Pluralizing Security: Molecular Security and the Circulation of Natural Gas

By examining how the UK’s onshore circulation of natural gas is secured according to plural notions of risk, this article develops a conceptual framework for attending to the relational constitution of circulating bodies and things, and the negotiated ways in which their realities are strategically manipulated through security’s practice. Deploying the language of molecular security, it offers three inflection points for critical security studies. First, it challenges reductions of circulatory security to practices of filtration and maintenance, showing how lines of exception are drawn through entities’ constitutive relations in attempts to manage their capacities to act. Second, the paper demonstrates how security operates according to plural imperatives (public safety, economic productivity, political stability, climate security) and referent objects (nation-states, populations, economies, organisations, environments, individuals) and performances, across a variety of scales (atomic to planetary). And third, it stretches security’s relationship with the exception, showing how it often takes mundane, managerial, forms whereby both the threats identified, and the interventions deployed, may never cross the threshold from normal to exceptional politics.