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Civilizing Security

Security has become a defining feature of contemporary public dis-

course, permeating the so-called ‘war on terror’, problems of everyday
crime and disorder, the reconstruction of ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states and
the dramatic renaissance of the private security industry. But what does
it mean for individuals to be secure, and what is the relationship
between security and the practices of the modern state? In this timely
and important book, Ian Loader and Neil Walker outline and defend
the view that security remains a valuable public good. They argue that
the state is indispensable to the task of fostering and sustaining liveable
political communities in the contemporary world and thus pivotal to
the project of civilizing security. This is a major contribution by two
leading scholars in the field and will be of interest to anyone wishing
to deepen their understanding of one of the most significant and press-
ing issues of our times.

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for

Criminology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Policing
and the Condition of England (with A. Mulcahy, 2003) and Crime and
Social Change in Middle England (with E. Girling and R. Sparks,
2000) and an editor of the British Journal of Criminology. Ian is a
leading authority on contemporary transformations in policing and
security.

Neil Walker is Professor of European Law in the Department of Law

at the European University Institute, Florence, and (for 2007) the
Tercentenary Professor of Law at the University of Edinburgh. He has
made well-known contributions to questions of transnational consti-
tutional theory as well as to the study of policing and security. He has
recently edited Europe’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (2004)
and Relocating Sovereignty (2006).
Civilizing Security

i a n l oa d e r a n d n e i l wa l k e r
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Ian Loader and Neil Walker 2007

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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Prologue: On writing about security today 1

1. Uncivil security? 7

Part I On state scepticism 33

2. The state as meddler 35
3. The state as partisan 73
4. The state as cultural monolith 94
5. The state as idiot 117

Part II Securing states of security 141

6. The good of security 143
7. The necessary virtue of the state 170
8. The democratic governance of security 195
9. Security as a global public good 234

References 265
Index 297

v
 Acknowledgements

We have been working together on this book, or at least on its themes,

for almost a decade. During such a span of time one necessarily receives
support, assistance and encouragement from a great many quarters,
both individual and institutional, and we would like to take this oppor-
tunity to acknowledge our debts and thank those to whom they are
owed. We wish to thank, first of all, our friends and colleagues at the
three extremely collegial and stimulating institutions at which we have
worked during the writing of this book: in Ian’s case, the Department
of Criminology at Keele University and the Centre for Criminology at
the University of Oxford, and in Neil’s, the Department of Law at the
European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. Ian would, in addi-
tion, like to thank the EUI for the award of a Jean Monnet Fellowship
in 2004 and for the subsequent hospitality which allowed us to give the
writing of this book something of a ‘kick start’.
We would, beyond this, like to thank all the seminar and conference
participants who have over this period commented on our work in
progress during the various presentations we have singularly or jointly
given, as well as those friends and colleagues who have been kind or
interested enough to respond to draft papers and chapters, or who have
engaged in discussion of the book’s themes. At the risk of omitting
someone with a legitimate claim to be included, and in no particular
order of importance, such thanks are due to the following people:
Andrew Ashworth, Richard Bellamy, Grainne de Burca, Damien
Chalmers, Bill Dixon, Benoît Dupont, Andrew Goldsmith, Benjamin
Goold, Carole Harlow, Jef Huysmans, Martin Innes, Vivienne Jabri,
Les Johnston, Susanne Karstedt, Liora Lazarus, Hans Lindahl, Tim
Newburn, Jim Sheptycki, Richard Sparks, Victor Tadros, Jim Tully,
Jeremy Waldron, Rob Walker, Michael Williams, Jennifer Wood, Lucia
Zedner and three anonymous Cambridge University Press reviewers.
Didier Bigo and Clifford Shearing are owed particular thanks for
pointing out why we were wrong in ways that helped sharpen our

vii
viii Acknowledgements

argument, while reminding us in the process of the virtues and possi-

bility of civilized intellectual and political dialogue. Thanks also to
John Dunn for issuing a challenge that we hope to have gone at least
some distance towards meeting. It should be apparent that the usual
disclaimer applies.
John Haslam and Carrie Cheek at Cambridge University Press have
been a model of professionalism – and were rewarded by not having
to wait as long as we usually detain our publishers. Finally, and once
more, we have drawn inspiration from the love and support of, respec-
tively, Penny, Eloïse and Imogen, and Gillian, Ross and Lewis, and
from the recent and joyous arrival into the world of Iris and Emilia. It
is to them that we dedicate this book.

The authors and publisher would like to thank the following publish-
ers for permission to reproduce material for which they hold the copy-
right: Sage Publications Ltd for sections of chapter 1 that first appeared
as ‘Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections Between
Policing and the State’, Theoretical Criminology 5/1 (2001), 9–35;
Cambridge University Press for a sketch of the overall argument that
first appeared as ‘Necessary Virtues: The Legitimate Place of the State
in the Production of Security’, in J. Wood and B. Dupont (eds.)
Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security (2006); and Hart
Publishing Ltd for an initial version of chapter 9 which is to be pub-
lished as ‘Locating the Public Interest in Transnational Policing’, in A.
Goldsmith and J. Sheptycki (eds.), Crafting Global Policing (2007).
 Prologue
On writing about security today

Citizens of western countries are too ready to take for granted the relatively
civilized political conditions they enjoy, forgetting that politics in most times
and places has been thoroughly predatory. Achieving a type of politics that
is less predatory, and geared to some conception of the public good, is not
easy under any circumstances, and may be impossible in the absence of
certain preconditions. One of these preconditions seems to be a collective
people, sustained by myths and capable of generating and monitoring polit-
ical power. (Canovan 2005: 138)

There comes a moment in the historical development of any field of

social enquiry, or at least in the formation of one’s own thinking about
its objects, when it seems necessary to return to basics; to dig up the
foundations in order to subject to sustained reflection elements of the
field, and the relations between them, that have come to be collectively
taken for granted, treated as the unexamined presuppositions of
research programmes. We believe that this moment has been reached
in the social and political analysis of security and its relationship to the
modern state.
Support for this judgement lies all around us today, both in respect of
the profound and perplexing transformations that appear to be affect-
ing the state’s capacity to act as the pre-eminent guarantor of security to
its citizens, and in the competing responses that these have provoked.
On the one hand, there seems plenty of evidence to buttress the view that
the modern state’s place as not a but the security actor is being eroded
under conditions of globalization and its neo-liberal thematization, such
that commercial operatives, and non-state actors within civil, or uncivil,
society, assume a far greater role in promising or providing security
within, and across, contemporary societies (Johnston and Shearing
2003; Krahmann 2005). This, in turn, has generated reactions ranging
from celebration, to cautious endorsement, to plain confusion, to cries
of concern about the likely, inegalitarian and illiberal, consequences
(Wood and Dupont 2006a; Zedner forthcoming). On the other hand,

1
2 Prologue

one can find no little – on the surface contradictory – evidence that, in

the wake of 9/11 and the Bali, Madrid and London bombings, state
authority is reasserting, reempowering and relegitimating itself under
the sign of security in the face of the dangers posed to society by transna-
tional political violence. Here debate is routinely joined today between
those political actors and commentators who hold that liberal democ-
racies confront unprecedented threats from ‘Islamic terrorism’ and that
states must take urgent, decisive measures to do what they deem neces-
sary to defeat it, and those who claim that under the cloak of a ‘war on
terror’ governments are mobilizing and responding selectively to threats
in ways that place hard-won democratic rights and principles in great
peril. It is against this backdrop, one in which security has become a
trope of everyday political discourse and exchange, that it appeared to
us valuable to revisit one of modernity’s most profound conundrums
and reflect fundamentally on the idea of security, on what it means for
individuals to be and feel secure, and on the complex, contradictory
intersections that exist between security and the practices of the modern
state. This book is the result.
The upshot of our reflections on this conundrum will become appar-
ent soon enough. But it may perhaps be useful at the outset – so as to
be precise about the book’s purposes and avoid offering readers a false
prospectus – to state clearly what we have not set out to accomplish.
We have not, first of all, sought to offer a detailed empirical mapping
of the plurality of actors and agencies who are engaged in practices
of security across the world today or a ‘state-of-the-art’ survey of the
theoretical paradigms and empirical enquiries that endeavour to make
sense of them (cf. Terriff et al. 1999; Zedner forthcoming). It is now
commonly accepted, and almost otiose to mention, that writing about
contemporary security requires one to come to terms with much more
than the nation state and its police, military and cognate security oper-
atives. The private security industry – in forms ranging from small local
companies to global corporations – now functions within and across
national boundaries and is engaged in ‘domestic’ security, the protec-
tion of transnational economic interests, and the support and conduct
of military operations. We must add to this the ‘grassroots’ policing
and protective practices engaged in by non-state actors within civil
society – especially but not only in poor communities in the develop-
ing world. We need to think about the development of the European
Union as an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ security actor and about the role
On writing about security today 3

played by states, the EU, the UN and international NGOs in practices

of post-conflict policing and social reconstruction. And so on and so
on. Faced with such pluralized, fragmented, commodified and by no
means state-dominated environments, we plainly require better empir-
ical knowledge, whether of the operation and effects of new security
actors on the ground, or their linkages with ‘old’ protective agencies
within security networks, or of the overarching institutional pattern
within different jurisdictions and across their territorial boundaries.
This much cannot be gainsaid. But such descriptive mapping is not the
only task that the pluralization of security confronts us with and it is
not the one we have chosen to tackle in this book.
This is not, secondly, a book about the ‘war on terror’. Since 9/11 the
shelves of bookstores across the western world have been filled – in new,
hastily arranged sections earmarked ‘terrorism’ – with text after text
purporting to analyse some element of the apocalyptic danger posed to
liberal societies and western interests by al-Qaeda and its offshoots, or
to praise or censure the ways in which the American or other govern-
ments have defined and responded to that threat.1 Many such texts can
no doubt lay claim to being serious books on a serious topic written by
serious journalists or academics, as recent efforts by, among many
others, Benjamin Barber (2003), Jason Burke (2004), John Gray (2003),
Michael Ignatieff (2004) and David Rose (2004) attest. But there is a
standing danger in the publishing industry that has developed around
the ‘war on terror’ of authors either chasing events in a manner that
gives their work an all too imminent ‘use-by’ date, or else of falling prey
to the kinds of spontaneous thinking that are, as Pierre Bourdieu was at
constant pains to remind us, the enemy of the construction of social sci-
entific knowledge and understanding. We will, as the book unfolds, have
cause to make observations on the way in which the so-called ‘war on
terror’ is permeating the contemporary politics and practice of security,
just as we will at numerous points seek to describe the agents and agen-
cies that comprise a pluralized security landscape that stands today in
great need of more precise cartography and fuller explanation. But these
are not, we want to emphasize, our principal purposes.
What follows then, and instead, is an essay on the idea of security
and its relationship to political community. It represents an attempt,

11
During a recent visit to the books section of Amazon.com (16 May 2006) a
search under ‘war on terror’ unearthed no less than 1,177 items.
4 Prologue

on our part, to take a step back from the practical immediacies and
apparent security imperatives of the present in a bid to make better
sense of the former and scrutinize the claims made in respect of the
latter. It is as such, if one wishes to insist upon a disciplinary tag, an
exercise in applied social and political theory, by which we claim no
more than that it is an effort to think and write as coherently as we
are currently able about the practice of security and its relationship
to the practices of the state, in ways that are informed by relevant
research and reflection in criminology, the sociology of policing and
social control, political science, public law and international security
studies. We shall, in substantive terms, outline and defend the idea
that security – understood sociologically as a ‘thick’ public good – is
an indispensable constituent of any good society and argue that the
democratic state has a necessary and virtuous part to play in seeking
to realize the good of security thus conceived – in seeking, in the
words of our title, to civilize security and to release its civilizing
potential. This, we believe, is an argument that has application and
purchase not merely in ‘settled’ democratic societies with strong state
traditions, but also in those settings where authoritarian states rou-
tinely act in ways injurious to the liberty and security of their citizens
and in environments where ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states lack the capacity
to act as a security-enhancing political authority. By way of conclu-
sion, we seek to extend and revise the argument still further by exam-
ining how best to conceptualize and promote security as a global
public good.
In making this case, we remain acutely aware that we are writing
about (and within), and in a modest bid to act upon, a world that is
deeply inhospitable to the democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic secu-
rity culture that it is our purpose to delineate and foster; one from
which, as John Dunn (1993: 122) has argued, ‘any reasonable and rel-
atively concrete social and political hope’ has been ‘deleted’. It is a
world in which the governments of liberal states increasingly accede to
populist, xenophobic demands in ways that undermine the democratic
liberties of their citizens. It is a world where neo-liberalism – and the
‘order of egoism’ that it champions (Dunn 2005: ch. 4) – has come to
be ascendant in ways that have enabled policing and security resources
to be captured by those with the greatest supply of economic and social
capital and thereby distributed in inverse relation to risk, and hence
need. It is a world replete with authoritarian regimes, and divided or
On writing about security today 5

post-conflict societies, where insecurities, inequalities and the absence

of democratic governance go hand in hand. It is a world, in sum, in
which the idea of politically constituted public authority recognizing
the claims and seeking to coordinate the security interests of all its citi-
zens appears remote and increasingly far-fetched.
Faced with such inhospitable conditions, one can easily lapse into
fatalistic despair, letting events simply come as they will, or else seek
refuge in the consolations offered by the total critique of securitization
practices – a path that some critical scholars in criminology and secur-
ity studies have found all too seductive (e.g. Bigo 2002, 2006; Walters
2003). Or one can, as we have done, supplement social criticism with
the hard, uphill, necessarily painstaking work of seeking to specify
what it may mean for citizens to live together securely with risk; to
think about the social and political arrangements capable of making
this possibility more rather than less likely, and to do what one can to
nurture practices of collective security shaped not by fugitive market
power or by the unfettered actors of (un)civil society, but by an inclu-
sive, democratic politics.
Social analysts of crime and security have become highly attuned to,
and warned repeatedly of, the illiberal, exclusionary effects of the asso-
ciation between security and political community (Dillon 1996;
Hughes 2007). They have not, it should be said, done so without cause,
for reasons we set out at some length as the book unfolds. But this
sharp sensitivity to the risks of thinking about security through a com-
munitarian lens has itself come at a price, namely, that of failing to
address and theorize fully the virtues and social benefits that can flow
from members of a political community being able to put and pursue
security in common. This, it seems to us, is a failure to heed the impli-
cations of the stake that all citizens have in security; to appreciate the
closer alignment of self-interest and altruism that can attend the
acknowledgement that we are forced to live, as Kant put it, inescapably
side-by-side and that individuals simultaneously constitute and
threaten one another’s security; and to register the security-enhancing
significance and value of the affective bonds of trust and abstract soli-
darity that political communities depend upon, express and sustain. All
this, we think, offers reasons to believe that security offers a conduit,
perhaps the best conduit there is, for giving practical meaning to the
idea of the public good, for reinventing social democratic politics, even
for renewing the activity of politics at all.
6 Prologue

These, of course, may prove to be naïve hopes, futile whistling in a

cold and hostile wind. It is in addition true that the project of civiliz-
ing security is ultimately a question not of social theory but of politi-
cal praxis. But if such a project is ever to be thematized as a politics it
requires, or at least can be furthered by, some form of theoretical artic-
ulation; one which reminds us, as C. L. R. James (1963) might have
said, that those who know only of security of security nothing know.
It is with this overarching purpose in mind that we have been moved
to write in the way that we have about security today.
 1 Uncivil security?

O
u r argument in this book is that security is a valuable public
good, a constitutive ingredient of the good society, and that
the democratic state has a necessary and virtuous role to play
in the production of this good. The state, and in particular the forms
of public policing governed by it, is, we shall argue, indispensable to
the task of fostering and sustaining liveable political communities in
the contemporary world. It is, in the words of our title, pivotal to the
project of civilizing security.
By invoking this phrase we have in mind two ideas, both of which we
develop in the course of the book. The first, which is relatively familiar
if not uncontroversial, is that security needs civilizing. States – even those
that claim with some justification to be ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’ – have a
capacity when self-consciously pursuing a condition called ‘security’ to
act in a fashion injurious to it. So too do non-state ‘security’ actors, a
point we return to below and throughout the book. They proceed in
ways that trample over the basic liberties of citizens; that forge security
for some groups while imposing illegitimate burdens of insecurity upon
others, or that extend the coercive reach of the state – and security dis-
course – over social and political life. As monopoly holders of the means
of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, modern states possess a
built-in, paradoxical tendency to undermine the very liberties and secu-
rity they are constituted to protect. Under conditions of fear, such as
obtain across many parts of the globe today, states and their police forces
are prone to deploying their power in precisely such uncivil, insecurity-
instilling ways. If the state is to perform the ordering and solidarity-
nourishing work that we argue is vital to the production of secure
political communities then it must, consequently, be connected to forms
of discursive contestation, democratic scrutiny and constitutional
control. The state is a great civilizing force, a necessary and virtuous
component of the good society. But if it is to take on this role, the state
must itself be civilized – made safe by and for democracy.

7
8 Uncivil security?

But our title also has another, less familiar meaning – the idea that
security is civilizing. Individuals who live, objectively or subjectively,
in a state of anxiety do not make good democratic citizens, as
European theorists reflecting upon the dark days of the 1930s and
1940s knew well (Neumann 1957). Fearful citizens tend to be inatten-
tive to, unconcerned about, even enthusiasts for, the erosion of basic
freedoms. They often lack openness or sympathy towards others, espe-
cially those they apprehend as posing a danger to them. They privilege
the known over the unknown, us over them, here over there. They
often retreat from public life, seeking refuge in private security ‘solu-
tions’ while at the same time screaming anxiously and angrily from the
sidelines for the firm hand of authority – for tough ‘security’ measures
against crime, or disorder, or terror. Prolonged episodes of violence, in
particular, can erode or destroy people’s will and capacity to exercise
political judgement and act in solidarity with others (Keane 2004:
122–3). Fear, in all these ways, is the breeding ground, as well as the
stock-in-trade, of authoritarian, uncivil government.
But there is more to it than that. Security is also civilizing in a further,
more positive sense. Security, we shall argue, is in a sociological sense
a ‘thick’ public good, one whose production has irreducibly social
dimensions, a good that helps to constitute the very idea of ‘public-
ness’. Security, in other words, is simultaneously the producer and
product of forms of trust and abstract solidarity between intimates and
strangers that are prerequisite to democratic political communities.
The state, moreover, performs vital cultural and ordering work in fash-
ioning the good of security conceived of in this sense. It can, under the
right conditions, create inclusive communities of practice and attach-
ment, while ensuring that these remain rights-regarding, diversity-
respecting entities. In a world where the state’s pre-eminence in
governing security is being questioned by private-sector interests, prac-
tices of local communal ordering and transnational policing networks,
the constitution of old- and new-fashioned forms of democratic polit-
ical authority is, we shall argue, indispensable to cultivating and sus-
taining the civilizing effects of security.

Security and its discontents

Raising these possibilities is, of course, to invite a whole series of
obvious but nonetheless significant questions: what is security? What
Uncivil security? 9

does it mean to be or to feel secure? Who or what is the proper object

of security – individuals, collectivities, states, humanity at large? What
social and political arrangements are most conducive to the production
of security? It is also to join – in a global age that is now also an age
of terror – a highly charged political debate about the meanings and
value of security as a good, and about how it may best be pursued. It
is these questions, and this debate, that we want to address in this
book.
Security has become the political vernacular of our times. This has
long been so in respect of ‘law and order’ within nation states.
Authoritarian regimes are routinely in the habit of using the promise
and rhetoric of security as a means of fostering allegiance and sustain-
ing their rule – delivering safe streets while (and by) placing their citi-
zens in fear of the early morning knock at the door (Michnik 1998).
Democratic societies too have over the last several decades come to be
governed through the prism of crime – a phenomenon especially
marked in the USA, Britain and Australasia, though not without reso-
nance in other liberal democratic states (Garland 2001; Simon 2006;
see also Newburn and Sparks 2004). But security has also since 9/11,
and the ‘war on terror’ waged in response to it, become a pervasive and
contested element of world politics, impacting significantly on the
‘interior’ life of states and international and transnational relations in
ways, as we shall see, that escalate the breakdown of once settled dis-
tinctions between internal and external security, war and crime, polic-
ing and soldiering (Kaldor 1999; Bigo 2000a).
Today, security politics is riven by disagreements over the pros and
cons of self-consciously seeking security using predominantly policing
and military means; by disputes about how and whether to ‘balance’
security with such other goods as freedom, justice and democracy; and
by conflicts between a conception of security as protection from physi-
cal harm and wider formulations of ‘human’ or ‘global’ security. In the
face of these debates we are aware that the title and ambitions of this
text are likely to meet with one of three possible responses. They will be
seen by some as offensive to the benign intentions and purposes of gov-
ernments and security actors. They may be viewed, alternatively, as the
naïve, wrong-headed pursuit of an oxymoron. Or they may be dismissed
– by those who share our broad ambition to civilize security – as too
limited in their grasp of what the idea of security can and should mean.
We want to probe a little further into each of these anticipated reactions.
10 Uncivil security?

In so doing, we can begin to pinpoint the limitations of certain estab-

lished dispositions towards, and public discourses about, security, as
well as indicating how the debate about security can be moved to a dif-
ferent – we think more fruitful – place.1
The first – currently hegemonic – response issues from a lobby that
seeks fairly unambiguously to promote security and that takes excep-
tion to the idea that security needs civilizing. Security, on this view, is
an unqualified human good. The protection of its people from internal
and external threats stands consequently as the first and defining pri-
ority of government. Far from needing to be balanced with democra-
tic rights and freedoms, security is a precondition for the enjoyment of
such goods. Far from needing ‘civilizing’, security is the foundation
stone and hallmark of civilization. Security, moreover, can and should
be directly and consciously pursued using what Joseph Nye (2002)
calls ‘hard power’ – by enabling, resourcing and enthusiastically
backing the military, intelligence agencies and the police. It is these
agencies that will protect the state and its citizens, and these agencies
whose purposes and effectiveness must not be hamstrung by excessive
legal rights and safeguards that give succour to the enemy, or by
forms of democratic deliberation that obstruct decisive executive
action. This – stripped to its essentials – is the discourse that has ani-
mated countless ‘wars on drugs’ and ‘crackdowns’ on crime and dis-
order in both democratic and authoritarian states over recent decades,
and which since 9/11 has fuelled and justified what may turn out to be
a permanent ‘war on terror’.
This disposition towards, and identification with, security has long
antecedents dating back to Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, and is

11
Our concern in this section is not principally with paradigms of scholarly enquiry
and exchange with all their characteristic caution and careful qualifications but,
much more, with the dispositions towards security that find expression in con-
temporary public and political discourse. The positions we discuss – those we
term the ‘security lobby’, the ‘liberty lobby’ and the ‘human security lobby’ – are
clearly more internally complex than the brief typifications which follow allow;
there are few ‘security lobbyists’, for instance, who do not make some room for
rights-based limitations, just as few civil libertarians fit the political caricature of
their opponents as complacent about the safety of their co-citizens. But what we
seek to capture here are the overarching orientations of each worldview, the
claims and contentions that their proponents instinctively ‘reach for’ and find
emotionally compelling, those which consequently tend to constitute the broad
contours of, and lines of division within, security politics today.
Uncivil security? 11

deeply sedimented in the present (Robin 2004). It represents the clear-

sighted and hard-headed outlook of a good many politicians and police
officers. It holds – for anxious citizens – a deep emotional allure. But it
is not without some serious shortcomings, two of which warrant an
introductory note. It proceeds, first of all, in ways that gloss over the
paradoxes that attend the pursuit of security (Berki 1986: ch. 1; Zedner
2003). It has little to say, and rarely pauses to reflect upon, the most pro-
found of these; namely, that the state’s concentration of coercive power
makes it simultaneously a guarantor of and a threat to the security of
individuals. Security, as Berki (1986: 13) puts it, is inescapably a
problem for and a problem of the state – a condition we deal with more
fully in later chapters (see also N. Walker 2000: ch. 1). Nor does the
security lobby grasp clearly the implications of how human beings are
mutually implicated in one another’s in/security – as both an ever-
present potential threat to the security of each, and at the same time a
necessary precondition for giving effect to such security. Still less does
the security lobby register and absorb the fact that security is, in an
important sense, destined to remain beyond our grasp – ‘more within us
as a yearning, than without us as a fact’ (Ericson and Haggerty 1997:
85). Not only does this mean that there can never – in a paradox rich
with implications – be ‘enough’ security measures, which hold out a
promise of protection while always also signifying the presence of threat
and danger. It also warns us that responding to demands for order in the
terms in which they present themselves (i.e. zero-tolerant police, tougher
sentencing, more prisons, ‘wars’ against drugs, or crime, or terror) can
be little more than a bid to quench the unquenchable.
The effacing of paradoxes such as these is closely connected to –
indeed a key contributor towards – the second and most deleterious
shortcoming of the security lobby. This is its tendency to make security
pervasive, to proceed in ways that treat and thereby produce ‘security’
– or, more accurately, security rhetoric and activity – as a dominant,
emotionally charged element of political culture and everyday life.
Security – as Buzan et al. (1998) usefully remind us – is not only a con-
dition of social existence, a description of social relations marked by
order and tranquillity. It is also a political practice, a speech act, one way
of framing and naming problems. To call something ‘security’ – to make
what Buzan et al. (1998: 25) call a ‘securitizing move’ – is to suggest,
and to seek to mobilize audiences behind, the idea that ‘we’ face an exis-
tential threat that calls for immediate, decisive, special measures. It is, in
12 Uncivil security?

other words, to seek to lift the issue at hand – whether it is crime, or

drugs, or migration – out of the realm of normal democratic politics, to
claim that as an emergency it demands an urgent, even exceptional,
response.
The security lobby – blessed as it invariably is with ‘blind credulity
and passionate certainty’ (Holmes 1993: 250) – makes precisely this
move. It connects with and articulates public insecurities about crime,
or disorder, or terror in terms that institutionalize anxiety as a feature
of everyday life and link security to a conception of political commun-
ity organized around binary oppositions between us/them, here/there,
friends/enemies, inside/outside. In encouraging ‘emotional fusion
between ruler and ruled’ around the question of fear (Holmes 1993:
49), it generates a climate that inhibits – even actively deters – critical
scrutiny of the state’s claims and practices. By translating security into
Security, into a matter of cops chasing robbers, soldiers engaging the
enemy, it risks fostering vicious circles of insecurity (atrocity – fear –
tough response – atrocity – fear – and so on) that ratchet up police
powers, security technologies and their attendant rhetoric in ways that
it becomes difficult then to temper or dismantle. In all these ways, the
security lobby makes ‘security’ talk and action pervasive, or what we
shall call shallow and wide, reproducing ‘security’ on the surface of
social consciousness and rendering it dependent on the visible display
of executive authority and police power. In so doing, it fails to get close
to the heart of what it is that makes individuals objectively (or inter-
subjectively) and subjectively secure – it is unable, that is, to under-
stand, still less to create, the conditions under which security becomes
axiomatic, or deep and narrow. For us, these are vital distinctions, ones
that we revisit and develop as our argument unfolds.
The second response to our stated ambitions – the one likely to regard
the enterprise as hopelessly misplaced – is concerned above all to
counter security. This emanates from what we may call the ‘liberty
lobby’ which disputes the suggestion that security can be civilized.
Security, on this view, is a troubling, dangerous idea. Security politics –
especially in the form we have just set out – is seen as authoritarian and
potentially barbarous – ‘contrary to civil well-being’ (Keane 2004: 46).
It is a politics that privileges state interests (and conceptions of security)
over those of individuals; that is inimical to democratic values; that pos-
sesses a seductive capacity to trample – in the name, and with the
support, of ‘the majority’ – over civil liberties and minority rights; that
Uncivil security? 13

is, in short, conducive to the very violence that it purports to stamp out.
Security, consequently, is something that must either be curbed in the
name of liberty and human rights or, given its close police and military
associations, abandoned as a value altogether.
Let us briefly introduce two strands of this critical disposition. The
first – common to human rights movements across the globe – seeks to
constrain the power of security by questioning its imperatives, and
fencing in its demands, with an insistence on protecting or enhancing
the democratic freedoms and individual rights that security politics is
indifferent to, throws into a utilitarian calculus, chips away at, or sus-
pends. From this standpoint, habeas corpus, access to legal advice,
limits on detention and police interrogative powers, jury trials, rights of
appeal and the like are the expression and tools of a desire to preserve
a space for individual liberty in the face of the forceful demands of an
overweening state and global state system – whether in ‘normal’ or
‘exceptional’ times.2 A second stance – associated with those working
under the loose banner of ‘critical security studies’ (Krause and Williams
1997) – deepens and radicalizes the impulse and insights of the first.
This holds that security is irredeemably tainted by its police/military
parentage, and by its authoritarian desires for certainty. On this view,
security is a political technology that must ‘continue to produce images

12
An intriguing point of intersection between the ‘security’ and the ‘liberty’ lobbies
can be found in the idea of a ‘right to security’. This most often finds expression
today in the political vernacular of those who claim that an innocent, peaceable
majority have a forgotten right to live free of crime and violence – a right which
purports to trump those which protect law-breaking minorities (Loader forth-
coming a). But this ‘right’ has also long taken a juridical form – one that need not
carry the same resonance. Article 3 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights speaks, for instance, of the ‘right to life, liberty and security of the person’,
a formulation repeated in Article 5 of the European Convention of Human
Rights. In these cases, reflecting the anti-totalitarian impetus of the post-war
human rights charters, the security right in question is a highly limited one, iden-
tical to or basically continuous with the right to liberty against state interference
mentioned earlier in the same clause. However, as Liora Lazarus (forthcoming)
has highlighted, there are jurisdictions, notably South Africa, where a constitu-
tional right to security has recently assumed a more substantive form and one
more in keeping with the expansive political rhetoric mentioned above – as the
right ‘to be free from all forms of violence from either public or private sources’
(Article 12 (1) (c) of the South African Constitution) – and where it is has been
successfully litigated as such. In the more expansive political and legal formula-
tions of the right to security one cannot avoid thinking that rights talk and pro-
tections are being turned against the ‘liberty lobby’ in ways that seem likely to
increase the tendency of security to become pervasive.
14 Uncivil security?

of insecurity in order to retain its meaning’ (A. Burke 2002: 18) in ways
that make it, at a conceptual level, inimical to democratic politics; or
else it is a practice deeply tarred by its intimate empirical relation to the
formation and reproduction of state-centric interests and xenophobic,
anti-democratic political subjectivities and collective identities (R. B. J.
Walker 1997). The conclusion in either case is the same. Security, it is
claimed, has to be abandoned, the dual analytical and political task
being to unsettle and deconstruct security as a category so as to find
ways of thinking and acting beyond it (Dillon 1996; Aradau 2004).
There is much of value in this critique of uncivil security – a great
deal, in fact, which we are sympathetic towards. But these critical
stances also share certain lacunae. Each, in particular, expressly or
implicitly intimates that security – understood as being and feeling free
from the threat of physical harm – is a problem, a conservative sensi-
bility and project that is all too often hostile to the values and institu-
tional practices of democracy and liberty (Huysmans 2002). The result
is that each operates as a negative, oppositional force, one that evacu-
ates the terrain that the security lobby so effectively and affectively
occupies in favour of a stance that strives either to temper its worst
excesses, or to trash and banish the idea altogether – a stance that
appeals in part because so few others appear motivated to defend the
liberties which are being imperilled. There is, on this view, little or no
mileage in seeking to think in constructive terms about the good of
security and the kind of good that security is. There is little point in
fashioning a theory and praxis that explores the positive – democracy-
and liberty-enhancing – ways in which security and political commun-
ity may be coupled; in reflecting upon what it means, and might take,
to make security axiomatic to lived social relations. There can, in short,
be no politics of civilizing security.
Proponents of the third – ‘human’ or ‘social security’ – response share
with us both a desire to transcend this received security–liberty
dichotomy and, in their own way, an ambition to civilize security. On
this view, however, such a project requires that security be rescued from
a taken-for-granted association with the ‘threat, use and control of mil-
itary force’ (Walt 1991: 212), and extended to other domains of social
and political life (e.g. de Lint and Virta 2004).3 We can usefully highlight

13
Huysmans makes a useful distinction here between those critics of how security
language constitutes political identity and community that we have just discussed,
Uncivil security? 15

two variants of this position – one international, the other domestic. The
former takes its cue from the United Nations Human Development
Report 1994, which introduced, and sought to mobilize opinion behind,
the concept of ‘human security’, an idea which has subsequently been
taken up in further work conducted under the auspices of the United
Nations and the European Union (Commission on Human Security
2003; Barcelona Group 2004; cf. Paris 2001). It seeks to decouple secur-
ity from questions of war and peace and deploy it as a device aimed at
urging governments to treat as emergencies such chronic threats as
hunger, homelessness, disease and ecological degradation – the latter, for
instance, being described by the Commission on Global Governance
(1995: 83) as ‘the ultimate security threat’. The domestic version of the
argument draws from the insight that there is no policing or penal solu-
tion to the problem of order the conclusion that crime control – or harm
reduction – is ultimately a matter of, and dissolves into, questions of eco-
nomic and social policy more generally. This is a commonly held dispo-
sition within both sociological criminology and social democratic
politics, one which has in recent years informed a critique of situational
crime prevention, crime science and other forms of technocratic crime
control, and underpinned the promotion of multi-agency, social crime
prevention (Crawford 1997; Hope and Karstedt 2003). On this view,
security conceived of in a ‘shallow’ manner as freedom from physical
harm or threat is both inseparable from a more profound sense of
‘well-being’ or ‘ontological’ security and, therefore, also dependent
upon the broader institutions and services of social welfare (Fredman
forthcoming).
There is, once more, much to applaud in this attempt to extend the
meanings and application of the idea of security. It reminds us that
freedom from physical coercion is but a part of any rounded concep-
tion of human flourishing. And it pinpoints the limited and often
counter-productive role that security politics and policing institutions
play within this wider project. But there are difficulties with this attempt
to broaden and extend security. It too – like the liberty lobby – tends to
abandon the contest over how to render individuals and groups free
from the threat and fear of physical coercion – in this case by a hasty

whom he terms ‘framers’, and those who seek to extend the language of security
to other domains of public policy, whom he calls ‘wideners’ (Huysmans 2006:
ch. 2).
16 Uncivil security?

and undue relegation of the significance of security in its ‘shallow’

sense. But it also, more importantly, transcends the security–liberty
opposition in a fashion that risks making security pervasive in new
ways. It does so, in respect of intranational crime, by connecting secu-
rity to better education, full employment, or improved social conditions
in a manner that tends to colonize, or ‘criminalize’, public policy such
that the latter loses sight of its own values and objectives and comes
instead to be thought about, funded and judged as an instrument of
crime or harm reduction. The quest for ontological security, in other
words, itself risks being ‘securitized’ in ways that render security per-
vasive in a more expansive sense than already indicated: as simultane-
ously deep and wide, such that any reconsideration of its preconditions
is treated as a threat, prompting both parochial, xenophobic reactions
and calls for more security in the shallow – police- and punishment-
centred – sense. Internationally, human security discourse likewise risks
extending the dynamics and dangers of ‘securitization’, with all its anti-
political talk of existential threats and attendant calls for emergency
measures, from the military to the political, economic, societal and
environmental sectors (Buzan 1991; Buzan et al. 1998). By extending
the reach of security in these ways, this position evacuates the terrain
of contemporary security politics (and with it the struggle to make
security axiomatic) in favour of a politics that risks turning all politics
into security politics.
In this book we take up the challenge of developing a fourth posi-
tion – of thinking constructively about the relationship between secu-
rity and political community through reconceptualizing security not as
some kind of eigen-value embracing the whole of politics, but as a more
modestly conceived but still ‘thick’ public good. We also indicate how –
under conditions of pluralization and globalization – we may realize
this revised conception of security in terms of institutional principles
and design. In making good on these ambitions, we clearly need to
counter the charge that ‘civilizing’ security (or anything else for that
matter) inevitably carries with it a class and colonial baggage –
amounting to a mission to bring ‘our’ standards and ways of doing
things to a backward, barbarian ‘them’, whether at home or abroad.
We try to do so as the book unfolds. For now it is sufficient to record
the intuition that guides our enquiry: namely, that there is something
to be gained from thinking through the connection between a family
of words – civil, civility, civilizing, civilization – that have to do
Uncivil security? 17

with taming violence and fostering respectful dialogue, and another

family – politics, polity, policy, police – that have to do with the regu-
latory and cultural frameworks within which such democratic peace
building may best take place (Keane 2004: chs. 3–4).4
Our aim is not to effect a banal compromise, or occupy some
implausible middle ground, between the outlooks of the security and
liberty lobbies. We want instead to step outside the terms of the con-
frontation in a bid to move discussion of security to a different place
altogether. In his work on authenticity, Charles Taylor describes this as
an ‘act of retrieval’, a phrase that captures well the activity we have in
mind. A work of retrieval, Taylor says:

suggests . . . that we identify and articulate the higher ideal behind the more
or less debased practices, and then criticize these practices from the stand-
point of their own motivating ideal. In other words, instead of dismissing
this culture altogether, or just endorsing it as it is, we ought to attempt to
raise its practice by making more palpable to its participants what the ethic
they subscribe to really involves. (1991: 72)

To engage in such retrieval in respect of security requires neither ‘root

and branch condemnation’, nor ‘uncritical praise’, still less ‘a carefully
balanced trade-off’ between the received ideas and practices of security
and liberty (1991: 23). It demands instead taking security seriously as
a ‘moral’ category and engaging in a struggle to define its ‘proper
meaning’ as a ‘motivating ideal’ (1991: 73). This requires, or so it seems
to us, that we recover and develop two somewhat buried or neglected
meanings of security. We need, first of all, to emphasize, as the human

14
We should make it clear at this point that our title is not intended to reference,
or to signal an explicit alignment with, the work of Norbert Elias on the ‘civil-
izing process’ (Elias 1939/1978, 1939/1982). Elias’s historical sociology of long-
term developments in the cultivation of manners, regulation of passionate drives
and the control of private violence clearly has some overlap with the argument
outlined here, as will become apparent. But the idea of civilizing security is, for
us, much more specifically about the practice of taming private violence by redi-
recting the passions that security and threats to it arouse into and through polit-
ical and legal institutions and regulating the violent potential of those public
institutions. Here our inspiration and debt lies rather more in Mahatma
Gandhi’s famous response to being asked what he thought of western civiliza-
tion. In replying that ‘it would be a good idea’, Gandhi supplied an immanent
critique of the claims of western governments to be ‘civilized’ coupled with the
thought that ‘civilization’ remains, for all the atrocities that have been carried
out in its name, a desirable and unfinished political project.
18 Uncivil security?

security scholars have rightly done, the idea of the individual as the
basic moral unit and referent of security – an idea that originates in the
political theory of modernity.5 That individuation of security necessar-
ily implies and so alerts us to the irreducibly subjective dimension of
security, an idea that led Montesquieu to opine that ‘political freedom
consists in security, or at least in the opinion one has of one’s security’
(cited in Rothschild 1995: 61; see also McSweeney 1998: ch. 1). This
in turn provides a cue for a second act of retrieval; namely, of the root
Latin meaning of securitas as freedom from concern, care or anxiety, a
state of self-assurance or well-founded confidence. What this recovered
cluster of meanings indicates is that security possesses subjective as well
as objective dimensions, and that in both dimensions the ‘surfaces’ of
physical security are intricately connected to the ‘depths’ of ontological
security. And it is this intimate link between security and generic ques-
tions of social connectedness and solidarity that elevates it above terms
like order, protection and safety as an orchestrating theme for our
enquiry. The sense that security is about the relationship individuals
have to the intimates and strangers they dwell among and the political
communities they dwell within, and that it may therefore be connected
in mutually supportive ways to the values and practices of ‘belonging’
and ‘critical freedom’ (Tully 2002), is what inspires our attempt to con-
struct an alternative theory and praxis of security.

