This paper addresses an analytical gap in critical security studies related to the social construction, legitimation, and institutionalisation of referents objects, or the for whom of security. As it lays out, referent objects tend to be assessed based on pre-theoretical commitments that themselves fall outside of the scope of critical security analysis. This has important analytical and ethical consequences, which I heuristically illustrate in relation to the individual in both Copenhagen School securitisation theory and human-centred security. In one case, the individual is understood as an atomised Hobbesian figure at odds with the collective, and in the other, as a socially embedded figure representative of humanity. Incommensurate ontological baselines have on the one hand stymied fruitful dialogue between these two influential approaches. More importantly, however, fixed perspectives on the individual have also served to limit each approachs purview, even on their own terms. In highlighting the value of de-naturalising the individual, I lay out a broader argument for problematising referent objects more generally, as a more productive way of thinking about security that moves the conversation beyond practically endless articulations of potential danger. Overall, I argue that the intersubjective processes by which any referent object is constituted as a legitimate claimant to security, is as central to the critical study and ethical practice of security, as that of putative threats to it.

Land is intertwined with politics: both as a sine qua non for the territorial state, as well as a spatially limited natural resource through which geopolitical power and advantage are articulated and enacted. This remains the case, notwithstanding the emergence of global and planetary frameworks for land management towards collective environmental and developmental goals. Indeed, such frameworks contend with narratives and practices that not only treat land as a strategic national resource, but entangle it with the very ontology of statehood itself. This study examines such state-natures through the case of Russian agricultural land use. Analyzing governmental discourse from 2000 to 2020, it examines how in the extensive cultivation of agricultural land has come to be a hallmark of twenty-first century vertical and horizontal symbolic state-making: both as an instrumental means of enhancing the states geopolitical power, as well as a means by which state is reified as environmentally sovereign and self-subsistent. So doing, the study complements a growing body of work in critical environmental geopolitics that has tended to eschew state-based analysis, or else leave the state underproblematized. As I argue, considering how the state is made natural, in turn helps to understand how nature is politically if not ontologically entangled in geopolitical thought and practice-in ways that attempts to act upon and indeed bring about wider-scale environmental subjects must contend.