Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Abstract This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.


Introduction
The geography of security is a demanding and critical field of study. In the current transatlantic political climate important questions about the nature of security have emerged. Debates on what security is, what and where needs securing, and what is being secured against are vociferous and divided. Securities are contested. Britain's vote to leave the European Union in 2016 has, for example, unsettled the cohesion of common securities in Europe, and put in balance shared strategies on coping and managing the multi-scalar risks and threats to national and regional security. In the U.S., claims by President Trump to construct a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border as an issue of security for the American people (Trump, 2016) have met with resolute counter claims that such a move is illegal and immoral. Security here is conceived at the level of the state, what Philo (2012) calls Big 'S' Security primarily 'outward looking' and concerned with (re)actions of states to protect against harm for peoples and communities. Less present is small 's' security matters that are 'inward-looking' and concerned with wellbeing, emotional and affective geographies of security (Philo, 2012). What are the impacts of 'Brexit' on individual migrants living and working in the U.K., for example, How does Trump's claim to 'build a wall' on the U.S.-Mexico border shape the emotional and embodied encounters of Hispanic Americans living in the U.S.? These are matters of geopolitical security and of the everyday securities of individuals; the two matters are interconnected and interdependent. Whilst these two approaches often operate at cross purposes and have been studied as conventionally unrelated, scholars have sought to bridge the gap through work on everyday, embodied securities (Bondi, 2014;Philo, 2014;Waite, Valentine, & Lewis, 2014). Feminist geographers in particular, advocate 're-scaling' studies of security linking the emotional and embodied experiences of security with broader geopolitical discourse and praxis, illuminating the spaces, relations and subjectivities of security (Enloe, 1989;Hyndman, 2001;Ojeda, 2013;Pain & Staeheli, 2014). This paper combines scholarship from feminist IR and geopolitics with work on the social and cultural geographies of children and young people to generate a dialogue and advance thinking in the social geographies of security. We argue the importance of empirical data to evidence how securities are multi-scalar and present an analysis of young people's everyday securities in Scotland showing how different geopolitical scales interact. We argue that young people's everyday experiences of racism and Islamophobia are linked to broad securitisation discourses and events and that ethnic and religious minority young people employ complex psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation in response to these everyday risks. To conceptualise this, we propose that the concept of 'ontological insecurity' (as used in sociology and critical IR) is useful to theorise the cumulative effects of fear and anxiety that young people may experience. We discuss how multiple and overlapping experiences of exclusion, racism and Islamophobia impact on young people's sense of self and how the 'closest-in' human geography of security (Philo, 2012) has the potential to shape broader security processes.
The paper begins by reviewing interdisciplinary work on critical securities, cross referencing feminist security studies with work on the social geography of children and young people as agents of change. Following this, we discuss the concept of ontological security (OS), tracing its psychoanalytic and sociological roots and extend this to social geography to support an analysis of young people's everyday securities. The second half of the paper presents an empirical analysis of young people's everyday securities in Scotland, focusing on two strategies -'pre-emptive' and 'pro-active' -that are employed by young people as a means of self-securitisation in response to perceived risks and threats of racism, Islamophobia and exclusion. We conceptualise 'pre-emptive' securities as modes of behaviour through which young people's agency is constrained in some way. Those strategies, that are employed when hostile encounters are anticipated, involve minimising the self to mitigate against potential danger. 'Pro-active' strategies demonstrate a fuller notion of agency, because they involve extroverted behavioural techniques that promote difference as positive, rather than minimising difference to a perceived normative condition. Such strategies are relational and multi-scalar, they are generated through intersubjective encounters, shaped through discourse and fraught with complexity.

Young people and everyday security
Interdisciplinary scholarship on security has burgeoned in recent decades, stimulated in part by the effects of 9/11 as a key geopolitical event. Traditional Realist interpretations have tended to regard security as a geopolitical ethic and a foundational concept of the sovereign state, largely delineated as military, political, economic, societal and environmental (Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1998). Much of this scholarship analyses the role of states in protection and defence using macro-scale logics to understand. Alongside this feminist critical security studies emerged after the Cold War to destabilise the dominance of realist perspectives and re-scale studies of security. Enloe's (1989) ground breaking work on the gendered dynamics of war, conflict and political economy, for example, shifted focus to the bottom-up, everyday and personal practices that shape or facilitate the 'international' . More recently, critical interventions have explored security as an 'elastic' concept (Mythen, Walklate, & Khan, 2012), concerned with the micro, partial and peripheral securities enacted in everyday life. In International Relations, multi-scalar analyses of 'alternative securities' (Booth, 2007;Neocleous, 2008;Shepherd, 2013;Wibben, 2011) advocate a 'finer scale of security' that 'traverse public/ private distinctions' (Hyndman, 2001, p. 219). Human security approaches that are people-centred, multi-sectoral and context-specific have been adopted by humanitarian and development agencies concerned with understanding these finer scales. However, whilst the disaggregation into 'sectors' of security incorporates the economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political securities of individuals, it has proved challenging to implement and remains top-down (Hyndman, 2001). Geographers have been prominent in challenging the linearity of conventional IR approaches to security, calling for a more 'everyday' , 'grounded' and 'lived' approach that acknowledges the overlapping, relational processes of security (Benwell and Hopkins, 2015;Dittmer & Gray, 2010;Dowler & Sharp, 2001;Koopman, 2011;Ojeda, 2013;Pain, 2009;Secor, 2001). These approaches have brought to the fore questions of scale, disrupting the overstated binary of global and local to demonstrate their interconnectedness and affirm a 're-scaled' analysis of security. We adopt this approach and draw heavily on feminist geographies of security since they encourage dialectical thinking and seek to understand how international events and public agendas are co-constituted with the local, the intimate and private subjectivities (cf. Dowler & Sharp, 2001;Enloe, 1989;Hopkins, 2007;Pain, Panelli, Kindon, & Little, 2010). In cultural geography too, scholarship on mobilities and biopolitics have explored the affective and embodied aspects of security in particular spaces (Adey, 2009;Anderson, 2010).
