Drawing on my fieldwork on non-state forms of security in urban South Africa, my paper contributes to recent approaches in the Critical Anthropology of Security that highlight how local understandings of the notion of security shape people’s experiences and practices in this domain. More particularly, probing into ethnographic examples I explore how different vernacular notions of security influence how people relate to each other and with whom they interact. I argue that what I call ‘securosociality’ can take vastly different forms depending on how specifically the actors involved in it define security.