The state of the state

Our introductory remarks also pitch us into a second heated and
current global debate – this time about ‘the state of the state’. This
debate takes two closely connected forms that are relevant here. At
issue most broadly is the question of whether under conditions of glob-
alization the political and legal sovereignty of the state over its
bounded territory, and the associated coherence of national cultures, is
being eroded by flows of capital, people, information, goods and eco-
nomic power that criss-cross and undermine territorial borders. The
more specific variant addresses the way in which the state’s monopoly
over legitimate coercion, and its attendant promise to guarantee the
security of its citizens from internal and external dangers, is giving way
in the face of the emergent claims and competences of private security

15
This idea is developed in chapter 2 below.
Uncivil security? 19

interests working beyond the state, forms of ‘grassroots’ communal

policing below the state, and transnational security networks operat-
ing above the state.
In respect of both these debates, a range of competing positions can
be discerned. The question of ‘globalization’ is contested between
those who emphasize the perhaps terminal demise of nation states in
the face of de-territorialized – and footloose – economic power
(Albrow 1996; Bauman 1998; Beck 2000), those who deny the exist-
ence of novel global processes and stress the continuing capacity of
states to steer their economy and society (Hirst and Thompson 1996),
and authors who argue that while there is nothing unprecedented
about global interconnectedness, the ‘extensity, intensity, velocity and
impact’ of planetary networks and flows is nonetheless reconfiguring
radically the nature and loci of political community (Held et al. 1999:
16). The debate on policing is divided in not dissimilar ways between
writers who take the view that ‘modern democratic countries have
reached a watershed in the evolution of their systems of crime control
and law enforcement’ (Bayley and Shearing 1996: 585) and those who
offer a less dramatic reading of current ‘transformations’ (Jones and
Newburn 2002).
We do not aim in this book to arrive at any settled view on these
matters – something that would lead us towards writing a different
book from the one that we intend. It is nonetheless useful for our pur-
poses to offer some assessment – in the specific field of policing and
security – of what appears to be the contradictory state of the contem-
porary state. We mean by this that there appears, on the one hand, to
be plentiful evidence of the persistence, reassertion and extension of
state capacity and reach over matters of internal and external security
in the face of both ‘old’ intranational forms of crime and disorder and
‘new’ transnational threats to the safety of citizens. Yet this coexists,
on the other hand, with an emergent plurality of policing and security
actors. Whether located in large and small commercial enterprises,
locally based citizens’ groups, or bureaucratic networks operating
between and above nation states, these actors answer to demands for
order that the state cannot or will not meet, and increasingly, it seems,
compete with states in promising to offer security to anxious citizens.
Let us, then, begin with a brief overview of these competing tenden-
cies, offering, in each case, an initial indication of the issues they raise
for the project of civilizing security.
20 Uncivil security?

In defence of the contention that the state’s presence in the provision

of security remains powerful and pre-eminent, one may point to the
following:
• State police forces retain a massive material presence in the life of
modern societies. Though their role and effectiveness is often now
called into question, and they have in many jurisdictions been
subject to market-inspired forms of managerialism, we have in
recent years witnessed the proliferation and global diffusion of
crime-control strategies that continue to afford the police a privi-
leged place, whether in the form of zero-tolerance, ‘quality of life’,
intelligence-led, problem-solving or community policing. And nor is
this centrality limited to societies with strong state traditions. Even
in weak or failing states with limited infrastructural capacity and
competing power centres, the police remain the sharpest and most
visible face of the state in daily life, often in ways that threaten the
liberty and security of citizens. Across the world, the police loom
large in the social imaginary of nation states and are ideologically
put forward as the solution to the problem of order. Any account of
policing and security that fails to register the presence and effects of
the police will remain wholly inadequate.
• Recent years, it is true, have seen the diffusion of crime control
responsibilities ‘downwards’ to subnational tiers of government and
‘upwards’ to new inter- and transnational institutions and networks.
But this represents a shuffling of cards within the state rather than a
diffusion of responsibility to non-state actors. This is apparent, for
instance, in jurisdictions (such as Britain and France) where munic-
ipal government has recently come to play an augmented role in
devising local policing and community safety strategies, as well as in
federal states (such as Germany, the USA, Canada, or Australia)
with established traditions of subnational responsibility for policing.
In both cases, national and subnational levels of government today
act in consort with the ‘responsibilized’ businesses, communities and
individual property-owners through which the state governs security
(O’Malley 1992; Simon 2006). Similarly, practices of transnational
policing, whether in the form of bi- and multilateral cooperation
between national forces, or in respect of new security institutions
(such as Europol) created under the auspices of the European Union
(EU), have largely been ‘steered’ by state actors and are ‘rowed’ by
public police operatives.
Uncivil security? 21

• The policing and security institutions of the modern state (and their
attendant discourses) continue to expand their powers, resources
and technological reach, often in ways that cross territorial frontiers
and established political and legal categories. One can point here to
the recent reorganization of historically decentralized police systems
(such as Holland and Belgium) or to the formation, in Britain for
example, of new national police institutions such as the Serious and
Organized Crime Agency. And one can highlight the involvement,
since the end of the Cold War, of national security agencies in
matters of law enforcement with all that signifies in terms of a blur-
ring of the distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ security. The
creation by the EU of a civilian (i.e. police) peacekeeping force to
manage crisis situations in conflict zones beyond EU borders points
in a similar direction. These trends, evident prior to 9/11, have accel-
erated and deepened as part of the ‘war on terror’ waged in response
to it. New state security agencies have been created, existing ones
have seen their powers and budgets swell. States of exception have
been declared and basic rights infringed or suspended. Forms of sur-
veillance against citizens at home and abroad have intensified, as
have intelligence gathering, exchange and cognate modes of cooper-
ation between states. In a further blurring of the increasingly lame
internal/external security divide, soldiers find themselves engaged in
policing activities (hunting wanted criminals, carrying out order
maintenance patrols in foreign cities), while the US and UK govern-
ments engage in ‘new imperial’ efforts to constitute administrations
(and public police forces) in client, quasi-sovereign states such as
Afghanistan and Iraq.
We will return to, and flesh out, these examples in the chapters that
follow. For the moment, all this brisk schematic overview serves to do is
to highlight the fact that state power is still very much with us. Far from
‘withering away’, as Marx prophesied, states around the world continue
to adorn their ‘shiny uniforms’ (Castells 1997: 303) and deploy powers
that can protect – but also imperil – the lives and liberties of citizens. But
these brief examples point also to some important reconfigurations of
public power. They indicate the emergence of multiple sites of rule both
inside and beyond nation states. Security inside states is divided between
national, regional and local agencies organized around new mentalities
of governance and new ‘extensions’ to and ‘couplings’ with non-state
bodies (Rigakos 2002: 42). Practices of transnational policing unfold in
22 Uncivil security?

opaque governmental settings that empower a new coterie of security

actors. Each, in different ways, obscures lines of transparency and
accountability and gives a new twist to long-standing problems of demo-
cratic authorization and legitimation.
The project of civilizing security must, in the light of this, be oriented
to posing certain antique but still significant questions pertaining to the
control and direction of public power. It must engage – in the field of
policing and security – with the theoretical and practical work of sub-
jecting the state’s power of physical and symbolic violence to democ-
ratic scrutiny and legal control. But it has to do so in a multi-site
security environment that has been, and is being, refigured by processes
of globalization. These processes have not only ‘ “unbundled” the rela-
tionship between sovereignty, territoriality and political power’. They
have also, as Held and McGrew put it, made the ‘proper locus of pol-
itics and the articulation of the public interest . . . a puzzling matter’
(2002: 127, 129).
Yet this ‘puzzle’ does not only have to do with transformations of
and within the state. Today it cannot be assumed that the state remains
pre-eminent in either authorizing or delivering policing and security.
Other non-state actors now lay claim to authority and competence in
this field. In defence of the contention that what Johnston and Shearing
(2003) call the ‘governance of security’ is conducted by a multiplicity
of institutions, one can point to the following:
• Private security has become big business across the world. In Britain,
the USA, Canada, South Africa and beyond it has long been acknowl-
edged that those employed by commercial security outfits outstrip the
total number of public police officers. Private security operatives are
hired by corporations, national and local governments, and private
citizens to guard office complexes, airports, universities, housing
estates, schools, hospitals, shopping centres, civic buildings, courts,
even police stations. People’s access to, and conduct within, large
tracts of urban space is regulated by private security guards,
employed by commercial companies, enforcing property rather than
criminal law. Such guards also, in some settings, engage in ‘front-line’
law enforcement and order maintenance policework (Rigakos 2002).
Anxious citizens, in turn, rely on the security market for an array of
protective hardware (alarms, gates, locks, CCTV systems), as well as
resorting to forms of self-policing – often encouraged by insurance
companies and neo-liberal governments. Some have formed ‘private
Uncivil security? 23

residential associations’ or sought security inside ‘gated communi-

ties’, withdrawing their demand and support for public provision
(including policing provision) in the process. In response, the public
police increasingly act as market players, contracting-out non-core
‘business’, eliciting corporate sponsorship, and marketing or even
selling their services to a public disaggregated into individual ‘cus-
tomers’.
• All this is happening in societies with strong, established states. In
those with weak or failing states, or undergoing political transition,
the public police are not the only or main security actor, nor can they
lay claim to a monopoly over legitimate force inside their territory.
Across many parts of the globe today – in Italy, Colombia, Brazil,
Northern Ireland, Russia, Afghanistan, the impacted ghettos of US
and European cities – one finds alternative power centres contesting
state authority, ‘shadow sovereigns’ (Nordstrom 2000) operating
their own codes of behaviour and mechanisms of enforcement
(Gambetta 1993; Varese 2001). In these contexts, those who can
afford to have, once more, fled behind walls, venturing from their
residential enclosures only to make passage to other protected work
and leisure domains. The dispossessed by contrast are left at the
mercy not only of militarized, partisan police forces, but also crim-
inal gangs, hired ‘rent-a-cops’ and urban vigilantes. Alternatively, in
some isolated pockets – parts of South Africa and Argentina for
instance – poor communities are striving to put in place non-violent,
local capacity-building forms of non-state security governance.
• Nor are these developments confined within the borders of modern
states. ‘Security’ has also become a multinational business, one
that crosses territorial boundaries and further erodes the internal/
external security distinction. Several private security enterprises
now trade their wares across the globe (Johnston 2006). They sell
security advice, equipment and personnel to anxious citizens and
warring factions in weak and failed states. They claim to be filling
the ‘security gaps’ left by the fall of communist rule in the former
Soviet Union and eastern Europe. And they offer to serve and protect
the interests of multinationals operating in disordered, crime-ridden
locations. To this, one can add the ‘privatization of violence’ occur-
ring in many conflict and post-conflict zones around the world, as
‘private military firms’ such as MPRI and Dyncorp – dubbed by
Peter Singer (2003) ‘corporate warriors’ – promote and sell military
24 Uncivil security?

‘know-how’, equipment and intervention to beleaguered govern-

ments and other armed groups (Avant 2005). It is a telling symbol
of these trends that one of the fastest-growing industries in post-
invasion Iraq is private security.
These examples too we will flesh out in more detail below. What they
serve for the moment to illustrate is the existence of a pluralized –
market-driven – environment where the state exists alongside, spon-
sors and competes against a plethora of non-state actors in a bid to
promise security to citizens. It is a field where the state is not only less
and less involved in delivering policing and security on the ground –
what Osborne and Gaebler (1992) call ‘rowing’ – but also often lacks
the effective regulatory capacity to ‘steer’. It is a field constituted by
new sites of rule and authority beyond the state, one where market
power or communal ordering escapes from the forms of public will-
formation that only the democratic state can supply.
Against this backdrop, the project of civilizing security is faced not
only (or even mainly) with the task of controlling the arbitrary, dis-
criminatory exercise of sovereign force, or with the excesses of state
power. It is confronted, rather more, with a notable absence of politi-
cal institutions with the capacity and legitimacy required to prevent
those with ‘the loudest voices and the largest pockets’ (Johnston and
Shearing 2003: 144) from organizing their own ‘security’ in ways that
impose unjustifiable burdens of insecurity upon others. Or, to put the
same point more widely:

These days, the main obstacle to social justice is not the invasive intentions
or proclivities of the state, but its growing impotence, aided and abetted
daily by the officially adopted ‘there is no alternative’ creed. I suppose that
the danger we will have to fight back in the coming century won’t be totali-
tarian coercion, the main preoccupation of the century just ended, but the
falling apart of ‘totalities’ capable of securing the autonomy of human
society. (Bauman and Tester 2001: 139)

This is the predicament we address in this book – one in which states

appear overly intrusive and subject to insufficient democratic and legal
constraint, on the one hand, yet unable to exercise effective regulatory
control over non-state ‘security’ actors, on the other. Both dimensions of
this predicament are, in our view, baleful in their consequences. The first
gives rise to uncivil, liberty-threatening states of ‘security’; the second to
inequitable and decivilizing conditions of insecurity. This situation calls
Uncivil security? 25

for new and imaginative thinking both about ‘forms of effective polit-
ical regulation and democratic accountability’ (Held and McGrew 2002:
122) fit for the altered conditions we find ourselves in today, and about
the sorts of political community that such institutional arrangements
can help to generate and sustain. It is in seeking to advance such think-
ing that we defend the idea that security is, sociologically speaking, a
‘thick’ public good and argue for the necessary virtue of the democratic
state in the production of security thus conceived.

The state in policing and security studies

We suspect that many will find this an unpromising line of argument
to pursue – one likely to be dismissed as sociologically untenable and
normatively suspect. For if one scratches below the surface of many a
text in policing and security studies, and contemporary social and
political thought more generally, one tends to encounter the signs of a
more or less powerfully felt scepticism towards the state (e.g. Tilly
1985). On occasions this scepticism is explicitly stated, sometimes pas-
sionately and loudly so. But more often it lies buried, unarticulated and
undefended, an implicit assumption that quietly guides enquiry and
analysis. Generally what is being assumed is that sovereign state power
is a dangerous presence in social and political life (an evil), or at best a
presence whose force is only to be prevailed upon at moments of last
resort (a necessary evil). In either case, the state is postulated as a stand-
ing threat to the liberty and security of citizens, an entity that requires
eternal vigilance, oversight and control. Much less is it assumed that
the state may play a positive role in producing the forms of trust and
solidarity between strangers that are essential ingredients of secure
democratic societies.
This, it should be said, is not true of the field of enquiry taken as a
whole. The vast bulk of atheoretical, policy-focused work in policing
and security studies (of the sort found in a mushrooming number of
applied reports, books, journals and think tanks) continues to address
questions posed by the state, whose place in the production of order it
leaves uninterrogated. It tends, as such, to be a de facto champion of
the security lobby’s contention that there exists an instrumental polic-
ing or military solution to the security question, and to imply that the
issue at hand is to locate and evidence the strategy – targeted patrolling,
improved intelligence or technologies, better community relations,
26 Uncivil security?

zero-tolerance or problem-solving policing, military assistance or

intervention – that will bring it to practical fruition. But in those
more sociological, theoretically self-conscious – and in these respects
critical – parts of the academy one can, we think, find the traces of
deep-seated state scepticism, one that generates among (especially
Anglo-American) policing scholars a tendency to think about security
in ways that ‘either downplay the importance of the state form or
denounce it altogether’ (Ferret 2004: 50). It is worth pausing at this
point to reflect on this state-sceptical habitus and to engage briefly in
the kind of ‘sociology of the sociology of policing’ (Ferret 2004: 50)
that may tell us why the intellectual field is structured in these ways.
To do this we may usefully consider three ways in which policing has
since the early nineteenth century been coupled with the state (Loader
and Walker 2001). The obvious starting point here is Max Weber. In
his essay Politics as a Vocation, Weber argued that the state must be
understood sociologically in terms of ‘the specific means peculiar to it’
(1948: 78; emphasis in original), namely, he suggests, the use of phys-
ical force. He then characterizes the modern state in the following
terms:

A state is a human community that (successfully) claims monopoly of the

legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’
is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the
right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or individuals only
to the extent that the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source
of the ‘right’ to use violence. (Weber 1948: 78; emphasis in original)

What Weber offers here is a succinct theoretical distillation of the

sociohistorical processes that from the seventeeth to the nineteenth
century saw the modern (European) state wrest the ‘right’ to use vio-
lence from dispersed local centres of power and authority and consol-
idate for itself the institutional resources required to secure both its
external borders (the military) and civil peace within those borders (the
police) (see, e.g. Elias 1939/1982; Tilly 1975; Liang 1992). By monop-
olizing the means of physical violence the state was, in short, able to
assert and defend its own interests in the post-Westphalian world of
sovereign states, as well as threatening and prevailing over alternative
sources of violence (and forms of free-riding) in the domestic arena.
Upon these coercive foundations two further connections between
police and state have been forged. The first is a symbolic one. As
Uncivil security? 27

modern states sought to nurture or foster national identities, police

forces became deeply implicated in the wider cultural project of nation
formation. Police forces historically played a key instrumental and
symbolic role in forging the boundaries and identities of nation states,
marking out ‘national territory’ and in so doing cultivating ‘national
citizens’ (Emsley 1993: 87; see also Walden 1982; Emsley 2000). The
state, in other words, claimed for itself a monopoly of symbolic vio-
lence, and the police remain one of the institutions through which this
identity- and community-shaping power of what Bourdieu (1987) calls
‘legitimate naming’ is administered and national communities are rou-
tinely imagined and reproduced (Loader and Mulcahy 2003).
The second concerns the connections that have been established
between policing and the broader project of governing a population.
As modern states during the course of the twentieth century assumed
responsibility and claimed credit for the well-being of their citizens, the
police came to be interlocked closely with other agencies – health,
housing, social security, environmental protection, utility supply –
involved in giving effect to that broader ‘welfarist’ project. To varying
degrees in different times and places, the police have been required at
the level of policy generation and implementation to act in coordina-
tion with, or to direct, support or ‘stand in’ for, other agencies in the
supply of state-guaranteed goods and services. In becoming in these
ways an instrument of social governance, the modern police retain the
traces of the pre-modern conception of Polizei (Knemeyer 1980),
wherein ‘police’ (and ‘police science’) were concerned with producing
and administering a general condition of stability and prosperity
(Foucault 1981; Pasquino 1991; Neocleous 1998).
The sociology of policing and social control has since its inception
in the 1960s and 1970s been wary of the consequences of all three of
these connections between police and state. Its practitioners have been
animated by the tasks of explaining, understanding, unmasking, criti-
cizing, campaigning against and finding (better) ways of constraining
the concentrations of physical, symbolic and governmental power
inherent in them. Why though has this sceptical disposition towards
the coupling of state and policing so dominated the field? Three
reasons suggest themselves.
First, Anglo-American policing scholars in particular, but also those
operating within the western liberal tradition more generally, occupy a
cultural and political space where ‘government is deeply distrusted’
28 Uncivil security?

(Bayley and Shearing 1996: 585), one in which suspicion towards the
state is a deep-seated and long-standing cultural sensibility capable of
finding articulation across the political spectrum – by conservatives,
liberals, socialists and feminists alike.6 Aside from the general struc-
turing effect of this secular disposition, we should recall, secondly, that
the sociology of policing was forged in the cauldron of political and
social upheaval that marked the 1960s and 1970s. Against the back-
drop of student rebellion, anti-Vietnam protest and industrial strife,
the state – and its coercive ‘front line’, the police – appeared to be in
the illegitimate business of upholding an unjust political order by vio-
lently suppressing protest, and a bankrupt moral order in ways that
radically failed to ‘appreciate’ and served only to ‘amplify’ deviance
(J. Young 1971). As one commentator wryly put it at the time: ‘Cops
are conventional people . . . All a cop can swing in a milieu of mari-
juana smokers, inter-racial dates and homosexuals is the night stick’
(Brooks 1965, cited in Skolnick 1966: 61). This was closely interwo-
ven, thirdly, with a prevailing intellectual climate in social science
(loosely organized in this field around organizations such as the
European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control) that
was in revolt against the discipline and conformity that the state – even,
perniciously, the welfare state – was striving to inculcate and enforce.
It was a climate in which (police) sociologists ‘took sides’ (Becker
1967) on behalf of the protestor, the deviant, the poor – in other words,
the ‘underdog’ – against the overweening power and authority wielded
by the state. The state was, in short, a large part of ‘the problem’.
The social analysis of policing and security has, for reasons pertain-
ing to its conditions of emergence, tended to be organized around the
domain assumption that the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence –
its capacity, as it were, to act as a bully – lies at the core of the ‘problem
of the state’. The analytical and research task has thus focused on the –
essentially liberal – project of uncovering and constraining the mul-
tiple ways in which this bullying tendency manifests itself. Hence the
research agenda over the last three decades has been structured around
questions of police power and violence; the abuses of police discretion;
the ways in which ‘police culture’ subverts efforts to control police
work; the rise of paramilitary policing; and discrimination against

16
The reasons for this deep-rooted sceptical sensibility are discussed at length in
chapter 2.
Uncivil security? 29

minority groups both inside and outside the police. Hence also promi-
nence has been given to questions of accountability – whether in terms
of seeking effective redress for individuals who have suffered at the
hands of the police, or controlling the power of chief officers to deter-
mine – undemocratically – the shape and direction of law-enforcement
policy.
These are not trifling matters. Nor, for the reasons we have already
stated, have they ceased to be pressing or pertinent. Far from it. But a
state-sceptical habitus that addresses itself only or mainly to these
issues cannot serve us well – either sociologically or normatively – in
seeking to address the security question today. Sociologically, it
remains insufficiently attuned to the ways in which power is being
reconfigured within and between states, on the one hand, and flowing
away from states, on the other, as well as to the new forms of insecu-
rity that these transformations instil. Normatively, it cannot address
itself fully to the ways in which the state remains an inescapable part
of the ‘solution’ to this predicament, a vital means of generating and
sustaining the ‘public interest’ over matters of policing and security in
a market society whose neo-liberal champions triumphantly proclaim
that no such thing exists (cf. Marquand 2004). Yet state scepticism
remains a pervasive, deep-seated sentiment, inside and outside policing
and security studies, on the right, left and centre of the political spec-
trum. The project of civilizing security needs to navigate a path
through and beyond it.

Plan of the book

It is for these reasons that we devote ourselves in part I to a sceptical
reading of state scepticism. For these purposes, we have assembled four
‘ideal-typical’ forms of scepticism towards the state that we believe can
be located in the social analysis of policing and security, in social and
political theory more broadly, and in much contemporary political ver-
nacular. These overlap in significant respects, not least in the core
assumption that it is the state’s capacity to act in various ways as a
bully that lies at the heart of its dangerousness. Each, however, coa-
lesces around a specific elaboration of the ‘problem of the state’ and an
attendant set of worries about the operation and effects of its physical,
symbolic or governmental power. We therefore, in chapters 2 to 5,
offer a hermeneutic reconstruction and critical assessment of forms of
30 Uncivil security?

sceptical thought that depict the state, in turn, as a meddler, a parti-

san, a cultural monolith and an idiot.
In chapter 2 we focus on the foundational image of the modern state
as a meddler in individual rights and interests, and use this as a lens
through which to introduce and explore the historical, sociological and
conceptual linkages between security and the state that developed within
the modern social imaginary – something that saw the state and the cri-
tique of the state emerge and take shape hand in hand. We then explore
three of these conceptual linkages in some detail. In chapter 3, we
describe and dissect the view which sees the state as a means of fortify-
ing the interests of those advantaged by the present unjust pattern of eco-
nomic and social relations, one that depicts the state (and its police
agents) as an unwanted and unwelcome force that needs to be moni-
tored, exposed, struggled against and, ultimately, transcended. Chapter
4 focuses on how the state, and the forms of policing connected with it,
is bound up with a production and reproduction of particular forms of
cultural order in ways that are inimical to minority interests, cultures
and practices. In chapter 5, we turn to what many analysts see as the
most intractable problem of the modern state – its incapacity to acquire
the knowledge it needs to accomplish its purposes, including its security
purposes. This is illustrated by a discussion of various problems of con-
temporary security governance, and of the theorists of nodal governance
who claim to have found a way of transcending both these problems and
the state problematic which generates them.
In respect of each of the above, we outline a ‘best case’ version of the
strand of scepticism under discussion, indicating the intersections that
are posited between the state, security and liberty, and the alternatives
that are projected to the alleged dangers of state-centric conceptions of
security. We also interrogate the interplay that exists between these
structures of thought and feeling and current transformations in prac-
tices of state and non-state security. It is in this light that we consider
once more, and in greater detail, the empirical illustrations sketched
earlier in this introductory chapter. In so proceeding, our aim is to indi-
cate the strengths of each of these forms of state scepticism and high-
light the particular challenges it poses for the project of civilizing
security as we understand it; not merely as a ‘concession’ to critics of
the state (cf. Wood and Dupont 2006a: 6), but because many of these
criticisms are ones that we share. But we will also, in each case, pinpoint
important blindspots that our positive argument strives to make good.
Uncivil security? 31

In part II, we develop this more positive case, which factors in, and
seeks to alleviate or remedy, the dangers that each variant of state scep-
ticism alerts us to, while nonetheless maintaining that the state’s place
in producing the public good of security is both necessary and virtuous.
The key to this, we argue in chapter 6, lies in developing a more
rounded conception of security as a ‘thick’ public good. Such a con-
ception contains three elements. It posits – relatively uncontroversially –
that security offers a necessary platform for the production of other
social goods, but contends further that this instrumental dimension is
symbiotically related to a recognition, first, that security has irreducibly
social dimensions and, second, that it serves to constitute the notion of
‘publicness’ that remains, or so we contend, a key component of the
good society. In chapter 7, we specify in more detail the kinds of cul-
tural and ordering work that the state, or some functional equivalent to
it, is alone or best placed to perform in producing the good of security
thus conceived and argue that this translates into what we term an
anchored pluralism. We then, in chapter 8, explore the pathologies of
modern security that today give rise to security practices in which the
vices rather than the virtues of the state tradition are in evidence, before
spelling out – in terms of a set of institutional principles – how a poli-
tics of anchored pluralism may break the vicious circles that render
security pervasive and contribute, instead, towards creating the pre-
conditions for it becoming more axiomatic. Finally, in chapter 9, we
extend our argument to the international and transnational arena, and
consider what it may mean and take to configure security as a global
public good.
pa rt i
On state scepticism

To be a friend of the state has been made to

seem an index either of stupidity or of corrupt
purpose. To be a dependant or client of the state
has been made to seem odious and degrading. By
contrast, the state’s enemies have vindicated
their enmity as a direct expression of their own
practical insight and purity of intention.
(John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, p. 246)
 2 The state as meddler

T
h e image of the meddler – of the state as prone to interfere in
matters that are none of its business and to do so to the detri-
ment of those whose business these matters are – is an apt place
to begin our enquiry into the various modes of state scepticism and the
cumulative critique of state policing they provide. This is so because
the meddling metaphor can be taken as foundational in three distinct
though interrelated senses. First, it is foundational in a historical sense.
As we shall see, and as is important to our overall argument, the origins
of the modern state and its coercive power are inextricably bound up
with the origins of critical thinking about the modern state and its coer-
cive power. The development of the modern state is closely linked to
the secularization of authority, and in that very process of seculariza-
tion we see both the intensification of the burden of justification of
political rule and the emergence of new forms of such justification. In
particular, one important new species of political justification, includ-
ing the justification of the policing function of the modern state,
comprised those normative schemes which saw legitimate rule as con-
ditional upon and limited by the interests of those individuals over
whom such rule came to be exercised – and which therefore contained
a strong sense of the illegitimate potential of the state form if, where
and when it did not respect these individual-centred limits.
Secondly, the meddling metaphor remains sociologically founda-
tional. Far from being eclipsed by later developments, the broadest ver-
nacular of state scepticism and state police scepticism remains tied up
with the perils and pitfalls of meddling. This fear of meddling comes
in two forms. On the one hand, the fear that the state and its police
will overreach themselves and prevent or curtail the exercise of funda-
mental liberties – the classic negative freedoms of physical integrity,
freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of movement, speech, assem-
bly and conscience, personal privacy, etc. – is as resonant within polit-
ical discourse today as it ever has been, and provides a critical premise

35
36 On state scepticism

which, at least in rhetorical terms, is common across the spectrum of

political ideology. On the other hand, the concern that the state,
through a mixture of pre-emption and prohibition, will disable indi-
viduals and groups from exploiting their negative freedom in order to
take positive control of their own affairs, and in particular their secur-
ity affairs, is also a powerful theme of state scepticism. And if this has
been a less constant and pervasive preoccupation than the fundamen-
tal concern with negative freedom itself, it has, as we shall see, certainly
assumed a new intensity in the contemporary age. In both cases, the
fear of meddling is fuelled by the ways in which the very state tradition
that reflects and sustains a new concern with the moral status of the
individual also carries or nurtures certain conceptions of security and
policing which challenge and conflict with this individual-centredness.
Thirdly, the meddling metaphor is foundational in a conceptual
sense. For it is difficult to make sense of the other brands of state scep-
ticism we will discuss – partisanship, cultural imperialism and idiocy –
without seeing these as analytically continuous with at least some of
the strands of thinking which fuse in the meddling metaphor.
In this chapter, we examine, in turn, each of these different founda-
tional arguments, the first two providing an independent contribution
to the corpus of state scepticism and the third, as suggested, serving as
a short bridge to those other aspects of the sceptical thesis which are
the concern of subsequent chapters. Before we do so, however, we must
say something about our general method of exploring the origins and
resilience of state scepticism about security and policing in general and
the meddling critique in particular.