Many have observed the securitisation of everyday life through surveillant technologies, policing powers and counter-terrorism policies, particularly since 9/11 (Dalby, 2014;Pain et al., 2010). For some, this tragic event has enhanced personal and ontological insecurity through the everyday production of fear (Pain, 2009) and nurtured hyper-vigilance among citizens to mitigate against amorphous global terror threats (Katz, 2010). Furthermore, the banal 'architecture of security' in everyday life generate differentiated landscapes of security where fear and defensiveness infuse ordinary spaces, subjects and practices (Adey, 2009;Askins, 2008;Hyndman, 2007;Katz, 2010;Ojeda, 2013;Pain, 2009). Whilst exploring the banality of security is an important departure from conventional 'masculinist' visioning, it often works to reify boundaries between the global and local. Greater recognition of the connections between intimate violence and global geopolitics through analyses of everyday encounters is thus welcomed and is emerging (Benwell, 2016;Christian, Dowler, & Cuomo, 2015;Pain, 2015). In her ethnographic work on Palestinian American youth, El-Haj (2015) explores the tensions between transnational belonging and everyday nationalism in American schools showing the benign exclusionary practices that disrupt young people's sense of belonging and citizenship. Similarly, Noble and Poynting (2010) discuss the affective experiences of migrant belonging in Australia arguing that affective relations operate at the local and national scale simultaneously. In these accounts, the bodily and spatial politics of fear and risk are aligned suggesting that delineating 'sectors' of security is analytically limiting and demonstrate empirical approaches to understanding the interconnected processes of securitisation and subjectivity in place. Social geography can make important contributions to this body of work by exploring the intersections of identity and relations to illuminate the everyday spatialities of security.
In social and cultural geography, research about the security of children and young people has tended to foreground ideas of safety, belonging and the family instead of necessarily discussing ideas about 'security' per se. That being said, much work in this area is about protecting the everyday securities of children and young people and/or managing and minimising the potential risks and insecurities that may come to harm younger people.
Whilst age is frequently highlighted as a 'neglected dimension' in studies of security (Beier, 2015;Bourne, 2014;Philo & Smith, 2013), the emergence of children's geographies as a vibrant sub-field of social and cultural geography has placed centre-stage debates about the everyday safety, security and well-being of children, whether this be at home, in school or in public spaces (Benwell & Hopkins, 2015;Horschelmann & El Rafaie, 2014;Skelton, 2013). For example, Pain (2006) discusses the everyday securities of children in the context of fear and anxiety associated with stranger danger and paranoid parenting, and Ansell (2008) discusses debates about risk in the context of young people participating in gap year projects in the global South and how the risks and insecurities of such activities are mediated by gap year providers. Further to this, scholarship on young people's resistance and resilience to challenging circumstances through embodied and emotional strategies has been instrumental in demonstrating youth agency in children's geographies (Boyden & Mann, 2005;Watson, 2015). In her work on young Italian Muslims, Frisana (2010) explores how young Italian Muslims resist Islamophobia using 'tactics' such as wearing the hijab to disrupt stereotypes of Islam; using cultural capital to as a tool for inclusion and participating in local and transnational political activism. In different ways, each of these tactics contests the dominant narrative of Islamophobia in Italian society and demonstrate youth agency, albeit within dynamic socio-spatial contexts. These studies are valuable in their approach that frames young people as active participants in relational encounters, rather than objectifying young people as vulnerable or without agency Security studies, more broadly, would be enhanced through engaging with this approach and bringing youth voices to the fore. This paper adopts such a position and discusses young people's strategies in achieving ontological security.

Ontological insecurity: psychosocial responses to fear and risk
We argue that ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland employ psychosocial and emotional strategies to preserve ontological security and mitigate against everyday risks. In this context, becoming ontologically insecure, we argue, is a result of persistent damage to selfhood through negative associational ascriptions. It is the cumulative effect of trauma -represented and lived, past and present -for many ethnic and religious young people in Scotland. The concept of ontological insecurity was originally found in R D Laing's psychoanalytic work on The Divided Self. 'Primary ontological insecurity' , he argued, is 'the feeling of a precarious and threatened sense of existence' (McGeachan, 2014, p. 96). 1 The state of ontological security, by contrast, is that which 'ordinarily' should exist to be deemed psychologically stable.
If a primary ontological security has been reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to one's own existence. If such a basis for living has not been reached, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat. (Laing, 1960, p. 42) For Laing, the everyday social context of individual experience is important, the spaces and others that occupy their worlds influence the way individuals make sense of the world. Whilst there are challenges in adopting a psychoanalytic term and applying it to a social geography context, our aim is to make connection between disciplines and between conventionally separate theoretical trajectories. Elsewhere, geographers have successfully used OS to discuss embodied insecurities in other contexts, such as Waite et al. 's (2014) work on the hyper-precarious experiences of refugees and asylum seekers and Bondi's (2014, p. 332) autobiographical vignette on 'what it means to feel insecure' . Moreover, it is not our intention to suggest a fixed, linear path towards a state of ontological insecurity that is somehow inevitable given the right conditions. Rather, we attempt to enliven the concept in the context of broad security debates and emphasise particular psychosocial impacts of racism and Islamophobia on individuals and their responses to this. In order to mitigate against a crude translation of the term, we have drawn specifically on two interpretations of ontological security (OS) that we find useful in the theoretical framework we employ here.
