children away, there was often little material incentive to remain. Emily explained that she believed her mother-in-law was trying to pressure her husband to leave the marriage, in the belief that he should be able to find a wife who would enhance his prospects more. Emily was a young widow with a child from her previous marriage and had left primary school without completing the first year. Her anxiety about the likelihood of abandonment was such that she declared she would drink poison should this happen.
In patrilineal Lesotho, too, young women expressed fears about marriage, but here by contrast the girls feared that they would marry in the future. Should this happen, they would be expected to live with their in-laws in an unfamiliar village, undertaking household chores and unable to accomplish their other plans. Young women in Lesotho also expressed a desire not to have many children for fear of having too many dependents. Mapoka, for instance, was afraid that if she had many children she would not have money to feed them. Some young married women in Lesotho feared having any children.
Thus young people's concerns about access to food and secure livelihoods were deeply entwined in relationships with others. Anxieties about marriage and childrearing are far removed from global (or national) food security discourse -even where understood in terms of livelihoods. As Pain and Smith (2008) have emphasised, geopolitical and everyday accounts of fear fail to map onto each other. Yet these intimate relationships and emotions are fully bound up with material dimensions of rural life. As Hunter (2010) has observed in South Africa, sex and love are entwined with ideas about money. Hunter (2010) charts shifting relations between resource flows, embodied emotions and social meanings of marriage that have occurred in tandem with shifts in political economy. Chronic youth unemployment, economic insecurity and AIDS, he argues, are tied to changing notions of femininity, masculinity and love (notably 'provider love'). While these relations are not linear, they are nonetheless significant (Hunter, 2010). A picture of young people's insecurities must incorporate these complexities of contextualised lives, rather than assuming a uniform impact of an existential threat such as hunger.

Disease and HIV
None of the young people directly related their fears for livelihoods and food security to the purported impacts of AIDS on rural southern African societies (de Waal & Whiteside, 2003), but a number suggested their aspirations for the future might be unsettled as a consequence of disease. A young boy in Malawi, for instance, feared that he would not achieve his ambition of becoming a soldier because he would fall sick. Equally, a boy in Lesotho insisted that a sad future would be one characterised by illness.
AIDS was certainly a concern for young people, particularly the Malawian boys, perhaps as a result of securitisation messages delivered via the home-based care group. Young men talked of how they enjoyed sex, but subsequently experienced regrets as it provoked a fear of having contracted HIV. Testing was widely discussed and many young men referred to being afraid to suggest that their wives get tested for HIV: their wives would be reluctant for fear that if they were positive their husbands would leave them. As one boy explained of course we have fears, but in the process of searching for the right one you just maybe meet someone who is not trustworthy. The problem is that we don't go for blood tests, as they [girls] know that once they are found positive you will leave them.
The young men were clearly anxious about the prospect of having sex with young women whose HIV status was unknown (and also about actually proposing that their partners be tested), but seemingly gave little thought to whether the young women might experience similar anxieties about their sexual partners. In general, while their AIDS-related fears were in part around contagion, unlike the fears addressed through securitisation discourse -and for the most part AIDS policies and programmes -they were complex and tied to the micropolitics of personal relationships and everyday subjectivities (Lemanski, 2012;Pain & Smith, 2008).
Insecurities related to health were associated in part with the unpredictability of sickness and death. Ethel, a young woman in Malawi, said she believed that she might get sick, causing her to fail to achieve her aspiration, but insisted this was something that no one could predict. Patric described his desire for a healthy life without sickness and with enough food, and his fear of diseases which 'just come, suddenly' . Likewise, when asked how he expected his life to be in the future, Tseliso, a young man in Lesotho, answered 'I cannot say precisely because death comes unexpectedly' . Interestingly, in these precarious communities there appeared to be little expectation of the certitude that some scholars (e.g. Anderson & Adey, 2011;Philo, 2012) suggest lies at the core of security.

Other insecurities
Young people in both communities experienced a range of insecurities that did not merely preoccupy their minds, but shaped their behaviours. Some young people expressed a fear of having to move to an unfamiliar village and family. This was a common outcome of AIDS-related migration, in which young people whose relatives become sick or die have to move, either because there is no longer an income to pay rent (necessitating a return to the village), or in order to receive (or provide) care in an alternative household (Ansell & van Blerk, 2004). Migration to an unfamiliar place is also a common consequence of marriage. In Malawi, for instance, Milka reported being afraid to go to live with her stepmother who she believed would treat her harshly.