A note on the study of the state

Clearly we cannot make sense of state scepticism without a working
notion of what we mean by the state, but this immediately presents
certain challenges. Like so many of the key ideas in the social sciences,
the concept of ‘state’ is an essentially contested one. Indeed, even its
essential contestation is essentially contested. There is no agreement
on whether the state is one concept or many – on whether there is a
single broad conceptual umbrella under which we can place city states,
pre-modern states, modern states, post-modern states amongst many
other variants, or whether they each have to stand on their own con-
ceptual ground. Neither is there agreement on what the key constituent
The state as meddler 37

properties of the state or of its various subspecies are, or about the con-
ditions and periodization of its (or their) development and decline. If
we feed into the other side of the equation the observation that the con-
cepts of policing and security present similar conceptual minefields, the
difficulties in explicating some foundational connection between state
and policing become profound.
Fortunately, however, our focus of analysis is sufficiently sharply
defined to permit us to cordon off some of the more treacherous sec-
tions of this conceptual minefield. There are two elements to this defi-
nitional refinement, the second of which we shall introduce a little later.
First, and most generally, our enquiry is temporally limited. What we
are concerned with in essence is the history of modernity, and in par-
ticular the legacy, if any, formed by developments in a certain phase of
state-security relations which remain recognizably continuous with
present conditions. This immediately narrows our perspective to the
very gradual and uneven development of the modern state from the six-
teenth century onwards (Finer 1997: 1261). It allows us to concentrate
on the kind of capsule the emerging state provided for the development
of new security mentalities and policing forms (and for the criticism of
these mentalities and forms), including the new specialized institution
of professional police forces which emerged in European cities as
diverse as Paris, St Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna and Dublin as early as
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Emsley 1996: 45) and which,
in a more intense phase of development of the ‘new police’, were then
consolidated at national level across Europe and the United States in
the first half of the nineteenth century.
Even if we may legitimately confine ourselves to the history of moder-
nity, however, it of course remains the case that different conceptions of
the modern state and of modern policing stress different emergent trends
and constituent properties. Some, notably in the Marxian tradition,
stress economic motivations as paramount, while others, often influ-
enced by Weber, give top billing to changing modalities of political
power and the institutional forms that these take. Others still, such as J.
G. Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other exponents of the contemporary
‘Cambridge School’, concentrate on the power of ideas and of language
as a carrier of ideas. Certainly, there may be particular contexts in which
it is possible and important to discern that one type of cause was primary
or catalytic. But where we are instead dealing with general trends which
are expansive across time and place – where we are concerned both with
38 On state scepticism

the longue durée of historical change and with a pattern of change which
unfolds across quite different societal contexts – too insistent a search
for causal primacy seems both methodologically vexed, and, more
importantly, simply inadequate to the complexity of human affairs. As
Charles Taylor, himself often associated with the Cambridge School, has
remarked, ‘[t]he only general rule in history is that there is no general
rule identifying one order of motivation as always the driving force’
(2004: 33).1
This thesis of multiple and mutual causality is vital to our under-
standing of the dynamics and future possibilities of policing and secur-
ity as thick public goods, as we shall see in part II of the book. But for
now we are interested in how it helps to account for the formative role
of the meddling metaphor in the emergence of the state and state polic-
ing. In that regard, mindful of the importance of avoiding the mistakes
of excessive idealism, excessive materialism or excessive institutional-
ism, we may follow the example of Robert Cox (1987) in conceiving
of the modern state as a variegated but internally coherent structure
made up of all three properties – ideas, material capabilities and insti-
tutional forms. The ideational component revolves around the twin
concepts of nationhood and citizenship. Nationhood involves the idea
of a cohesive community of sentiment and attachment based on lin-
guistic, cultural and historical bonds. Citizenship denotes membership
of a political community – understood as a self-standing entity to
which obligations are owed and from which rights are derived rather
than as an instrument of dynastic power and/or divine will. The mate-
rial component implies a relatively segregated and integrated national
economy, one whose division of labour within an emergent capitalist
model of mass technologically assisted production by formally ‘free’

11
This should not be seen as a lazy retreat from hard historiographical graft or as
a failure of normative nerve. Rather, it amounts to a simple recognition that
ideas always come wrapped up in practices which they both complement and
help to shape, that these practices are also influenced by and pursuant to mate-
rial needs and interests, and that, additionally, these practices are constrained
and enabled by institutional forms which are themselves both independently
causally significant and reflective of prior norms and interests. In other words,
where we are concerned with long-term transformation on a wide scale – even
more so on a trans-societal scale – rather than the contingent balance of causal
forces at play in the unfolding of a discrete local episode, then we just cannot
escape the explanatory ‘levelling effect’ of the intricate and deeply recursive
mutual causality of ideas, needs and interests and institutional forms.
The state as meddler 39

labour is both sufficiently complex and diverse to meet the majority of

domestic demand (and to provide the terms of external trade necessary
to meet residual demand) and sufficiently coordinated in all the factors
of production to be capable of providing for its own reproduction.
Finally, the institutional component is based on a centralized govern-
ment constituted through and regulated by an impersonal legal system,
claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a defined ter-
ritory against internal and external threats and with an administrative,
military and policing capacity sufficient to exploit that monopoly and
so stabilize its rule (Schulze 1996: ch. 2; Finer 1997: ch. 5; Sorensen
2004: ch. 1).
The links and forms of mutual support between the various elements
are of course close. Ideas of nation and citizenship cannot be sustained
without an administrative and political infrastructure committed to
their development and consolidation, and without an economic system
providing the material wherewithal to sustain the welfare of the rele-
vant collectivity – however asymmetrical the pattern of individual and
class contributions and rewards. The material component in turn
depends upon an ideational and normative framework which ‘natu-
ralizes’ the pattern and contours of commercial exchange and a legal,
organizational and coercive superstructure which both tracks and
monitors that pattern and provides the taxing power and the distribu-
tive mechanisms to enforce the prevailing economic order and to com-
pensate for its worst excesses. Finally, the apparatus of government
cannot be sustained without a socially resonant model of the polity as
an abstract embodiment of the national interest and as an instrument
for articulating the rights and obligations of its members, nor without
a fiscal base in productive economic activity.
Yet this kind of synchronic account of the complementary character
of the parts can never provide the full explanatory picture. We need, in
addition, a diachronic account of how the various parts, and the
whole, have developed over time. Otherwise, we lack a proper appre-
ciation of what is distinctive and original – as opposed to resiliently
self-reinforcing – about the modern state and its security and policing
capacity, and so of what is distinctive and original about its security
concerns and about the susceptibility of these concerns to critique. In
so doing – to introduce a second ‘focusing’ restriction of our explana-
tory framework – we will take as our point of departure the ideational
element of our ideational/material/institutional triptych.
40 On state scepticism

Does this choice, however, not immediately fall foul of our own
methodological stricture to be ecumenical in the consideration of
causes? It does not, for the simple reason that as we are primarily con-
cerned with the critique of the modern state and its police – and in the
first place with the meddling critique – our discussion must be centred
in the realm of ideas, and in particular on how the meddling critique
connects with and emerges from the novel ideas which contributed to
and became embedded in the foundations of the modern state. In any
event, as demonstrated above, the analytical division between the dif-
ferent dimensions is only analytical – a heuristic device for teasing out
complexity – and, as we shall see, in invoking the core founding ideas
we also necessarily refer to institutional context and material interest.

Historical foundations
A common, and for us particularly apt, place to start a discussion on
the founding ideas of the modern state is with the seventeenth-century
political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and in particular his classic
work Leviathan (Hobbes 1946). Written against the backdrop of the
English Civil War, Leviathan is of central interest to any enquiry into
the relationship between the modern state and security for two reasons,
one very obvious and the other rather less so. The obvious reason con-
cerns Hobbes’s substantive political theory and in particular his brand
of social contractarianism. For Hobbes, famously, the Civil War which
he lived through was no mere pathological episode, but provided a
vivid and chastening illustration of man’s natural condition. All men
were created free and equal, but were also prey to their base instincts
and selfish motives, and, consequently, if left to their own devices in
the state of nature, became embroiled in a war of all against all. Yet it
was this pre-political state of nature, however unpalatable, which pro-
vided both the normative thrust and the strategic rationale for the form
the polity should take. Natural freedom and equality meant that only
by the active consent and compact of the subjects of these natural enti-
tlements could they be renounced and transferred to another entity.
The selfish and predatory aspects of human nature meant that the only
terms on which such a renunciation would be considered by the con-
tractors as being in accord with their rational self-interest were those
which protected all against the instincts of all, promising peace and
removing or containing the most basic instinctual fear – the fear of
The state as meddler 41

death. This could not be achieved, according to Hobbes, except

through a construct which would combine in itself the terrible poten-
tial of all the contracting parties. The state was thereby required to
assume the form of ‘the biblical monster Leviathan, which alone
retained the wolf-like potential of man’s primeval condition, and was
the sole arbiter over peace and war, friend and foe, life and death’
(Schulze 1996: 51–2).
Hobbes, therefore, indicates a fundamental, indeed mutually consti-
tutive connection between the state and security, and whatever policing
forms are required to provide that security. The very rationale for
the state and its most basic function, in his view, is to provide for the
security of its subjects. But this security comes at a profound cost. The
ineluctable logic of Hobbes’s position is to invest absolute power in
the sovereign. For him, there was not the acknowledgement of an imma-
nent republican virtu within the community which had reined in the
early Renaissance conceptions of princely power of Machiavelli and
others. Nor was there the sense of constraint in accordance with a legacy
of divine or natural law which had stayed the hand of his ‘sovereigntist’
predecessor Bodin, or the comparatively benign and dignitarian view of
human nature which led his contractarian successors, Locke and
Rousseau, to argue for the possibility and desirability of a more limited
and responsive view of political authority. For Hobbes, there were no
such moderating influences. Rather, the promise of security could only
be kept if all political power was retained in a single and indivisible
source. So much so, indeed, that it has been persuasively argued that
Hobbes’s hypothetical sovereign, mandated to dictate his subject’s
beliefs and practices just however was best calculated to maintain public
order, aspired to be the most absolute ruler in all history – more power-
ful than in the dreams still less the practice of any king or emperor from
the classical period to the Middle Ages (van Creveld 1999: 180). Any
liberty left to the subject in such an uncompromising scheme of rule
would merely be by the discretion or default of the ruler – in Hobbes’s
memorable phrase, no more than the cracks left between the laws that
the sovereign chose to enact (Hobbes 1946: 139).
Small wonder, then, that Hobbes’s contribution to the tradition of
critical thinking about the state tends to be seen in negative terms,
measured only by the reaction it provoked. By setting up the state as
the all-powerful behemoth, of the kind beloved of the more extreme
sections of today’s ‘security lobby’, he makes us starkly aware of the
42 On state scepticism

excessive price of making security an absolute value, and so invites

those many who would balk at such excess to seek out and remorse-
lessly expose the most basic tension in his own position. For if the
purpose of absolute rule is to protect the ruler’s subjects from one
another, what happens, as seems to follow inexorably from absolutism,
when the power accrued to the sovereign comes to present as great if
not a greater threat to these subjects as they did to each other in their
original state of nature? Will the solution not prove worse than the
problem? This, indeed, is the founding paradox of state policing and
state security generally (N. Walker 2000: ch. 1).
Much subsequent theory of the state, starting with that of Hobbes’s
near contemporary Locke, can in fact be seen as an attempt to rebut
the illiberal implications of Hobbes’s contractarian formula. Tellingly,
however, the basic concept of the social contract itself by no means met
with the summary dismissal that was the fate of Hobbes’s particular
conception of that concept. To be sure, subsequent social and political
theory did quickly repudiate the idea of the social contract, and the
state of nature which supposedly preceded it, as empirically false, and
of course rightly so (e.g. Hume 1951). However, the idea of the social
contract as a hypothetical and aspirational benchmark for assessing
the justice or otherwise of a statal order has proved much more
resilient. It has retained a hold on the theoretical imagination, and,
indeed, inspired by the work of Rawls (1971, 1993), has undergone a
significant revival over the past fifty years. Politically, too, the con-
tractarian message remains an important frame for normative under-
standing and projection, as exemplified in and promoted by many
modern constitutional preambles. And if we ask why the social con-
tract tradition upon which Hobbes was such an important early influ-
ence has proven so resilient, it tells us something important about the
positive contribution of Hobbes, and indeed much of early modern
thinking and theorizing about modern political order, to critical think-
ing about the very idea – the state – which it sought to construct and
refine.
This takes us directly to the second, less obvious, but more funda-
mental reason for identifying Hobbes as a key point of departure. For it
is Hobbes who is often credited as inventing the very idea of the modern
state. This is not a question of nomenclature, and indeed, although he
sometimes did refer to the state by name, Hobbes’s own preferred term
was that of ‘commonwealth’. Rather, Hobbes’s innovation lay in his
The state as meddler 43

understanding of the state as a purely abstract entity – a persona ficta –

separate both from the sovereign, who may nevertheless bear much of
the authority of the state, and from the ruled (Hobbes 1946: 146;
Skinner 1989; Runciman 1997: 32; van Creveld 1999: 179; Loughlin
2003: 58–61). Prior to Hobbes, the notion of state or its vernacular
equivalent in various European languages, all deriving from the Latin
term status, had been deployed severally, and in rough sequence, to
describe a process of increasing abstraction from the immanent socio-
political order, whether the focus be on the condition of the ruler or of
the ruled. In a most specific and grounded sense, it is used from the four-
teenth century onwards to refer to the king’s status or quality of stateli-
ness and fitness to rule. Later in the same century, a broader meaning
conveying the stable and peaceful state or condition of the realm begins
to emerge. Over the subsequent two centuries, the term gravitates
towards the positive framework of rule itself, and what is required for
rulers to hold onto their status principis. In particular, we find the
concept of state spreading out to signify the prevailing political regime,
or the general area over which the ruler is required to exercise control,
or, crucially, the institutions of government and the means of coercive
control that serve to organize and preserve order within political com-
munities (Skinner 1989).
Even with this last development, however, the process of abstraction
has not gone far enough to fulfil the modern definition of statehood. As
the persistence of the medieval doctrine of the ‘king’s two bodies’
(Kantorowicz 1957) demonstrates, the distinction between the private
property of the king, on the one hand, and his public responsibilities and
governing apparatus, on the other, is consistent with the retention of the
idea that the king or sovereign possesses or even embodies these institu-
tions (Skinner 1989: 103). In order to complete the modern under-
standing of state, what is required, and what is duly supplied by Hobbes,
is a sense of the ‘doubly abstract’ or ‘doubly impersonal’ character of the
state (Skinner 1989: 12). Not only should the authority of the state be
distinct from the people and their entitlements in the ‘state of nature’ or
pre-political society, but it should also be distinct from the rulers
entrusted with the exercise of its powers for the time being. For Hobbes,
as a purely ‘artificial man’, the state is quite distinct from both rulers and
ruled, and is thus able to call upon the allegiance of both parties.
Now clearly the general idea of the state as social contract fits
very closely with this process of double abstraction. The contract is
44 On state scepticism

an autonomous institutional construct, a set of binding normative

requirements which emerges from the negotiation of the interests of all
parties or constituencies but which is irreducible to the interests of any
particular party or constituency. No section of the ruled, therefore, and
a fortiori no putative rulers, can treat the state so constituted as a mere
cipher or instrument for their quotidian concerns, even if all parties can
claim that the legitimate authority of the state, or contract, depends
upon the interests of each of them being taken into account.
But what is novel and importantly discontinuous with the past
about this doubly abstracted idea of the state, and the contractarian
metaphor which is so intimately suited to its articulation, goes beyond
mere theoretical innovation. It runs deeper than the discovery of a new
intellectual scheme through which people can think in a disengaged
manner about their common life. To adopt an expression introduced
by Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) and taken up by Charles Taylor
(2004), the fullest significance of the kind of transformation about how
we think of political community which reached its apogee in Hobbes
concerns how it tracks and influences change in our very ‘social imag-
inary’. For Taylor, the social imaginary refers to a set of foundational
understandings and assumptions which are broadly based, rather than
the preserve of an intellectual vanguard, concerning how people
‘imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how
things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are
normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that
underlie these expectations’ (2004: 23). The social imaginary, thus con-
ceived, is of immense significance as the most basic grid of meaning
through which we see the world, but also, for that very reason, some-
thing which tends to be taken for granted. As a new social imaginary
gradually becomes established and sedimented in our everyday under-
standing, it is treated as natural and unremarkable. It becomes invisi-
ble to us, and only by rendering it visible again can we re-acquaint
ourselves with what is axiomatic in the break between one epoch
and the next – in this case between the pre-modern and the modern
genus of social imaginary and their accompanying forms of political
organization.2
12
In many of the above respects, Taylor’s take-up and development of the idea of
‘social imaginary’ bears close and suggestive comparison with both Raymond
Williams’s (1964) notion of ‘structures of feeling’ and Bourdieu’s (1990) concept
of ‘habitus’.
The state as meddler 45

For Taylor, as noted above, the most important and most deeply
rooted part of the social imaginary is its normative dimension, or what
he calls its ‘moral order’ (2004: ch. 1). The moral order of modernity
is axiomatically a secular and progressive order in which political
society is understood as established for the mutual benefit of its
members. It thus marks a rejection of a previously dominant concep-
tion of hierarchy in which moral agency depended upon its being
embedded in a larger social whole – one which is located in a sacral-
ized domain of ‘higher time’ (2004: 158) and whose very nature is to
exhibit the hierarchical complementarity which is the proper order of
all things.3 As in pre-modern orders, the individuals of modernity
remain social beings, unable to function in moral isolation. Yet unlike
pre-modern orders, modern political society is one which these indi-
viduals make for their own ends. It is based upon some pre-political
conception of what these individual ends might be, rather than an over-
arching cosmic scheme which defines and locates these individuals in
its own terms. The primacy accorded to individuals acting in and upon
secular time as authors of political society, rather than to the reifica-
tion of that society in a zone of higher time, in turn encourages the
understanding that, as with Hobbes and other contractarians, the basic
script of that society should reflect its human progeny and emphasize
the mundane needs of individual life and their coordinated pursuit. It
should concentrate on those capacities which are necessary to produce
and reproduce the existence of individuals as free agents – in particu-
lar prosperity and, of course, security itself. Freedom, as a prerequisite
of individual agency, and disciplined action, as the means by which this
freedom is harnessed to the pursuit of that mutual benefit which is the
justifying telos of such an instrumental view of political society, thus
emerge as the twin political imperatives of this new moral order. And

13
The model of sacrality here could of course be that of the great transcendental
monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. However, it is just as
consistent with a Platonic–Aristotelian conception of cosmic order, in which
society necessarily corresponds to certain basic Forms and a certain irreducible
order of things. Indeed, as Taylor argues in his discussion of the ‘great disem-
bedding’ of modernity, the great post-axial religions are much more ambigu-
ously placed in relation to modernity than neo-Platonic philosophy. For by
continuing to affirm a higher cosmology they call into question the correspon-
dence between this ideal order and the actually existing social order – so opening
up the possibility and desirability of one of the key assumptions of modernity,
namely the conscious remaking of political society (C. Taylor 2004: ch. 4).
46 On state scepticism

legally and constitutionally, these twin imperatives become crystallized

in a concern with individual rights – those entitlements which are con-
stitutive and defensive of agency and which thus have to be secured to
all agents equally, as well as with the responsibilities entailed and the
institutional order required for this agency to be effectively channelled
towards socially beneficent ends.
It hardly bears mentioning, of course, that the idea of the modern
social imaginary has to be treated with historical caution. It can tell us
something interesting and distinctive about modernity, but only if we
do not ask it to explain too much. In particular, three caveats should
be entered, and their cumulative consideration can help us to refine
what we mean by the modern social imaginary. In the first place, its
development was slow and uneven. It did not emerge fully formed as
a result of some seismic rupture, but evolved only gradually. Like
Hobbes’s work itself, it cannot be viewed as novel in all its parts, but
rather as a new synthesis made possible once various discrete strands
of thought developed to a sufficient pitch of intensity. We have already
seen, for instance, that the idea of the modern state could only take off
once authority could be conceived of as sufficiently divorced from the
prerogatives and privileges of the sometime ruler. Equally – and refer-
ring to the other element in Skinner’s ‘double abstraction’ – the idea of
the modern state required a similar distancing from the interests and
aspirations of the sometime citizens of the polity (Skinner 1989:
112–16), which in turn points to an earlier tradition of individual-
centred political thought. And indeed, if we look to the various trad-
itions of republicanism, both in its Greek and Roman roots and in its
later Florentine variant, these strands of thought placed the citizenry
in their public affairs squarely at the centre of political life, even if the
status of citizen was confined to a narrow and self-propagating elite.
Yet what was absent from early republicanism, apart from a more
inclusive definition of citizenship, was a sense of the apparatus of gov-
ernment as anything other than the instrument of the interests of citi-
zens in the here and now, and this necessarily curtailed what could be
thought of and done in the name of politics. Only with the idea of the
institutional autonomy of the state do we find a corresponding discur-
sive autonomy of politics – a sphere of cumulative discussion and
immanent reflection about what should be done in the collective inter-
est, neither in the eternity of sacred time nor in the instance of present
time, but over secular time.
The state as meddler 47

Secondly, even if we put aside the unevenness of historical develop-

ment and the existence of pre-modern precursors to the modern social
imaginary and treat the modern and pre-modern as ideal-types, we
should not exaggerate the difference between them. In particular, it is
not the difference between a world in which the only concern of politics
was celebration of and service to the sacred and one in which sacrality
was dismissed or merely paid lip-service. On the side of the pre-modern,
and as the tradition of early republicanism itself suggests, there was of
course much concern with the politics of the everyday, with systems of
authority or governance at every level of social organization. Indeed, as
we shall see in the next section, the ancient roots of the idea of police
power are central to the domain of everyday politics. However, in the
final analysis, within the pre-modern social imaginary the boundaries
of what was thinkable in terms of earthly structures of authority were
constrained by the requirements of fit with some more pervasive notion
of the hierarchical order of things, however indirectly that requirement
sounded in any particular instance. And on the side of the modern, we
are of course familiar with the idea of the theocratic state – dedicated,
at least rhetorically, to the achievement of some sacred plan in the
earthly domain. But, crucially, where the state aligns itself to the cause
of one of the modern salvation religions it does not do so by presenting
itself as in full and passive harmony with a settled cosmic order, but
instead tends to subscribe to a modern idea of human agency and to the
active transformation of society over secular time in more perfect
pursuit of the divine plan.
In the third place, the modern imaginary, in its detailed articulation,
is not one but many, and, indeed, Taylor would be the first to insist
upon this. It is a genus of which there are many quite distinct species.
In its very depth and generality, the basic moral order of modernity is
actually compatible with a bewildering variety of fuller flourishings of
the social imaginary and attendant sociopolitical orders. To return to
the triptych of ideas, material capabilities and institutional forms
unveiled earlier, we can see that not only have the bare ingredients of
the modern state form been capable of being produced to different
specifications and mixed in different forms, but that the recipe itself has
undergone certain adaptations and mutations. In the realm of ideas,
both nationalism and citizenship provide partial articulations of the
notion of a self-made political community. For such a community,
giving priority as it does to the claims and aspirations of its authors,
48 On state scepticism

needs a well-developed model of the effective ties and qualifications of

membership – of the integrity of the pre-political cultural community
whose compact the state is – on the one hand, and of the incidents of
membership, or the terms of the compact, on the other.
In crude terms, we can observe that while nationalism has supplied
the first of these models, citizenship has supplied the second. As it
developed in its modern form in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, national community, as we shall have cause to pursue in sub-
sequent chapters, provided an understanding of a community of
attachment over time (Yack 2003: 36), with an image of a shared her-
itage – whether based upon territory, language, ethnicity, mythologized
historical events or confessional allegiance, and most likely a mix of
these and other commonalities – passed and transformed from one gen-
eration to another and extending into an indeterminate future. For its
part, citizenship is more concerned with the rights and responsibilities
which set members apart from non-members and which provide the
appropriate articulation of individual freedom and collective discipline
for these members. What this makes clear is that nationalism and citi-
zenship are not alternatives, but inevitably go hand in hand in the
making of the modern state. Yet the ways in which these concepts coa-
lesce can differ greatly. And in the great variety of their mutual articu-
lations, ranging from a nationalism of ‘blood and belonging’ (Ignatieff
1993) and a form of citizenship in thrall to an exclusionary cultural
identity, on the one hand, to a thinner conception of civic nationalism
and republican citizenship, on the other, we already see one aspect of
the diversity of the modern state.
In the sphere of material capabilities too, we see the diverse path-
ways of the modern state. We have already noted in general terms how
the development of the modern state is tied up with the needs and pos-
sibilities inherent in a more complex division of labour. More specifi-
cally, the gradual emergence of the capitalist form of production, based
upon formal freedom of contract and an unencumbered conception of
property rights, provides both one image of a pre-political realm (of
commerce) from which a more instrumental conception of political
society might grow, and some of the very individual-centred values
which would inform the new social compact. Yet in its tension between
freedom and agency on the one hand and mutual benefit and the col-
lective discipline required for its realization on the other, the modern
state also retained the tendency towards a more collectivist ethic of
The state as meddler 49

production and redistribution, where this is what mutual benefit was

deemed to require, and thus towards the various forms of public inter-
vention in and control of the economy we associate with socialism.
Finally, in the area of institutional capacity, there are also many pos-
sibilities. Clearly, the emphasis upon the freedom and equality of each
individual agent and on the importance of collective consent provide
a route to modern forms of liberalism and representative democracy.
Clearly too, the idea of political society freed from a cosmology of
timeless hierarchy, and capable of being made over to conscious
human design and the collective discipline necessary for its imple-
mentation, opens the way to more collectivist ideas and ideologies of
human flourishing, and to an institutional machinery moulded to
these purposes. At one extreme, then, contemporary totalitarian ide-
ologies – often aided and abetted by introverted forms of nationalism,
together with the repressive forms of law and administration neces-
sary to their sustenance – are as much the offspring of the modern idea
of moral order as more individual-centred and democratically respon-
sive templates.
However diverse the concrete forms it takes, the modern state
remains basically compatible with and recognizable as an outgrowth
of a single underlying moral order. The tension between the freedom
that the recognition of individual agency is deemed to permit and the
discipline which that agency is deemed to require in the pursuit of
mutual benefit may be resolved in radically different ways, but both
extremes involve the same fundamental epistemic shift from an earlier
notion of a vertically ordered political society in thrall to a timeless
cosmology to a horizontally ordered anthropology from which polit-
ical society could be constructed and which would provide its sole jus-
tification.
Thus we can see how the modern state, from Hobbes onwards,
contained the seeds of its own critique, and, most immediately, that cri-
tique which centred on its illicit meddling in the affairs of its individ-
ual constituents. To take first the general part of this argument, in
accepting that the political order was a human construct, to be judged
only by its cumulative and resilient capacity to satisfy human needs,
the emergence of the modern state and the idea of moral order that
underpinned it brought forth the very idea of immanent critique – a
form of criticism of the polis which need not appeal to some force or
order beyond the polis and which, as such, can be seen to inaugurate
50 On state scepticism

the modern phase of properly political criticism. That is to say, as the

ends and means of the political order are no longer sacralized in higher
time, beyond the scope of human intervention, but instead begin to be
seen as within the gift of the constituent people represented by legisla-
tors and administrators operating in profane or secular time, then it
becomes in principle legitimate to subject these ends and means (and
those responsible for them) to ongoing criticism and revision. The
political order becomes essentially contingent and ‘mutable’ (Finer
1997: 1303), an institutional form which because constructed can also
and always be reconstructed.
To move to the specific part of this argument, because the new
moral ontology is individual-centred, the most fundamental critical
axiom is in turn the protection of individual agency, whether at the
point of consent to the political order or in its maintenance and fur-
therance. Hobbes’s absolute state, with its massive capacity for inter-
ference and constraint, provides a palpably easy target for any
individual-centred moral sensibility, but that should not blind us to the
fact that it is the emergence of the individual-centred moral sensibil-
ity itself which is the more important innovation. The absolute state
might be the worst case, but any state which, through its police and
other agencies, subjects individuals to discipline and constraint in the
name of the intermeshing interests of these very same individuals –
and all states must by definition do this – now becomes vulnerable
to the charge of illegitimate interference – of meddling in affairs
which remained within the sovereign power of individuals in their pre-
political state of nature.
Of course, critique is one thing, dominant authority another. The
other side of the modern state, as noted, is the tendency to compromise
agency, to subject individuals to discipline in the name, or at least the
furtherance, of some collectively defined project, to which nation-
based, class-based, faith-based and various otherwise grounded ide-
ologies, interests and structures contribute in complex combinations.
And here, palpably, the other parts of the grand tapestry of historical
explanation – the material and the institutional – are more prominent.
It is the fate of the modern state, then, to be inherently double-edged,
to generate both the object and its critique. The history of the modern
police and the history of criticism of the modern police, as we shall see,
are directly implicated in and by this double-edged character of the
modern state.
The state as meddler 51

Sociological foundations
How has the fear of meddling in the affairs of sovereign individuals, so
closely implicated in foundational thinking about the state, insinuated
itself into debates about the scope and legitimacy of state policing? As
noted earlier, that insinuation has taken two forms. In the first place,
and most obviously, policing has always been a special target of those
fears and criticisms which see the Hobbesian impulse of the state to
protect the security of the individual as a standing threat to all of his or
her other ‘natural’ freedoms – personal liberty, movement, speech, con-
science and privacy – as well as to the very bodily safety the Leviathan
is contracted to ensure. The fear, then, has both a narrow and a broader
dimension. Narrowly, the state which adopts its own dedicated police
force may be or become a self-defeating construct – or, less charitably,
a purely self-serving construct in terms even of the core Hobbesian aim,
threatening to generate more insecurity than it provides security. More
broadly, to the extent that state policing may be successful or at least
not a manifest failure in this narrowest sense, the trade-off in terms of
the loss of other basic liberties may still be excessive. In the second
place, the establishment of a public police force, as one manifestation
of the state’s broader propensity to interfere, threatens to curtail or
remove the possibility of individuals exercising their joint and several
‘natural’ freedom(s) to make their own security arrangements. Let us
now briefly examine in turn the form that these concerns have trad-
itionally taken in the history of modern policing, and certain contem-
porary manifestations of these concerns. In so doing, we seek to
acknowledge both the resilient strength and importance of these cri-
tiques and to indicate their equally resilient limitations.

Insecure liberties
Given its core emphasis upon the importance of protecting or con-
structing a sphere in which individuals can act without interference in
ways that reflect their understanding of what gives meaning and value
to their lives, liberalism is a political philosophy which resonates closely
with the ‘agency’ dimension of the modern social imaginary. So much
so, in fact, that we best understand the role of liberalism in modern
political culture not as a comprehensive descriptor of how particular
societies operate or even as a general theory or model of a just society,
52 On state scepticism

but as a powerful strand of thought, or ‘ideology’, which is present in

different variants and to greater or lesser effect in all modern social
orders – even those whose dominant tendencies may justly be viewed as
distinctly ‘illiberal’.4 One such variant of liberalism, and an important
part of the history of liberalism as an active political idea which goes to
the very heart of the meddling objection, is what Judith Sklar has
famously called the ‘liberalism of fear’ (Sklar 1989). This consists of an
apprehension of what may be done to ‘weak’ individuals in the name
of the state and through its overwhelming coercive capability. As we
shall see later, that fear is always liable to assume a more specific form,
whether of systematic bias in favour of and against particular sections
of the population, or of the shaping and sustaining of an intolerant
moral or cultural orthodoxy, or of cognitive overreach – of the state’s
failure to know the limits of its own knowledge and regulatory poten-
tial. However, just as liberalism began as a difference-blind ideal, as one
which asserted the equal gravity of every individual claim to freedom,
much of the anxiety about state power in general and the power of state
policing in particular has historically often been conceived of – and,
given the rhetorical power of the liberal idea of freedom in the political
cultures which grew out of the modern social imaginary, even more
insistently expressed – in difference-blind terms.
Our discussion of how the liberalism of fear informs the meddling
critique proceeds in two stages. First, and picking up where we left off
in the previous section, we examine how liberal concerns about the
overweening security capacity of the state became lodged in the social

14
According to Michael Freeden (1996: part II), liberalism is in fact the ‘dominant
ideology’ of modernity, if ideology is understood as ‘those systems of political
thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended, through which individuals or
groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who pre-
occupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding’ (1996: 3).
Freeden is concerned, with this definition, to distinguish liberalism as ideology
from liberalism as political theory or philosophy, stressing its instantiation in the
‘thought-behaviour’ (1996: 2) of individuals and groups seeking to understand
and/or shape the social world in which they are implicated rather than its status
as a relatively disengaged body of imaginative speculation or creation. Note,
however, that if, on the one hand, ‘ideology’ is more grounded than ‘theory’,
then, on the other, it nevertheless remains less fundamental than and is parasitic
upon the underlying ‘social imaginary’. Ideology draws upon and contributes to
a discursively realized body of thinking, while the social imaginary represents
the deeply engrained set of common assumptions about the social world that
makes theory and ideology possible.
The state as meddler 53

foundations of the modern state. The liberalism of fear has to be under-

stood as a double-sided phenomenon, the product both of a new and
distinctive mindset and of certain objective forces which encourage that
mindset. On the one hand, it speaks to a conceptual tension in the very
foundations of liberalism, one which fertilizes the seed of immanent cri-
tique planted in the very social imaginary which makes the modern state
possible. On the other hand, this anxiety also reflects and responds to
certain tendencies secreted in the long-term development of security and
policing. In the second place, we examine the development of the insti-
tutional form of the new police from the early nineteenth century
onwards, and highlight how this new form has profoundly ambiguous
implications from the liberal perspective – both intensifying the med-
dling concern and in some measure responding to that concern.
Let us begin, then, with the deeper foundations. The conceptual
tension at the heart of liberalism finds its focus in the equivocal status of
individual freedom in liberal understandings of the state, and in partic-
ular in the profound difficulty in fixing ‘in principle’ limits to the per-
missible encroachment upon individual liberties by the modern state.
Liberals are not anarchists. For all that they rejected the absolutism of
Hobbes, writers as central to the early liberal tradition as Locke, Smith,
Paine and Condorcet concurred with his basic premise that freedom
from the fear and prospect of personal violation was an indispensable
precondition for the sovereignty of individual action.5 Indeed, as
Stephen Holmes has said, security is the ‘idée maîtresse’ (1995: 245) of
the liberal tradition, the commonly agreed axiom around which various
and diverse liberal systems of thought revolve. So liberal thought has
the luxury neither of the wholesale endorsement of the Hobbesian
security vision, nor of its wholesale rejection. Instead, the paradoxically
self-defeating tendencies of the state which seeks to be both strong and
freedom-endowing have to be squarely faced. Somehow security and
liberty have to be reconciled.