Firstly, Giddens (1991, p. 243) argues that OS is a condition in which 'a sense of continuity and order in events' is achieved. This interpretation uses Laing's concept to reflect the perennial uncertainties of modern life, so that the experience of security is structurally contingent. He argues that individuals repeat actions to construct a sense of continuity, trust the world and feel secure in themselves. To be ontologically insecure, then, is to feel threatened by a sense of existential anxiety, such a state is defined as a 'generalized state' rather than a direct response to a threat, as would be characterised by fear (Giddens, 1984). Also following R.D. Laing, Ahmed (2004, p. 64) notes that fear is the basis of security whereby discourses of fear are related to preservation of the subject; subsequently there is 'affective politics' of fear that 'preserves only through announcing a threat to life itself' . Ahmed shows how fear is both a relational and embodied experience. It relies on encounters with 'other' bodies as objects of fear with certain subject/objects needing to be secured or secured against -an 'ontology of insecurity' in which space and mobility is constrained through fear, and fear is produced through an exclusionary politics of citizenship and belonging. Drawing on the work of Noble (2005) sees OS as 'comfort' . He refers to the experiences of migrants in Australia and the way in which they 'negotiate the affective and cognitive dissonance thrown up by the act of migration' in order to be comfortable amongst strangers in a new society and secure a place in the world (Noble, 2005, p. 108). For Noble, OS and comfort are framed as feelings/senses imbued with power, an orientation that is both situated and social. OS is achieved through feelings of belonging and acts of mutual recognition. Thus, misrecognition and exclusion work to undermine an individual's OS.
The second perspective is a critical IR perspective centred on the work of Kinnvall (2004Kinnvall ( , 2006 work on globalisation and religious nationalism in India. Critical security scholars in IR have adopted OS in work exploring how governing elites build a narrative of OS at the level of the state (Huysmans, 1998;Mitzen, 2006;Steele, 2008). These studies, however, often neglect the intra-state dynamics that shape state securities. Kinnvall (2004), on the other hand, works at the finer scale, analysing the role of state discourse on individual subjectivities. She argues that nationalism is powerful because it conveys security and unity in 'times of crisis' exploring the impact of state discourse on religious subjectivities. Kinnvall (2004:745) analyses security as a 'thick signifier' bound to wider discursive and institutional continuities.
Analyzing security as a thick signifier makes us realise how structural conditions of insecurity are intimately linked to the emotional significance of identity mobilization.
In this reading, OS is a condition whereby an individual or group can sustain and secure a narrative of the self, involving trust and mutual recognition. Achieving OS is thus a relational process -socially and spatially contingent and subject to 'stranger-other' processes. To 'securitize the self' is to achieve biographical continuity and relies on intersubjective relations to affirm such continuity (ibid.). When this position is under threat of discontinuity it leads to a state of existential anxiety and gives rise to a politics of resistance and search for security through reliable tropes of nationalism (ibid.). Skey (2010) uses a similar explanation to describe the sense of belonging amongst the English ethnic majority showing that OS is achieved through banal nationalism and only undermined through perceived threats to the ontological order of the nation.
Drawing on these resources we employ a theoretical framework that prioritises the emotional and psychosocial explanations of security. We explore how geopolitical tremors are felt by young people and affect their sense of ontological security and being in the world. Thus, adopting OS as a theoretical tool enables security to be analysed as multi-scalar, relational and intersectional. Our focus is on ethnic and religious minority youth in Scotland and their responses to othering processes generated by geopolitical events and discourses. Events, such as the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich (2013), Glasgow Airport and London bombings (2007) and terrorist incidents in Paris (2015), Brussels (2016) and Istanbul (2017), have shaped the everyday securities of minority youth in Britain. Subsequent counterterrorism policies have delineated groups who are deemed high risk, marking out Muslims in particular as 'securitized' or 'suspect' citizens (Hussein & Bagguley, 2012;Maira, 2009;Pantazis & Pemberton, 2009). Paradoxically, those deemed 'risky' are often those most at risk and in need of security (Mythen et al., 2012) Racism and Islamophobia are risk for young Muslims as well as those misrecognised as Muslim (Alexander, 2000;Hopkins, Botterill, Sanghera, & Arshad, 2017) and have potential to destabilise OS. Katz (2010, p. 61) argues that in response to pervasive landscapes of fear individuals 'tend to turn inward' , potentially internalising the fears of others. Others have also observed practices of self-surveillance amongst young Muslims, such as the self-policing of mobility (Hussein & Bagguley, 2012), self-silencing in public and institutional settings (Hopkins, 2010;Nabi, 2011) and mainstreaming faith practices for conciliation purposes (Mansson McGinty, 2013). In the following sections, we discuss the psychosocial strategies young people employ to secure themselves against everyday risks and cope with intersubjective anxieties, the 'seemingly banal moments of discomfort' that reveal a 'more fundamental ontological relation underlying all acts of racism' (Noble, 2005, p. 12). Young people's experiences are located within particular histories and discourses, yet they are also dynamic and, whilst 9/11 has a long-standing legacy, for many young people the event itself is a distant memory, or not even recalled. As such, youth insecurities should be understood geopolitical framings, with more careful consideration of youth agency and the psychosocial strategies used to mitigate against everyday risks they encounter growing up in this context.

The study: young people's everyday geopolitics in Scotland
This paper is based on a large qualitative study that sought to explore issues of faith, ethnicity and place in the context of young people's everyday geopolitics in Scotland. A key aim of the research was to explore ethnic and religious minority young people's engagement with and negotiation of (national and international) political events and agendas, examining the impacts of key events on communities and individuals growing up in Scotland. The research study involved 382 young people living in Scotland during 2013/2014, putting a diverse range of young people's voices at the centre of this research. Child-centred empirical accounts of geopolitics of this scale are rare and a key aim of this study has been to produce a vital counterbalance to much of the adult-centric research and a comprehensive data-set that captures youth voices. Forty-five focus groups and 223 interviews were conducted with young people aged 12-25 from six sample groups: Muslims, non-Muslim ethnic and religious minorities (e.g. South Asian Sikhs, Hindus, Black African Christians), asylum seekers and refugees, international students, Central and Eastern European migrants, white Scottish young people. The large scale qualitative data-set generated by the interviews and focus groups offers a rare opportunity for comprehensive in-depth analysis of minority youth identities and the psychosocial impacts of security discourses on young people. Recruitment was achieved through snowball sampling with initial contacts made with schools, colleges, universities, third sector organisations and religious groups across urban, suburban and rural Scotland. The data were fully transcribed and analysed using thematic coding through NVivo software and secondary manual in-depth analysis to corroborate themes. The research involved a rigorous ethical approval: informed consent was gained from all participants (and parents where participant was under 16); all participants names and school/college names have replaced with pseudonyms (which in most cases were chosen by the participants) and participants were age banded to protect participant confidentiality; each interviewer has a commitment to anti-racist research (Anthias & Lloyd, 2002) and has engaged reflexively in this research, conscious of the multiple positionalities of the research team and this impact on conducting and analysing research data.
