The problem
International security is often analysed through states, institutions, capabilities and formal guarantees. Those matter, but they do not by themselves explain how people decide whether a guard can be trusted, whether an embassy warning should be followed, which risks can be tolerated, or when a protocol should be adapted to local circumstances.
My work asks what changes when security is treated as something produced through relationships rather than simply delivered by institutions. In Juba, formal arrangements were never absent. The question was how they acquired practical force. Personal ties, reciprocity and social embeddedness shaped when rules were followed, bypassed or made meaningful.
Juba and Chinese everyday security
The empirical core of this programme is multilingual ethnographic research with Chinese residents in Juba, South Sudan. Across three fieldwork visits, I combined participant observation with around 100 interviews to examine how residents, firms and other actors perceived risk and organised protection for themselves, their assets and their interests.
The findings challenge a common explanation of Chinese presence in high-risk environments: that Chinese actors are simply unusually risk-tolerant, or that their behaviour can be read directly from Chinese state strategy. What matters in practice is how people are embedded in local social and institutional relationships, what forms of reciprocity they can mobilise, and which sources of protection they regard as credible.
Relational security as an argument
This research develops relational security as an analytical approach. The central proposition is not that institutions are irrelevant, nor that relationships are uniquely Chinese. It is that formal security arrangements become operative through social relations and everyday practice. Security therefore depends on the relational infrastructure through which warnings are interpreted, assistance is accessed, guards are trusted and obligations are made actionable.
Read alongside relational approaches in International Relations, this reframes relationality as infrastructure rather than cultural essence. It also provides a way to connect everyday security practices to larger questions of political order, legitimacy and international presence.
From South Sudan to wider security questions
The Juba research now supports a broader agenda on Chinese security practices overseas, microgeopolitics, peacebuilding and the politics of protection across the Global South. One strand examines Chinese approaches to peacebuilding and developmental peace. Another asks when everyday practices become geopolitically consequential and how researchers can demonstrate that connection without simply redescribing ordinary activity as “geopolitical”.
The programme also provides the baseline for my current Gulf project. The Gulf offers a harder test of the relational argument because states are stronger, rules are more consistently enforced and formal protection is more readily available. If relationships still shape how protection becomes credible there, relational security travels beyond contexts of institutional weakness.