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Paper short abstract:

Objective security describes the world of the past, while subjective security looks into the future. It is the latter’s aspirational aspect that allows people – as in Central Africa – to imagine life beyond what is currently feasible in conflictual contexts and to push limits of the possible.

Paper long abstract:

Too often, objective security is taken as the „reality“, that which is, whereas subjective security is how people „perceive“ this reality, often in distorted ways. The aims of scholarship are thus regularly to understand these distortions, whereas practitioners attempt at sensibilizing and informing the populace. Subjective security, however, is no derivative. It has a distinct epistemology, lives in the minds of people, and shapes the world they inhabit. One way of understanding the often-paradoxical relationship between objective and subjective security is through the lens of temporalities: objective security describes the world of the past, while subjective security looks into the future. Objective security is descriptive, wherein the present becomes the cumulation of pasts, and the future is expected as a calculated continuation. Given the conflictual past of such countries as the Central African Republic, a positive future is thus commonly found in „resilience“ – conflict is to be expected and people are therefore lauded for making spaces for lives and livelihoods regardless. Subjective security, on the other hand, looks into the future, often in contradiction or reinterpretation of the past. Thus, Central Africans desire a state „return“ even though the state was rarely present in the past and if so, often in a discriminatory and violent manner. It is this aspirational aspect of subjective security that allows people to go beyond what is currently feasible to not only imagine a world beyond the boundaries of fact, but to push limits of the possible.