This paper is based on a selected sample of ethnic and religious minorities from the study (286). This includes Muslims and those who could be mistaken for Muslim, i.e. Sikhs, Hindus, Black African and Caribbean young people, asylum seekers and refugees, and some international students. The narratives that follow represent their reflections on feeling secure or insecure in everyday spaces in the light of the potential threat of racism whether experienced directly or not. Moreover, there are a number of observations that we would make about our sample. First, whilst we fully acknowledge that this paper is based on a particular sample and not all of the interview data, we do not necessarily seek to make empirical generalisations about the experiences of young ethnic and religious minority people in Scotland. Rather, our purpose is to complement and extend current understandings about the experiences of young people and how they seek to negotiate particular hostilities that they may encounter in their everyday lives. Second, these interviews were conducted within a specific time and space, namely during the Referendum campaign for Scottish independence, which therefore alerts us to the situational nature of the findings. Third, interviews as a research method can provide insights that go beyond the individual perspective and make social structures and collective processes available through individual narratives. Indeed, narratives are never 'direct accounts' but rather discursively constructed (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). In the following sections, we discuss some of the psychosocial strategies of resistance and resilience that young people use to preserve ontological security in the context of racism and Islamophobia. We explore both the pre-emptive and pro-active strategies employed to minimise difference and sustain everyday security.

Pre-emptive self-securitisation: 'Taking precautions'
Most of the ethnic and religious minority young people in this study had experienced some form of racism, ranging from racist language and 'banter' at school (which was perceived by many as relatively innocuous) to verbal and physical harassment and abuse on public transport, in the street and on social media perpetrated by strangers and peers. The resilience to these incidents ranged in intensity and young people employed a wide range of strategies to protect themselves from the effects of racism. Avoiding and ignoring racism when it occurred were the most common strategies employed, with some invalidating their experiences as irrelevant, not 'proper' , 'blatant' or 'in your face type' racism, feeling 'blasé' or 'used to it' . As Derek, a Ghanaian international student from Dundee reflects: I feel like everyone from ethnic minority encounters racist, racism all the time. It's part of being an ethnic minority. But whether it was real racism or it was in my head, that's the issue … it's never anything concrete like we're sworn out or we're called an abusive term. It's just these slights that people may perceive or may not perceive. (Derek, male, international student, Dundee) Rani, a female Muslim asylum seeker outlined her own experience: I was on the bus with my friend, we were just sitting in the very back seats and there were three Scottish teenagers, two girls and one guy and they were all drunk … first they started name calling … I kind of ignored it … but then the girl pulled my scarf off and she's like 'why do you wear this?' You know 'are you trying to hide nits or something' … then she pulled my hair. (Rani,(19)(20)(21)Muslim asylum seeker,Glasgow) In this case, Rani did report the incident to the police, but she felt let down by their apparent lack of interest in her experience. This was again why some young people saw the need to create their own strategies, due to the failure of public bodies (e.g. police, schools, social services) to take their concerns seriously.
In spaces where young people had either experienced or anticipated hostility they employed pre-emptive security strategies as a form of self-surveillance. Analyses of pre-emption have largely been at the national and international scale in geographical research, with critical work on the governance and discourse of pre-emptive security and anticipatory politics (Anderson, 2010;Gregory, 2004;Massumi, 2007). Whilst some have explored the impacts of large-scale pre-emptive security acts on local communities and popular culture (Amoore & de Goede, 2008;Weber, 2005), the pyschosocial pre-emptive responses of individuals to geopolitical narratives is relatively unexplored. However, these works offer considerable theoretical resources. For Massumi (2007, p. 19) pre-emptive action is predicated on fear, which is a 'palpable action in the present of a threatening future cause … whether the threat is determinate or not. It weakens your resolve, creates stress … and may ultimately lead to individual and/or economic paralysis' . Drawing on Massumi (2007), Ben Anderson theorises pre-emption as distinct from 'precaution' and 'preparedness' because it involves acting on the basis of 'indeterminate potentiality' , the threat is emergent rather than actual. Anderson writes in the context of macro-level logics of security, it is possible to re-scale these ideas to the individual. In anticipating certain futures, individuals calculate risk taking into account a series of imagined futures. Their subsequent actions are justified through the preservation of ontological security. We conceptualise 'pre-emptive strategies' of young people as acts that are based on an emergent and indeterminate threat. Often, pre-emption involves the suppression or strategic deployment of agency to fit particular contexts in order to mitigate against real or perceived harms. As we will demonstrate, the pre-emptive tactics young people employ are driven by a fear of what might happen in contact with others, so their quest for ontological security is rationalised through a mode of assimilation and self-restraint. Performances are thus regulated by imaginations of future scenarios that require anticipatory actions (cf. Anderson, 2010). Mythen et al. (2012) refer to such practices as 'checking' and 'hushing' whereby individuals invoke 'conscious performances of self-restraint' (391) and self-silencing in order to stay safe. In this research, many young people interviewed said they responded to potentially confrontational situations by 'staying out of the way' or 'keeping ma'self to ma'self' . As Shera, a British Sikh in Aberdeen suggests, you pre-react … if you were to think that someone was going to be hostile before they actually are, you would be more apprehensive and you would be more aggressive towards them before anything, any direct contact. (Shera, male, British Sikh, Aberdeen) The extracts that follow demonstrate a range of pre-emptive strategies that young people employed due to fears of being targeted. These strategies are multi-scalar, relational and intersectional. They are also 'generative' in that all acts of pre-emption generate something else (Anderson, 2010), they alter the socio-spatial context and re-make an encounter.