15
Historians of political ideas typically date the evolution of liberalism back to
Locke, even though awareness of liberalism as an ideological tradition is subse-
quent to the political employment of the term from the 1830s onwards, and even
John Stuart Mill, considered by many as the prime exponent of nineteenth-century
liberalism, did not actually describe his own writings as elaborating a set of polit-
ical beliefs called liberalism. Nevertheless, even though liberalism as a full-blown
ideology is indeed a product of the nineteenth century, a basic continuity of
concern and commitment – of diagnosis and prescription – justifies the location
of the roots of modern liberalism in the earlier tradition (Freeden 1996: 139–44).
54 On state scepticism

Yet there can be no easy route to reconciliation within the liberal sen-
sibility. Security may be the precondition of that liberty which is nec-
essary to discover and pursue what gives meaning and value to an
individual life, and the pursuit of security may only be justifiable if it
promises such a freedom dividend. But this close conceptual interde-
pendence does not mean that trade-offs between security and liberty
can be avoided. Both security and liberty are relational concepts. More
security typically implies less of something else, and that something else
is often one or other of our cherished freedoms. Equally, more liberty
typically implies a reduction in something else, and that something else
may be our capacity to provide security. As we shall see in due course,
the modern state has at its disposal certain institutional devices which
seek to provide a measure of practical reconciliation of liberty and
security, and these may help to deflect or temper concern about the
proper relationship between the two concepts, not least by providing
deliberative fora within which the question may be aired. But for now
let us pursue further the more basic conceptual abeyance at the heart
of liberalism, and how the failure adequately to fill this vacuum feeds
anxiety about the spread of police power.
As an attempt to square the conceptual circle, the idea of ‘balance’ has
for long been prevalent in legal and political discussions over the recon-
ciliation of security and liberty, the resort both of liberals determined to
hold or restore the line of individual liberty and of those seeking to
justify the latest qualification of that liberty in the name of enhanced
security (Waldron 2003a; Loader forthcoming a). Balance implies the
existence of values which, when mutually implicated, tend to pull in
opposite directions; where the optimal solution – the striking of the
appropriate balance – may involve a sacrifice of some dimension of one
or other value. But balance between these competing goods, for all that
it may be the predictable conceptual terminus of liberty’s equivocation
over security – of that concern with the secular reconciliation of collec-
tive discipline and individual freedom which is the deep puzzle of the
modern social imaginary – can never be a comfortable metaphor for the
liberal, for two reasons. First, and more specifically, liberals tend to be
deeply uneasy about the invocation of consequential reasons for the
erosion of liberties (Waldron 2003a: 194). Our most fundamental free-
doms, whether of expression, assembly or liberty of the person, are con-
sidered too precious simply to be weighed on a social scale against
competing goods and diminished in proportion to the intensity of the
The state as meddler 55

claims made on behalf of these competing goods. If, as the liberal would
argue, there are compelling reasons flowing from respect for the indi-
vidual for maintaining that people be free from the fear or prospect of
arbitrary arrest and detention, then a mere circumstantial increase in the
security risk of maintaining that freedom – whether, to take two famil-
iar contemporary cases, the circumstance in question be the hosting of
a high-level international summit attended by controversial political
figures or a local wave of terrorist attacks – cannot be enough in itself
to dispose of these compelling reasons. The language may be that of
Nozickian ‘side-constraints’ or Dworkinian ‘rights as trumps’ or the
Rawlsian ‘lexical priority’ of basic rights, but the moral instinct of the
liberal is typically to give some special status (even if not an absolute pri-
ority) to the protection of basic liberties, which means that they cannot
simply be traded away for other social gains. The idea of balance cannot
easily acknowledge that special status. Rather, it implies the existence of
a single metric for the weighing of all social goods, and as such sits far
more comfortably with that genus of political thought which is liberal-
ism’s great partner and rival within the cadre of individual-centred
modern political ideology: namely, utilitarianism.
This highlights the second, and more general, source of liberal unease
with the idea of balance. Not only is balancing unable to accord special
priority to core rights, but it lacks any clear, consistent and uncontro-
versial meta-rule or formula for resolving disputes between different
values. The idea of a single metric for assessing social benefits turns out,
on closer examination, to operate as an exclusionary device. It suggests,
negatively, that no species of value can be exempt from the general
weighing of values, but does not specify, positively, how that compre-
hensive weighing is to take place. As the history of utilitarian thought
from Bentham onwards indicates, how we calculate a unit of the good
and how we reduce different goods to a single scale is itself a deeply
uncertain and contested exercise, one finally dependent upon a privileg-
ing of one of many rival general registers of value (aggregate happiness,
aggregate welfare, minimum aggregate infringement upon or frustration
of individual interests, etc.), all of which are both controversial in con-
ception and notoriously unclear in application. Balancing, in short,
promises a false objectivity and suggests an artificial precision in our
attempts to devise just institutional arrangements and answer liberal
concerns. Behind its cover of careful calibration of diverse interests and
preferences, balancing is actually peculiarly lacking in certainty and
56 On state scepticism

rigour. Once liberty is fed into the utilitarian calculus, what comes out
the other end is a matter of deep uncertainty and disputation. Whenever
and wherever a new assault on liberal sensibilities is apprehended, and
in the contemporary new global climate of unease following 9/11 the
sheer pervasiveness of that sense of assault is perhaps unprecedented, the
mantra of balance is unfailingly invoked in the law courts, in political
debate, in public commentary and in the vigilant critique of civil
society’s state-watchers. But it is difficult to avoid the impression that it
is a mantra often invoked either by critics of liberalism in complacent or
cynical disregard of its historical inability to set absolute or proportional
limits upon the encroachment of liberty, or, if by liberals themselves,
merely for want of any more compelling formula for holding the line.
Whether rooted in cynicism, complacency, or fragile hope, what is
certain is that the idea of balance can provide no guarantee against
certain structural tendencies deeply inscribed in the social foundations
of policing and security, which brings us to the second – and objective –
element within the liberalism of fear. These structural tendencies, as we
shall see, have been significantly sharpened and intensified with the
development of the modern state and its dedicated policing capacity. Yet
if we fail to appreciate their pre-modern roots, we cannot fully compre-
hend the depth and resilience of their substantiation of liberal anxieties.
So whereas in the previous section we stressed the discontinuity of the
modern social imaginary in order to appreciate the novelty of a certain
critical modern understanding of the political, here, by contrast, it is
important to stress the continuity and the accumulation of the social
forces which makes modern police power so formidable.
In a powerful recent study, Marcus Dirk Dubber (2004, 2005) has
traced the roots of the police idea to Greek and Roman ideas of house-
hold governance. In the original Athenian distinction, while politics was
a matter of self-government by equals – or, rather, by the equally privi-
leged – in the public domain, economics was seen as the art of govern-
ment by these privileged public actors of their private household for the
common good of the whole family.6 This idea of a private domain of
patriarchal governance underwriting a narrow sphere of public citizen-
ship was carried forward in the Roman law notion of the paterfamilias

16
The distinction between economics and politics closely mirrored the distinction
in classical Greek between two dimensions of life – zoe, or natural life, and bios,
or politically qualified life (see Agamben 1998).
The state as meddler 57

exercising plenary power over the familia. So far, so familiar, but the
innovative aspect of Dubber’s genealogy lies in his linking of these clas-
sical traces to medieval and early modern conceptions of police science,
and to the idea of the king or the ruling elite as the head of a larger and
secondary unit of governance:

Police marked the point of convergence between politics and economics,

when one mode of governance merged into the other, and created the oxy-
moronic science of political economy. The police power was born when the
governmentality of the private (micro) household was expanded, and trans-
ferred, onto that of the public (macro) household. (Dubber 2005: 81)

But how did this merger take place? Dubber seeks to answer this ques-
tion through a mix of discursive analysis and assessment of the devel-
oping jurisdictional scope and depth of police power. Discursively, the
image of the household, and the sovereign as head of a second-order
‘public’ household and so responsible for its social and economic well-
being, is prominent in many of the foundational tracts of modern polic-
ing. It can be located in the general works of Rousseau and the Scottish
Enlightenment thinkers, and also in the more focused works of key
figures in the anglophone police tradition such as Blackstone writing
in the middle of the eighteenth century and Patrick Colquhoun fifty
years later. Further, all of these writers, as well as acknowledging the
relevant classical roots, were explicitly influenced by (and exercised a
reciprocal influence upon) the contemporary continental method of
police science (Polizeiwissenschaft), which in turn drew upon an earlier
French and German tradition of police laws, police regulations, police
ordinances and, in due course, police officials dating from the fifteenth
century (Knemeyer 1980). The commonalities across this body of
thought are striking, and three themes in particular can be drawn out
(Dubber 2004).
First, and most obviously, there is an idea of strict hierarchy, mirror-
ing the categorical distinction between householder and household.
Secondly, there is the ‘defining undefinability’ of police power. Indeed, in
continental police science, reflecting the common etymological roots of
police7 and polis, police power was regarded as the root and rationale of

17
The modern term police has French origins and from these origins was received
into usage in the two other early major European ‘policing’ traditions – the
German and the Anglo-Scottish.
58 On state scepticism

all governance. No form of regulation was in principle to be denied the

higher householder in his efforts to educate and discipline his extended
family in pursuit of its common welfare, and, as is well documented in
the history of crime and punishment, this capacious view of the power of
the pater patriae was eagerly accommodated across the length and
breadth of early modern Europe (Keane 2004: chs. 3–4). Alongside the
recognized catalogue of criminal acts, matters as diverse as sporting
codes, gender relations, vagrancy, night-walking, gaming, fair commerce,
usury, animal husbandry, public sanitation, undue expenditure, inappro-
priate dress, excessive diet, eavesdropping, malicious gossip and imper-
sonation were viewed as essential to the good management of the public
household and were thus subject to police jurisdiction, and infringement
often led to draconian punishment. Thirdly, and related, the idea of patri-
archal police power is marked by its ‘ahumanity’ and ‘amorality’
(Dubber 2005: xv). It was not just a power ‘to govern men and things’
(2005: xiv), but a power the moral status of whose objects – men and
things – was not clearly distinguished. Both were merely ‘tools in the
householder’s hands’ and, as such, prone to be worked, adapted, dis-
carded or reappropriated as the macro-householder saw fit and in accor-
dance with all the technologies of power familiar from the domestic
household (2005: ch. 1).
Of course, it is possible to overstate the strength of the household
metaphor and its successful transfer to the macro-domain of the polity
in general and the modern state in particular (Loader and Zedner
2007). Indeed, in his own work, Dubber seeks to explore the tensions
and contradictions which ensued when this patriarchal conception of
police governance met the social contractarian architecture and self-
governing rhetoric and aspirations of the new American republic of
1789 (Dubber 2005: part II). We will return to these tensions shortly,
but first it is worth emphasizing two points about the household
origins of police power which cumulatively underwrite the strength
and tenacity of its influence on modern policing.
In the first place, we may surmise that part of its resilience as an idea
capable of being borne, copied and adapted across the ages from the
classical to the early modern lay in its resonance with a pre-modern
notion of hierarchy. The patriarchal metaphor, especially as extended
in a vertical chain of connections from various ‘private’ contexts,
whether the Greek or Roman household or the English manor or the
‘quasi-households’ (Dubber 2005: 61) of the guild or corporation, the
The state as meddler 59

religious order, the military, or the slave plantation, to the ‘public’

household of the polity, was well capable of being accommodated
within an earlier social imaginary of pre-ordained and seamless hier-
archical order. Indeed, once relocated and viewed in the broader
context of governance of which it was a part, the classical idea of
republicanism itself, for all that it also served as a precursor of modern
forms of comprehensive and comprehensively secular politics, is
merely one horizontal plane supporting and supported by an otherwise
vertically ordered framework of governance and social organization.
In the second place, its close fit with that earlier conception of moral
order notwithstanding, we can also see how the extended household
metaphor could be carried forward and reconfigured to meet the dis-
ciplinarian side of the modern social contract. Some of the most
insightful work on the social history of the state, indeed, has been con-
cerned with precisely this bridging of the pre-modern and the modern.
Writers such as Norbert Elias (1939/1978), in his account of the ‘civil-
izing process’, and Michel Foucault (1984), in his analysis of the rise
of an encompassing ‘biopolitics’, have eloquently demonstrated how
taking individual freedom seriously and harnessing it to a collective
production helped justify, in the era of the emergence of the modern
state, continued investment in that sense of unity of order which sus-
tained earlier and more ‘natural’ conceptions of hierarchy, now
adapted to an altogether larger scale and more ambitious remit. Those
calculations and devices that were deemed necessary and justified to
civilize the macro-household of the state in the name of its sovereign
collective utility were increasingly unconstrained by the demands of
some transcendental conception of order or of harmony with or defer-
ence to other spheres and sites of social organization, and so could be
more comprehensive in the extent, and remorseless in the intensity,
of their regulatory claims. The new raison d’état was explicitly self-
referential and all-encompassing in its moral and strategic vocabulary,
tending to eclipse or subordinate the claims of other forms of reason
or sentiment. As pointed out earlier, contemporary forms of totalitar-
ianism may be the most pathological outcome of this dynamic, but this
should not blind us to the disciplinary power secreted in all forms of
modernity, and to the generosity and aptness of its inheritance from
earlier notions of patriarchy.
So, it appears, just as no conceptual ‘floor’ of liberty can be guar-
anteed within the balancing act of modernity, so its countervailing
60 On state scepticism

principle, security, knows no objective ‘ceiling’ – no constraint on its

potential pervasiveness. Rather, if the utilitarian calculus is in practice
tied to the collective good, and if that collective good is in practice sus-
ceptible to paternalistic definition, then the policing of that collective
good can become just whatever measures are deemed necessary to
secure good order and just whatever instruments are deemed neces-
sary to implement these measures by just whichever public authority
stands in loco parentis. As one contemporary ethnographer of the
police has noted, policing may in principle be ‘concerned with all the
manners of a society’; in that one pithy formula he traces a direct line
back to pre-modern and early modern conceptions of police power,
and to the liberal fear it has consistently provoked (Laurie 1972, cited
in Manning 1979: 45).
But, to move to the second stage of our enquiry, how are these under-
lying conceptual concerns and social dynamics translated into the insti-
tutional forms of modern policing? Here we find conflicting tendencies.
If, as is commonly agreed, the major distinguishing features of the ‘new
police’ which emerged across the western and colonial world in the
nineteenth century were their degree of publicness, professionalism
and specialization (Bayley 1985; N. Walker 2000: ch. 2), then each of
these three trends speaks eloquently to liberal anxieties. Publicness,
first and foremost, because the replacement of diverse local or private
suppliers by a central state supplier or licensor ascribes to the state for
the first time a monopoly or dominant position in the direct provision
of legitimate coercion within its territory, rather than simply in its
overall coordination and last-instance authority. Professionalism,
because the replacement of part-time amateurs by a full-time, trained
and bureaucratically organized corps increases the effective capacity of
police power. Specialization, because the gradual shedding of regula-
tory and administrative responsibilities across a wider sphere of gov-
ernance – and thus a retreat from the broadest conception of police
power of the early police scientists – and the concentration on core
policing tasks of crime prevention and detection and the maintenance
of public order, means that policing can be better focused on matters
of security.
Yet, even if we accept this somewhat stylized conception of the trans-
formation from ‘old’ to ‘new’ policing, each of the key three traits actu-
ally has more ambiguous implications for police power than may be
immediately apparent from a state-sceptical perspective. Publicness
The state as meddler 61

may be as much a counter to local excess and a pledge of commitment

to general and uniform standards as a central consolidation of power.
Professionalism may be as much about new modes of internal regula-
tion and investment in a distinctive occupational culture and honorific
code – the emergence of new forms of other- and self-discipline within
the police corps – as about refining techniques of social control. And
specialization, as already suggested, purchases a greater intensity of
concentration on core tasks – the very tasks which may increase the
security of all sections of the population rather than simply bolster
existing social hierarchies, in return for a stricter demarcation of juris-
dictional boundaries and a renunciation of at least some of the older
‘household’ prerogatives.
Historiographical work on the origins of the new police remains
highly polarized as to the causes and consequences of transformation,
with ‘orthodox’ historians asserting the more benign interpretation
and ‘revisionists’ preferring a more sceptical reading – one often closely
informed by a neo-Marxist perspective on the new disciplinary chal-
lenges posed by the rise of a new urban working class (Reiner 2000:
ch. 1). But here again, we must be mindful of Taylor’s caution about
the limitations of unicausal interpretations of history. The direct asser-
tion and institutionalization of state authority can be seen neither as
the fullest unleashing of Leviathan, now licensed to meddle in every
nook and cranny of individual life, nor as its final capture. Rather, as
Dubber portrays in his own work, in the ambiguous institutional
implications of the new police we see conflicting projects and tenden-
cies at work, with different forces prevailing or compromise achieved
at different times and places. On the one hand, the new police, with
their unprecedented manpower resources and ever evolving technology
of coercion and surveillance, acquired and retain an unprecedented
capacity for interference. On the other hand, the very liberal sensibil-
ity which feared the coercive potential of the state, and the underlying
modernist sentiment that politics and the state be directed to human-
ist ends, provided a more or less effective countervailing power.
The strength of that countervailing tendency is most marked in those
states in which the modern constitutional tradition, with its preoccupa-
tion with limited government, and in time also with democratically
responsive government, has successfully taken hold. From Montesquieu
onwards, modern constitutionalism sought to guard against the excesses
of the state by a number of devices aimed at diversifying, checking and
62 On state scepticism

balancing institutional power. So from the original modern constitu-

tional charters of America and France onwards, we are familiar with
mechanisms both at the level of the general design of the organs of state
and in the more specific context of police organization which seek to
restrain the tendency towards the excessive accumulation of police
power and its abuse (N. Walker 2000: ch. 1). At the general level, the
division of power both horizontally, between executive, legislature and
judiciary, and vertically, between central and devolved or federated
units, guards against an over-concentration of power in one unit, and,
crucially, the gradual development of the franchise over the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries both permits a greater plurality of interests to be
represented in the legislative and executive domains and guarantees elec-
toral accountability of the representatives. The state constitutional order
may also provide for a more or less justiciable charter of rights capable
of overriding or qualifying legislative acts or executive action in respect
of policing which is in violation of these rights.
Within the policing field more specifically, the articulation of state
authority may, like the general institutions of state themselves, be more
or less decentralized. If centralized, there may be one central force, as
in Ireland or Poland, or several, and whether centralized or decentral-
ized, the competences of the various forces in multiple systems may be
coordinated and discrete, as in France or Finland, or uncoordinated
and overlapping, as in Italy or Belgium (Bayley 1985: chs. 3 and 8).
Furthermore, constitutional law may provide a scheme for the internal
accountability of policing, through the specification of an organiza-
tional hierarchy and internal accountability relations backed up by a
discipline code, and also for the external accountability of policing,
whether to dedicated bodies such as ministries of justice, interior and
defence, judicial or quasi-judicial complaints authorities, national or
regional experts, elected or hybrid police authorities, civilian review
boards and local consultative committees, or to more general agencies
of accountability such as courts, prosecutors, ombudsmen or parlia-
mentary assemblies and committees (Goldsmith and Lewis 2000).
This array of modern constitutional techniques for channelling, lim-
iting and rendering police power accountable is of dual significance –
both as a carrier and as a reflection of liberal anxieties and sensibilities,
and as an objective methodology for curbing the meddling capacity of
the state. Of course, as already intimated, how much difference institu-
tional measures make in practice is a variable matter. For the concerned
The state as meddler 63

liberal, they can only ever be ‘second-best’ solutions, ways of mitigat-

ing rather than taming Leviathan. If there can be no stable and satis-
factory balance in principle between security and liberty, then the
constitutional arsenal can only ever provide particular and contingent
solutions, opportunities for debate and publicity, and sites of vigilance
and accountability. And since constitutionalism, too, is a form of power,
we should not assume that the constitutional system is within the gift
of a liberal, power-restraining worldview. Even where its basic frame-
work is entrenched against easy reform, the constitutional system is far
from immune from the influence of the government of the day, whose
preference may lie more in bolstering its capacity to meet new or exist-
ing security threats than in self-limitation.8 Moreover, the constitutional
solution is more apt to ‘take’ in some policing and political cultures
than in others, and in none is it proof against intrusive tendencies. In
colonial and communist policing systems, for instance, policing has typ-
ically been an oppressive tool of an ideological elite – a licence for
unlimited meddling – and post-communist and post-colonial systems
have in many cases found it difficult to shed that legacy (Mawby 2003:
21–5). In the Far East, the continuing influence of older models of social
discipline has led one commentator to conclude that, despite continen-
tal influence on institutional redesign, in both Japan and South Korea
the contemporary police remain ‘natural, hierarchical, authoritarian –
respected and feared by the vast majority; opposed even hated by polit-
ically progressive minorities’ (S. Y. Lee 1990: 91).
In the western cradle of liberalism and constitutionalism, too, where
fears of meddling tend to be most vociferously expressed, contempo-
rary anxieties can in some measure be traced to different traditions. So,
although there has been some convergence in recent decades, conti-
nental systems remain on the whole more centralized and militaristic,
more focused on administrative tasks, more associated with govern-
ment and less publicly accountable than their Anglo-American coun-
terparts (Mawby 2003: 20), and this reflects the abiding influence of

18
This represents a paradox of police governance to join the more basic paradox
of state policing as a potential threat to the very security it promises to deliver.
This more specific paradox of police governance inheres in the fact that the
national and local state is both an influential source of regulatory control over
the police and, as one of the main beneficiaries of the police’s ordering capacity,
part of the problem that regulation seeks to address (N. Walker 2000: 4–6,
54–67).
64 On state scepticism

continental police science and the dirigiste state tradition which com-
plemented it. The Anglo-American model, for its part, tends to be more
localist and populist – particularly in the United States where the
republican and federal origins favoured local self-government. In
neither case, however, can institutional design remotely be considered
a liberal panacea. In the continental system, the fear of meddling is the
fear of intrusion by an aloof, unaccountable and politically interested
central authority. In the Anglo-American environment, recent central-
izing tendencies have stoked similar fears, but a more long-standing
liberal concern is with the interlocking of police with local political
elites, and the partial and uneven intrusion in the lives of different local
populations this threatens.
The liberalism of fear, then, retains a widespread resonance within
the state tradition. One of the paradoxes of globalization, moreover,
particularly in the light of 9/11, is that concern with the oldest of state
monopolies, as well as the state behaviour which gives rise to this
concern, is communicated more and more effectively transnationally.
As we shall see in later chapters, cross-border policing is also a bur-
geoning activity, and it gives rise to its own set of anxieties. But prob-
ably the primary impact of global interconnectedness on policing
remains the way in which the experience of elsewhere corroborates and
amplifies well-established intra-state forms of relations between police
and population and their attendant anxieties. Police meddling and its
fear, as we have tried to argue, is the original sin of the modern state
security tradition, the inevitable upshot of the founding tension
between individual freedom and collective discipline. Modern state
formations may be deeply diverse in structure and dominant ideology,
but we continue to recognize in them all, as they recognize in each
other, that common resilient tension.

Liberating security
Let us now deal more briefly with the second element of the meddling
concern – the desire to liberate security provision from the clutches
of the state. In recent years, we have seen a revival of interest in non-
state forms of policing provision (see, e.g., Jones and Newburn 1998,
2006; Johnston and Shearing 2003; Mazerolle and Ransley 2006) –
a revival which has had repercussions for our historical understand-
ing of the stages of police development and which has also fed into a
The state as meddler 65

contemporary sense that the phase of the centrality of the state-

controlled ‘new police’ within the overall profile of policing may be
coming to an end, or at least undergoing significant revision. From
the historical perspective, there is now greater appreciation than once
there was that non-state policing activities by no means disappeared
with the onset of the new police. Rather, the new police have always
been complemented, or at least supplemented, by a range of special-
ist security activities by non-police public bodies, by commercial
organization, and through citizen initiative. In terms of contemporary
trends, much current analysis of policing is concerned to identify, and
in many cases encourage, an acceleration in the trend away from state
policing, pointing to a diverse array of contributory factors ranging
from the fiscal crisis of the post-war state and the rise of ‘mass private
property’ (Shearing and Stenning 1987) in the form of office plazas,
shopping malls, sports complexes, etc., to a more general commodi-
fication of security in response to an increased awareness of, and sen-
sitivity to, the intensity and diversity of social risks and the inability
of the traditional state police to address all such risks (Jones and
Newburn 1998: ch. 8; Kempa et al. 1999; Loader 1999; Rigakos
2002).
Just as the background factors are various, so too are the range of
predictive trajectories and normative hopes associated with this new
school of analysis. Some of the more radical diagnoses and institutional
suggestions have less to do with a concern with rescuing the private
individual from the encroachment of the state and more to do with
devising alternative forms of publicly sanctioned collective organiza-
tion of security provision which avoid some of the other pathologies of
top-down state provision – in particular its lack of responsive intelli-
gence – and so are more appropriately considered at a later juncture
(see chapter 5). For now, though, let us concentrate on that strand of
analysis which retains the meddling theme, stressing the dangers atten-
dant upon and damage caused by the state’s undue interference with
the entitlements and voluntary market exchanges of sovereign individ-
uals.
This line of scepticism is of course rooted in the same modern social
imaginary as the critical perspectives considered in the previous section.
Its most obvious intellectual debt is to neo-classical (or neo-liberal)
welfare economics, which, with its axiomatic insistence on treating the
individual as a rational utility maximizer, closely overlaps the concerns
66 On state scepticism

of both liberalism and utilitarianism with the sovereignty of the individ-

ual agent and the reducibility of collective welfare to individual-centred
concerns (Freeden 1996: ch. 7). Today, the sharpest edge of that scepti-
cism is to be found in that brand of economic theory known as ‘public
choice economics’ (Buchanan 1978), which applies the insights of neo-
classical economics to the political decision-making process itself.9
Four charges are from this standpoint levelled at the state as a mech-
anism for producing and distributing social goods, including security.
First, that as public bureaucracies (especially those of a monopoly kind
such as the police) have no price signals to which they are required to
respond, they have no incentive to be efficient and keep costs down.
Second, that state provision tends to be colonized by vested bureau-
cratic interests, thereby subordinating consumer interests to those of
producers. Third, that state forms privilege the interests of the knowl-
edgeable, articulate, active or merely noisy over and above those of
people who do not wish to make political participation central to their
conception of the good (Seldon 1990: 99). Fourth, that public bodies
offer consumers only the ‘cumbrous political channels’ (Friedman
1962: 91) associated with what Hirschman (1970) calls ‘voice’,

19
Perhaps the contemporary thinker who most obviously bridges the two sides of
the meddling critique is the libertarian Robert Nozick, who begins his opus
Anarchy, State and Utopia with the arresting proposition that ‘Individuals have
rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violat-
ing their rights)’ (1974: ix). Unlike many liberals, Nozick rejects the social con-
tract as an artifice which, lacking empirical credentials, is in danger of allowing
all sorts of metaphysical assumptions about the source and proper trajectory of
the good favoured by the author to contaminate the foundations of the state.
Instead, starting from a strong premise of self-ownership (including ownership
of property acquired from the exploitation of individual talents), he prefers to
draw upon the classical economist Adam Smith’s famous device of the ‘invisible
hand’ to explain the emergence of the state from the destructive and unstable
contest between ‘protective associations’ that the state of nature is assumed to
generate. The resultant entity is only, however, legitimate in its minimal form,
enforcing criminal law, punishing transgressors and prohibiting acts of ‘self-
exemption’ (Holmes 1995: 27), as well as providing the stable legal framework
necessary for market exchange. Any further extension of the redistributive or
other regulatory functions of the state involves immoral acts of coercion – at
worst the coerced removal of one individual’s legitimate holdings in order to
improve the lot of another and at best the forcible extinction of choice as to how
to protect and exploit what is one’s own (Nozick 1974: part II). Such a libertar-
ian perspective is equally suspicious of the two aspects of meddling – both arbi-
trary encroachment on citizens’ person and property and frustration of their
desire to do as they wish with their person and property.
The state as meddler 67

channels whose efficacy is hindered by the inability of consumers to

‘exit’. This style of thought does continue to recognize a sphere of
‘public goods’ whose non-excludability (and the associated problem of
free-riding) makes it necessary for such goods to be collectively
financed and provided, and policing is generally held to be among
these – a point we shall have cause to develop at some length in part
II. But the necessary involvement of the state in security stands as but
a pathological – and still dangerous and inefficient – exception to the
liberty-respecting purity of the free market (Hayek 1979: 46).10
What are the practical implications of this brand of scepticism? In
part, it generates the belief that state policing (or at least the non-coer-
cive aspects of it) should be exposed to the full blast of competition
from the private sector. But it also implies that sovereign individuals
should be able to break free from their undignified dependence on the
state and pursue their own self-determined security interests. They
should not, in other words, be prevented from clubbing together with
others to realize their freely chosen security goals (by, for example,
forming private residential associations or gated communities) or
seeking through voluntary market exchanges to purchase the hardware
and services they believe will make them secure, whether they be
burglar alarms, gates, CCTV systems or commercial security patrols.
Indeed, one of the particular fears neo-liberals and libertarians have
about the state is that its actors may seek to discourage, control or even
prohibit (in short, meddle in) these voluntary acts of security seeking.
Hence the efforts made by neo-liberal governments across the world in
recent years to encourage their citizens to take more personal respon-
sibility for the security of their person and property (Home Office
1994; cf. O’Malley 1992; Garland 2001: ch. 5). Hence also the
attempts of some neo-liberal economists to urge that governments act
to stimulate security markets by, for instance, offering tax incentives to
individuals who ‘improve the security of their own property and pur-
chase private policing services’ (Pyle 1995: 54; see also Elliot 1989).

10
There are some ‘anarcho-capitalists’ – such as Murray Rothbard (1985) and
Bruce Benson (1990) – who cut through the arguments about the necessary
minimal role of the state offered by social contract theorists and by libertarians
such as Nozick (1974), as well as by public choice theorists, arguing that the
state – and its law enforcement functions – can be dispensed with altogether and
replaced by ‘a fully privatized enterprise of law’ (Benson 1990: 357). For a fuller
discussion, see Loader (1997a).
68 On state scepticism

Limits of the meddling critique

Several – if by no means all – of the claims and concerns about the state
to be found under both branches of the meddling critique have a reso-
nance beyond the parameters of liberal and libertarian thought and
welfare economics. This form of state scepticism quite properly, in our
view, emphasizes that security is a basic good that serves as a precon-
dition for the meaningful exercise of liberty, even if it holds security to
possess no non-instrumental value beyond that. And it rightly concedes
the necessary place of the state in offering minimal guarantees of secur-
ity to all, even if it finds it difficult to specify and hold that minimum
line, and even if it sees no legitimate security-enhancing place for the
state other than that, and, indeed, is acutely concerned that it may
injure both personal liberty and security and curtail the sovereignty of
individual choice to expand the state’s place in the production of secu-
rity beyond the elusive minimum.
The liberal and neo-liberal/libertarian variants of state scepticism are,
accordingly, quite properly alert to the dangers that arise from concen-
trating the capacity to exercise legitimate force within a given territory
to a single entity – the paradox being, as mentioned, that the very
monopoly of violence that exists to guarantee the security and basic lib-
erties of individuals stands as an ever-present threat to that security and
liberty. It highlights, in other words, the inherently ‘double-edged’ char-
acter of state police institutions (N. Walker 2000: 6), even in their
capacity as upholders of ‘general order’ (Marenin 1982) – the mainte-
nance of public tranquillity and safety that is the indispensable basis for
social routines and the pursuit of individual purposes in which all sec-
tions of a society have a stake. In so doing, it pinpoints the propensity
of state police forces to exceed or abuse their power in ways that
directly impinge on the very individual rights and entitlements they are
‘contracted’ to protect – a tendency most glaringly apparent in weak,
failed or authoritarian states (Goldsmith 2003), but which remains a
feature of state policing even in more sustainably democratic settings.
At the very least, this scepticism about state power – a scepticism appar-
ent in the long-standing preoccupation of police studies with the (arbi-
trary, violent) operation of police powers and discretion (e.g. Westley
1970; D. Dixon 1997) – indicates the importance of forms of constitu-
tional and political regulation within any schema that seeks to defend
the proper place of the state in the just and democratic production of
The state as meddler 69

internal security, and even here it is rightly concerned with the blunt-
ness and fragility of such protective instruments.
It should, of course, come as no surprise that much of the meddling
critique commands widespread sympathy. As we have sought to argue,
the secular and individualist tendencies of the modern social imaginary
which underscore both the promise of the modern state and the
concern with coercive state interference have permeated across all of
contemporary thought, exposing tensions which it is literally unimag-
inable to dismiss. Yet this does not mean that the meddling critique
should be accepted uncritically, or that it has closed off all avenues for
alternative diagnosis and prognosis. Rather, the more expansive con-
ception of the state-security nexus we want to defend in this book must
also identify and address, and seek to transcend, certain shortcomings
exhibited in the meddling mindset, and particularly in the more
extreme neo-liberal/libertarian variants of this brand of scepticism
towards the state. Let us briefly highlight three.
The first concerns the preconditions that are required to create and
sustain limited, constitutional, rights-regarding states. There is, as
Margaret Canovan (1996: 38) points out, a tendency in classical liberal
theory to assume ‘that any fool can establish a nightwatchman state’
and a corresponding disregard for the forms of trust and solidarity
between strangers that provide the cultural conditions of possibility for
the minimal, rule-governed state that liberals find acceptable. But
surely such states require citizens to care about, and be prepared to do
something about, abuses of police power or, more broadly, to identify
with belonging to a polity in which the police are held to account and
the rights of all equally guaranteed? This, of course, raises some thorny
matters pertaining to the affective dimensions of social and political life
(to which we return in part II), issues that neo-liberal and libertarian
writers have tended to steer well clear of. They have remained too pre-
occupied with the (problem of the) state and the threat it poses to indi-
vidual freedom, and insufficiently attentive to the trust-building
functions of political community upon which the liberty and security
of citizens depend.
A second and related issue concerns the forms of individual security
seeking that neo-liberalism is eager to promote (or at least prevent the
state from preventing), and the conception of security upon which
these rely. This conception, in using a pre-social state of nature as its
reference point, is atomistic and unrelational. This has both conceptual
70 On state scepticism

and practical consequences. Conceptually, it helps explain the difficul-

ties liberals have with the balancing metaphor. For if the individual side
of the security equation contains no social dimension, there can be no
prospect of reconciliation with an idea of collective security which
sometimes challenges these individual conceptions in the name of some
broadly shared social good. The two become literally incommensu-
rable, and the liberal lacks any means of conceiving of deference to a
shared good in terms other than loss. Practically, the atomistic and
unrelational conception suggests forms of individual security-seeking
practices that are self-defeating and in a profound sense oxymoronic
(Loader 1997b), an ‘expression of the desire for sovereign agency’
(Markell 2003: 22) that depends upon and projects a semblance of
security produced by lifting oneself out of coexistence with others in
order to render one’s own existence less contingently vulnerable and
the future more predictable. These practices are often at the same time
exercises of private power. They eschew democratic political life in
order to achieve ‘distributive outcomes according to one’s assets, skills
and preferences’ (Offe 2003: 450) in a manner corrosive of the forms
of trust and solidarity which any sustainable notion of the public good
of security draws upon and, in its turn, replenishes. Neo-liberalism
remains committed, in other words, to forms of security that ‘organize
the world in ways that make it possible for certain people to enjoy an
imperfect simulation of the invulnerability they desire, leaving others
to bear a disproportionate share of the costs and burdens involved in
social life’ (Markell 2003: 22).
The current proliferation of these private – anti-social – security
practices raises the question, thirdly, of whether – as neo-liberals main-
tain – the state’s always potentially intrusive and counter-productive
attempts to ‘insert some logic into the messy human predicament’
(Bauman and Tester 2001: 137) are the source of social misery and
insecurity in the world today. Might it not be suggested, instead, that
the fragmentation and weakness of public political authority also lie at
the heart of the contemporary security constellation, whether in
respect of weak states whose repression of their citizens serves so often
to mask their lack of effective infrastructural power, or in liberal
democracies faced with growing market-induced disparities in the
security resources available to their citizens? As we have seen, the state
is no mere contingent product of the modern social imaginary, but the
very frame of secular organization in which its hopes and fears alike
The state as meddler 71

are invested and reap their dividend. The state may contain certain
ineradicable tensions, but if the only response is ‘as little as possible’,
then that is to concede too much to the fears, with nothing to put in its
place except other and more partial forms of the regulation (or dereg-
ulation) of secular affairs. The state is not the pathological message of
modernity, but merely its (unavoidable) messenger, and, here as else-
where, shooting the messenger can be no answer. Against this back-
drop, neo-liberal and libertarian forms of state scepticism seem simply
to be ‘barking up the wrong tree’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 137). As
Zygmunt Bauman says: ‘Too much of the state is a catastrophe, but so
is too little’ (2001: 137).

Conceptual foundations
It should hopefully be obvious by now why we have started with the
meddling critique, and why we must keep it constantly in mind while
exploring the other brands of state scepticism. The meddling critique
is inextricably bound up with the very idea of the modern state – with
both its historical foundations and its social development – and we can
and should no more dismiss it than we can or should seek to eradicate
the state itself. The partisan, culturally imperial or idiot state – the
respective subjects of the following three chapters – is always first and
foremost a meddling state. Without the capacity and propensity to
meddle, to act against the basic liberty and security interests of those
whom it is supposed to serve, the state could not engage in these other
pathologies; and, conversely, where or to the extent that it is innocent
of these other pathologies, the meddling concern remains a live and
pervasive one.
Yet it is not only the strength of the meddling critique but also its
shortcomings which provide a bridge to later sections of the book. If
the modern social imaginary lies at the source not only of the state, but
also of the very notion of immanent political critique and the master
ideology of liberalism, then we might expect the framework concerns
of this mindset to surface again in our tour of state scepticism, and so
should remain alert to the limitations of that mindset. We should be
wary of the preoccupation with the atomized individual, and of the
limits and dangers of the conceptual opposition of individuality and
sociality. Most of all, we should be wary of any tendency to view the
state as at best a necessary and at worst an expendable evil, rather than
72 On state scepticism

simply as the site within which the tensions of the modern social imag-
inary are inevitably played out – for good or for ill. This caution will
by no means provide all the answers we seek, but, hopefully, it will
allow our enquiry to be neither seduced by false utopias nor con-
founded by false dystopias.
 3 The state as partisan

W
e turn now to an image of the state, and a form of state scep-
ticism, associated more with the political left than with lib-
erals and the neo-liberal and libertarian right. It has deep
roots in socialist and anarchist politics and through that pedigree line
provides an exemplar of the anti-state thought which emerged hand in
hand with the state tradition in the manner discussed in the previous
chapter. As a disposition towards the state, it can, moreover, be argued
to possess a contemporary relevance that stretches well beyond those
bodies of deeply sedimented critical leftist thought, with proponents of
this stance endorsing the broad concern of the liberal and the free mar-
keteer about state violence and the paradoxes inherent in concentrat-
ing the power of legitimate coercion in the container of the state. But
there the resemblance begins and ends. In contrast to liberalism, this
leftist variant of state scepticism argues that the state’s monopoly of
violence is not merely a necessary precondition for the maintenance
of a consensual ‘general order’. The police are, rather, a vehicle for
upholding what Marenin (1982) calls ‘specific order’. They are a means
of fortifying either the interests of the state itself, or those of con-
stituencies favoured by the present configuration of economic and
social relations. The state is, on this view, a partisan actor in social and
political life, as are its agents the police. It is as such an evil, an
unwanted and unwelcome force that needs to be monitored, exposed,
struggled against and – depending on the particular variant of leftist
politics – radically reformed or transcended.
In this chapter we present and scrutinize two instances of this radical
critique of the state. The first has been a staple of work in critical crim-
inology and police studies for some three decades or so. It posits the state
as being structurally tied to dominant private interests, systematically
directed towards coercing the weak and the poor, and integral to the
reproduction of relations of inequality organized around class, gender,
ethnicity, age and sexuality. This argument is most readily invoked in

73
74 On state scepticism

relation to authoritarian political regimes, as we shall see. But it also

offers critical purchase on the operation of state power in more sustain-
ably democratic societies, not least in divided societies or in states that
have since the 1980s been captured and streamlined by neo-liberal gov-
ernments. The second is associated more with work in international rela-
tions and critical security studies, though it too finds expression in
current criminological writing. This focuses on the advent – both prior
to 9/11 and as part of the ‘war on terror’ waged in response to it – of a
‘new state of exception’. It addresses the presence today of a seemingly
permanent and boundless emergency state, one whose securitizing prac-
tices lay bare the violence that underpins ‘democratic’ politics and rep-
resent a clear and present danger to democracy and political liberty –
both at home and abroad.
Our aim is to review the respective claims of these two overlapping
strands of radical state scepticism. We consider in each case the ways
in which they illuminate current developments in policing and security
practice. And we identify the issues that this state-sceptical disposition
raises for the position we develop and defend in this book. Having
done this, we conclude by pinpointing the blindspots of a stance
that remains devoted to a critique of the state and, as such, unable
or unwilling to grasp its indispensability to the project of civilizing
security.

