This is the answer to the question of ensuring collective security. The question about ensuring personal safety can be found at: How to protect yourself and your loved ones?
The answer below is applicable to any country of residence (not only to the country where you were born).
What is the homeland?
You can accept your so-called homeland (motherland, fatherland, etc.) as a given. On the other hand, if you reject a concept of “homeland” that presupposes the threat of violence and coercive pressure on its own subjects and neighboring peoples, you may decide not to accept being part of a homeland.
In any case, the concept itself will often include the following:
- Neighbors (“our own,” of one nationality, faith, language, culture, or other common features)
- Territories that these neighbors consider to be their own, including their resources and infrastructure
- Shared history, including the history of previous generations
Who threatens the homeland?
Here we are talking about mass aggression (fanatics, fascists etc.) when dialogue and persuasion are already not possible.
How to protect the homeland
- The history of the homeland does not need to be protected by means of killing and maiming — even though rulers who want to motivate you to kill the “enemy” will often appeal to history.
- Territories, resources, infrastructures are often given more value than human life and are protected accordingly: by threats and killings. You, as someone who pays to maintain these places and structures (or as someone who refuses to have anything to do with them), can think differently and use nonviolent protection methods prepared in advance instead of murders; see Nonviolence in Action: Methods and Approaches.
- Neighbors are people who today consider themselves compatriots alongside you, and have built their lives and yours around this shared identity (with borders, state, army, etc.). You have the right to decide that your mutual obligations to your neighbors will not include killing, and that, instead, you will help with nonviolent collective protection, see Nonviolence in Action: Methods and Approaches.
If your neighbors are not willing to take nonviolent preparations for defense into account, you have the absolute right to act on the basis of your own assessments of your fear and risk, but you may find that your neighbors may condemn and restrain you, or even simply kill you for your choice.
So, who will protect the homeland? *
The armed forces, by maiming and murder.
People of good will, by nonviolent methods.
But only if the former (normally intolerant of peace and nonviolence, and accustomed to patterns of command and subordination) do not kill the latter, who are, after all, their own compatriots, with whom they share a homeland.
* Applicable to any host country (not only the country where you were born)
See also: How to protect yourself from the homeland