The potential for confrontation was identified across a range of spaces and social situations, such as at lunch times in the school playground, walking down particular streets in the neighbourhoods, public parks, public transport, football games. For example, following an incident of physical racial abuse on a bus in Glasgow, Rani, a Pakistani asylum seeker, did not take the bus for a month and subsequently sat at the front of the bus in plain sight to avoid being isolated and experiencing repeat trauma. In knowing the places and times of potential conflict, young people would 'avoid' and 'restrain' their mobilities, as Satnam reflects here.
I'd avoid the conflict, so avoid the conflict situations, so like not going out by myself, not going out at particular times, travelling in certain areas, those kind of things. (Satnam, male, Sikh, Glasgow) Satnam refers to particular local time-spaces as safe, whilst others are off limits. He explains his avoidance routines to protect himself from the risk of being attacked. This was more difficult at moments of heightened geopolitical crisis. For example, following terror attacks in other parts of the world and the subsequent negative media representations of Muslim communities. The impact of such representational discourse could be viewed as an 'assault' on the 'bodies, psyches and rights' (Ahmad, 2002) of young people who are framed as a 'could be terrorist' (Ahmed, 2004, p. 75), whether Muslim or non-Muslim. How young people determine what might happen to them is also bound to expectations about the potential futures of encounter understood through discourse and past experience. Sensing a possible future sets in motion a series of 'anticipatory affects' (Anderson, 2010, p. 783) that shape everyday practices and relations with others. For example, young people's mobilities are constrained, and they 'self-police' the routes they take in order to avoid confrontational spaces (Hussein & Bagguley, 2012). Suzana, a Bangladeshi Hindu living in Edinburgh explains how her public behaviours changed in response to the 7/7 bombings in London, and failed attack on Glasgow Airport. I always felt, like, what if people are actually like, keeping an eye on me, following me, looking at every single thing I do. So, I stopped throwing things in the bin for a while, I was like I'll just put it in my bag, I just won't put it in the bin, 'cause I was just scared if they think that I'm putting something in the bin. (Suzana, female, Hindu, Edinburgh on behavioural responses to London and Glasgow bombings) The anxiety of being the target of surveillance compels Suzana to alter her everyday embodied habits generating new socio-spatial contexts to operate within. She is 'scared' of the false conclusions others may come to and averts their gaze by changing her behaviour and in doing so minimises her own fears. In this sense, she is fearful of being the object of fear and accommodates essentialist discourses that 'other' her by avoiding potential misrecognition. This type of checking behaviour is reflected in other research on migrant integration and belonging where individuals engage in 'affective regulation of belonging' to 'fit' particular contexts (Noble & Poynting, 2010, p. 136). For Suzana, the context is a public space marked by geopolitical tensions, she internalises her discomfort and regulates her bodily practices to minimise the misplaced fears of others.
At the scale of the nation, levels of perceived racism in Scotland compared with England also affected young people's sense of security. Despite the relatively welcoming political landscape in Scotland and the perception that it is 'less racist' than England, the political narratives of inclusion and multiculturalism were undermined by spatially differentiated encounters of exclusion (cf. Dunn, Klocker, & Salabay, 2007;Noble, 2005). Shera, a British Sikh living in Aberdeen reflects on his fears when he moved from London to Scotland. I was a lot quieter, a lot. I had … I wouldn't speak as much, I wouldn't say too many things to people, and I would stay out of certain conversations simply because it could associate me, associate myself with something else that could be related to … anything. I mean people, they look at me and I have got a turban, I have got a beard, so they would normally associate me with someone who is highly religious or a religious extremist or whatever have you. So, I tend to stay away from those kind of topics and stuff like that. (Shera, male, British Sikh, Aberdeen) Shera's sense of belonging in Scotland is affected by his fears of embodied misrecognition. His apprehension to speak and appear too religious silences him and prevents him from being himself. Shera's securitising strategy is relational to his experience in London. For him Aberdeen is 'not' London and the security he associates with London is not felt in Aberdeen so the place becomes a site of insecurity which he must make secure for himself, by himself. Aberdeen is then a spatial metaphor for an assemblage of fears that Shera experiences, yet such fears are produced relationally -with other spaces and bodies (cf. Ahmed, 2004).
For others, the anticipation of racism and Islamophobia felt constraining in spite of their perception that Scotland is 'not that racist' . Nabila, a British-Libyan Muslim who has grown up in Dundee describes her experiences at School. I remember in school like all my friends were like Christians, white … I was very scared about what people would think of me and how that would affect my friendships and like parties I would be invited to. And they would be like 'Oh you don't drink. You shouldn't come. ' So, it is easier to … so I kept a lid on it a lot. And then now it is just really easy to say, Yeah I don't drink. Yeah, I want to go out … … I don't think there was that much racism, I think I kind of had it in my head mostly that people would judge me, but yeah they were actually really nice. (Nabila, female, Muslim, Dundee) Nabila's experiences as a minority Arab Muslim in a majority white Scottish school are not unusual and she deals with the anxieties of 'fitting in' with a reflective resilience despite her initial fears about the judgements of others. It is evident from this quote that Nabila employed strategies at school to minimise difference and censor elements of her faith practice to be accepted, anticipating negative reprisals. Despite this, she denies there was racism at school, and takes personal responsibility for the feelings of exclusion she may have felt at the time. This extract also reveals the lack of trust she has in her own judgements that may indicate a further strategy to mediate her own fears.