Partisan states
Critical criminology has since its inception taken as its leitmotiv the
idea that the state and state power are a problem. This claim has over
the last three decades been advanced in different theoretical registers,
with contrasting degrees of sophistication, and in the name of various
categories of oppressed groups. We cannot hope to detail here either
the range of radical perspectives on the state or their application to
questions of policing and security, and we do not intend to try. Suffice
it to say that some of these are pressed in relation to social class, base
their diagnosis and prognosis on one or other variant of Marxist state
theory (cf. Miliband 1969; Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 1990) and are con-
cerned, broadly, with how police institutions are conditioned by rela-
tions of property ownership and production which these institutions,
in turn, help to reproduce (Spitzer 1981; Brogden 1982; Grimshaw and
Jefferson 1987). Others develop critiques of the state from the vantage
The state as partisan 75

point of feminist (MacKinnon 1989) or critical race theory (Goldberg

2001), and have been concerned with the differential treatment that
women, or ethnic minorities, receive either as police officers or as recip-
ients of police attention or misrecognition and neglect (Scraton 1987;
Cashmore and McLaughlin 1991; Westmarland 2001).
What can be said generally about these critical perspectives is that
each is organized around some version of the claim that the state func-
tions to protect and reproduce dominant interests and values. Each
posits the police – an institution which is to the state what the knife’s
edge is to the knife (Marenin 1996a: 10) – as a vital force in the main-
tenance of prevailing political and social order. So too, more broadly,
is the ideologically unifying appeal to ‘law and order’ that is mobilized
to mask and sustain relations of domination in which marginalized
populations are systematically subject to ‘over-control’ and ‘under-
protection’. In so arguing, this depiction of the state presents a whole-
sale challenge to liberal social-contract theorists who understand the
state as being formed by equals to whom that state promises equal pro-
tection, and to the related self-image and ideological representation of
the police as politically neutral state agents delivering an impartial,
uniform service to all.
As a way into these issues, we may usefully borrow two now rather
unfashionable categories from the Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser. It can be said first that the police function as part – arguably,
to continue the knife analogy, the sharpest part – of what Althusser
(1971) calls the repressive state apparatus. Under this heading, one
might pinpoint several salient dimensions of policing practice in struc-
turally divided societies. Firstly, we can point to the ways in which
routine police deployments focus disproportionately on the economi-
cally and socially excluded so as to reproduce patterns of domination
organized around class (P. Cohen 1979), race and ethnicity (Keith
1993), gender (Brown and Heidensohn 2000) and age (Loader 1996).
This becomes most nakedly apparent in respect of those social groups
(such as vagrants or migrants) whose disconnection from economic
and social institutions renders their social control almost wholly a
matter of policing – groups evocatively referred to by J. Lee (1981) as
‘police property’. Secondly, one can highlight the manner in which
police force is called upon at moments of socio-economic and political
crisis to uphold the status quo by quelling the presenting symptoms of
economic and social inequalities or development – whether in respect
76 On state scepticism

of urban unrest, industrial strife or political protest. We return shortly

to these aspects of the relationship between policing and the social.
But policing and security institutions also function as part of what
Althusser calls the ideological state apparatus. They are one of a range
of bodies – the media, churches, the family, education systems – whose
practices seek to manufacture and sustain the consent of the ruled by
masking the unjust or oppressive ‘realities’ of prevailing economic and
social arrangements. Part of this involves finessing the coercive char-
acter of the state itself. Radical critiques have, in this vein, sought to
expose how the formal protections associated with the rule of law are
undone by the practical application of substantive categories of
inequality (McConville et al. 1991). Such critiques have similarly con-
tended that various ‘soft’ policing strategies – notably community
policing – aim principally to win the consent of routinely policed pop-
ulations by obscuring the ‘hard’ realities of the ‘coercive state’ – the
velvet glove covering and cushioning the iron fist (Bernstein et al. 1982;
Gordon 1984). But policing institutions also serve as an ideological
unifier in a more general sense. Through their socially authorized
power of ‘legitimate naming’, they are able to diagnose, classify and
represent the world in ways that apply forms of social glue at moments
of political crisis; articulating the crisis as one of ‘law and order’ and
highlighting and censuring assorted ‘folk devils’ as the cause of moral
breakdown and social malaise (Hall et al. 1978; Loader and Mulcahy
2003: ch. 7). This dimension of police power segues closely with the
state’s capacity to act as a ‘cultural monolith’. We therefore address it
mainly in the next chapter.
For now let us try to put some flesh on these claims by considering
several cases in which it may be argued that such partisanship is man-
ifest. This argument is most readily applicable to authoritarian politi-
cal systems. We mean by this systems which lack – or only weakly
embody – free and fair elections for political office, respect for the rule
of law and protection of human rights, systems in which ‘efficacy’
becomes the sole criterion for judging the performance of policing and
security institutions. This, of course, is a more or less adequate descrip-
tion of a range of political forms both historical and contemporary,
including colonial systems, former and current communist regimes,
and military or patrimonial states (and, as we argue in chapter 8,
democratic societies, too, can harbour authoritarian tendencies). It is
also important to add that significant variation can be found both
The state as partisan 77

between these different types of authoritarian rule and between states

within each category (Marenin 1996b; Mawby 2003). Colonial rule
admitted a range of styles of both administration in general and polic-
ing in particular (Anderson and Killingray 1991). China, Cuba and the
former Soviet Union cannot adequately be treated as one for policing
– or indeed other governmental – purposes. The parameters and
dynamics of authoritarian rule do not amount to the same thing in
Saudi Arabia, Indonesia or Zimbabwe; nor do the legacies left by dic-
tatorship in ‘societies in transition’ such as Argentina, Brazil, El
Salvador, South Africa and the former Soviet satellites in eastern
Europe.
These differences are plainly important for any proper assessment of
policing in authoritarian settings. For present purposes, however, we
can fruitfully focus upon those features of authoritarian policing
systems that most clearly reveal the partisanship of state power and its
effects on the liberty and security of individuals.1 Prominent among
these recurring elements are a concentration on what Brodeur (1983)
calls ‘high’ policing. Policing in authoritarian states is first and fore-
most about protecting the interests and ideology of the regime/leader-
ship/party, as well as the private interests that it supports and that
support it. The focus of secret and uniformed police agencies is on
monitoring populations, the surveillance of political opponents and
quelling dissident activity and public disorder, tasks for which they are
given draconian powers. The flipside is that secondary importance is
accorded to the prevention and control of ‘ordinary’ crime (e.g. Stanley
1996). The police in authoritarian settings function as the hierarchi-
cally organized, executive arm of the political centre, are subject to no
independent oversight or control, and have little or no popular
mandate. They tend to work in tandem with the security forces with

11
There is a voluminous literature on policing in authoritarian states on which we
have selectively drawn and condensed in order to advance our specific analytic
purposes. We have found most useful the following: on colonial policing –
Brogden (1987), Anderson and Killingray (1991, 1992), Ahire (1998); on polic-
ing in communist regimes – Michalowski (1992), Shelley (1997), Wong (2002);
on policing in Latin America – Huggins (1998), Caldeira (2001), Goldsmith
(2003); on policing in post-communist states – Lo – ś and Zybertowicz (2000),
Kadar (2001), Uildriks and van Reenan (2003). We have also drawn upon
Marenin’s (1996c) collection on the intersection between policing and political
change, and the tradition of scholarship on comparative policing (Bayley 1985;
Mawby 1990, 1999, 2003).
78 On state scepticism

whom – tellingly – they are often barracked. In authoritarian states no

meaningful distinction is drawn between ‘national defence’ and ‘inter-
nal security’. Fear operates as a central category of political rule ( Lo – ś
2002).
Authoritarian states can be strong – or at least give the appearance
of being so. But they are often today ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states, either
unable to provide basic social goods (including security) to their
people, or competing with alternative power centres for the control of
territory and the monopoly of the means of violence (Rotberg 2003).
Weakness or failure seldom however signals equanimity. When states
falter, police and military institutions are the last to display signs of
weakness – though their strength can often inhere not in being directed
from the centre but in an excessive autonomy to define and pursue their
own interests. Indeed, violent repression of the population tends to
exist in inverse proportion to the lack of infrastructural capacity
(Goldsmith 2003), and in contexts of civil unrest or insurgency failing
states frequently resort to brutal interrogation and the deadly use of
force against their populations.
When authoritarian states are weak or have failed, or are under-
going processes of transition, crime and violence often spiral out of
control, as do levels of public insecurity. This tends to generate degrees
of popular identification with repressive policing – demands for states
to crack down on new sources of fear. It can also give a lease of life, as
in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, to new – often crimi-
nal – protection enterprises ‘founded largely on the former secret secu-
rity structures’ (Loś
– 2002: 181), or, as in Latin America, to anxious
middle classes hiring armed groups to eradicate ‘street kids’ (Brazil) or
delinquente (Colombia). The poor and dispossessed are thus often
caught at the receiving end of partisan forms of both state and private
violence. These, moreover, can come together in deadly symbiosis, as
Michael Taussig’s ethnography of violence-saturated Colombia – Law
in a Lawless Land (2003) – so powerfully shows.
We are confronted here with states that are deeply violent and
nakedly partisan – states that offend conservative and liberal sensibil-
ities as well as those of state-sceptical radicals. But the latters’ critique
of the state does not only reference so obviously authoritarian regimes.
It can also offer insights into policing systems in liberal democratic
societies governed by electoral competition, the rule of law and respect
for human rights – states with formally independent policing systems.
The state as partisan 79

These states too come in different guises, as does their architecture of

policing. Significant differences are to be found between policing
systems in the USA (with its mix of federal, state, county, city and
almost countless small-town police forces); England and Wales (with
its common law ideology of the constable as ‘citizen-in-uniform’) and
the military-based gendarmes found in continental Europe (Emsley
2000; Mawby 2003). We can again, however, concentrate on the com-
monalities. Foremost among these – the radical state sceptic maintains
– is that policing in these settings remains tied to dominant interests
(organized around axes of class, gender, race and age) and integral to
the reproduction of unjust economic and social relations. Several
claims are advanced in support of this proposition.
The principal charge is that even in formally democratic states the
police form a constitutive element of a political order that allocates
resources and recognition in ways that disproportionately benefit some
social groups at the expense of others. And this includes the good of
security, with ‘over-control’ and ‘under-protection’ by the police stand-
ing as a reliable indicator of one’s marginality and powerlessness.
Policing, in other words, operates in these notionally equal, rights-
regarding societies in ways that are systematically biased. The police
offer a service to the propertied middle classes, while being targeted
disproportionately as a force at those located at society’s margins – the
destitute, the ‘dangerous’ poor – or those deemed to threaten its polit-
ical centres – what former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher
once called the ‘enemy within’. These distinctions, moreover, find
themselves embedded and reproduced in the working cultures of police
organizations and in the practical categories of apprehension that offi-
cers bring to their social ordering and crime-control tasks (Shearing
1981).
As Margaret Thatcher’s depiction of striking miners suggests, this
systemic bias is ‘revealed’ most clearly at times of social conflict and
political crisis, when the police are called upon to take on organized
labour (e.g. Fine and Millar 1984; McCabe et al. 1988), or control
political protest (e.g. Della Porta and Reiter 1998, 2004), or quell urban
disorders (e.g. Skolnick 1969; Cowell et al. 1982) – often in ways inju-
rious to the liberty and security of already marginalized populations.
But it remains a recurring feature of capitalist democracies even at times
of political calm. What forms of harm, violation and abuse pass unno-
ticed, lightly policed and rarely punished in such societies, the radical
80 On state scepticism

state sceptic asks? Those of the rich and powerful. And who – in liberal
democracies throughout the world – is most likely to be stopped,
searched, arrested, detained, prosecuted, imprisoned, even killed in
custody? Answer: young, impoverished, ethnic-minority males.
Two examples can help to put some sociohistorical flesh on these
contentions. The first concerns patterns of policing in divided – but
nonetheless democratic – societies. Northern Ireland offers a good case
in point here, though claims of state partisanship have also been
pressed in polities with indigenous populations (such as aborigines in
Australia and Canada) or minority groups seeking greater autonomy
or secession (such as the Basques in Spain). Not only are the practices
of indigenous or minority groups frequently subject to processes of cul-
tural misrecognition and disproportionate police attention – as is strik-
ingly evident, for example, in the case of Australian and Canadian
aborigines (Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
1991; Stenning and LaPrairie 2003). The demands of minorities are
also often framed by states as threats to national security and
responded to as such (Kymlicka 2005).
In the case of Northern Ireland, critics have argued that Stormont
and – following the imposition of direct rule in 1972 – the British state
have operated in ways that systematically protect the interests, culture
and security of the Protestant majority at the expense of those of the
Catholic minority. The partisanship and associated illegitimacy of the
state exists, in turn, in a close and mutually reinforcing relationship to
that of the police and security forces (Weitzer 1995; Ellison and Smyth
2000; Walker and Telford 2000). The Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC), from its formation in 1922 to its replacement by the Police
Service for Northern Ireland in 2003, was staffed overwhelmingly by
members of the Protestant community whose interests (and state) it
defended, and who in turn lent it passionate, often unconditional
support. It has, conversely, been deeply suspected by nationalists who
felt the grip of its coercive hand while being unable to call upon it as a
service. In the context of ‘The Troubles’, the RUC operated in close
tandem with the military, prioritized the suppression of political vio-
lence over the control of ordinary crime, and was alleged to have oper-
ated a covert ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy towards suspected terrorists and
colluded with Protestant paramilitaries in the murder of Catholics. The
police, in short, came in this ‘democratic’ setting to assume many of
the features associated with forces in authoritarian states – centrally
The state as partisan 81

controlled, barracked with the security forces with whom they are
entwined, focused on protecting the regime by suppressing political
violence and dissent, and subject to little or no independent oversight.
In the context of the current ‘peace process’, it remains an open ques-
tion whether a democratic future can be forged out of this legacy of
partisanship, and if so how (Patten 1999; Ellison and Mulcahy 2001;
Mulcahy 2005: part IV).
But it is not only in situations of communal conflict that democratic
states function as partisans. The leftist state sceptic can point, as a
second example, to the rise of ‘law and order’ politics (and its attendant
policing and penal strategies) in societies that have since the 1980s been
ruled by neo-liberal governments espousing the very state-sceptical
ideals we discussed in the last chapter. This principally means the
USA, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, though, as Loïc Wacquant
(2003) notes, free-market doxa is actively being ‘exported’ from the
USA (often via Britain) and often enthusiastically ‘imported’ by gov-
ernments and populations in western Europe, the former Soviet bloc
and Latin America. What these societies have witnessed in the last two
decades is a radical redrawing of the parameters and purposes of the
state, with (supposedly initiative-sapping) welfare provision being
elbowed out by the values and practices of the market. The social state
and disciplined market have given way – materially, to footloose capital
and the penal state (Gamble 1988; Wacquant 2003) and ideologically,
to forms of ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall 1980) that mobilize the
demons and massage the fears of an anxious, discontented majority. As
the state’s ‘left hand’ (of public provision) has been withdrawn, so its
‘right hand’ (of police and penal force) has come to the fore in a bid to
contain the social effects of the insecurities and exclusions that global-
ized market societies produce (Bourdieu et al. 1999; Parenti 1999;
I. Taylor 1999).
The result is neo-liberal democracies dominated today by new polic-
ing strategies – zero-tolerance, curfews, anti-social behaviour orders –
aimed at ‘cracking down’ on the disorder and incivilities of the urban
poor in ways that are inimical to civil liberties and conducive to abuses
of police power. Following the (it should be said, much disputed)
‘success’ of zero-tolerance policing in cutting crime in New York City,
these strategies are now being trumpeted globally by a tireless band of
police and political entrepreneurs (Dennis 1997; Bratton 1998). What
is being promulgated is a new rationality for governing the ‘outcasts’
82 On state scepticism

of the neo-liberal world (Bauman 2004), one which concentrates

resources and powers on the police and accords ideological pre-
eminence to a ‘get tough’ policing solution to the problem of order.
Policing, by these means, has become tied up with a neo-liberal stream-
lining of government – one that has seen forms of social support for the
poor superseded by anti-social control strategies aimed by a partisan,
minimal state at the poor.
What lessons may we distil from this dissection of the biases that
attend policing and security practices in both authoritarian and demo-
cratic states? There is little doubt that this leftist variant of state scep-
ticism is valuable in highlighting the intersection between policing and
security and various axes of social stratification; in pinpointing how in
structurally divided societies the security of some groups is secured at
the expense of others; and in its suggestion that the state is no mere
neutral umpire holding the ring in conflicts between different societal
interests. In all these ways, it poses a strong challenge to the position
we want to defend. When confronted with the suggestion that security
can be conceptualized as a public good it asks: whose security? which
public? what good? It stands quizzically aghast at the idea that forms
of trust and solidarity can (or indeed should) be fostered between con-
stituencies with such structurally divergent interests. It asks: what is the
point of democratizing security if the rules of the political game are
stacked in such a way that certain groups find themselves losing time
and again? And it questions the sociological wisdom and normative
value of a perspective that places such a deeply biased entity as the state
at the heart of a project to produce more equitable distributions of
policing and security resources – whether in authoritarian or formally
democratic contexts.
These are important objections and we will return to them shortly.
First we must address ourselves to forms of policing and military prac-
tice that have deepened still further radical scepticism towards sover-
eign state power.

The new state of exception

The second strand of leftist state scepticism we consider in this chapter
takes its cue from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’, orig-
inally published in 1921 (Benjamin 1921/1985). In this piece, Benjamin
takes issue with the idea that the police institution is connected to
The state as partisan 83

‘general law’, still less subject to it. Rather, for Benjamin, ‘the “law” of
the police really marks the point at which the state . . . can no longer
guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at
any price to attain. Therefore the police intervene “for security reasons”
in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists’ (1921/1985:
141). Law, Benjamin argues, can be located in a specific place and time
that renders it open to critical evaluation. The police institution, by con-
trast, presents nothing solid, graspable, or controllable at all: ‘Its power
is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in
the life of civilized states’ (1921/1985: 141–2). It, consequently, ‘bears
witness’ – more so in a democracy than in absolutist systems that make
no pretence of subjecting executive will to popular oversight – ‘to the
greatest conceivable degeneration of violence’ (141–2). Police power is
not violence fenced in and directed by reason and law, but violence
beyond reason and law.
Benjamin’s remarks offer an insight into the intersection between
police power and sovereign statehood that has been developed in recent
years by those working broadly in ‘critical security studies’ (e.g.
Agamben 1993, 2004a; Campbell and Dillon 1993; R. B. J. Walker
1997; Neocleous 2000). Two sets of interconnected claims found within
this literature are relevant here. The first is a leftist articulation of Carl
Schmitt’s characterization of modern politics and sovereignty. For
Schmitt – writing in the context of the faltering Weimar Republic in the
1920s – the fundamental and irreducible element of what he terms ‘the
political’ is the drawing of the ‘friend–enemy’ distinction (Schmitt
1933/1996). The task of the sovereign is to decide on external and inter-
nal foes and to adopt such measures as will protect the integrity of the
state from them – in return for which he can demand obedience from a
people ‘terrified’ by their own radical insecurity ‘into the arms of author-
ity’ (McCormick 1997: 253). The political is, moreover, a realm of
authority not law, one that calls upon firm, absolute decisions, not
endless, polity-debilitating discussion. The sovereign state must decide
and decide alone on both the figure of the enemy and what must be done
to prevail over it, taking the necessary decisions with requisite speed
unfettered by the kinds of parliamentary deliberation and legal restraint
that may fatally weaken its capacity to perform this essential task.
‘Sovereign’, as Schmitt infamously put it, ‘is he who decides on the
exception’ (1922/1985: 5) – by which he meant both when a situation
is exceptional and what measures the exception requires.
84 On state scepticism

What, though – for radical state sceptics working in the field of secu-
rity – is the attraction of these authoritarian propositions? The answer,
in short, is that Schmitt troublingly brings to the fore both the deep
antagonisms that constitute political life and the role of extra-legal vio-
lence in constituting democratic polities that aim to be free of such vio-
lence – matters which liberal political thought is alleged to have
effaced, or at least sought to (Mouffe 1999). In particular, Schmitt
highlights the unlimited, violent decisionism that remains concealed
during moments of political tranquility only to be unmasked when the
state enacts its sovereignty by declaring an exception and exercising its
will accordingly (Agamben 1998; see, also, Derrida 1992; Taussig
1997; R. B. J. Walker 2004).
The second – closely related – claim is that ‘security’ provides the dis-
cursive site though which claims to exceptionalism are mobilized and
its practices enacted. As the ‘principle of formation’ of modern politi-
cal order, security ‘saturates the language of modern politics. Our polit-
ical vocabularies reek of it and our political imagination is confined by
it’ (Dillon 1996: 12). It does so, moreover, in ways that tie it intimately
and with deleterious effect to the state. By invoking security, the state
calls forth an anti-political and anti-pluralist political practice wherein
the problem at hand (be it terrorism, or drugs, or migration, or . . .) is
declared to involve imperatives instead of trade-offs and political
choices, to call for authoritative decision rather than democratic delib-
eration (or, in Schmitt’s view, indecision), and to warrant the restric-
tion of basic liberties as the price to be paid for the maintenance of
public security. These practices are, moreover, fuelled by security’s sig-
nification of an infinite and ever-disappearing horizon of possibility –
its rhetorical self-presentation as a condition beyond our grasp that
appears endlessly to require more ‘security measures’. Security, in
short, is the conduit through which a particular form of partisanship
proceeds – one in which the state takes such extra-legal measures as it
deems necessary to defend its interests and integrity. It is the paradigm
of Leviathan unbound.
Understood thus, the state of exception plainly antedates 9/11 and
the ‘war on terror’ that is being prosecuted in response to it. Indeed,
this variant of state scepticism would identify exceptionalism in many
of the quotidian acts of partisan states examined thus far. A consid-
eration of the ‘securitizing’ practices that constitute this ‘war’ none-
theless help to further our understanding of this radical variant of state
The state as partisan 85

and security scepticism. Some care is needed here, however. There is a

degree of overlap between the claims of this radical anti-statism and
the concerns expressed by liberal writers about the liberty-eroding
effects of the present security constellation – concerns that we in large
measure share. The liberal worry prompts a discourse about the vexed
but vital task of tackling terrorism democratically (e.g. Ackerman
2004; Golove and Holmes 2004; Ignatieff 2004; Rorty 2004). By con-
trast, the leftist critique of the ‘war on terror’ inspired by Benjamin and
Schmitt insists that it reveals certain endemic features of sovereign vio-
lence in ‘democratic’ societies, such that ‘in our age, the state of excep-
tion comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental
political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule’ (Agamben
1998: 20; see also Agamben 2004b: 609; R. B. J. Walker 2004). There
is no question here of combating terror democratically or, more gener-
ally, of civilizing security, as we shall see. Four elements of the current
security landscape help to illuminate this particular state-sceptical
disposition.
First, there is the advent of the USA as a self-appointed global
hegemon in a unipolar world, a state that defines and pursues its own
security interests either unilaterally, or with whatever ‘coalitions of the
willing’ it is able strategically to assemble (Buzan 2004). The USA today
operates in ways that bypass multilateral institutions or resort to them
instrumentally (N. Walker 2006a; forthcoming a), treat international
law as but one policy consideration among many, and refuse to be hide-
bound by constraints upon its freedom to act (such as the International
Criminal Court, which the US government has refused to ratify on the
grounds that it would gift to its enemies an opportunity for persecution
of its ‘good faith’ warriors which they would ruthlessly exploit). The
USA, of course, has throughout the period since 1945 engaged in –
mainly covert – acts of ‘regime change’ and often sought to depict itself
as ‘the world’s policeman’. But in the aftermath of 9/11, in the face of
new and diffuse enemies, it has claimed the right to strike pre-emptively
and unilaterally, not merely to defend its security interests, but – in the
project for the new century proposed by the neo-conservative hawks in
Washington – to spread liberal freedom around the globe (The White
House 2002). In each case, the exercise of sovereign will is to be fettered
not by any countervailing civilizing power, but only ‘by its own sense
of restraint’ (Kagan 2004: 70). The result, critics allege, is the creation
of a new imperial power offering the hand of protection to those it
86 On state scepticism

deems friends in return for supine obedience, while intervening by force

of arms if necessary to reorder states which are, or which harbour or
otherwise assist, its enemies – states whose sovereignty has by the fact
of US power been rendered contingent.2
But what holds on the international stage also has parallels at home.
We have witnessed, secondly, in the name of protecting democracies
against terrorism, a strengthening of the executive and an empowering
of security institutions. New powers, bigger budgets and a much freer
hand of discretion have been granted to police and intelligence agen-
cies – all in the name of enabling the kinds of lightly fettered, rapid-
fire, unilateral executive action deemed necessary to pursue and defeat
enemies at times of crisis (Scheuerman 2002). Prominent among these
measures are the following: (i) the extended powers of surveillance and
data-gathering granted by the USA PATRIOT Act 2001 and the
cognate provisions found in the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act 2001
and the British Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 and
Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 – measures that have parallels in a
wide range of jurisdictions around the world (see, e.g., Roach 2001;
Lyon 2003: ch. 2); (ii) the formation of the new greatly empowered
Department of Homeland Security in the USA; and (iii) the enabling of
executive detention and military tribunals in the USA and the preven-
tative detention without trial of terrorist suspects in the UK. The
former has suspended habeas corpus and due process rights for some
20 million non-citizens resident in the USA (Arato 2002: 458–9), while
the latter has required the British government to derogate from its
responsibilities under the European Convention on Human Rights.
None of this, moreover, is random or even-handed in its targets and
effects. While the daily life of the majority of citizens remains in large

12
There is an expanding cottage industry on the question of American Empire
which presses this claim in a variety of registers. For radicals of the sort under
discussion here, American imperialism entails a new mode of planetary oppres-
sion and tutelage pursued in the name of protecting US economic interests and
disseminating neo-liberal doxa (Hardt and Negri 2000; Harvey 2003). For other
progressives, it stands as a dangerous temptation of America’s hegemonic power
in the world (Barber 2003), or as an incoherent and fatal overreach of military
power (Mann 2003). There are, by contrast, some liberals and conservatives
who view US imperial rule – more or less enthusiastically – as an indispensable
ordering mechanism within the contemporary international landscape – the
attendant worry here being that the USA lacks the necessary domestic commit-
ment to the long haul (see Ignatieff 2003; Ferguson 2004). For more detailed dis-
cussion, see chapter 9.
The state as partisan 87

measure unaffected, surveillance is intensified against members of the

very minority groups that partisan states have long since directed
police attention towards. In a context where ‘external threat’ and
‘internal contaminant’ have become blurred (Newman 2004: 580), this
has been particularly marked in respect of both resident Muslim pop-
ulations and refugees/asylum seekers. Nor are these measures without
their symbolic resonance and sociocultural spill-over, whether in terms
of increasing lay enmity (and violence) towards minority groups,
eroding the support of fearful citizens for democratic rights and free-
doms deemed to protect ‘terrorists’ and imperil public safety, or in
subtle but telling militarizations of mundane culture (as evident in sales
of the civilian version of the US army vehicle, ‘the Hummer’).3
In these respects, the leftist state sceptic argues, we have witnessed a
dangerous reassertion and extension of state power – one that has
amounted in effect to a ‘war on freedom and democracy’ (Bunyan
2002). But the ‘war on terror’ has, thirdly, given a boost to new or inten-
sified forms of security cooperation between states and to the micro-
power of transnational networks of policing and security professionals.
The most telling developments here have occurred within the European
Union (EU). In respect of the former, one can point specifically to the
‘fast-tracking’ – post 9/11 – of the European Arrest Warrant and the
common definition of terrorism and, more generally, to an escalating
frenzy of intergovernmental security activity under the rubric of the
‘Area of Freedom, Justice and Security’ – activity that has, among other
things, deepened the tendency to posit areas of public policy such as
migration/asylum as security problems (den Boer and Monar 2002;
Gilmore 2002; N. Walker 2004; Bigo and Guild 2005; Huysmans
2006). In terms of the latter, one can highlight enhanced levels of police
and judicial cooperation within Europe and intelligence sharing with
the USA, a greater role for Europol in combating terrorism, and the
empowerment of opaque professional networks such as the Task Force
of European Police Chiefs and the now regular meetings of intelligence

13
It is far from insignificant in this context that the USA PATRIOT Act is an
acronym, standing for ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’. This legisla-
tion extends a recent trend in the USA to name criminal legislation after high-
profile victims, the most notable instance being the anti-paedophile statute
‘Megan’s Law’ (Simon 2001). In the present case, of course, the named recipient
is a collective victim, the act a sign of its determination to ‘fight back’.
88 On state scepticism

heads. To this one may add the formation of a standing EU civil (i.e.
police) peacekeeping force with a mission to deploy ‘humanizing’ force
in conflict zones around the world – notably thus far in the Balkans
(Caygill 2001).
The charges in respect of each of these developments run broadly in
the same direction: that the ‘war on terror’ has reinforced an already
existing trend to privilege ‘internal security’ over ‘freedom’ and
‘justice’ in the development of the EU, such that it risks transmogrify-
ing into an ‘integrated law enforcement zone’ (den Boer and Monar
2002: 27) targeting suspect populations in ways inimical to social
justice and human rights; that it has buttressed and empowered what
was already emerging as a bureaucratic transnational security elite of
officials and security professionals – an elite that exercises micro-
power in opaque, informal settings at some remove from any kind of
effective legal oversight and public scrutiny (Hayes 2002). A further
charge is that the EU – like the USA – has developed the capacity and
will to bring its moral order to peoples elsewhere in the world in a way
that deploys violence in the service of morality and ‘leads to the gradual
abandonment of the territorial principle of modern statehood’
(Douzinas 2003: 177).
This brings us, fourthly, to the blurring of certain key distinctions
that once structured the field of security – a trend that pre-dates the
‘war on terror’ but which has been accelerated by it (Andreas and
Price 2001). The first of these concerns internal and external security,
policework and soldiering. Here one encounters a de-differentiation
of once distinct worlds that have, since the end of the Cold War, been
‘converging towards the same enemy’ (Bigo 2000a: 173). External
security agencies (notably, the army and intelligence services, but also
customs and immigration officers) now seek out enemies at home
and, in the case of the military, are called upon to secure domestic
infrastructure – airports, bridges, utility installations – from attack.
Soldiers, moreover, have since 9/11 found themselves engaged in
manhunts for wanted criminals and conducting order-maintenance
patrols of urban streets in Afghanistan and Iraq. The police, con-
versely, seek out ‘internal’ enemies – terrorists, organized criminals,
drug traffickers – beyond the territorial borders of states (Nadelman
1993), while also finding themselves dispatched abroad on peace-
keeping operations or to train indigenous police forces up to ‘western’
standards.
The state as partisan 89

To this one must add – post 9/11 – a blurring of the related categories
of war and crime (Feldman 2002; Huysmans 2004). The US govern-
ment has since the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon been
waging a self-styled ‘war’ against what it judges to be an unprece-
dented threat from international terrorism – and it is the circumstance
of warfare that has justified the exceptional executive powers that
states throughout the world have assumed. But this is no conventional
war, perhaps not even a war at all. The ‘enemy’ is diffuse, unknown
and composed principally of non-state actors. Its modus operandi is to
commit criminal acts – however atrocious. Nor will it be clear when,
if ever, the war has been won – something that raises the prospect of a
more or less permanent assault on democracy and liberty. Yet, at the
same time, the US government refuses consistently to apply the war
metaphor (if metaphor it is), engaging instead in what Golove and
Holmes (2004: 5) term strategic ‘paradigm shopping’ motivated by
‘the desire to limit accountability and oversight’. This is most apparent
in respect of the detainees held in the legal black hole of Camp Delta
in Guantánamo Bay (Rose 2004). These are neither prisoners of war
nor criminal suspects – both categories that afford a degree of due
process and legal protection. Instead, they have been deemed ‘enemy
combatants’ – a status beyond law whose consequence is that ‘they are
subject now only to raw power’ (Agamben 2004b: 610). There can, for
the radical state sceptic, be no more telling symbol of the new state of
exception – a sovereign force exerting its will in a fashion that is simul-
taneously partisan and out of control.
These critical observations on the current security constellation
impart some valuable warnings, some of which, as noted, are shared
by liberal critics of the ‘war on terror’. They suggest, first and foremost,
that democratic societies risk spiralling into a vicious circle of
terror–fear–repression whose all too likely consequence is the erosion,
perhaps even demise, of democratic government and the rule of law
(Rorty 2004). As political elites respond to acts of terror with ‘security
measures’ that seek to assuage public insecurity (and anger) by further
empowering police and military institutions, they do several things: not
only do they direct the resources of the partisan state at already often
unpopular and over-policed minority populations (both at home and
abroad); they also institutionalize public anxiety in ways that make it
difficult to envisage cultural conditions that will permit ‘temporary’
exceptional measures to be repealed, and leave themselves with little
90 On state scepticism

practical choice but to respond to the next terrorist attack with yet
more – still tougher – ‘security solutions’. As each ‘ordering measure
brings into being new ambiguities and ambivalences which call for
further measures, the chase never ends’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 79;
see, also, Dillon 1996: 127).
For liberals the practical task is to find ways of responding to terror
(and the fear and loathing that it generates, or reinforces, or renews)
in ways that break out of this insecurity-heightening, democracy-
corroding spiral (see, for example, Ackerman 2004; Ignatieff 2004;
Dyzenhaus and Hunt forthcoming). This too, more broadly, is the
impulse that informs this book – one that holds that it is possible in
this field to envisage and create virtuous circles that both civilize secu-
rity and release the civilizing potential of security. The variant of state
scepticism we have been concerned with here presses, however, a more
disquieting claim – one that presents a serious critique of such possi-
bilities. From this perspective there is no obvious route away from a
world in which exceptionalism has become what Agamben (2004a: 2
and passim) calls ‘the dominant paradigm of government in contem-
porary politics’ – and certainly not one which travels under the banner
of security. We are faced with what looks set to become an unceasing
war against terror in which partisan, exceptional states name and chase
new enemies, fortify borders as they violate them, suspend law in the
name of law, and undermine democracy in an effort to save it. How, in
such a world, the leftist state sceptic asks, can we speak meaningfully
about, let alone begin to construct, a socially coherent project of col-
lective security?

