Uncertain, malevolent and irrational: Narratives of insecurity used by ordinary Finns when describing information environment after the outbreak of war in Ukraine

Using a vernacular approach to security, this article examines what ordinary people narrate about the insecurities they experience in their information landscape in a time of remote war and the practices they employ in response. Based on the narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with Finnish nationals in spring 2022, after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the article identifies two main narratives and three sub-narratives of informational insecurity. The first narrative portrays information as reassuring to the individual experiencing war at a distance, and the second depicts information as a source of insecurity. In a war context, feelings of insecurity arise because information is perceived as uncertain, malevolent, and contradictory to one’s prior understanding of the reality. The vernacular security approach is applied because participants’ experiences are complex, and they cannot be confined within one concept of security. Participants draw on influences from diverse scholarly and media discourses of security.