From these extracts, we can clearly see that strategies to securitise the self against potential harm are spatially patterned, relational and generative. We also propose that the wide range of strategies employed by young people show they are also constituted through intersections of identity. In particular, many Muslim women in our study discussed how alternative pathways to faith were sought to stay safe. McAuliffe (2007) contends that 'one of the strongest visual signifiers in contemporary geopolitics in the Muslim veil' . Haldrup, Koefoed and Simonsen (2006) argue that when othering is enacted through practical encounters with 'other' bodies this is a 'practical orientalism' most apparent when visible markers of difference are displayed. Many young women identified the stigma associated with the headscarf and responded with differing degrees of resilience. But despite claims that racism and Islamophobia 'bounce off you' , due to increased levels of awareness and resilience to such exposure, the feelings of apprehensiveness remained. Afia, a Scottish Muslim from Glasgow remarks, 'there is a feeling you get definitely of, they are looking at me in a way that they shouldn't be looking at me because I am dressed like this'. Similarly, Bene is a Sri Lankan Ahmadi Muslim refugee living in a multicultural district of Glasgow. She wears a headscarf and is highly conscious of the way in which her body and dress is read as geopolitical.
it's not that safe … where I live has loads of like junkies and stuff … at the start of my street there's like flats and stuff so walking at night alone might not be a good idea, if you're wearing the headscarf … they can see I'm a Muslim and they might have opinions and views about Islam and stuff and if they watch the news … it's like you need to watch out for things, you need not to be somebody who's too loud, seek attention of unwanted people. (Bene, female, Ahmadi Muslim refugee, Glasgow) The need to 'watch out for things' demonstrates Bene's strategies of self-surveillance in her local neighbourhood. She is on high alert of others whilst walking through the everyday, local spaces of her home taking care not to 'seek attention of unwanted people' . In her study of Muslim women in Scotland, Ali (2013) contends that negative representations of Muslim women wearing hijab have serious implications for how women express their faith in everyday life. Muslim women's experiences of being 'invisibly visible' in different cities in Scotland. Muslim women are marked out by racialisation and symbolic dress, but they are also overlooked because of these signifiers. The visibility of Muslim women and their representation as 'foreign' and 'other' amplify their physical presence in Scottish cities, yet they are personally anonymous, 'figures of faith' rather than 'individuals' (Ali, 2013).
Negotiating the politics of display and deciding whether or not to cover is an ongoing process for many young Muslim women. The following two examples show how the decision-making process over whether or not to wear a headscarf is itself fraught with geopolitical tensions.
If a lady is walking down the street in a headscarf and like she's got a full covering on then that's highlighting that she's Muslim. She's got an identity, she's being identified as Muslim which might make her get targeted more … so, like how people would view you if you'd get treated differently and like your chances of getting a job, or just generally the way that people treat you … whether you're like be a victim of racial abuse. I think that's one o' the key considerations when you're like thinking about putting a headscarf on. (Nadia, female, Muslim, Dundee) I'm quite scared about like bad judgement especially with all of the things in the media going on about Islam. Like if they see a girl with a hijab on they know that she's Muslim and they jump to conclusions like terrorism and stuff like that. So that's something I wouldn't want to bring to myself. I don't know if like that reason why I'm not wearing it is because I'm trying to kind of blend in or like hide myself from that so … but then I think that I'm quite, kind of like a coward … if there is something that I believe in than I should do it, I should show people what is right instead of like hiding away from it. (Tahali, female, Muslim, Dundee) Tahali's extract shows the tensions she experiences in deciding whether or not to cover. She is 'scared' of judgements, but unsure of her reasoning, blaming herself for being a coward and 'hiding away' . She is fearful in anticipation of the judgements and abuse she could encounter for being herself, so she minimises herself to guard against them. Rather than carving out alternative pathways to faith through a politics of resistance, Tahali is stuck wondering what to do in the face of perceived threat of Islamophobia. Many have argued that the headscarf is a 'contested signifier' for Muslim women, and a means through which to assert alternative identities through an empowered politics of display (Siraj, 2011;Tarlo, 2010). Tahali's decision-making is ongoing throughout the interview, as if she uses the space to reflect on the disconnect between her private intentions and public actions, and the external context of 'others' (bodies and discourse) who generate her sense of public unease. Her agency is constrained by a fear of being marked as a threat, yet she is also reproducing discursive tropes about others through her use of 'they' as a universal, homogenised threat that she must secure herself against.
Classed assumptions also pervade young people's security fears and many singled out particular groups as the main perpetrators of racial violence. 'Neds' or 'chavs' were frequently mentioned as a potential threat, whilst also demonised for being uneducated and involved in drugs or alcohol. Ali is a Pakistani international student from Dundee. He says he sometimes conceals his Muslim identity in order to avoid potential confrontation from particular groups.
I try to, see the, like, my personal thing I try to avoid it. I don't give anybody response … Most of the people know I am Muslim, but people know, people general, educated people they have, like, have probably they have broad their mind, they know all Muslim are not same. But the people they have a low mentality, they have a thinking, they just read the paper, they have a newspaper, oh, all Muslim are same. They give you a sweeping statement all over the place. (Ali, male, Muslim, Dundee) His assumption is that other people's opinions are framed by the geopolitical 'situation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Syria …' and subsequent representations of 'foreign' others in the mainstream media. But this concealment also has classed dimensions as he differentiates between educated and non-educated people to navigate potential sources of hostility. Ali's resolution to hide himself in certain situations supports Kinnvall's (2004) notion that achieving OS is an intersubjective process. The pre-emptive security measures employed here are part of a relational exchange within which mistrust and lack of mutual recognition produce mutual anxieties. These examples highlight the psychosocial impacts of securitisation where avoidance, introversion and restraint are enacted by individuals to obstruct potential harm. They also add to a plethora of evidence that everyday racism and 'practical' or 'banal' orientalism (Haldrup, Koefoed, & Simonsen, 2006) is far from absent in contemporary multicultural landscapes. The reproduction of 'them' and 'us' dichotomies for the sake of security is apparent, despite its subtler manifestations. Moreover, young people appear to be complicit in this reproduction, suggesting that youth agency is constrained by a requirement/compulsion to 'fit in' with essentialising tropes for a 'quiet life' . We are not here validating the problematic critique that Muslims 'self-segregate' or retreat into colonial tropes where they are hiding, unseen and guarded. Rather, we question the extent to which youth agency is consciously enacted whilst essentialist discourses are being internalised to preserve OS because of intercorporeal expectations. These pre-emptive modes of securing the self are anticipatory and seek to preserve (Anderson, 2010), but the complex intersubjective and interdependent processes potentially alter the socio-spatial order of things.