Against security?
The strands of radical thought outlined in this chapter offer a cogent
critique of the state and its securitizing practices. It is a critique that
appears able to capture important aspects of a historical record that
has seen states time and again, in both authoritarian and democratic
contexts, allocate the benefits and burdens of policing in ways that sys-
tematically protect the security interests of powerful constituencies at
the expense of those of the poor and dispossessed. It supplies, in addi-
tion, a cogent account of the dangers of placing security at the ideo-
logical heart of government, of the capacity of security politics to
colonize public policy and pervade social life in ways that threaten
The state as partisan 91

democratic values and sustain fear-laden, other-disregarding forms of

political subjectivity and collective identity. In these respects, this
variant of state scepticism offers a critique of the operation and effects
of state power that in many significant respects we share (N. Walker
2000; Loader 2002). But it also poses what are undoubtedly some pro-
found challenges to the position we wish here to construct and defend.
If we are to make a persuasive case for both the good of security, and
the indispensability of the state to the production of that good, then we
need to find a means of rising to them.
These objections then are far from trivial, and we have not devoted
this chapter to them simply in order to knock them down. But they
nonetheless arise from a standpoint that is not itself without short-
comings, as we hope to show in meeting them. As a prelude to the more
sustained effort along these lines that we offer in part II, let us consider
briefly what these shortcomings are. For analytic purposes, they may
usefully be put into three groups.
This radical variant of state scepticism tends, first of all, to underplay
the openness of political systems and the theoretical and political
prospects that this affords. It displays, in particular, a structural fatal-
ism that overlooks the overlap between the production of specific and
general order, such that disadvantaged groups and communities have a
considerable stake not only in controlling state power, but also in using
public resources (including policing resources) as a means of generating
more secure forms of economic and social existence. It also remains
insufficiently attentive to how the mix between general and specific
order (the extent, in other words, to which policing is shaped by
common as well as factional interests) is conditioned by political strug-
gle and the varieties of institutional settlement to which this gives rise,
thereby varying over time and between polities. Much the same point,
moreover, can be directed at the radical critique of the violence that
underpins liberal political orders that aim to be free of such violence.
One finds here a quite proper insistence on the troubling conundrum
that democratic polities ultimately depend upon coercion to enforce
collective decisions and protect democratic institutions. But this point
is hammered home in terms that are overly sweeping and reductionist –
often, as in the writings of Agamben (2004a), as a philosophical claim
that invites but resists sociological scrutiny. If ‘there is always a violence
at the heart of every form of political and legal authority’ (Newman
2004: 575), upon what grounds can we distinguish between, or develop
92 On state scepticism

a critique of, the security-seeking practices of particular states – and

why would we bother?
Radical anti-statism evinces, secondly, a preference for social and
political criticism over social and political reconstruction. It favours a
politics that privileges the monitoring, exposure and critique of the sys-
tematic biases of state power (as, for instance, in the indefatigable
efforts of the British-based NGO Statewatch), one that implicitly or
expressly holds that ‘security’ is so stained by its uncivil association
with the (military and police) state that the only available radical strat-
egy is to destabilize the term itself, while contesting the practices that
are enacted under its name (Dalby 1997: 6; see, also, Dillon 1996: ch.
1). There can, from this vantage point, be no progressive democratic
politics aimed at civilizing security. Rather, one is left with a politics of
critique, and a failure of political imagination, that leaves radically
underspecified the feasible or desirable alternatives to current institu-
tional configurations and practices, or else merely gestures towards the
possibility of transcendent forms of non-state communal ordering – as
in George Rikagos’s (2002: 150) claim that ‘the only real alternatives
to current policing practices are pre-capitalist, non-commodified secur-
ity arrangements’.
Finally, one finds what we think of as a one-sided appraisal of the
sources of inequality and insecurity in the world today. This leftist anti-
statist sensibility tends, in the ways we have demonstrated, towards an
account of social injustice that views it as the product of the state’s
malign and coercive interventions rather than of its impotence and
neglect. Here one finds a curious parallel with the neo-liberalism con-
sidered in the last chapter – the state remains the problem. But one also
encounters a critique of security politics that views it as tied to the pro-
duction of authoritarian government – as if security is in some essen-
tial fashion inimical to democracy and human rights. Here the radical
critic begins to inhabit similar ground to that occupied by what we
characterized in chapter 1 as the ‘security lobby’. They assess the land-
scape very differently and commit to diametrically opposed political
purposes. But they cling commonly and tenaciously to the belief that
security stands opposed to liberty.
Our aim, in part II, is to move beyond these positions and opposi-
tions: first, by retrieving the idea of security as a public good that is
axiomatic both to the production of other goods (most directly, liberty)
and to the constitution of democratic political communities; second,
The state as partisan 93

by arguing that the production of this good demands not the whole-
sale critique and transcendence of state forms, but more robust regu-
latory interventions by democratized state institutions. We must first,
however, factor into our positive case two further critiques of the state,
starting with the claim that it is a cultural monolith.
 4 The state as cultural monolith

I
n the previous chapter we saw how the state through its policing
and security provision can be a powerful mechanism for the pursuit
of special interests. The concern was with how certain general fea-
tures of the security provision function of states are conducive to the
articulation, consolidation and reinforcement of various asymmetries
of power and forms of prejudice. In the present chapter we want to
consider a complementary critique – one that is implicit in much scep-
ticism about state policing but which finds less explicit theoretical
expression than the other variants of scepticism considered in part I.
This critique is concerned not with the state as machinery for the rein-
forcement of inequality and the amplification of bias generated else-
where in the social and economic domain, but rather with the state as
a site of cultural production in its own right, capable of generating
meanings and of promoting orthodoxies of a certain type. Of course,
the distinction between the state as material enforcer and as cultural
initiator is sometimes artificial and never clear-cut. Frequently, as we
will see, the state’s ideological involvement in mobilizing or sustaining
certain beliefs and sensibilities is in close synergy with its repressive
function. To borrow another phrase from the old Marxist lexicon – the
autonomy of the state from basic socio-economic forces and relations
is only ever relative. Just as, in the argument of the last chapter, the
forms of domination originating beyond the state will frequently rely
upon the state and its security apparatus for their entrenchment or sta-
bilization, so too the forms of meaning generated by the state and its
security apparatus always owe something to broader social and eco-
nomic pressures.
Nevertheless, the cultural critique of state policing is far more than a
mere echo of the material critique. Rather, it supplies potent additional
ammunition to the sceptic of state policing, threatening to check the
counter-positions which we tentatively outlined at the end of the last
chapter. To the criticism that the partisanship thesis is too fatalistic

94
The state as cultural monolith 95

about the role of the state and too pessimistic about its emancipatory
potential, the adherent of the cultural critique may deliver a consider-
able riposte. This begins by revisiting and refining and qualifying the
distinction drawn by Marenin (1982) between general order and special
order. For the core of the claim that the cultural work of the state in the
domain of security has its own partial consequences lies in a refusal to
accept that, unlike the specific order of those powerful public and
private constituencies who succeed in manoeuvring the state in defence
of their special interests, the generation and maintenance of the general
order of everyday social tranquillity is somehow neutral between dif-
ferent security concerns or worldviews. From this broader critical per-
spective, there is no area of security work uncontaminated by some kind
of bias. There is, rather, and however it may be presented, something
irreducibly particular about the defence of general order (just as, con-
versely, given the cross-cultural familiarity of certain types of class,
gender, ethnic or public bureaucratic bias, there is something general
and recurrent about the defence of specific order). And in the irreducible
particularity of even its broadest role we must understand state polic-
ing as the facilitator and defender of a kind of cultural orthodoxy which
continues to privilege some ways of viewing and acting in the world
over others. In the face of this additional set of objections, the argument
of the proponent of state policing that the supposedly universal bene-
fits of its quotidian security practices outweigh the disadvantages of
occasional and episodic resort to the defence of specific interests threat-
ens to be stillborn.
What does it mean to suggest that the cultural import of state secu-
rity and policing, even when concerned with general order, is irre-
ducibly particular? Just because, as already noted, this dimension of
scepticism about state policing has been less explicitly theorized than
the others, and tends instead to rest upon certain standing general
assumptions about the culpability of the state, or upon the message of
a wider body of work on the link between statehood and cultural
monism, then, much more so than in the case of these other dimensions
of scepticism, we have to construct for ourselves the best version of the
cultural case for scepticism as it applies to the policing sector. Mindful
of this, we assemble our argument in distinct stages. First, the basic
conceptual building-blocks from which a more explicit theoretical
argument might be constructed will be put in place. On that basis, the
case will be made that the cultural particularity of the policing of
96 On state scepticism

general order is indeed irreducible and unavoidable, but that, crucially,

just for that reason this characteristic must also be seen as logically
prior to, and independent of, the state form of policing. Only subse-
quently will the way in which this cultural particularity tends to man-
ifest itself in state settings be fleshed out and the question of the
possibility of the state acting otherwise raised.

The particularity of police culture

The conceptual building-blocks take the form of a number of structural
features or coordinates of the general policing role which shape the
ways in which the police are implicated in the production of social
meaning. These are the singularity of the police function, the tendency
towards uniformity in the pursuit of that function, its highly permis-
sive character, its time-bound quality and its societal locatedness. Let
us examine these five features in turn, and suggest how their conjunc-
tion helps account for the tendency towards a monolithic cultural dis-
position.
First, there is the singularity of the policing function and its security
objective. In an age when both the normalizing discourse of police
management science and the self-presentational rhetoric of police pro-
fessionals more and more emphasize the sheer diversity of police tasks,
the versatility required to perform them, and the comparability and
continuity of many if not all of them with other non-police tasks, this
might seem counter-intuitive – think here of the abiding popularity of
such disaggregating labels as policing by objectives and problem-
oriented policing (Butler 1984; Goldstein 1990; McLaughlin and
Murji 1997, 2001). Yet if we stand back from the ‘profane’ detail
(Reiner 1995), it is arguable that policing remains a singular activity in
two important and connected senses – one internal, the other external.
Internally, it is striking the extent to which the many and various tasks
of the police, even after they are bundled into very broad and loose
functional categories, are further reducible to a unitary purpose, and
indeed are treated in the final analysis as no more than means to the
achievement of that overall purpose. Crime prevention, crime detec-
tion, the preservation of life and property, the prevention of public dis-
order, the regulation of traffic, and the myriad forms of assistance of
other regulatory functions of the state in which the police are involved:
this list is a typical catalogue of the mandate of modern policing, but
The state as cultural monolith 97

all elements within the catalogue can without undue strain be gathered
under the holistic umbrella of the generation and maintenance of those
conditions of general order under which the citizenry are most likely
both to be and to feel secure (Silver 1967; Bittner 1990; Reiner 2000:
ch. 4). So much so, indeed, that while in the public politics of policing
the question of the proper balance and trade-off between and within
diverse police functions is often fraught with controversy, the idea that
these functions be assessed in terms of their contribution to the overall
purpose or meta-function of providing security tends to remain taken
for granted.
This internal idea of unity – of holistic purpose – is linked to the
second and externally directed sense in which policing can be viewed
as a singular activity. The point can be developed in both a weak sense
and a strong sense. In a weak sense, just as many particular policing
functions are best viewed as instrumental to the general purpose of
security provision, so too the security purpose itself is largely justified
in its own terms, and not as a means to some even broader function or
higher purpose. That is not to say that the general achievement of secu-
rity cannot be viewed and treated in instrumental terms, but just that,
for the most part, unlike some key areas of government activity, it is
simply not viewed and treated in such terms, or at least not in a narrow
sense.1 Rather, to recall our discussion of the roots of the modern polit-
ical order in chapter 2, security should be understood as one of the
most basic, defining functions of the polity. And insofar as it can be
viewed as linked to other major social functions, as we shall see in
chapter 6, this is in a broad foundational sense rather than in a narrow
instrumental sense – as a sine qua non of the achievement of a broad
menu of other social goods rather than as something whose value is
exhausted in the achievement of any particular such good. In this,
however, perhaps security is not so unusual. Other areas of state activ-
ity such as health provision or education are also largely self-justifying,
and if linked to other purposes are likewise viewed as broad founda-
tions rather than narrow ladders.
Where security stands apart from other broad areas of public policy,
and asserts itself more forcefully, is in its tendency in the name of
urgency and indispensability, and so peremptory non-negotiability of

11
Compare security provision in this respect with tax collection, whose purpose is
purely instrumental to the achievement of other purposes.
98 On state scepticism

its own imperatives, to evacuate other considerations from its func-

tional domain (Wæver 1996). Not only is it the case that security is not
merely instrumental to and so not parasitic upon any other distinct
purpose, but, as suggested in our preliminary review of the critical
security studies literature in the previous chapter, it tends to yoke the
discourse of public policy to its own uncompromising purpose. The
singularity of security, then, inheres not only in its (internal) unity of
function but also in its (external) tendency to exclusivity. As we shall
see, this has profound consequences for the ideological context in
which security tends to be pursued.
One key aspect of this may be illuminated by tracing the close con-
nection between the idea of a single all-encompassing meta-function of
security and a second structural feature of the general policing role.
This is the presumption that policing should be administered equally
and uniformly – without discrimination between different contributors
or beneficiaries. Most immediately, this appears to be a matter of orga-
nizational efficiency and of the necessarily diffuse effects of the pro-
duction of some security ‘goods’. General order is something that in
any particular context has an indeterminate set of contributors and/or
beneficiaries – whether this is the acceptable protocols of public behav-
iour at a football match, a public march, or a city-centre shopping mall,
or the proper balance between preventative intervention and free cir-
culation in a traffic network or in an airport security system, or the call-
answering priority protocols of a fast-response mobile patrol unit, or
the local prevention and reassurance dividend of a particular level of
foot patrol, or the population range made more secure by the arrest of
a murderer or the defusing of a terrorist bomb. It is thus simply often
highly impractical for the police to act other than in accordance with
broad and non-discriminating procedures or to other than non-
discriminating effect. As with all contexts of mass and repetitive orga-
nizational performance, some degree of rule-following becomes a basic
imperative of bureaucratic efficiency and operational coordination,
and some equality of effect is inevitable given the non-assignable
quality of many security benefits.
Logistics apart, however, there are also strong reputational reasons
why the police either refrain from overt practices of discrimination in
contexts where the operations of general order are on open public
display or relatively easily discovered, or, in the frequent circumstances
where public exposure is less likely, at least maintain a rhetoric of
The state as cultural monolith 99

neutrality. In turn, these dramaturgical considerations rest upon a

deeper and more fundamental platform of normative political theory,
one that, significantly, reinforces the pressure towards uniformity not
only within particular general order contexts but also between differ-
ent such contexts. This strand of political theory, and the social imag-
inary with which it is associated, recalls our discussion in chapter 2 of
the founding justificatory promise of the modern state, and in particu-
lar the individuation and hence equalization of the standard justifica-
tion of political rule under conditions of political modernity. If each
citizen is accorded formal equality ab initio then the terms of the hypo-
thetical social contract should be the same for all – and never more so
than as regards the foundational and singular contractual virtue of
security. It follows that the conclusion of that social contract should
not discriminate between individuals or classes of individual either as
regards the value to be attributed to their security or as regards the
basis on which their interests may be interfered with – including coer-
cive interference with their own security interests – in order to protect
the security of others. It also follows that, in order to ensure such
uniformity or equality of treatment, the liberal state should have a
monopolistic or, at any rate, pre-eminent role in the provision of secur-
ity – there should be only one standard social contract with one state
in the case of each territorial population. Of course, the most vigorous
manifestation of these promises lies in the idea of formal equality
before the law itself – the idea that the law should as a general pre-
sumption, and in the absence of special justification, be blind to dif-
ferences between different categories of subjects in its specification of
the terms and conditions of security (D. Dixon 1997; N. Walker 2000:
ch. 2). Yet for the rule of law to achieve practical vindication it requires
to be underpinned by an ethic of executive endorsement and bureau-
cratic fealty, of uniform – and disinterested because uniform – appli-
cation of the legal mandate on the part of the officials of the polity, and
in particular those officials charged with the singular function of secur-
ity maintenance (Bittner 1983; Grimshaw and Jefferson 1987).
At root, then, the promise of uniformity can be seen as the ideolog-
ical flipside of the claim to singularity. So much is staked on the idea
of general order as encapsulating the police mission and as the trump
of non-security considerations precisely because it is so central to the
very justification of modern political community and the purpose of
the social contract. Accordingly, the promise that this enormous power
100 On state scepticism

will be wielded sine ira et studio typically becomes axiomatic to its

social acceptability.
That notion of uniformity, however, stands alongside and in some
tension with a third structural feature of the general policing role:
namely, the extent to which the police are nevertheless permitted, and
indeed required, actively to shape their general role. For while there
may be strong logistical, prudential and moral reasons for uniformity
in the pursuit of the singular virtue of general order, the police also
retain a high level of discretion in the performance of their function
(Jefferson and Grimshaw 1984; H. Cohen 1985; Klockars 1985), one
that both challenges the very idea of a transcontextual or ‘uniform’
sense of uniformity and strongly influences the content of any sense of
uniformity that does prevail.
The first point flows from the notoriously high level of latitude
allowed to officers ‘on the street’, at the operational cutting edge of the
police organization. Such practical discretion is only superficially
about the open texture of legal language and the ample scope this
allows for the discovery and creative interpretation of ‘hard cases’. At
a deeper level, it is attributable to certain inescapable practical exigen-
cies of policework; to the fact that, once we discount the high-profile
rituals of mass public order, much policing takes place in dispersed
‘regions of low visibility’ (van Maanen 1983: 377) and in contexts
which may require uncorroborated decision-making. It has to do as
well with the sheer diversity and unpredictability of the situations of
disorder which police officers may be required to repair and the imme-
diacy with which such repairs may be required. In Egon Bittner’s
famous formulation, ‘the policeman, and the policeman alone, is
equipped, entitled, and required to deal with every exigency in which
force may have to be used to meet it’ (1990: 248). The police officer,
therefore, is licensed to paint on a wide canvas, with bold and urgent
brush-strokes. Even if it does not exclude rule- or recipe-based solu-
tions entirely, this combination of variety and immediacy implies that,
certainly at the level of the detailed encounter, any such solutions will
be less than fully adequate to the task. In other words, the idea of a
universal template from which a uniform practice of general order can
be generated is already stretched thin by the very operational logic of
day-to-day policework.
At the level of general policy, too, the legal framework is a permis-
sive one. The idea of the police as servants of the law, and as keepers
The state as cultural monolith 101

of the law’s liberal promise, can at best be only a partial guide to the
meaning of general order. Simple allegiance to the law may, subject to
the caveats suggested above and within the bounds of common inter-
pretation of often vague textual formulations, encourage an even-
handed approach to individual cases once addressed by the police. But
in a context of scarce resources and unavoidable choices as to the pri-
orities to set both within and between discrete policing tasks, the legal
text, however plain its meaning in addressing particular behaviours
and decoding particular encounters, cannot provide criteria to decide
which encounters should be sought and which cases should be identi-
fied and treated as cases in the first instance.
Yet it has been observed of many western constitutional cultures
that, despite the law’s structural inability to provide a comprehensive
directive to policing – to supply all the guidance the police officer (of
whatever rank) needs in pursuit of general order – inflated claims to
that effect continue to be made on its behalf (Jefferson and Grimshaw
1984). As already noted, the public image of the neutral uniformity of
the police in pursuit of general order is a precious reputational prize,
and so whatever can help anchor this belief, including the notion of the
comprehensive authority of law, will remain rhetorically attractive.
Paradoxically, however, by obscuring the problem of discretion, the
idea of law’s directive capacity tends only to exacerbate it. What this
threatens, and often delivers, is a ‘policy vacuum’ (Goldsmith 1990:
96), where, under the cover of the supposed sovereignty of law, a con-
ception of general order is allowed to flourish in which the cultural
preferences and sensibilities of the police are required to fill the gap.
While uniformity, therefore, is a theme that is central to the legiti-
macy of state policing in its pursuit of the singular objective of general
order, it is also one that may be confounded by the obstinate reality
of police discretion. The meaning of general order threatens to frac-
ture into as many particulars as there are diverse contexts of police
action, and to the extent that this may be resisted or mitigated it is
only through the signifying or meaning-shaping interventions of the
police themselves (Fielding 1984). What kinds of factors influence
them in this cultural work, bearing in mind that it remains tied to the
ideological discipline of a uniform mode of self-presentation? It is
here that the last two structural features of the police pursuit of
general order – its time-bound and societally specific quality – assume
importance. And crucially, as we shall see, as they flow from certain
102 On state scepticism

irreducible features of policing as a distinctly or particularly located

practice, it is these structural features that provide the fundamental
explanatory key to the irreducible particularity of their cultivation of
the idea of general order.
By asserting that the policing of general order is time-bound, we seek
to convey two meanings and messages that are apparently in tension,
but, on deeper reflection, can be seen as mutually supportive. The first
is that the policing of general order is a backward-looking and con-
servative activity – one bound to the past. The second is that the polic-
ing of general order is a temporally contingent activity – tied to and
shaped by the circumstances of a particular time.
The first of these characteristics – the conservative quality of main-
stream policing – has been widely remarked upon (Reiner 2000: ch. 3).
Often the focus of this kind of analysis is the substantive political alle-
giance of police officers – whether or not, and the extent to which, they
favour parties and programmes of public policy and morality associ-
ated with the political right (Reiner 1980). While the fact that police
are often drawn from working-class backgrounds may suggest a degree
of sympathy – if not solidarity – with the relatively disadvantaged, a
stronger and countervailing set of socializing factors is provided by the
self-selection of those who seek to join the police as well as by the pat-
terns of interaction involved in everyday policework. As noted in the
last chapter, the routine clients of the police are typically the econom-
ically dispossessed and the culturally marginalized. This, together with
the fact that in their public order and state security role the police are
often set in opposition to the organized and disorganized forces of the
left, tends to encourage or confirm police officers in a political world-
view that looks sceptically both on the relationship between socio-
economic deprivation and crime and on political resistance.
Rather than focusing on the question of who makes or can be ‘made
into’ a good police officer, another and complementary type of
research into police conservatism – one that allows us to begin to forge
the connection between the two distinct senses of policing as a time-
bound activity – has at its centre of gravity the structural question of
what is generic to general order. Here, the emphasis is upon how the
police, in Richard Ericson’s (1982) term, are inevitably ‘reproducers
of order’ (emphasis added), and how it follows that ‘their sense of
order [is] . . . that of the status quo’ (1982: 7). Their function is to
restore order where it has broken down, whether because the normal
The state as cultural monolith 103

authoritative practice which guarantees the security of social relations

has failed, or because absent the normal authoritative practitioner –
be it ambulance or fire service, teacher, social worker or priest – a
‘stand in’ is required (H. Cohen 1985: 37). Moreover, it is not just the
reactive quality of much policework and the ensuing episodic,
symptom-treating shallowness of the typical police intervention that
encourages the occupational prejudice that how things ought to be
should be closely modelled on how they have been until now.
Preference for restoration over innovation is also one further conse-
quence of the self-presentational imperative of uniform neutrality. An
entity whose principal charge is simply to mend the tears in the exist-
ing fabric of security, rather than to treat the general quality of that
fabric, will typically seek to make an ideological virtue out of that
occupational necessity. It is likely to remain publicly indifferent to
those deep causes of (in)security over which it has little leverage and
less mandate, including the asymmetries of power and resources
between different groups, and in so doing to style itself as the mere
editor rather than the author of public policy.
Yet this very detachment from the underlying causes of disorder can
also reinforce the conviction with which a very particular version of
general order is pursued. On the one hand, in seeking to restore the
existing order regardless of its social foundations, police officers also
inevitably act so as to preserve these foundations. On the other hand,
however, and paradoxically, a sense of general order that is unflinch-
ingly and unreflectively tied to the status quo also tends towards its
own reification. For a mechanical fidelity to the current security settle-
ment implies either simple disregard for its underlying terms or the
assumption that these terms are natural and unassailable – in either
case encouraging an additional perception of general order as a time-
less aspiration and imperative. It is here, then, that we can see the
strength of the connection between the perennial and the quotidian –
between the sense of being bound to the ‘eternal’ past and being bound
to the present. Just because of the taken-for-granted, relentless priority
of the everyday imperative of preserving the peace, it may be presented
and self-understood by police officers to be about prevailing in an
unending and essentially unchanging struggle. The idea, prevalent in
many police cultures, of policing as a ‘thin blue line’ (Reiner 2000: 89),
on whose resilience the maintenance of social order depends, gains res-
onance and derives its motivational power from the way in which
104 On state scepticism

today’s problems, in being decontextualized and divorced from their

roots, may be seen as but the continuation and latest manifestation of
an eternal narrative of order and chaos. In a nutshell, the temporal
variation of the patterns and priorities of mainstream policework tends
to be masked by deep cultural understandings of general order as both
a conservative virtue and a timeless preoccupation; yet this very
masking supplies much of the motivational and legitimating back-
ground that makes such contextual adaptability possible.
If one way of grounding the particularity of general order is tempo-
ral, the other is spatial, and this brings us, finally, to the societally spe-
cific quality of policing. General order is never universal order. It
always pertains to a specific territorial social order – an appeal to a
particular place as well as to a particular time. And like the temporal
appeal, its persuasiveness lies in its combination of objectification and
contextual fit. Just as the appeal to the status quo ante apparently
places the policing mission beyond the prejudice of the police them-
selves and locates it in the ‘timeless’ demands of the present, so the
appeal to the needs and aspirations of a particular society holds a
similar objectifying promise. Likewise with the locationally sensitive
content of the objectified standard. Just as the appeal to a particular
path-dependent construction of general order situates and domesti-
cates the police task in historical terms, the appeal to a particular
society and territory situates and domesticates it in geographical terms.
The allure of the ‘here’, then, is just as strong as the allure of the ‘now’
in the ‘common sense’ through which the preservation of general order
is constructed. This is seen perhaps most spectacularly in the resilient
attractiveness of ‘community policing’ ever since it became a designer
label in the 1970s – one which has seen it marketed in many contexts
beyond its Anglo-American origins (Brogden and Nijhar 2005; Ellison
forthcoming). There is a larger story to be told about the success of
community policing discourse, to which we will have cause to return,
but its elemental attraction as a discourse about territory and about the
social bonds associated with territory should not be underestimated.
Indeed, if we look a little closer, we see that police talk is suffused with
the language of place and place-centred social attachments – so much
so that we often barely notice. From Neighbourhood Cops and Watches
to local beat officers, from Apache Territory to ‘skid row’ (Bittner
1967), from Area Patrol to the European Union’s ‘Area of Freedom,
Justice and Security’, we find metaphors of spatial location – secure and
The state as cultural monolith 105

insecure – central to characterizations of general policework. And

between the local and the supranational, of course, lies another key site
of policing, the nation state. It is to this key site that we now return.

The cultural partiality of state policing

The very idea of general order, then, can only be realized in a cultur-
ally partial manner. The singular and politically foundational quality
of the core police mandate, the enormous power and responsibility
implicit in the project of order maintenance, means that the stakes of
social legitimacy for police organizations are set very high. One of the
key ways in which the police seek to address this challenge is through
the legal and organizational discipline of uniform neutrality. Yet the
various and multitiered features of police discretion entail that a juridi-
cal model of compliance is never enough. In addition, and reflecting the
fact that police practice is always a located practice (even if occupa-
tional self-understandings and self-presentations may often suggest
otherwise), the police will situate their general role in the contingencies
of time and place. In other words, they seek – and indeed have no
option but to seek – a contextually appropriate, and hence partial,
sense of general order.
The relationship between these basic coordinates or characteristics
of general order policing and the state form is a complex one. On the
one hand, as already noted, if general order is always and necessarily
coloured by its spatio-temporal particularity, then the state form
cannot in principle be indispensable to such particularity. We must
maintain instead that such particularity, just because it is a necessary
feature of general order, could have emerged and could develop other-
wise. On the other hand, as state-sponsored policing has been the dom-
inant form of policing in the modern age, and as the concentration and
specialization of resources on policing in the modern age are unprece-
dented, the irreducible particularity of general order and the cultural
bias associated with this concentration and specialization have un-
doubtedly found their most powerful and eloquent articulation in the
state context. That connection, moreover, is much more than circum-
stantial – it is not simply a case of the species ‘state’ being one indis-
tinct or unremarkable carrier of the paradoxes and tensions of security
associated with the genus ‘polity’. Rather, we must see the state form,
106 On state scepticism

if not as inevitable and indispensable, as nevertheless the constitutive

and the sufficient, or – in Aristotelian terms – the ‘efficient’, cause of
the development of particular conceptions and manifestations of
general order. Indeed, this is true in a double sense. For as we observed
in chapter 2, we must understand the modern state both as decisively
conducive to the development or maturing of a new social imaginary
which stressed individuality and formal equality within a separate
public or political realm, and as distinctively responsive to the new
problems of general order and political rule associated with the main-
tenance of that new realm. The contemporary state, in short, is deeply
implicated in both the problems and solutions of general order, and in
the contribution of the police to these problems and solutions. If we
examine this a little more closely, we can discern three cumulatively sig-
nificant links between the particularity of the state and the particular-
ity of the preservation of general order through policing. These are in
turn structural, instrumental and symbolic.
In structural terms, we can see a deep homology between the situa-
tion – or rather the ‘situatedness’ – of the state, on the one hand, and
of the maintenance of general order, on the other. Any political com-
munity will have its own distinctive spatio-temporal situation, but the
form that this takes in the context of the state and the ‘system of states’
(Falk 1995) more broadly suggests a strikingly close fit with the basic
coordinates of general order. For just as the so-called Westphalian
framework of sovereign states ‘locates’ and articulates political com-
munity within a configuration of territorially discrete sovereigns, so
too the policing of general order, with its emphasis upon singularity or
coherence of function and uniformity of standards, and upon the
monopoly power or pre-eminent authority required to achieve such
singularity and uniformity, presupposes a mutually exclusive demar-
cation of the domains within which its various particular writs run. In
both cases then – the state and the general policing function – a
premium is placed on the construction of distinctive communities
defined in terms of the two boundary coordinates of space and time.
If we continue for a moment longer to bracket the question of the
specific (instrumental and symbolic) connection between state and
general order, and instead pursue the general idea of their being homol-
ogous structures, we can already glimpse the basic outline of the cul-
tural monolith thesis. For there is a considerable literature, much of
which is hardly concerned with the policing function of the state,
The state as cultural monolith 107

which attests to a strong causal connection between the nation state’s

need to provide an authoritative political space for a particular com-
munity at a particular time with a particular history, on the one hand,
and its tendency to create and sustain what Jim Tully (1995: ch. 3) calls
an ‘empire of uniformity’, on the other (see, e.g., Vincent 2002). As
Tully indicates, nationalism is by no means the only code through
which the unitary tendency of the state operates, yet the theme of one
nation, one culture, one people is a decidedly powerful one. In partic-
ular, the emphasis on the role of the state as a mediator of belonging
in ways that bring to the fore the affective dimensions of social and
political life plays strongly on the idea of common nationhood – an
active identity forged through some combination of common history,
myth of origin, language, religion, territory, political bond or other
sources of attachment and belonging. Often this argument is pursued
in a critical spirit, indicating that the nation state tends to foster forms
of ‘imagined community’ (B. Anderson 1991) that are unitary and
homogenous, that rest on an unreflexive conception of political mem-
bership, and which ‘admit only one – although largely abstract – iden-
tity, in relation to which struggles among all other identities are
expected to take their proper place’ (R. B. J. Walker 1997: 73).
And even where nationalist ideology is less prevalent and not viewed
as hegemonic, those structural features of the state which flow from its
authority-in-the-last-instance can still encourage cultural imperialism.
For Pierre Bourdieu, for example, the state is the point of intersection
of enormous symbolic and instrumental power, the place where both
meaning and interests are authoritatively if always provisionally arbi-
trated. It is the site where, in series of meta-struggles over the very basis
of political power, the mutually dependent questions of the ‘the domi-
nant principle of domination’ and ‘the legitimate principle of legitima-
tion’ are contested, negotiated and resolved, with the relatively open
rules of contestation by no means compromising the unitary logic of
resolution (Bourdieu 1996: 376). Moreover, the modern state’s title to
cultural domination can be assumed and exercised in a subtle rather
than a strident manner; managed at a distance rather than hands-on;
administered through the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 1978) rather
than through primary regulation; elaborated in a thousand micro-
edicts rather than in a discursively explicit and coherent ideology,
advertised as common sense rather than political theology; cultivated
through the detailed aesthetic and incremental seeding and weeding of
108 On state scepticism

the ‘gardener’ (Bauman 1992: 178) rather than contained in the static
blueprint of the architect. Yet the message from this, as much as from
the more explicitly nationalist literature, is equally one of the formi-
dable quality of the state’s role in cultural production.
Whatever their precise source, the monolithic tendencies of the state
in the cultural sphere have two potentially deleterious effects. The first
is an illiberal posture towards minority groups whose practices and
values do not (or are deemed not to) accord with the dominant articu-
lation of national culture. The consequent failures of cultural and polit-
ical recognition, and the attendant calls for assimilation of those who do
not share ‘our way of life’, may foster multiple forms of symbolic – and
on occasions physical – violence against the minority cultures concerned
(C. Taylor 1994; Levy 2000: 25). The second is the elevation of national
boundaries (and associated distinctions between inside/outside, us/them,
here/there) in ways that, at best, limit or undermine forms of solidarity
and moral concern towards others and efface or refuse the mutual inter-
dependencies that obtain under conditions of globalization and, at
worst, generate forms of xenophobic hostility towards those marked out
by territorial frontiers as foreigners or within territorial frontiers as
strangers. These two claims form the cutting edge of a deep-seated scep-
ticism within political theory towards the nation state as an appropriate
symbolic mediator of political community. It is a critique, indeed, that
is capable of reaching across a wide politico-intellectual spectrum,
embracing both cosmopolitans – profoundly suspicious of a nationalist
politics that ‘substitutes a colorful idol for the substantive universal
values of justice and right’ (Nussbaum 2002: 5) – and those who would
eschew the national particular in favour of other kinds of particularism
(Vincent 2002).
But how significant, if at all, is the field of policing, and the practices
and discourses associated with the general maintenance of security, in
contributing to the culturally monolithic tendencies of the nation state?
To what extent is the suggestiveness of the structural ‘fit’ vindicated
through actual instrumental and symbolic links? The answer in both
cases would appear to be strongly affirmative. The instrumental or func-
tional link is an obvious one. Even in pursuit of their general-order func-
tion, the police possess the singularity and priority of purpose, the
pre-eminence of authority, the legal means, the bureaucratic where-
withal, the irreducible discretion, the eternally urgent mandate and the
contiguity of territorial jurisdiction to bolster and sustain the form and
The state as cultural monolith 109

the content of the cultural orthodoxy of the state – both the very idea of
a single orthodoxy and the particular substance of that orthodoxy.
Whatever monolithic, anti-pluralist predilections are present within the
political culture of the state, therefore, the police are invariably well
placed to articulate and reinforce them. This is so whether, and most
obviously, we are talking about discrimination against national minori-
ties, or whether we are talking about any other orthodoxies and positive
moralities which favour some ascriptive or affiliative categories and the
behavioural codes associated with them over others (based on race,
gender, class, physical handicap, ethnicity, regional identity, local hab-
itat, age, sexual orientation, dress, etc.).
The symbolic link is also strong and multifaceted, and serves to rein-
force the instrumental link. From the outset the structural correspon-
dence between the state and the general-order function provided much
material for mutual signification. Most obviously, this has been true of
the way in which the policing of general order, with its emphasis on
particularity and exclusivity of jurisdiction, tends to fix the very co-
ordinates of statehood in particular spatio-temporal locations. That
tendency is vividly demonstrated in Emsley’s work on the importance
of the gendarmerie in continental Europe in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries in marking out ‘national territory’ and ‘turning peas-
ants into Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards and Russians’ (Emsley 1993:
87). Coming as ‘the man praising order’ (Emsley 2000: ch. 15), on
arrival the gendarme was often the most tangible manifestation of the
particular source and version of general order associated with this or
that nation-state project, his symbolic flying of the flag having a quite
literal foundation. Furthermore, the singularity and uniformity of the
general police function, the idea of its providing an indispensable floor
to effective political community, means that even in those countries,
such as England, where the police were less directly involved in the
initial consolidation of national territory and forging of national con-
sciousness, the police and the police function in due course came to be
associated with the continuing viability of the nation and with the
preservation and refinement of national mores and authority (Gorer
1955; Emsley 1992).
In turn, this points to the importance of policing in the political fab-
rication and cultural forms of national memory. If, in the context of
nation building, our common narratives do not simply record who we
are and what we have in common but actually help to construct these
110 On state scepticism