Other young people expressed fears related to crime. One young man in Malawi was afraid of being attacked by robbers as he had heard of contract killings taking place, commissioned by individuals involved in the sale of body parts. Perhaps more realistically, herdboys in Lesotho lived in fear that they would be attacked by armed cattle thieves. They described lying awake in their remote mountain huts, hearing gunfire on a roughly monthly basis. For them, experience of insecurity was deeply embodied (Hyndman, 2001;Smith, 2001).
Insecurity is inescapable in these precarious communities. Wilson in Malawi recounted how those who had planted their maize early had achieved good crops that year. Yet many had feared to plant when the first rain fell, as this might have been followed by dry weather. Those who hesitated were afflicted by very heavy rain at the end of the season, as a result of which their crops turned yellow and failed to produce cobs.
Insecurity does not merely shape behaviours but is used instrumentally in the functioning of rural society. Fear of punishment shaped young people's engagement with schooling; for example, girls in Malawi were afraid to go to school without having first completed their homework. In Lesotho, young men played on girls' fear of the consequences if they were suspected of having sex outside marriage; in such instances, girls felt compelled to marry them. Tseliso explained that his girlfriend had agreed to be 'eloped' into marriage 'as she could not go back to her place because it was so late so she was afraid of the parents' . In Malawi some of the boys said they were afraid that if they watched videos they would want to emulate what they see -pornography, violence and wealth. Fear (perhaps instilled by adults in the community) served to discourage them both from watching videos and aspiring to what were considered unhealthy lifestyles. It is not only in the geopolitical arena that anxiety is cultivated as a tool of governance (Anderson & Adey, 2011).
Many young people's fears lay in the realm of the supernatural. One young man in Malawi said he was afraid of ghosts or zombies that lurked around the graveyard at night. A number of young women in Malawi were afraid that personal success would invite witchcraft. Susan said she was afraid to become a teacher because someone might bewitch her; another girl explained that she feared witchcraft would prevent her succeeding in her ambition to become a nurse and yet another was afraid to start a business because she might be bewitched. Witchcraft beliefs exercise social control by instilling anxieties associated in particular with achieving successes that are not open to all within a community. These socially produced beliefs are connected with socio-economic marginality and, it is argued, increasingly prevalent. Ashforth (2005) analyses witchcraft in contemporary southern African society as a form of spiritual insecurity. He suggests that the 'dangers, doubts, and fears arising from the sense of being exposed to invisible evil forces' (p. 1) relate to (but are not reducible to) other everyday insecurities arising from pervasive poverty, violence, political oppression and disease. In particular, he argues that recourse to witchcraft accusations may be shaped by insecurities provoked by AIDS. Witchcraft is not the only malign force evoking fear in young people though; some fear other consequences of striving for social advancement.
Fanny, in Malawi, for instance, suggested that all of her relatives who had completed their school education had become mad, and fear of this consequence led her to leave early.
Ultimately, many young people faced the future from a fatalistic standpoint. They could not believe in a secure future, but accepted their lives would remain characterised by threats and uncertainty. Asked whether she thought she would have enough food in the future, or be stricken by hunger, Lucy remarked 'Hunger doesn't end' . Milka's response to the same question encompassed the limitations of uncertainty: 'You can't talk about the future when you don't know where you are going' .

Discussion and conclusions
The findings reported here have implications both for social and cultural geographies of in/ security and for geographical work on youth temporalities and relationalities. Contributing to the growing body of work that takes seriously the temporalities of young people's lives, seeing them as individuals with futures, as well as individuals for whom the future has significant bearing on the present (Ansell et al., 2014;Cole & Durham, 2008;Jeffrey, 2008;Uprichard, 2008), the paper emphasises that young people's fears and insecurities are an important dimension of temporality. Not all participants expressed fears about their present or future lives, but many did, and others described a sense that their futures would be impossible to predict. For some this uncertainty provoked anxieties, while others appeared resigned to it. Some of the young people described fears related to the immediate future, while others expressed longer term concerns. Some were more forward-looking, while others were preoccupied with the present moment (Ansell et al., 2014). Their insecurities were also deeply relational. They were concerned with the well-being of others, but also felt insecurities that were produced or perpetuated through relations with others. Whether 'realistic' or lacking substance, young people's insecurities shape wellbeing in the present and future, and as such merit attention. Insecurities also shape young people's behaviours -whether in terms of reluctance to engage in particular livelihood activities (including sowing crops) for fear of failure or unwillingness to strive for success for fear of witchcraft.
Moreover, a focus on youth temporalities -on young people's relationships to a feared or uncertain but fundamentally relational future -contributes to social and cultural geographical understandings of in/security and its relation to securitisation in particular settings. Juxtaposing young people's accounts of their fears for the future with the securitisation discourses focused on AIDS and food that prevail in global and national policy arenas, we found little correspondence. In accord with Hyndman (2001), Pain and Smith (2008), and as Gough et al. (2016) have noted in relation to urban youth, insecurity realities are overlooked by security discourses. What our paper adds is some texture as to the ways in which young people's concerns differ from securitisation framings.
