Kurylo, Bohdana;
(2025)
Civil Society and the Politics of Security.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Civil society has been a noticeable blind spot in security studies despite the ongoing deepening of its agenda over recent decades. Against this background, this thesis develops the argument that civil society can be a meaningful security actor – not only in terms of conceptualising and providing security but especially through its positioning towards and relationship with other actors that contest the situated terrains of security. To illustrate this argument, the dissertation explores how civil society participates in the politics of security in two specific contexts: reproductive health struggles in Poland and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Capturing these variegated enmeshments of civil society in security politics requires a contextualist analytical framework that focuses on and reformulates four pivotal categories underpinning these processes: civil society itself, security, empowerment and emergency. The analysis of both contexts shows a variable configuration of these elements. Central to each context, however, is the self-constitution of civil society as a plural security actor. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Polish and Ukrainian civil society groups and hermeneutic textual analysis, I examine the conditions empowering them to act and mobilise in response to perceived emergencies. The result demonstrates that through spontaneous concerted action amidst the emancipatory moments of emergency, citizen groups laid claim to the very power they required to assert their presence in security politics. This presence reflected a varied understanding of security and practices associated with it, along with a multifaceted relationship between civil society, the state and the citizen. This research contributes to the burgeoning corpus of critical security scholarship that seeks to decentre elite but also academic security knowledges by attending to marginalised subjectivities in non-Western contexts. It joins cross disciplinary efforts to deepen the understanding of civil society’s multivalent role in the politics of security through a conceptually supple, empirically nuanced and normatively aware lens.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Civil Society and the Politics of Security |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203892 |
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