Rypel, David; (2025) Assembling a Secure Life: Everyday Security and Belonging of Queer People in Georgia (Sakartvelo). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text PhD Thesis - Final (deposit) version.pdf - Submitted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 May 2027. Download (6MB)

Abstract

This thesis discusses how the politics of belonging is implicated in living a secure life as a queer person in Georgia (Sakartvelo). Critical security scholars commonly assume that security is inherently exclusionary and violent. However, this view may result from a narrow focus on security discourses and practices of political elites and their agents and the neglect of the experiences of marginalised groups. My ethnographic research uses an original framework inspired by valuation studies to re-investigate the relationship between security and belonging from the perspective of people with the lived experience of being queer in Georgia and their conceptualisations and practices of a secure life. Based on the data collected between 2019 and 2023 through in-depth interviews and participant observation, it shows that in the context of their lives, the relationship cannot be expressed in the form of simple binary oppositions, such as inclusion=security and exclusion=insecurity. The insecurity queers face in Georgia is often an effect of their membership (whether desired or not) of collectivities of belonging (such as the nation or the family) constructed in oppressive parameters. These collectivities, and particularly their normative regimes, render queer lives insecure across five registers of a secure life—five clusters of related concerns: physical, autonomous, material, relational, and infrastructural. Similarly, enactments of a secure life mobilise practices of both inclusion and exclusion, including self-exclusion, which further complicates the assumed link between security and exclusion. Crucially, the attention to the enactments of a secure life also reveals that gains within one register often mean losses in another. So, one commonly achieves only an imperfect, partial version of a secure life. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of (everyday) security studies and expands the body of research on gender, sexuality, and belonging in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

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