Pro-active securities: 'Being better than myself'
The second mode of self-securitisation we discuss are the pro-active strategies that young people employ to feel safe and maintain security. Whilst there is some overlap with the pre-emptive we delineate these strategies as demonstrating a fuller notion of agency. These are self-conscious attempts to challenge and resist dominant narratives of exclusion through counteracting potential prejudice. In all of these examples, young people attempt to activate dialogue through embodied and/or verbal means, to resist being the object of fear. Once again, however, the requirement to manage the fears of others through disassociation and denial drives these actions suggesting that youth agency is to some extent tempered by intercorporeal expectations.
Young people were pro-active in disassociating themselves from being the object of fear, counter false assumptions that would associate them with stereotypes of Muslims. Embodied performances like 'smiling' , 'looking people in the eye' and being 'better' than 'normal' or were discussed as strategies to minimise difference and recalibrate prejudice. For some these performances contribute to an active denial of racism to stay safe temporarily in moments of potential conflict. Here, Kudoo turns racism into banter in an act of diplomacy.
For me personally, I am quite … I would never take offense, I would probably try and join in the banter. Because as soon as you take offense, or as soon as you react to that, that is what these guys want. These guys want a reaction, especially if someone is looking for a fight. (Kudoo, male, Sikh, Glasgow) For others, however longer term strategies involved presenting a public face of stewardship to counteract negative perceptions, as Umar, a Pakistani refugee living in Glasgow remarks: I do get the feeling that I always have to be better than who I would normally be. So, I would always go out of my way to do nicer things or be a bit more public about doing it because I am a what a steward or … the reason is that, ok if he has been good, or if he has done something wrong, then they are going to automatically associate that with everyone the same … you do get picked out a lot more, and people do keep an eye out just to see, just to kind of feel you out. (Umar, male, Muslim refugee, Glasgow) Umar explains his need to overcompensate due to a feeling of being under surveillance, denoting an implicit wariness over his sense of belonging in public space and fear of being misrecognised. He is acutely aware of the performance of goodness and civility to detract from what Gardner (1995) refers to as 'uncivil attention' -'public harassment … that exist on a continuum of possible actions, ending with violence' (cited in Noble, 2005, p. 112). Umar feels a pressure to perform 'better' than normal in case he gets 'picked out' , aware that his body could be misread by others as 'wrong' and so he continually negotiates the balance between 'multicultural tolerance' and 'uncivil attention' through public visibility (Fortier, 2008).
Similarly, Az, an Ahmadi Muslim asylum seeker from UAE living in Glasgow, talks about her attempts to 'normalise' herself, using universally accepted conventions to side step her perceived 'difference' . I think if you take the first step and smile and say 'hi how are you' or 'how's the weather' and stuff and you know just be normal, be who you are even if I'm wearing scarf or even if I'm a Muslim, it doesn't change me, I'm still a human being. So, I have felt then I find it easier that they find, well people find it easier to talk with me if I'm open and smiling rather than the person who is closed or you know doesn't talk to them regularly. (Az, female, Ahmadi Muslim, asylum seeker, Glasgow) Here, Ajay talks about his encounters with others at the Gym where he makes an extra effort to be 'the politest guy' in order to recalibrate prejudice. I actually purposefully put in an effort to kind of, change people's opinions without doing it so forcefully if that makes sense, or trying to show it off, it's more like, OK I'm just going to be extra nice, and part of that's the way I've been brought up, just be nice, talk to people, build relationships, make a network as well. (Ajay,(22)(23)(24)(25)Scottish Sikh,Aberdeen) As a young man belonging to an ethnic minority group whose encounters take place in the gym, Ajay's pursuit of OS is multi-scalar and shaped by the intersections of race, religion, (hyper)masculinity and discourses that place him in the position of a potential terrorist and a threat to the moral order of the gym, the city and the nation.
Sasha, a Black African pupil from a school in Glasgow describes her considered approach to minimising other people's potential fears about who she might be. when I'm waiting for the bus I'll let everybody else go in. Like I don't care if you're young or old I'll just let you go in first. It's like they're scared of something but it's like when they do look up I smile to show like we're not all dangerous people, yeah. (Sasha, female, Black African, Glasgow) Once again Sasha predicts how her body may be misread by others and performs everyday habits in a subservient and conciliatory manner, denying her own rights to manage the worries of others. These strategies reflect what Noble (2005, p. 113) calls 'techniques of composure' -actions aimed at 'achieving a sense of stability to the immediate lifeworld, a settled feeling, particularly in contrast to a conflictual or chaotic world' . However, they also demonstrate a worrying pressure on young people to perform security in order to manage other people's misconceptions of them. As these extracts show, these embodied security performances occur in a range of public spaces -on the street, on public transport and in the gym -each with their own complex relational entanglements.
The proactive stances also show a degree of self confidence in one's ability to change perceptions through positive demonstration. Building 'inner confidence' or OS was seen by many as an essential precursor to feeling secure. I'm so much confident about myself and I believe in myself and I believe what I can do and what I can get by myself, all by myself. Now, so I don't let all this stuff really affect me to the way I carry myself. But to be honest it really affects so many people … have, I have friends that have really been affected by this stuff. To understand somebody who is Nigerian actually say different nationality when he's being asked 'where you from' , yeah, I'm being honest here, I've seen somebody who is Nigerian saying a different nationality … it's the fear of being identified with certain things, you understand. So, it goes a long way to affect how people carry themselves, how proud they are to say where they are from. (Addae, male, Nigerian international student, Glasgow) Addae constructs a very confident narrative of the self, able to withstand the effects of racism, unlike others he knows who engage in more covert forms of self-surveillance to dissociate from their Nigerian roots. Addae trusts his capacity to deflect racism and maintain a secure sense of self, relational to others who are less confident and more 'affected' by the threat of misrecognition and racism. He is ontologically secure because he trusts only those situations that validate his identity rather than those that threaten his sense of being.