First, the young people were seldom singularly focused on access to food or avoidance of HIV. They spoke of fears that related to food, to livelihoods, to health, to the consequences of sexual activity. These fears were perhaps provoked by securitisation policies and practices that penetrated the local communities. However, these fears existed in complex contexts, extended over time, that shaped the ways in which they were felt and expressed. Securitisation discourses, by contrast, decontextualise and seek to address specific insecurities in isolation.
Secondly, young people's concerns were contextualised, subjective and relationally produced, while securitisation focuses on generalised fears about societal access to food or societal outcomes of the spread of HIV. While there are undeniably processes that impinge on large numbers of people, securitisation discourses seek to protect an aggregate social body; they are thus not interested in the personal (individual or relational) interests of the most marginalised.
Third, this raises issues concerning global, national and NGO interventions framed by securitisation discourses. As Philo (2012) has noted, there is a clear disjuncture between the insecurities faced by world's poor and those identified by global elites. Given the lack of correspondence between the discourses and young people's felt insecurities, it is perhaps unsurprising that such interventions often fail to proffer helpful remedies to the fears of marginalised youth. Securitisation-derived policies tend to be technocratic and restrictive rather than responding to felt needs and the complex processes they arise from. Food insecurity is often addressed through forms of neoliberal food provisioning that do not promote security amongst the poor of the Global South (Nally, 2011). Schemes like Malawi's fertiliser subsidies and Lesotho's 'block farming' land consolidation programme, as well as more commercially driven interventions such as GM technologies, focus on raising production rather than more social and ecological food systems approaches that might enable the poor to access food (Lang & Barling, 2012). They are unlikely to quell young people's fears for the future. Instead, fear of hunger provokes young people to take their own precautions: precautions that might erode their livelihoods in the long term. AIDS, too, is framed in relation to (individual) health rather than its wider contexts. Counselling and testing schemes, designed to persuade young people to police their own sexual behaviour as well as access treatment where needed, in practice induce anxieties because they do not accommodate the realities of young people's relationships. The possibility of testing is not welcomed where it is likely to breed mistrust. Broadly, the policies arising from securitisation discourses assume issues can be addressed through technocratic measures rather than engaging with power relations and politics. Moreover, the impact of securitisation discourse is often to control rather than to secure the bodies of the poor (Ingram, 2010;Noxolo, 2012). Policies inspired by agendas focused on human security or food security, then, are not only failing to address the felt insecurities of marginalised young people; they may also harm the interests of those young people and serve to restrict their freedoms. Huish (2008) observes that the human security discourse in general risks abandoning its radical roots to make it more amenable to both policy-makers and academics. He argues the need for a social justice theorisation. One value of a social justice lens would be to throw light not simply on how a security apparatus might respond to situations of hunger or disease, but also onto the production of insecurities. Global political economy lies behind subjective insecurity. Indeed, the global economic system often displaces insecurity onto marginalised populations in order to reproduce the social conditions required for global capital accumulation (Taylor, 2009). Specifically, Taylor (2009) argues, Western mass consumption displaces its ecological costs onto the world's poorest, making them (and life in general) deeply insecure.
This raises the question of how policy-makers might respond to young people's felt insecurities. If attentive to young people's perspectives, there is scope for policy responses that mitigate envisaged future threats. For instance, bursaries that have allowed orphans from both case study communities to continue in school appear to reduce young people's fears of the negative consequences of orphanhood. But there is a wider need for a ground-up theorisation of security as a policy focus in relation to global issues such as AIDS and food crises. A social justice approach might be valuable. While social justice often focuses on material distribution and control, it could also take account of how secure people feel about their presents and futures. Concepts such as the human right to food or food sovereignty have advantages over the food security discourse. Food sovereignty focuses attention on people's own local control over food production and a right to live without fear of system failure (Havnevik, 2016). Indeed, Lang and Barling (2012) suggest that food sovereignty might be a precondition for food security.

Notes
1. Interest in migration as a security risk was not new. Tesfahuney (1998) had discussed the securitisation of international migration, and the representation of migrants as 'threats' some years previously. 2. The estimates for 2015 were 22.7, 9.9 and 22.2%, respectively (UNAIDS, 2017), a change that is partly attributable to new survey methods.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This project was funded by a grant from the ESRC-DFID Poverty Alleviation Research scheme, ref RES 167-25-0167.