ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains her analysis of ‘Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Security’ from her book on the history of lethal self-defense. The spread of DIY Security in answer to widespread insecurity subsists on the selective outsourcing of critical government functions even as the state invests in increased militarization. The author utilises the concept of necropolitical governance to interrogate how a selectively armed, ‘law-abiding’ citizenry becomes endowed with the ‘right to kill’ in response to pervasive perceptions of insecurity, suspended in a generalizable ‘state of exception’ that merits legalized violence as national protection. The state exerts a necropolitical ‘capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,’ by deputizing those considered ‘law-abiding’ citizens to discipline vulnerable and criminalized populations. A necropolitical analysis interrogates the governing structures that appeal to the general welfare and safety while designating certain lives disposable.