marks of identity, then such narratives provide important sources of

mythologization. Tradition itself becomes a rich source of invention.
The structural centrality of the police makes them a key object of
explicit fantasy and, as in the case of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, they may be accorded an imaginary role in the founding of the
nation (Walden 1982; I. Taylor 1999: 25). Perhaps even more impor-
tantly, at the ‘paleo-symbolic’ (Gouldner 1976: 224) level of unstated
beliefs and feelings and the stock of meaning tokens and fragments that
service this ‘mundane culture’ of everyday life (Loader and Mulcahy
2003: ch. 2), the centrality of the police to the ‘timelessly timely’ task
of preserving order against chaos and providing protection against
manifold social vulnerabilities means that the association of the police
with the sense of the continuity of the national societal order within
which such sentiments are framed is often deeply entrenched and
highly implicit. The iconization of the police and their status as a ‘con-
densation symbol’ (Turner 1974) around which various concerns
about social order are organized is achieved and sustained as much if
not more through songs, jokes, paintings, photographs, fiction, comic
books, films, TV series and the production and circulation of memo-
rabilia as through more deliberatively coded forms of communication
(Loader 1997c).
The forms of symbolic affirmation described above can of course
help furnish the police with the authority to execute the tasks through
which their instrumental role in sustaining the state and its general
order is performed. However, this self-fulfilling vindication of their
instrumental task is a double-edged sword. The various and cumula-
tive forms of operationalization of the structural correspondence
between nation-statehood and general order as situated and irre-
ducibly particular activities that we have set out certainly underscore
the enormous power of policing, but not always in ways about which
we can be sanguine.
The key position of the police and their general-order function
within a web of security-signifying beliefs and practices – one that
tends to ‘saturate the language of modern politics’ (Dillon 1996: 12)
and set the limits of our political imagination – operates in this regard
to do four things. First, the massive assumption of security as a holis-
tic and exclusionary discourse tends to privilege and cement the state
itself as the guardian of security, and by extension the police as the
guardian of the guardian, in ways that naturalize their ‘tangible, all-
The state as cultural monolith 111

pervasive, ghostly presence’ (Benjamin 1921/1985: 141–2) in the life

of modern societies and, with it, the institutional violence-in-the-last-
resort that underpins ‘democratic’ politics (see also Taussig 1997;
Neocleous 2000).
Secondly, by invoking ‘security’ as its foundational purpose and the
policing of general order as the basic measure of that purpose, the state
gives most tangible form to what in Schmittian terms (1922/1985: 5)
may be viewed as its sovereign right to ‘decide on the exception’. At
best, then, security operates as primus inter pares in its claims on public
policy as against other potential goods. At worst, security threatens to
operate as an anti-political political practice wherein state actors
declare the problem at hand (be it terrorism, or drugs, or migration,
or . . .) to demand imperatives rather than involve trade-offs and polit-
ical choices, to call for decisive decision instead of democratic deliber-
ation, and to warrant the restriction of basic liberties as the price to be
paid for the maintenance of public security (Huysmans 2004).
Whichever is the case, what is crucial to underline is that what may be
claimed to justify exceptional treatment under the banner of security
need not be the threat to any identifiable special interest or specific
strain of order itself of ‘exceptional’ importance, but rather the threat
to the ‘normal’ standard of general order, however defined. And along-
side and underpinning the privileging of security discourse there is a
privileging of the key ‘securitizing’ (Wæver 1995) actors who partici-
pate in that discourse and in its relevant politics of definition. As iconic
figures in the production of national security, the police, despite their
lack of democratic credentials, often acquire ‘the right of legitimate
pronouncement’ (Loader and Mulcahy 2003: 46) – the reputational
standing necessary to identify problems and deviations from the
‘normal’ standard of general order and make reckonable claims to their
diagnosis and solution.
Thirdly, building on these formidable symbolic foundations of ‘natu-
ralness’ and exceptionalism, securitizing state practices and state actors
serve in particular ways to rally and reify a ‘unitary people’ whose social
existence is fragile and deemed to be in need of authoritative ‘protec-
tion’. Here we reach the key insight of the cultural monolith critique.
The state, with its security apparatus deeply complicit, can thus become
a site in which individuals and groups practically and emotionally over-
invest as a means of transcending their own vulnerabilities as individu-
als and groups. They see in the state and its sovereign force a vehicle for
112 On state scepticism

producing the fantasy of total security that they lack the resources to
secure alone. The state on this view becomes an obstacle, in Markell’s
(2003) terms, to producing a conception of security based upon an
acknowledgement of our mutual vulnerability to and dependence upon
each other. This is so because the generation of political community
around the idea of danger tends to foster forms of solidarity that cohere
around common enemies, such that national life is re/constituted
through an antipathy towards those outsiders (whether within or
beyond territorial borders) represented as hostile to ‘our’ freedom and
‘our’ security – something that has been ever more discernible in the USA
and many other western states in the aftermath of 9/11.
More particularly, the fantasy of total security – of security ‘deep’
and ‘wide’ – is harmful to the extent that it seeks to, and does, gener-
ate an affectively charged, close to unconditional identification with
those institutions – notably policing institutions – that through the
process of symbolic affiliation we have discussed come both to embody
the ‘way of life’ under threat and to be tasked with keeping the dan-
gerous other at bay. The resulting investment in a policing solution to
the question of ‘deep’ or ontological security (and often within that to
particular repressive police strategies) can all too easily coexist with a
tendency to overlook or condone abuses of power committed by ‘our’
police and turn a blind eye to practices that undermine the liberty and
security of unpopular minority groups (see Loader and Mulcahy 2003:
chs. 5 and 9; and, more generally, S. Cohen 2001). Security, accord-
ingly, becomes not a precondition for the exercise of critical freedom,
but a standing threat to it. And, especially when it is coupled with an
overt politics of belonging in the broader public arena – as is most obvi-
ously the case in many so-called ‘divided societies’ (Brewer 1991;
Mulcahy 2005), but is also in some measure true of any state with a
dominant national tradition – there will be an illiberal, anti-pluralist
price to pay. The more comprehensive in reach, and the more major-
ity-indulgent and orthodoxy-affirming the publicly aspirational and
broadly received understanding of the good of security, the more
implausible and doomed to anxiety-fuelling disappointment it is likely
to be even for those in whose name such an approach is pursued. Yet
that very over-investment in orthodoxy can, at the same time, generate
more acute harms of misrecognition or non-recognition for those con-
stituencies deemed ‘unorthodox’ – increasing their sense of public inhi-
bition and vulnerability, of precarious belonging and, perhaps, of
The state as cultural monolith 113

frustrated disengagement or confrontation (Giddens 1991; C. Taylor

1994).2
Fourthly, and finally, we also have to be alive to the external effects
of the development of culturally partial forms of nation-state policing.
At the macro-level, one obvious consequence has to do with the very
development and sustenance of the ‘international’ and of the related dis-
tinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ security. If policing and secu-
rity are foundational to the nation-state project, and the nation-state
project in turn remains fundamental to the Westphalian global order,
then the very idea of a realm of inter-sovereign and so ‘undomesticated’
external order, with all of its instabilities and susceptibility to an ‘anar-
chistic’ (Bull 1977) and zero-sum security diagnosis and a military mode
of treatment, is but the flipside and consequence of the proliferation of
particular ‘general orders’ at the state level. We will have much more to
say about this in the final chapter, but for the moment there are other
potentially damaging external effects of the cultural particularity of
national policing to which we should attend. These can be summed up
under the twin themes of imperialism and mistranslation.
Policing, of course, has always been a key part of strategies of impe-
rial domination, whether we are talking about the overseas colonies of

12
The example of contemporary France is instructive in this regard. In the course
of a remarkable few months between the autumn of 2005 and the spring of
2006, many French cities experienced two distinct waves of public unrest – in
the first wave a series of clashes between young second- and third-generation
members of ethnic minorities and the police and security services, and in the
second wave a series of demonstrations led by middle-class students protesting
against new laws which they deemed threatening to their capacity to begin and
pursue a life-long career. What is most interesting about this case is the fact that
both waves were so strongly defined and coded in security terms, and the con-
nection between the two waves that this shared coding hints at. The first wave
dramatized the sense of social and political exclusion of young members of
ethnic minorities, and the intensity of the threat their disorderly and property-
damaging behaviour was perceived to offer to a political establishment who sub-
sequently stood accused in many quarters of over-reaction. The second wave was
organized around the theme of précarité – in the first instance certainly précar-
ité de l’emploi (job insecurity), but gradually widening to signify a deeper range
of insecurities about the disappearance of a certain received understanding of the
French ‘way of life’ – economic and cultural – under conditions of globalization.
In the first wave, therefore, we see some of the symptoms and secondary effects
of the harms of misrecognition caused to minorities, while in the second we see
the dangers of reifying a particular conception of ontological security – one that
is closely related to the minorities’ sense of exclusion and misrecognition – for
the very majority whose needs it purportedly serves (see, e.g., Pfaff 2006).
114 On state scepticism

various European states (Brogden 1987; Anderson and Killingray

1991, 1992) or, from the very cradle of modern policing, the spread of
the French gendarmerie over Napoleon’s European empire (Emsley
2000). For present purposes, however, we are not concerned with the
more directly repressive motivational edge of imperial policing which
was highlighted in the previous chapter. For whether we are dealing
with classical forms of colonialism or with the kinds of post-colonial
imperialism implied by national or (increasingly) international inter-
ventions in failed or transitional states (Oakley et al. 2002), the devel-
opment of a specifically and nominally policing solution in place of or
in supplement to a military solution is always in some measure about
the attempted routinization and normalization of rule, and in turn
about how the idea of general order is utilized in that process of nor-
malization. On the one hand, various features of the idea of general
order, in particular the commitment to uniformity and the sense of
involvement in a timeless war between order and chaos, encourage the
view that general-order solutions appropriate to one context and cul-
turally inflected by that context may be equally applicable to other con-
texts. This is especially so where the key agents of change begin from
a position of imperial conceit – a sense of the superiority of any solu-
tion developed on ‘home’ territory and a paternalistic assumption that
any translation problems are best handled by those expert in the source
rather than the destination language. On the other hand, the irre-
ducible particularity of general order – the uniqueness of the material
and cultural conditions under which such order must be negotiated –
means that such an approach always risks hubristic failure.
Whether we are talking about the globalization of community polic-
ing over the past thirty years, fuelled by its promise to supply ‘a value-
free commodity unencumbered with the trappings of economic and
political interest’ (Brogden and Nijhar 2005: 9), or the efforts of the
United Nations peacekeeping capacity’s civilian policing arm –
CIVPOL – to use an internationally recruited policing force as a key
catalyst in the ‘nation-(re)building’ activities of transitional adminis-
trations in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor (Bellamy et al. 2004: ch. 12;
J. M. H. Wilson 2006), the manifold problems of mistranslation have
been well documented (Linden et al. forthcoming). General order, in
short, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, always travels
with culturally specific baggage, and because of this can never adapt
easily to its new environment.
The state as cultural monolith 115

Lessons and limits of the monolith critique

The variant of state – and security – scepticism set out in this chapter
teaches a number of salutary lessons. It is highly attentive to the
powerful, if often understated or misstated symbolic and emotive
dimensions of security and community, and possesses a sharp sensitiv-
ity to their pathological consequences. In so doing, it warns those, such
as ourselves, who wish to draw democratic virtues from the inescapable
presence of cultural identity and political affect in the politics of security
that they are ‘playing with fire’. It supplies, further, a cogent account of
the dangers of placing security even in the supposedly neutral and inno-
cent form of general order at the ideological heart of government, of the
capacity of security politics to colonize public policy and social life in
ways that are injurious of democratic values, and of its propensity to
foster and sustain fear-laden, other-disregarding forms of political sub-
jectivity and collective identity. In all these ways, it reminds us that
security ‘cannot be dissociated from even more basic claims about who
we think we are and how we might act together’ (R. B. J. Walker 1997:
66; see also Dillon 1996: 34).
Yet critical work in policing and security studies remains, in our view,
skewed in its account of these associations. It concludes too easily from
the above that there can be no progressive democratic politics aimed at
civilizing security, that security is so stained by its uncivil association
with the (military and police) state and its monolithic affects and effects,
that the only radical strategy left open is to deconstruct and move
beyond it (e.g. Dillon 1996: ch. 1). In so doing, this strand of state scep-
ticism commits two mistakes, both of which flow from its failure to
appreciate or at least sufficiently to acknowledge what we tried to
demonstrate in an earlier section of the chapter; namely, that state polic-
ing, however culpable it might be in exacerbating certain of the tensions
involved in applying general order in any particular context, is not the
fixed and fundamental source of these tensions. It forgets, first of all, that
while the affective connections between security, state and nation are
deeply entrenched, they take no necessary or essential substantive form.
They can, in other words, be remade and reimagined in ways that
connect policing and security to other more inclusive, cosmopolitan
forms of belonging – to political communities that ‘do not necessarily
equate difference with threat’ (Dalby 1997: 9). It tends, secondly, to
forget that the ‘pursuit of security’ through general order is not only the
116 On state scepticism

product of forms of technocratic, authoritarian government that impov-

erishes our sense of the political (Dillon 1996: 15). Security, in the sense
of a broadly responsive and acceptable conception of order, can also be,
and indeed – if we examine the political aspirations which preceded and
have survived the modern state – must also be, conceived of in a prior
and abstract sense as a valuable human good, one that in concrete appli-
cation is a key ingredient of the good society as well as being axiomatic
to the production of other individual goods (most directly, liberty). It is
our contention that security can be rethought along these lines, and that
the state through its ordering and cultural work continues to possess a
central place in the production of security thus conceived; we develop
this argument in part II. We must first, however, consider one further
critique of the modern state tradition.
 5 The state as idiot

L
e t us suppose for a moment that one could minimize or eradi-
cate the shortcomings of the state we have examined thus far –
its propensity to meddle, to be biased, and to privilege majority
over minority norms and practices. Suppose one could build a benign,
well-intentioned state that consistently acted in ways that respected
individual rights, and was impartial between competing interests and
protective of minority cultures. According to the sceptical stance we
consider in this chapter, one would still be faced, even under these con-
ditions, with a deeper, arguably intractable, tragedy of the state. The
state is, on this view, an idiot. Its bureaucratic remoteness means that
it lacks the situated knowledge and therefore the capacity to deliver
security across a diverse array of local settings. Nor can it easily acquire
such knowledge without resorting to authoritarian, diversity-threaten-
ing means. The state, moreover, is not merely deficient in the knowl-
edge of local circumstances that is prerequisite to the production of
security. It also tends towards obduracy – being both unreflexive about
its own cognitive limitations and determined to press on with its pur-
poses, including its policing and security purposes, in wilful disregard
of its own ignorance. The state, or so it believes, ‘knows best’.
Idiocy and obduracy are, according to this view, characteristics even
of strong democratic states operating within their own national bound-
aries – in conditions, that is, where they at least possess the sovereign
capacity and authority that enable them to generate knowledge of
‘their’ territory and populations, however imperfectly. But these traits
are more radically marked in respect of ‘weak’ or ‘failing’ states which
lack either the infrastructure and legitimacy that enable mature demo-
cratic states to ‘know’ their societies, or the control of territory that is
a minimal precondition for administrative knowledge production.
Knowledge deficits are, furthermore, a chronic feature of states oper-
ating in the international and transnational arena, whether in cooper-
ation with other states, or when trying to resolve conflict, keep the

117
118 On state scepticism

peace or otherwise intervene in environments overseen by other sover-

eign authorities – something US and British ‘intelligence’ failures in the
run up to the second Iraq War demonstrated once again.
The ‘state as idiot’ critique overlaps with all three of the sceptical out-
looks we have addressed thus far, as we shall see. It is also protean in the
political form that it assumes, taking aim at the state from divergent
standpoints in the name of alternative institutional solutions. Several
variants of this stance can be found on the political right. It is implicit,
for instance, in Michael Oakshott’s (1949/1991) withering attack on
‘rationalism in politics’, his fire being directed at the view that Reason,
and its practical manifestation in state planning, can be put to work in
solving human problems. On this view, the state is posited as the pur-
veyor of the ‘sovereignty of technique’ (1949/1991: 21) deploying its
bullying power to trample over practical knowledge in a bid to impose
‘uniform conditions of perfection upon human conduct’ (1949/1991:
10). One encounters it – even more explicitly – in Hayek’s case for the
benefits of markets over administration as mechanisms for producing
and allocating goods. Hayek’s starting point is that knowledge in human
societies is inescapably partial, widely dispersed and necessarily frag-
mented – in short, imperfect. Knowledge, he says, is contingent and tem-
porary information about particular times and places, and ‘not given to
anyone in totality’ (Hayek 1948: 78) – a condition of ignorance that
chronically limits the coordinating and allocative potential of the state.
The ‘data’ needed for such coordination cannot, Hayek argues, be col-
lected by a single authority, nor will such an authority be able to discern
its necessary implications. We must consequently abandon the idea that
‘everything must be tidily planned and made to show a recognizable
order’ (1948: 27), as any such deliberate organization of society from
the top ‘smothers spontaneous formations which are founded on con-
tacts closer and more intimate than those that can exist in the larger unit’
(1948: 28). For both Oakshott and Hayek, this culminates in a profound
distaste for the state and the forms of political decision-making associ-
ated with it: in Oakshott’s case out of a preference for the authority,
traditions and local craft-ways of practical knowledge; in Hayek’s, as we
saw in chapter 2, in favour of decentralized and autonomy-enhancing
decision-making that he believes can only exist in market forms.1

11
We should be careful here to note the dissimilarities between these two positions.
Oakshott clearly saw Hayek as having fallen victim to the very rationalist
The state as idiot 119

We will have cause to revisit Hayek later in the chapter, as his work
looms large in the attempt of Clifford Shearing and other champions
of local initiative to think about and deliver security beyond the state.
But our principal purpose in this chapter – as this brief mention of
Shearing and his collaborators indicates – is to address those versions
of the ‘state as idiot’ critique that emanate broadly speaking from the
left – conceptually, under the banner of communitarian or pragmatist
philosophy; politically, in the name of ‘bottom-up’ community poli-
tics and democratic experimentalism. As a way into this strand of
state scepticism, we may usefully consider James C. Scott’s influential
Seeing Like a State (1998). Here one finds, as with Oakshott and
Hayek, a critique of top-down rationalist planning, along with a par-
allel effort to pinpoint the cognitive deficiencies of the state – these
forming, for Scott, a large part of the explanation for the tragic failure
of ‘so many well-intentioned schemes to improve the human condi-
tion’ (1998: 4). Scott documents the disasters of what he calls ‘author-
itarian high modernism’ across fields as diverse as city planning,
scientific forestry, collectivist agriculture and vanguard politics. In so
doing, he argues that modernist self-confidence in the capacity to
deploy scientific and technical knowledge in an effort to change
people’s ‘work habits, living patterns, moral conduct and worldview’
(1998: 4) is doomed to fail because it rests upon ‘thin simplifications’
about societies generated by remote state actors in ways that gloss
over the diversity, complexity and unpredictability of the social and
disregard competing sources of local knowledge upon which the
success of state projects depends. ‘Formal schemes of order’, he
argues, ‘are untenable without some elements of the practical knowl-
edge that they tend to dismiss’ (1998: 7).
Scott’s critique of the idiotic and obdurate state is not, however,
launched in the name of the sovereign individual and untrammelled
market forces – he argues, contra Hayek, that markets generate their
own ‘heroic simplifications’ (1998: 8).2 His point, rather, is that the

patterns of thought that he believed had been the ruin of modern European pol-
itics, describing Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as ‘a plan to end all planning’
(Oakshott 1949/1991: 26). Hayek, for his part, explicitly distanced himself from
the English conservative tradition of which Oakshott was a prominent repre-
sentative (Hayek 1978).
12
Scott similarly distances his position from that of Oakshottian conservatism.
While he applauds Oakshott’s ‘astute and telling’ critique of rationalist planning
120 On state scepticism

state possesses a deep incapacity to recognize, understand and learn

from the ‘practical skills and applied intelligence’ (1998: 313), the fine-
grained awareness of local circumstances and contingency, that make
up informal knowledge – or what he calls mētis (1998: ch. 9). This
failure, Scott argues, is bound up, as cause and effect, with a twofold
statist hubris: states regard themselves as far smarter and more far-
seeing than they really are, and their subjects as far more stupid and
incompetent than they in fact are (1998: 343). It is in response to this
posture of cognitive imperialism that Scott advances the case for
‘mētis-friendly institutions’ that are plastic, diverse and adaptable in
the face of constantly changing environments (1998: 352–7).
Our aim in this chapter is to consider the application of this critique
of the state, and promotion of local knowledge, to questions of polic-
ing and security. We do so, first, by examining the problems and failings
of some recent top-down, state-sponsored policing and crime-control
programmes through the lens of the ‘state as idiot’ problematic. In so
doing, we highlight the trend towards multilevel, ‘networked’ security
governance that these programmes are said to signify and the express
or implied ‘theory’ of the relationship between the state and the social
that they mobilize. We then offer a critical reconstruction of one influ-
ential ‘left-Hayekian’ attempt to conceptualize and practically promote
across various jurisdictions the possibilities of communal security
beyond the state; namely, the work of Les Johnston, Clifford Shearing,
Jennifer Wood and others on ‘nodal governance’. We conclude with
some brief remarks on the limits of bottom-up, non-state practices as
vehicles for civilizing security.

Problems of security governance

We have, in recent years, witnessed a shift in crime-control practices
away from the police towards policing and, more broadly, from gov-
ernment to governance (Loader 2000; Pierre 2000; Mazerolle and
Ransley 2006). These terms signal a repositioning of the state in rela-
tion to the plurality of agents and agencies now involved in the ‘gov-
ernance of security’ (Johnston and Shearing 2003). They attest that the

Footnote 2 (cont.)
and his appreciation of the contingency of practice, Scott goes on to dismiss him
as a complacent apologist ‘for whatever the past has bequeathed to the present
in terms of power, privilege and property’ (1998: 424, 431).
The state as idiot 121

state is no longer the sole or even pre-eminent player in efforts to

control (rather than punish) crime, but, rather, exists today as part of
loosely coupled security networks comprised of state, commercial and
lay actors (Dupont 2004). This, in turn, has been accompanied by new
mentalities and technologies of rule. The state – to cite again Osborne
and Gaebler’s (1992) familiar nautical metaphor – has become less ori-
ented to ‘rowing’ (actually delivering policing on-the-ground) and
more focused on ‘steering’ (setting the strategic framework within
which delivery takes place). Far from displacing the state, however, the
practice of ‘ruling at a distance’ means that it becomes more active –
demanding a greater degree of the very authority and legitimacy that
the move towards multi-actor governance threatens to undermine.
Instead of being concerned solely with its own capacity to ‘row’, the
‘steering’ state has to wield authority over, and generate knowledge
from and about, a wide range of social institutions in an effort to co-
ordinate and regulate a diversity of policing and security practices.
Here the ‘state as idiot’ critique offers some sharp – albeit not, in our
view, fatal – insights into the state’s capacity to undertake the effective
governance of security networks. We turn to these in due course. Let
us begin though by recalling and describing some of the key trends and
developments.

State-led, police-centric
Consider first those security strategies and practices that one might
describe as state-led and police-centric – an array of subnational,
national and international practices in which the state retains a privi-
leged place as both provider and regulator. Prominent here are an assort-
ment of strategies that travel under the banner of community policing.
As noted in chapter 4, such strategies have acquired global prominence
and received much warm official rhetoric in recent decades (Skolnick
and Bayley 1988; Brogden and Nijhar 2005), whether in the form of
policies aimed at embedding the patrol officer as a dedicated, exemplary,
networked and knowledgeable presence in local social life, or, more
ambitiously, of attempts to make the police into local civic leaders,
spearheading efforts – in consultation with local people – to ‘activate the
good’ within communities (Alderson 1979; Innes 2004). We can cite also
the coming to the fore of ‘problem-oriented policing’ (Goldstein 1990),
with its conception of the police not as a force reacting willy-nilly to
122 On state scepticism

outbreaks of crime and disorder, but as an institution proactively

engaged with others in attempting to forge holistic solutions to deep-
seated problems of which crime and disorder are merely symptoms. And
we can note the rise and global spread of ‘broken-windows’ and ‘zero-
tolerance’ policing with their superficially alluring prescription of the
police shoring-up majority communal norms by ‘cracking down’ on
incivilities which, left untended, can send communities spiralling
towards chronic forms of criminal victimization (Kelling and Coles
1996; cf. Harcourt 2001).
There are, it should be said, important differences of emphasis
between these approaches, even if they do not warrant the quasi-theo-
logical battles that take place between their respective champions.
They have, in addition, given rise to endless – apparently technical, but
always also highly political – debates about whether, and under what
conditions, each of them ‘works’ (see Tilley 2003).3 For present pur-
poses, however, we are less concerned with whether these strategies are
instrumentally effective than with what they tell us about trends in
security governance, and here we can pinpoint some significant com-
monalities between them. Uppermost among these is a police-centred
and top-down conception of the production of order within commu-
nities – the rhetorical claims of community policing notwithstanding.
The police are posited in each case as the lynchpin of local security, as
the institution best placed to diagnose problems, design solutions and
mobilize individuals, organizations and businesses to implement them.
The police, in short, are elevated to the status of community leaders
orchestrating practices of local ordering (Innes 2004), a position justi-
fied by the resources, know-how and capacity for decisive action that
they bring to bear on problems of crime control and order mainte-
nance. Such claims, it seems to us, are implicit in each of the afore-
mentioned policing strategies and constitute an overlapping consensus
in the conception their respective advocates hold of the relationship
between policing and the social.
Yet if these presumptions are present within policing strategies
deployed in circumstances where the state possesses the territorial
control and sovereign authority necessary to generate knowledge of
local communities, they are even more apparent in respect of the

13
We return to some of these issues when discussing the consumerist syndrome in
chapter 8.
The state as idiot 123

‘export’ of policing ‘models’ to places where such knowledge is almost

entirely lacking. The propensity of crime and policing policy to ‘travel’
has increased markedly under conditions of globalization (Newburn
and Sparks 2004; Melossi et al. forthcoming). Broadly speaking, this
has taken one of the following forms: (i) the regular import/export flow
of apparently successful and increasingly ‘commonplace’ anti-crime
strategies (e.g. neighbourhood watch, broken-windows and zero-
tolerance policing, crime-reduction partnerships, restorative confer-
encing) between liberal democratic societies (Wacquant 2003; Jones
and Newburn 2004); (ii) the more active efforts of police entrepreneurs
(Bratton 1998) or ‘transnational police elites’ (Marenin forthcoming)
to market and sell new or rebranded community or zero-tolerance
policing ‘models’ to cities and states across the world (Ellison forth-
coming); (iii) the provision of external assistance such as personnel,
equipment and ‘know-how’ to weak or failing states in dealing with
problems of organized crime and insurgency (e.g. Goldsmith et al.
forthcoming); and (iv) training police forces in ‘transitional states’ so
as to bring them up to the standards of liberal democracies (Bayley
2006) – something that explicitly underpinned the ‘twinning arrange-
ments’ between EU police forces and their counterparts in former com-
munist states in central-eastern Europe in the lead-up to the latter’s
accession to full EU membership (N. Walker 2002a) and marks the
current missions of the US and British governments in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Common to each of these cases, as mentioned in chapter 4, is the
promotion of security solutions in simplistic ignorance of local histo-
ries, conflicts and priorities, coupled with an implicit ‘occidentalist’
presumption as to the ‘ “sameness” of key cultural categories, practices
and institutions’ (Cain 2000: 71). To this one can often add a mis-
sionary determination to bring ‘our’ guidance and standards to those
Rudyard Kipling called ‘lesser breeds without the law’ – a neo-colonial
ambition that demands little or no understanding of ‘their’ ways of
seeing and doing things.4 There can be few better illustrations of the
intimate relationship between idiocy and obduracy.

14
We should note here that the international traffic in security practices is not
entirely one way. The remarkable global diffusion of restorative justice ideas and
programmes rooted in Aboriginal and Maori dispute-resolution processes offers
one of the best counter-examples of crime policy travelling from the periphery
to the centre (cf. Blagg 1997). So too do the efforts of Clifford Shearing – dis-
cussed further below – to promote to other parts of the world forms of non-state
124 On state scepticism

A cognate series of difficulties underpin the ‘very mixed’ record

(Linden et al. forthcoming) of United Nations (CIVPOL) and
European Union peacekeeping ‘missions’ dispatched in recent years
to post-conflict societies such as Kosovo, Haiti and East Timor (e.g.
J. M. Wilson 2006). Such missions have proliferated since the end of
the Cold War. They have also become international and multi-agency
in terms of personnel (commonly today comprising the police, military
and humanitarian NGOs), as well as assuming broad remits encom-
passing such activities as law enforcement and patrolling, human rights
monitoring, training local forces, organizing the return of displaced
persons, overseeing elections and assisting economic reconstruction –
in short, governance (United Nations 2000). But these missions have
been bedevilled and undermined by a catalogue of recurring problems:
multiple sources of authority and accountability; confused, conflicting
and shifting mandates; logistical problems in acquiring suitably trained
staff and adequate equipment; a lack of law enforcement as well as
longer-term institution-building capability, and a dim awareness of,
and inability to acquire, the knowledge of local history, culture and
conditions that is prerequisite to their effectiveness (Oakley et al. 2002;
Linden et al. forthcoming). All this, of course, is grist to the mill of
those who charge such missions with cultural misrecognition and
imperialism, as we have seen. But it also attests to the cognitive impe-
rialism that so readily accompanies the state’s overweening idiocy.

Reconfigurations of state authority

We can point, secondly, to the reconfigurations of state authority that
one encounters within a range of contemporary ‘partnership’ arrange-
ments aimed at delivering public safety – arrangements found today
across several jurisdictions. Some of these remain steadfastly top-down
and orchestrated by the state. They involve police efforts to extend
their capacity through the deployment of a new tier of dedicated patrol
or community support officers, as has happened in both the
Netherlands and England and Wales in recent years. Or they amount

Footnote 4 (cont.)
security governance first developed in poor communities in South Africa – prac-
tices that Shearing claims ‘can be adapted and transferred to practical use in
many nations of the world, including the established democracies of the West’
(Shearing and Kempa 2000: 206; Wood 2006; cf. B. Dixon 2004).
The state as idiot 125

to state-sponsored attempts to encourage individuals, community

groups and businesses to participate in ‘responsible’ anti-crime activ-
ity (through, for example, a bewildering array of ‘watch’ schemes), or
to exhort individuals to provide the police with the information they
need to tackle crime (as evident in the spread across several jurisdic-
tions of programmes such as Crimestoppers). On occasions, these
amount to the public police actively striving to reassert the state’s
capacity to steer, as recent initiatives aimed at creating an ‘extended
policy family’ in England and Wales attest (Home Office 2001; Blair
2002; Johnston 2003). Starting from a recognition that the police have
lost their monopoly of patrol provision to a range of alternative (local
government and commercial) suppliers, the state police seek here to
mobilize their symbolic capital in a bid to tempt consumers (such as
local authorities) to purchase ‘police community support officers’, as
well as putting themselves forward as a network regulator, training and
accrediting a plurality of ‘authority figures linked to the police’ (Home
Office 2001: 90). The police, on this view, are to be the hub of, rather
than a mere node within, ‘partnerships for civic renewal’ (Home Office
2001: 35).
But alongside initiatives such as these which indicate new linkages
between state and market sectors, we can highlight – across several
jurisdictions – developments that reposition the police in more radical
ways within multi-agency arrangements for governing security, initia-
tives that point at the same time to a new pervasiveness of security con-
cerns and consciousness across government (Crawford 1997, 2003).
The enhanced and in many respects novel role of subnational tiers of
government (e.g. local councils in Britain, city mayors in France,
regional authorities in parts of Italy) in such matters as employing city
guards and neighbourhood wardens, policing and punishing anti-
social behaviour, developing urban safety strategies and (in the British
case) factoring crime-control considerations into all fields of local gov-
ernment activity is a clear indicator of this (Karn 2007); as is the promi-
nence of the security question within campaigns by civic leaders to
market their cities and attract inward investment, and the networking
of such local policy elites in bodies such as the ‘European Forum for
Urban Safety’ (Melossi and Selmini 2000; Ocqueteau 2004; van der
Vijver and Terpstra 2005). So too is the embryonic development within
the EU of a concern to coordinate the control of (especially) juvenile,
urban and drug-related crime within and across member states, a
126 On state scepticism

concern given institutional form with the formation in 2001 of the

European Crime Prevention Network (den Boer and Peters 2005). The
multidimensional, networked conception of policework fashioned by
the British Crime and Disorder Act 1998 can also be highlighted here.
This encompasses: (i) the formation of statutory ‘crime-reduction part-
nerships’ according the police a prominent strategic role, in collabora-
tion with municipal authorities and other public agencies such as
health authorities and probation, in the local governance of crime; (ii)
various measures – notably, ‘anti-social behaviour orders’ and ‘local
child curfew schemes’ – that require of the police and local government
a strategic role in shaping and monitoring their use and the active
deployment of their resources to enforce them, often in ways which
blur or traverse the boundaries between the institutions and processes
of criminal and civil law; and (iii) aspects of the legislation – ‘child
safety orders’, ‘youth offending teams’, the aforementioned crime-
reduction partnerships – which call upon the police either to supply
information needed to activate ‘welfarist’ interventions, or to actively
share information with criminal justice and social service agencies. All
in all, this amounts to a diffuse and expansive role for the police in the
administration of civic governance (Crawford 2003; Newburn 2003).
We can point finally, under this head, to new configurations of secu-
rity governance in which commercial organizations are the lead or sole
actors. The provision of security in shopping malls, leisure and office
complexes and other sites of what Shearing and Stenning (1983) call
‘mass private property’ provides the clearest example of this – settings
in which owners establish particularistic forms of social and moral
order and enlist private security firms to enforce it on their behalf using
property law (Wakefield 2003; Kempa et al. 2004). The growth of
private residential associations and the formation of ‘Business
Improvement Districts’ (most commonly in the USA) offer analogous
cases in point (Alexander 1997). These are best characterized as forms
of ‘private government’, security pursuits from which the state has
been displaced and where commercial actors assume the task of both
‘steering’ and ‘rowing’ – albeit within a market space constituted by
law. But we can also highlight the tendency of market actors, as well
as local authorities and groups within civil society, to enlist police
capacity – for instance, by purchasing police officers or police time for
allotted periods and thereby seeking to redirect public resources (with
their attendant symbolic power) towards the pursuit of communal
The state as idiot 127

order through the mechanism of contract (Gans 2000; Crawford and

Lister 2005). Here, it seems, we encounter security partnerships in
which the state continues to ‘row’, under contractual arrangements in
which non-state actors play a greatly enhanced role in ‘steering’. They
form, as such, but one of the ways in which private policing develop-
ments impact on and complicate the regulatory tasks required of the
state and the knowledge which it requires for their successful accom-
plishment, matters to which we now turn.