Others used faith as a means of security, gaining biographical continuity through faithidentities. Darvesh, A Scottish Sikh from Aberdeen, remarks on the importance of his Sikh identity in confronting injustice and so actively employs his faith in order to justify and bolster both his views about social justice but also his embodied practices and how these are read by others.
Sikhs are meant to be very individual in, in the, in the sense that if there is an injustice happening in any situation, a Sikh cannot hide in any group, they stick out like a sore thumb so they have the absolute right to come forward and deal with that injustice … so when people see me and think oh gosh, look at him, it's fine, it's how it's meant to be. (Darvesh, male, Scottish Sikh, Aberdeen) Many of these proactive strategies could be seen as young people demonstrated resilience from the cumulative effects of racism over time. If so, to what extent is resilience a mechanism for ontological security? And to what extent should young people be required to develop resilience against hate crime? Resilience is contested concept to understand youth responses to adversity, since it is often applied using adultist frameworks and without due regard for the social and political context of risk and resilience (Boyden & Mann, 2005). In her study of children's emotional resilience in post-conflict settings, Watson (2015) argues that resilience should be viewed as a form of resistance. In this way, the agency of young people is recognised, disrupting dominant narratives of children as marginalised victims. For others, resilience and vulnerability are not such binary positions, but rather in a dialectical relationship and context dependent (Boyden & Mann, 2005;Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2015). The degree of resilience in these narratives is variable to intersections of identity, intergenerational processes and spatial configurations. Moreover, expressions of resilience are disturbed by core vulnerabilities. Aziz is a South African Muslim refugee living in Inverness. He explains his approach to living with racism since he first arrived in Scotland.
I was being called everything from 'Paki' to terrorist and to just out of place and all that stuff. But I'll be honest with you everything has just changed. Everyone has grown up everyone's matured they've all kind of understood, understood me as a person. I've become a lot more comfortable with the whole kind of, obviously because you have all these Middle Eastern wars and all that going on and everyone's kind of labelling and like 'Islam's a terrorist' and all that stuff … But to be honest I mean it doesn't really impact us as, it might impact me on my religion but it's not going to impact me as a person. I would never let my religion come between me and being a human being. That's something I strongly, strongly agree with. I would never do something that I'm not comfortable doing. So, everyone's just, I feel once someone got to know me that they would overlook this ethnic barrier if you will, so. (Aziz, male, Muslim, Highlands) Aziz refers to the disappearance of racism over time as his peers and friends gained understanding of him as a person, he doesn't feel marginalised or feel the impact of geopolitics in his everyday life. The distinction between his faith identity and his human being is also interesting here: Aziz separates his personhood from his faith and his ethnicity which suggests he gains ontological security through dissociating from them because they reflect a marginal and distant threat. In this way, he deflects the label of Muslim as victim or as threat and mediates insecurity through his appeal to a universal humanity. Aziz's narrative reveals a tension between the 'strong' sense of being himself, and dissociation from certain aspects of himself, a vulnerability that co-exists with a resilience to defend a normative position.

Conclusion
This paper has presented a relational, multi-scalar and intersectional analysis of young people's everyday securities as a provocation to advance a social geography of security. Following Brocklehurst (2015, p. 34) we take a view than is more than 'the pursuit of security provided by states on behalf of people' and offer an intervention to the methodological nationalism in studies of security. As Mythen et al. (2012) state security has an 'elasticity' -as such analysis of how securities are negotiated at the scale of the everyday are significant and relate to wider geopolitical securities. Discourses of geopolitics shape the experiences of young people, and they employ strategies to negotiate and resist being scripted in particular ways. Such strategies are relational and spatially contingent. Social geographers are ideally placed to provide theory and evidence on everyday securities through fruitful collaborative endeavours with those working on critical security studies in IR, political psychology and political sociology.
We have demonstrated that young people have overlapping experiences of insecurity that are located in a particular context of race, religion and nationalism. The political project of multicultural nationalism in Scotland is neither immune from nor overrides global security discourses or the legacies of neo-colonial modes of othering that operate simultaneously in everyday landscapes (Botterill, Hopkins, Sanghera, & Arshad, 2016). Using the concept of 'ontological insecurity' we put forward a framework to understand multi-scalar strategies of self-securitisation, how individuals preserve or construct a secure self through complex psychosocial negotiations. We have delineated these negotiations as 'pre-emptive' and 'pro-active' . These strategies are not conceptualised as dichotomous and both involve the prevention of harm and require some limitation of agency. As such, the appearance of agency through pro-active resistance should not be read as uncompromised. Young people often revert, albeit temporarily in most cases, to essentialising positionalities associated with ethnic and religious minorities (e.g. social withdrawal, avoidance of particular spaces and places, conformity, religiosity) to strategically negotiate the fear and anxiety that they encounter. Importantly, the performativity of such positionalities are simultaneously liberating, as young people are pro-active in managing sites of insecurity, and limiting in the sense that they may reify problematic stereotypes of ethnic and religious minorities. Young people are often compelled to take responsibility for both their own security and that of others and it is precisely those who are deemed threatening that are required to alter behaviours and nurture landscapes of peace for the sake of others suggesting an unequal individualisation of global (in)securities (cf. Beck, 2012).
Moving forward, there is considerable scope for social geographers to explore everyday securities of young people. In the context of Brexit, youth mobility and citizenship, employment and social securities are a key area for research and policy. The uncertainties generated by the vote on EU membership have potential to destabilise individuals' economic, political and social securities. More broadly, understanding security as a social and cultural matter is important for cross-cutting policy development and deeper understanding of psychosocial securities is required alongside 'big(ger)' security concerns. This includes greater recognition of youth agency in policy aimed at 'protecting' children and developing a multi-scalar understanding of securities that shape young people's everyday lives and their strategies of resistance.

Note
1. In 'The Divided Self' Laing refers to Mrs. R. -an 'agoraphobic' woman who he deems 'ontologically insecure' since she has difficulty in experiencing her own existence without others who know her or in relation to familiar surroundings (like the family home). She 'could not be herself, by herself, and so could not really be herself at all' (cited in McGeachan, 2014).

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

Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/K000594/1].