This paper regards the contributions that the study of discourse and security can make to international attempts to ameliorate conditions of human security via the study of discourses of security in local socio-cultural contexts. It starts by debating an applied program of work conducted at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) between 2007 and 2014. This program of work began by evolving a cooperative approach to community Security Needs Assessments, and subsequently generated a process of Evidence-Based Design to back UN staff in the explicit integration of local knowledge as a vital resource in the design of security-related policies and programs. The paper describes how this work drew from the ethnography of communication, the practical challenges its developers met in rendering such knowledge program-pertinent, and how this led them to conceptualize a focus on local strategies for the task of UN program design. It reflects on the potential of local strategies research (LSR) for handling applied challenges in human security, what a LSR agenda on security could look like, and how this might be extended in dialogue with the vernacular security approach to discourse and security.