Exploring the Discursive Instabilities of “Security”: Notre-Dame-des-Landes and its Echoes in Mainstream Media

Drawing on both Feminist Security Studies (Wibben 2011; Stern 2005, 2006) and Media Studies (Callison and Young 2020; Deuze 2005; Durham 1998; Fraser 2001; Macé 2006), this paper explores the concept of “security” - or rather, “(in)security” – as a site of instability, particularly in an age of rapid technological and political change. Thinking of security “on the basis of (women’s) everyday lives” (Wibben 2011) opens up new ways to interrogate the media and the role they play in legitimizing some definition of (in)security while marginalizing others. Defining security necessarily implies identifying threats and determining what—or who—is worth protecting. This process is inherently political.
I aim to focus on the case of the ZAD [Zone à Défendre] of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. The French expression “Zone à Défendre” could be translated in English in “zone to defend” or “land defense zone”. The expression both evokes and subverts the military language of security. The ZAD was a long-standing (2009-2018) occupation and protest camp in France, created to resist the construction of a major airport project. It became a key site of ecological resistance and political experimentation, where activists practiced forms of autonomous living and contested state authority. Zadists also developed their own autonomous media, the website zad.nadir.org.
This paper examines how “security counter-discourses” emerged on this website, challenging dominant notions of security, territory, and identity. Through a discourse analysis of two corpora (76 texts from zad.nadir.org and 250 articles from the regional newspaper Ouest France), I will show how this redefinition both embraces and destabilizes hegemonic understanding of security, and therefore generates discursive instability. However, this instability is reabsorbed when echoed in traditional media, where norms of objectivity and immediacy tend to neutralize or depoliticize these counter-discourses.