The production and limits of state knowledge

The two broad developments in security governance highlighted
above – those which remain state-led and police-centred, and those
which reconfigure state authority in potentially more far-reaching
ways – both have a further consequence which is pertinent to the
variant of state scepticism we are concerned with in this chapter –
namely, they give rise to new forms of knowledge production and
deployment. These forms have developed both as tools for doing police-
work in the first case, and as a means of trying to regulate the plurality
of agencies now involved in efforts to realize security in the second. In
respect of the former, an obvious illustration is the current popularity
among both the British government and police forces of ‘intelligence-
led’ policing with its focus on generating and analysing information on
crime patterns, ‘hot-spots’ and ‘known offenders’ in an effort to
sharpen law enforcement practice (Maguire 2000). The ‘Compstat’
crime-analysis programme that figures so dramatically in ideological
representations of zero-tolerance policing and its claimed impact on
crime in New York City is a further case in point of the same trend
(Bratton 1998; cf. Manning 2001; Weisburd et al. 2003). Extrapolating
from developments such as these, and from their own research on the
police in Canada, Ericson and Haggerty (1997) contend that the
‘modern’ police project of tackling crime and securing territorial order
is in fact being transformed by a pervasive concern with information
management organized around risk. The police, they argue, have been
reconfigured as ‘knowledge workers’, generating, brokering and dis-
seminating socially authoritative information to other governmental
agencies (insurance companies, licensing bodies, credit agencies, local
authorities, the media, etc.) in order to assist them in constituting indi-
viduals and populations ‘in their respective risk categories’ (Ericson
128 On state scepticism

1994: 168). On this view, community policing becomes ‘communica-

tions policing’ as the police are embedded at the centre of loosely
coupled informational networks whose purpose is to sort and adminis-
ter the population with a view to suppressing risk.
Such highly circumscribed, pre-formatted information has, more-
over, as Ericson and Haggerty intimate, come to play a pronounced
role in the state’s efforts to govern security. Recent British experiments
in applying the techniques of ‘new public management’ to policing
and community safety are instructive in this regard – not least because
they are now being taken up elsewhere (McLaughlin and Murji 2001).
Under this umbrella, though with antecedents in earlier initiatives
aimed at ‘policing by objectives’ (Butler 1984; Waddington 1986),
we have witnessed in the last decade or so an increasingly heavy
reliance on audits, consumer surveys and nationally established per-
formance targets as vehicles for proactively disciplining the police and
crime-reduction partnerships. These, in turn, form the basis for a per-
formance management regime comprised of routine monitoring,
inspection, evaluation and ‘Best Value’ reviews conducted by a prolif-
erating complex of organizations – Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of
Constabulary, the Audit Commission, the Association of Chief Police
Officers, the Private Security Industry Authority, the Police Standards
Unit, the National Policing Improvement Agency, Home Office-
funded evaluators – all in the name of ensuring compliance with
national standards, weeding out poor performance and spreading
what is deemed to be good practice (N. Walker 2000: ch. 4; Jones
2003). Such today is the form taken by the state’s rationalist ambition
to plan and administer policing.
These trends in security governance have attracted a large policy lit-
erature concerned with their instrumental effectiveness in cutting crime
and disorder – some of it, in these terms, fiercely critical (e.g. Bullock
and Tilley 2003). But they have also been subject to wider forms of crit-
ical social analysis, much of which highlights the predilection of the
state to think in a top-down fashion about communal order (and
accounts for its failures in these terms), or pinpoints the state’s inca-
pacity to bring into alignment and hold to democratic account the plu-
rality of institutional actors involved today in the production of security
(Crawford 1997; Hughes and Edwards 2002; Herbert 2006). This cri-
tique of the state’s role in security governance raises concerns that we
in large measure share, and which the project of civilizing security must
The state as idiot 129

find ways of circumventing. Using the ‘state as idiot’ perspective as our

guide, let us elaborate upon three of them.
The first – spanning both the policy and sociological literatures –
addresses the coordination problems found within multi-agency secu-
rity partnerships. It raises sceptical questions both about the state’s
impulse to subject the field of policing and security to forms of hier-
archical planning and about the difficulties of steering multi-agency
arrangements towards meeting their stated purposes. Part of this has
to do with the state’s cognitive limitations – its idiocy; commonly
found impediments to the success of multi-agency partnerships, or
community, problem-oriented and intelligence-led policing, are short-
falls of relevant information (about public anxieties, or local crime
patterns, or community priorities), or an incapacity to analyse avail-
able data and discern its meanings and implications (Wright 2002: ch.
5; Tilley 2003: 329–34), or recalcitrant actors supplying required
information to managers and external bodies in formally compliant,
line-toeing ‘rituals of verification’ (Power 1997). Hayek, of course,
would have expected little else. But this remains closely connected to
the pronounced tendency of the state to refuse to acknowledge these
limitations and to plough on regardless – its obduracy. Steering, as we
noted earlier, requires greater knowledge of underlying social dynam-
ics, and a higher quotient of authority and legitimacy, than mere
rowing, entailing, as it does, complex relations of trust and coopera-
tion between a multiplicity of actors both within and beyond the state.
The serious question that the ‘idiot’ critique poses, one that finds
support in the repeated implementation failures of contemporary
policing and crime-prevention programmes (Crawford 1998: chs.
5–6), is whether the state is capable of undertaking, or is best placed
to perform, the necessary coordination and regulatory tasks. The sus-
picion is that an entrenched attachment to linear and hierarchical
forms of ordering (Thompson 2003: ch. 2) leaves the state deficient in
the kinds of flexibility and nimble-footedness that are needed to bring
reflexive coherence to today’s interorganizational, multilevel security
networks.
A second, closely related, critique focuses on the democratic deficits
that attend the pluralization of policing and security provision
(Crawford 1997; Loader 2000). There are several strands to this com-
plaint. First, that state-sponsored policing and crime-prevention pro-
grammes remain for the most part remote and top-down, answering
130 On state scepticism

to their own bureaucratically set priorities. They either act on behalf

of the ‘community’ whose concerns and priorities state security actors
presume to know, or practise forms of consultation whose claims to
inclusiveness are radically deficient – practices that tend to elicit the
demands of, while at the same time helping to constitute, communi-
ties of the ‘trustworthy’ and ‘law-abiding’. The state’s resultant igno-
rance is, of course, greatest in respect of excluded, unpopular or
‘hard-to-reach’ constituencies (Jones and Newburn 2001) – something
that becomes an additional factor in forging a security politics which
tends to reinforce intolerance towards local minorities. It can be
argued, further, that the expansive conception of the police role pro-
jected by crime-control programmes such as community and problem-
oriented policing not only lacks a theory of police limits (Braithwaite
1992: 17), but entails the police extending their reach as ‘expert’ local
problem-solvers into areas where they can claim ‘no more legitimate
authority than the non-expert citizen’ (de Lint 1997: 260). And one
can point, lastly, to an increasingly complex institutional pattern of
local security that presents as a closed bureaucratic system, opaque
and unresponsive to its wider public environment (Crawford 1997) –
something buttressed by centralized and self-corroborating systems of
accountability that exhibit slavish devotion to supposedly objective
and politically agnostic forms of auditing and statistical performance
measurement, while ‘disallowing other competing sources of judge-
ment’ (J. C. Scott 1998: 93) about local security priorities and the
performance of policing institutions. Once more, it would seem, the
state manifests itself as the problem, unable to realize security in ways
that contribute to, rather than undermine, prospects for democratic
governance.
A third charge is that the state, convinced of its own security imper-
atives and ignorantly certain of its knowledge and objectives, pursues
security in ways that give it an ideologically and emotionally charged
pervasiveness across political and social life. The practices of what
Jonathon Simon (2006) calls ‘governing through crime’, or what, as we
saw in chapter 3, is referred to in the international relations literature
as ‘securitization’ (Buzan et al. 1998), have been amply documented in
this respect and contain several connected dangers: (i) that the security
question – with its accompanying language of urgency, imperative and
exception – pervades and colonizes public life in ways that threaten to
undermine the purpose, values and efficacy of other social institutions;
The state as idiot 131

(ii) that policing institutions and practices thereby become materially

and symbolically ‘wide’ rather than ‘narrow’ components of social
relations; and (iii) that a felt sense of public insecurity – with its affec-
tively saturated discourses of risk and blame, and attendant lines of
affiliation and division – is heightened in ways that make the task of
constructing ‘open, tolerant and inclusive communities’ ever more
intractable (Crawford 1997: 274). The state’s dearth of knowledge –
and lack of cognizance of, and reflexivity about, that dearth – thus
makes an independent and distinctive contribution to the process of
making security pervasive and to dynamics which gnaw away at, or
obstruct the formation of, the social and institutional conditions under
which security may be made axiomatic.
This is in many respects a persuasive critique of the state’s security
ambitions and their deleterious effects. It is also, as noted, one whose
concerns we in large measure share – a perspective that raises some
thorny regulatory problems that we return to, and consider more
fully, in chapters 7 and 8. We must first, however, turn our attention
to a variant of the ‘state as idiot’ stance that transcends the practice
of critique. Sure, this perspective has significant ‘left-Hayekian’
things to say about the state’s limitations as a security provider and
the radical implications of multi-actor governance. But it also aims
to explore – both conceptually and in social practice – the prospects
for enhancing security to be found in those forms of local knowledge
and capacity building that the state, it is claimed, has a nasty habit
of stifling.

Promoting nodal governance

We have in mind here the influential recent work of Clifford Shearing
and his co-workers in the ‘Security 21’ network based at the Australian
National University.5 Unlike many of the state sceptics considered else-
where in part I, Shearing and others take security seriously as a valued
social good (Johnston and Shearing 2003: ch. 1). They refuse,
however, to privilege the state – in either their explanatory framework

15
There exists now a large and evolving literature on nodal security governance.
An inventory of the most important contributions to date would, in our view,
include: Johnston and Shearing (2003); Shearing and Wood (2003a, 2003b);
Dupont (2004); Shearing and Johnston (2005); Burris (2006); Johnston (2006);
Shearing (2001, 2006); Wood (2006); Wood and Shearing (2006).
132 On state scepticism

or normative register – among the multiplicity of bodies that may con-

tribute to its realization, whether as provider or regulator (Johnston
2006: 34). Foremost among the reasons for this is the Hayekian claim
that the state lacks the knowledge and capacity to deliver security to
diverse local communities and, moreover, that its attempts to acquire
such knowledge and capacity evince a strong tendency towards
authoritarian outcomes. The state is an entity whose bureaucratic
remoteness renders it at best unable to make good on its well-inten-
tioned promises, at worst a clumsy, homogenizing force riding
roughshod over the possibilities created by locally responsive, bottom-
up security institutions embedded within civil society.
According to Johnston and Shearing (2003: 148), the state has
become but one ‘node’ among several now engaged in the governance
of security – to the extent that we should no longer grant it conceptual
priority under nodal arrangements. Whether as ‘auspices’ (sponsor) or
‘provider’ (Bayley and Shearing 2001), the state today collaborates
with, competes against, or supports a range of security actors from the
private sector or civil society, as we have seen. This, it is contended, has
contributed to the chronic security inequalities – or ‘governance
deficits’ – one encounters across the globe today, with poor communi-
ties being unable to tap the kinds of policing and security resources that
more economically advantaged groups have ready access to. In these
respects, Shearing and others subscribe both to the empirical claim that
the state has been decentred from its once (more) pivotal place in crime
control, and to many of the criticisms that have been levelled at emer-
gent forms of multi-actor security governance.6
But proponents of nodal governance refuse, in seeking to make good
these deficits, to resort to what they term the ‘nostalgic, hopeful’ path
of ‘turn[ing] our back on this trend and seek[ing] to reinstate strong
state governance’ (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 217), not least because
the legacies of oppressive state violence form part of the security
problem across many of the sites – notably South Africa and Argentina
– in which the ‘Security 21’ team have intervened. Thus, instead of

16
Johnston and Shearing (2003: 35, 148) also contend that the state today has
become both the subject and object of regulation (see also C. Scott 2002), a
feature of contemporary governance that, they argue, ‘problematises the attempt
to conceive it as the exclusive locus of public interests’ (Johnston and Shearing
2003: 35) and requires us to rethink regulatory practices in networked, non-
hierarchical terms. We return to the issues this raises below.
The state as idiot 133

depending on ‘familiar and comfortable’ ‘mental schemata’ associated

with the state (Dupont et al. 2003: 347), and the blanket dismissals of
neo-liberalism that such thinking tends to invoke, Shearing and his col-
leagues urge that we recognize the force of the Hayekian critique of
state forms and seek to harness local knowledge and capacity in ways
that expand and enhance what they call ‘community governance’
(Shearing and Wood 2003a: 217).
Bottom-up, non-state-based security programmes are, on this basis,
promulgated as alternative solutions to problems that the state’s deep-
seated idiocy leaves it institutionally incapable of tackling successfully.
Remedying ‘governance deficits’ means creating security markets that
poor communities can effectively participate in such that security is
identified, promoted and regulated as what Shearing and Wood term a
‘common’ – rather than ‘public’ or ‘private’ – good. In a recent theo-
rization of this strategy, Shearing and Wood (2003a) argue that this
entails thinking and acting along the following three lines. The first is
acting and thinking in ways that enhance ‘community self-direction’.
This means communities defining and pursuing their common interests
in respect of security, thereby functioning as autonomous security aus-
pices rather than simply administering central plans or striving to meet
alien objectives established by other nodes (Shearing and Wood 2003a:
213). The second entails creating and sustaining different forms of
‘community capital’. This means not only the social capital (or strong
social networks) with which Shearing and Wood argue poor commu-
nities in developing societies are replete, but also the economic capital
that reinforces it, as well as knowledge and capacities (cultural capital)
and recognition (symbolic capital) (see also Dupont 2004). Thirdly,
strategies aimed at improving ‘community regulation’ or ‘accountabil-
ity’ should be developed (Shearing and Wood 2003a: 218), whereby
local people – in determining, for instance, how to allocate policing
budgets – regulate the provision of their own security in ways that
‘respond to local needs, reflect local morality and take advantage of
local knowledge’ (Bayley 2001: 212).
What Shearing and Wood offer here is a theoretical elaboration of
the community peace programmes that ‘Security 21’ has helped to
develop and disseminate – notably the Zwelethemba model of local
capacity governance (Johnston and Shearing 2003: 151–60; Shearing
and Wood 2003a: 218–21; Roche 2002; cf. B. Dixon 2004). This
model – which was initiated in South Africa and then ‘transplanted’ to
134 On state scepticism

Argentina (Wood 2006), but which is currently being promoted else-

where – aims to enable community members to resolve their disputes
(the criminal justice lexicon of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ is explicitly
eschewed) in ways consistent with justice and human rights (peace-
making) while also aiming to address the sources of local insecurities
(peace-building). Through ‘gatherings’ of disputants convened by local
peace committees, negotiated resolutions to conflict are sought in ways
that avoid resort to force – though disputants retain the option of going
to the police throughout. In promoting this model, Shearing and others
emphasize the following key elements: actively developing and har-
nessing the skills of local people as facilitators; collecting and analysing
data on disputes and their sources, and on dispute-resolution processes
and their outcomes, so as to ensure the reflexive monitoring and ‘iter-
ative adjustment’ of programmes; mobilizing local knowledge and
capacity to solve problems; moving participants away from a past-
oriented punishment mentality towards a focus on reducing future
risks; and a funding allocation system that rewards facilitators and
invests in local communities on the basis of the peace committees’
accordance with good – that is to say, human rights-regarding – pro-
cedures and principles (Wood and Font forthcoming). It adds up, its
advocates claim, to a sustained attempt to use a combination of market
incentives and situated practical knowledge to bring security to poor
communities that free markets and historically despotic states have had
a shabby record of neglecting or oppressing.
This clearly amounts to a theory and practice of security that actively
seeks to relegate, or in some settings stand in for, the state as a player
in its local production. This move is Hayekian in that it rests upon the
free market champion’s axiomatic epistemological claim that the state
necessarily lacks the knowledge to respond effectively to – in this case
– demands for order. We must, Shearing and Wood (2003b: 415) urge,
‘recognize the soundness of many of the values that neo-liberalism and
associated sensibilities of governance advocate. This involves looking
afresh at many Hayekian arguments, particularly the view that gover-
nance is best exercised when it relies heavily on local knowledges and
capacities along with the view that markets often provide the best
means of mobilizing these knowledges and capacities.’
But this new approach is distinctly ‘left-Hayekian’ in that it seeks to
supplement or supplant the state, not in the name of the sovereign indi-
vidual and unfettered market forces, but through deliberative local
The state as idiot 135

capacity-building practices informed by the values of equity and

human rights. It offers in this sense a provocative challenge to state-
centric thinking about security issued in the name of experimental local
democracy; one that works through the ‘window of security’ (Shearing
and Wood 2003b: 417) in an effort to forge common interests and col-
lective problem-solving mechanisms within dispossessed communities.
It offers, at the same time, a radically decentred account of belonging
and political authority, a theory and praxis concerned more with secur-
ing ‘denizenship’ for poor people across a range of communal spaces
than with the old social democratic ambition of connecting people as
citizens of national political communities (Shearing and Wood 2003b).
In these respects, there are some instructive parallels between
Shearing and others’ account of ‘nodal governance’ and the pragma-
tist-inspired work of Charles Sabel and his collaborators on ‘directly-
deliberative polyarchy’ (e.g. Cohen and Sabel 1997; Gerstenberg and
Sabel 2002). Two such parallels are of particular interest. The first is a
radically processual concern with democratic experiments in local
problem-solving and ‘learning by doing’ that both sidesteps the ques-
tion of what motivates people to put and pursue things in common in
the first place, and eschews the communitarian language of belonging
and solidarity. Solidarity, on this view, is an ‘instrumental solidarity’
(Thompson 2003: 41), a coming together that develops out of the
experience of tackling specific common problems, but which is not,
and has no reason to be, any ‘thicker’ or more enduring than that. This
relates, secondly, to the belief that certain emergent governance prac-
tices (whether they be South African peace committees, or new tech-
niques of coordination and regulation in the European Union) need to
be understood and encouraged using a novel conceptual language not
tied to outmoded and state-centred political categories. It is in this
experimentalist spirit that the promise of a nodal conception of secu-
rity governance is both descriptively mapped and energetically pursued
(Johnston and Shearing 2003; cf. Loader and Walker 2004; N. Walker
2006b).

Bringing the state back in?

Matters however are more complex than they at first appear. A close
reading of the evolving body of work on nodal security governance
reveals that the state in fact continues to assume a far from insignificant
136 On state scepticism

role in its proponents’ preferred conception of security. At least three

such roles can be discerned. First, Shearing and Wood concede that, as
well as fostering community security institutions beyond the state, one
must continue to ‘explore regulatory strategies designed to retain state
control over non-state providers where their actions affect public inter-
ests’ (2003a: 217). Second, Shearing and others envisage a role for the
state in generating and re/distributing the collective resources that are
needed to place local community capacity-building projects on a firmer
footing (Johnston and Shearing 2003: 155). Third, radically reformed
state police forces are clearly intended to remain as the site of ‘last-
resort’ coercive intervention, acting as ‘responsive regulators’ (Ayres
and Braithwaite 1992) in ways that are sensitive to the ordering mech-
anisms of local communities (Wood 2004: 39–40; see also Brogden and
Shearing 1993).
This is hardly a trifling set of competences. Rather, Shearing and his
collaborators detail a key set of continuing regulatory, allocative and
coercive roles for the state in a manner which indicates important areas
of overlap between the nodal governance perspective and the position
we are seeking to develop in this book. Yet in respect of each of the
above three roles we find in the work of theorists of nodal governance
a markedly undeveloped account – both sociologically and norma-
tively – of how the state may be reconfigured in these ways, and of the
relationships that can be expected (or ought) to obtain between the
state and the locally based peace-making and peace-building pro-
grammes that Shearing and others ultimately seem concerned to priv-
ilege and promote. This, it seems to us, invites a series of difficult but
unavoidable questions. Let us conclude this chapter by considering
each of them in turn.
First, there is the question of what constitutes the ‘public interest’
and how the ‘public interest’ gets constituted. This remains deeply
underspecified. So too does the related issue of what the purposes and
limits of the state might be in acting as (meta) regulator of the security
practices of both rich and poor. How are we to discover or construct
the kinds of common regulatory norms that may prevent community
security practices becoming a ‘medium of injustice’ (Markell 2003:
158), driven by what James C. Scott (1998) concedes is the ‘partisan
knowledge’ of local actors who possess a passionate stake in particu-
lar outcomes? How, moreover, can the state act to ensure that local
security practices contribute to, rather than undermine, equity and
The state as idiot 137

human rights, or use its knowledge and capacities to enable effective

social learning to occur between what might otherwise constitute iso-
lated and parochial nodes of local security (Hirst 2000: 19)? And on
what basis and on what terms does the state, as opposed to any other
putative holistic regulator, get to play such a central role in the refine-
ment and monitoring of what is in the public (as opposed to private or
communal) interest?7
There is, on these matters, an evident tension between the approv-
ing if passing references Shearing and his collaborators make to the
state as mediator of the public interest and their overarching concern
with facilitating ‘community self-direction’. Several related issues arise
here. First, faced with a situation of deep security inequities between
rich and poor – or what Markell (2003: 181) calls ‘a relation of privi-
lege and subordination’ – Shearing and others prioritize a strategy that
strives to ‘include’ poor communities by providing them with resources
to enhance their own security, rather than seeking to ‘dismantle or
attenuate the privilege itself’ (Markell 2003: 181) – in this case, by
calling into question the anti-social security practices of the rich.
Indeed, Shearing and others often appear fairly relaxed about the
rise of gated communities, privately guarded corporate enclaves and
other risk-management security practices deployed by affluent elites
(Johnston and Shearing 2003: ch. 5), electing a strategy that leaves

17
It is important to note in these respects that we currently lack a grounded soci-
ological account of the dynamics of the local security practices that Shearing and
others advocate, still less any independent assessment of them from someone
who is not a member of the ‘Security 21’ team – an asymmetry of information
that leaves external observers having to take their arguably somewhat rosy por-
traits of them on trust. Evidence from other forms of citizen security elsewhere
in South Africa (Tshehla 2002), together with the scepticism of other authors
deeply immersed in questions of post-apartheid justice (B. Dixon 2004: 373–6;
Dixon and van der Spuy 2004), suggest that we are wise to retain some critical
distance from a model of non-state security that is running the risk of appearing
non-falsifiable. It is somewhat ironic that at a time when such suspicion is bub-
bling up in the place of its inception, the Zwelethemba model is being actively
canvassed as a security solution in ways that have yet to answer searching ques-
tions about how and whether the ‘model’ can successfully be imported into, say,
divided societies or liberal democracies with strong state traditions. We would
stress, however, that it is vital not to replace one set of presuppositions and
premises with another and opposite set, and that is certainly not our intention.
The Zwelethemba model is no more doomed to fail than it is bound to succeed.
The issue, as we have said, is one of evidence, and of its systematic collection
and evaluation.
138 On state scepticism

these forms of communal security untouched while seeking to extend

their loss-prevention logics and security dividends to poor commun-
ities. What this forgets is that security nodes are sites for the produc-
tion of culture as well as order, a means of forging individual and
collective identities and of communicating social meaning about
matters such as membership and belonging, inclusion and exclusion,
risk and blame. In this respect, the security politics of Shearing and
others does little to foster civic solidarity and identification across the
boundaries of local or ethnic ‘community’ – a point we return to
shortly. But it also tends to invoke a fantasy of security as sovereign
mastery of one’s own destiny, though on Shearing and others’ account
such ‘mastery’ is to be exercised by communities rather than – as in
Hayekian neo-liberalism – by sovereign individuals. What is entailed
in each case, however, is a downplaying of the mutually dependent
relationship that exists between the security of the privileged and the
insecurity of the subordinated and, more broadly, of any recognition
that the public good of security requires forms of political authority
that can help nurture and sustain the mutual acknowledgement of this
social connectedness and interdependency.8
Secondly, the far from trivial – and not unrelated – question of how
the state can obtain for itself the authority and legitimacy required to
raise and distribute funds to ensure the longer-term prospects of
‘bottom-up’ local security programmes is glossed over, as is the wider
matter of how levels of economic, cultural and symbolic capital inside
communities can be enhanced without the resource-allocating and
recognition-granting functions provided by the state.9 At the very least
this would appear to require the existence/cultivation of a sense of
belonging to a wider political community sufficient to persuade, in this
case, South Africans or Argentinians to identify with the plight of their
co-citizens and support, for non-instrumental reasons, both a frame-
work of common regulatory cause and acts of solidarity towards them.

18
Shearing has on occasions in the past recognized this connection. In their oft-
quoted paper Shearing and Bayley on ‘The Future of Policing’ write: ‘All poli-
cies that have any prospect of mitigating the growing class differences in public
safety depend upon the affluent segments of our societies recognizing that secu-
rity is indivisible’ (1996: 603).
19
It is noteworthy in this respect that the principal funding for these programmes
has to date come from foreign governments, the Finnish and Swedish govern-
ments in the case of South Africa, and the Canadian International Development
Agency with regard to the project in Rosario, Argentina.
The state as idiot 139

The locally oriented, state-sceptical politics of Shearing and others –

with its tendency to treat community, democracy and security as
unmediated, face-to-face relationships – has little to say either about
the necessary virtues of these mediated forms of political community,
or about the institutional ‘architecture of sympathy’ (Sennett 2003:
200) that may give practical effect to them. Nor do Shearing and others
appear sufficiently alert to the paradox that the programmes of com-
munal ordering they advocate may (however much they succeed in
generating safer, self-governing communities) weaken the very bonds
of solidarity towards strangers that are an essential prerequisite of their
continued viability and success. As Charles Taylor has pointed out,
forms of ‘tribal protection and advancement’ can – just as much as
market-driven atomism – erode the sense of common purpose, the will-
ingness to put and pursue things in common, that comes from, and is
reinforced by, a sense of confident membership of a broader political
community (1995: 282–5).
Thirdly, in what is otherwise a potentially promising rearticulation
of Kinsey et al.’s (1986) theory of ‘minimal policing’, relatively scant
attention is given to the question of how – historically violent, deeply
partisan – states are to be democratized, constrained and reoriented
along the lines suggested, such that they come to respect the integrity
and outcomes of local peace-making processes and intervene only
when called upon to do so (cf. Dupont et al. 2005: 15). In this context,
we are led to reintroduce the question that we first posed in chapter 2,
one that neo-liberal advocates of the minimal state have not in our view
adequately answered, and which contemporary theorists of nodal gov-
ernance have scarcely begun to address: namely, how can one create
the kind of rights-regarding constitutional state that is needed to
encourage and facilitate local security practices that are consistent with
democratic values such as ‘equity and human rights’ (Shearing and
Wood 2003a: 212)?
In our judgement these various lacunae are common symptoms of the
sceptical perspective that we have described and brought under scrutiny
in this chapter. It is a stance that – in the case of Shearing and others at
least – gestures towards the positive ordering and cultural work that the
state performs in the production of security. But it is also animated, as
we have shown, by the idea that the state is obtuse, hubristic and for
these reasons flawed as a security actor, as well as by a desire to situate
the main frame of analysis elsewhere – in the democratic experiments in
140 On state scepticism

local peace-making that can make good the state’s cognitive shortcom-
ings. There is much of value in both this assessment and this ambition,
as we have tried to indicate. Yet, ultimately, this portrayal of the state –
as a necessary evil, wanted but not welcome – prevents a full apprecia-
tion and exploration of its necessary and virtuous role in giving practi-
cal effect to security understood – in sociological terms – as a ‘thick’
public good. It is to this exploration that we now turn our attention.
pa rt i i
Securing states of security

Thus far . . . we have no reason to suppose

that there is any better general solution to
the problem of security [than the state], and
little, if any, reason to regard any other
possible countervailing value as a serious
rival to security as the dominant continuing
human need.
(John Dunn, The Cunning of Unreason, p. 212)
 6 The good of security

T
h e cumulative critique of the role of the state in policing laid
out in part I cannot easily be gainsaid. The state can be and
often has been a physical and psychological bully. It is prone to
meddling, to interfering where it is not wanted. It does take sides, and
in so doing packs the hardest punch. It undoubtedly does seek to
set the cultural climate and in some measure is successful, as it is in
making life difficult or impossible for those who do not conform to the
norms it encourages and defends. Finally, it will tend towards stupid-
ity. Not only does it lack the means to answer all the key questions
about individual and collective security, it often seems unable or
unwilling to recognize this deficiency.
Yet, as our scepticism about state scepticism has sought to make
clear, in concentrating on its dangers and limitations, the state scep-
tics have tended to be inattentive towards the continuing positive con-
tribution of the state. They have paid insufficient regard to the case
that the state, or its functional equivalent, remains indispensable to
any project concerned with optimizing the human good of security,
or, at least, have neglected the full implications of that possibility. To
remedy that defect, and move beyond mere scepticism about state
scepticism, demands a closer appreciation of the role of the state in
the generation of social meaning and in the ordering of social prac-
tice pertaining to security. But to achieve that more intimate under-
standing of the state and its possibilities, and avoid a circular
justification of its security function, we must first gain a little distance
from it. We must begin in the present chapter by revisiting the concept
of security and asking what, if anything, makes security decidedly –
perhaps even peculiarly – suited to public provision. Only then will
we be in a position to address the task of reconnecting that impera-
tive of public provision to the particular ‘public’ institutional form of
the state.

143
144 Securing states of security

Security as a ‘thick’ public good

The best place to begin an examination that seeks to refine our under-
standing of whether and why security is a candidate for public provi-
sion is with the general literature on ‘public’ or otherwise collective
goods. Such an enquiry, however, cannot proceed without some initial
conceptual ground-clearing. As is obvious from even the most cursory
reconnaissance, the terrain of ‘public’ goods is an overcrowded and
potentially treacherous one. In the first place, there is the sheer
expanse of terminology available. Goods may be public, collective,
communal, common, shared or social, to take only the most common
terms in currency, and there is both considerable inconsistency and
much overlap in their use. Similarly, the term ‘good(s)’ has many dis-
tinct meanings and many shades within these distinct meanings.
Goods can designate material objects or conditions with some use
value, such as a bridge or a railway network or clean air. Or, as the
plural gives way to the singular, the relevant object of analysis may
become abstract institutions or forms of social organization that are
considered to be good, such as friendship or democracy, or even gen-
erally valued features of institutions or forms of social organization,
such as conviviality or solidarity. Finally, and most abstractly of all,
the ‘good’ can be shorthand for ‘conceptions of the good’ – for those
general attributes that are claimed to contribute towards or even be
definitive of the common good or the ‘good society’, such as justice or
equality.1
In the second place, and accounting for much of the variation in the
choice and use of terminology, different writers working within differ-
ent disciplines have very different reasons for entering this conceptual
terrain. Economists, lawyers, sociologists and political theorists are all
regular visitors, but each has their distinctive ‘knowledge-constitutive
interests’ (Habermas 1974). Economists tend to be primarily con-
cerned with the identification of those goods that cannot adequately be
provided for in the marketplace. Lawyers focus on the question of
whether certain diffuse public benefits may be the subject of funda-
mental rights, or of justiciable claims more generally. Sociologists
emphasize the functional prerequisites of the survival of the social
system. Political theorists are more concerned with ideal conceptions,

11
This discussion draws upon and develops that of Geuss (2003: 8–9).
The good of security 145

with what ought to be viewed as central or conducive to the bonum

commune.2
Rather than a reason for despair however, the richly diverse geneal-
ogy of the idea of public good may be helpful to our enquiry. Instead
of viewing the different conceptions as concerned with quite different
problématiques and as theoretically incommensurable, we may under-
stand and represent them as more or less ambitious appreciations of
what is involved in something being viewed as a public good. At the
thinnest level, which we associate with economists’ understanding of
public goods, and which tends to be taken as an initial point of refer-
ence across the various literatures, the social or public element is
entirely instrumental. What is at issue here is the indispensability or
importance of a social or public element to the very process of pro-
ducing or otherwise providing the goods in question. Thereafter, all the
factors that bear upon their value as goods, including the effects of
their enjoyment, the manner in which they are enjoyed, and any other
conditions prerequisite to their enjoyment, are to be understood in
entirely individual-centred terms. At a thicker level, we may, by con-
trast, think of public goods as having just that social dimension in
terms of effects or experience or conditionality that is passed over in
the instrumental conception of the economists. Finally, at the thickest
level of all – one that is at best only implicitly recognized in the various
literatures – we may understood public goods as having a constitutive
dimension, as being in some measure implicated in the very dynamic
through which particular publics become conceived and self-conceived
as publics.
In what follows, we seek to show how the concept of security repays
analysis as a public good at each of these levels and in consideration of
the relationship between these three levels. In so doing, we necessarily
advance a more ambitious understanding of security as a public good
than is common in the literature. We go beyond the familiar instru-
mental dimension, seeking to place fuller emphasis on the social dimen-
sion and to develop the notion of a constitutive dimension as the
controlling idea. As we shall see, not only does a layered approach help

12
Some of the most interesting current literature – with an emphasis upon mater-
ial that tries to talk across disciplines – includes Raz (1986); Waldron (1993,
2004); C. Taylor (1995); Heritier (2002); Mayntz (2002); Murphy and Nagel
(2002); Geuss (2003); and Etzioni (2004).
146 Securing states of security

to account for the terms in which we make our case, it is also vital to
the substance of that case. As to its terms, it is precisely because of the
importance accorded to the constitutive dimension that we retain the
language of ‘public goods’ to describe security, albeit in a significantly
fuller sense than that intended within the economics literature. As to
the substance, it is only through the density of the web of connections
made between instrumental, social and constitutive conceptions of the
idea of security that we are able to do full justice to the argument for
the public provision of security, and so establish the platform necessary
to address the task of re-establishing the vital nexus between security
and the state.

Security as an instrumental good

Under the standard economic definition public goods are those whose
consumption is ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non-rival’. To provide for one is
to provide for all, and enjoyment by one does not detract from enjoy-
ment by all. Street lighting, clean air and national defence are among the
paradigm cases of public goods so conceived, as, crucially, is internal
security itself.3 This definition rests upon recognition of the possibilities
and implications of market failure. A public good is a good that, on the
one hand, is hard or even impossible to produce for private profit, yet,
on the other, if supplied does not exhibit the normal problems of con-
sumption scarcity. The dimension of non-excludability creates a free-
rider problem, so removing or reducing the usual incentives for anyone
to supply the goods in the marketplace. The dimension of non-rivalness,
or jointness of supply, points to the large beneficial externalities of pro-
viding the good to any particular group of consumers who register their
demand – an added value of untargeted and cost-free supply to which
the market by definition is insensitive. Because of these twin concerns, it
is typically claimed that public goods, with their economies of scale,
require some mechanism of compulsory collective commitment if they

13
According to Olsen (1971: 14), for example, ‘the basic or most elementary goods
and services provided by government, like defence and police protection, and the
system of law and order generally, are such that they go to everyone or practi-
cally everyone in the nation. It would obviously not be feasible, if indeed it were
possible, to deny the protection provided by the military services, the police, and
the courts to those who did not voluntarily pay their share of the costs of gov-
ernment.’ See also Murphy and Nagel (2002: 45–8).
The good of security 147

are to be adequately provided at the relevant scale or even provided at

all, with the state generally considered as the best or at least the default
candidate for public provision.
The basic attraction of the economists’ approach is twofold. First,
by focusing on the fundamental question of whether and how goods
get to be produced at all, it poses the question of the necessity of public
provision in the most stark and straightforward terms. Secondly, the
crisp questions it asks seem to promise clear black or white answers.
So it may seem self-evident why security, and in particular such secu-
rity as is capable of being generated or assured by the public police, is
viewed by many as one of the pre-eminent public goods (Jones and
Newburn 1998: 33). The provision of a secure environment is an
accomplishment the benefits of which cannot easily be restricted to a
determinate group of users who have paid the appropriate charge.
Equally, there is an intuitive appeal in the argument that security is a
non-rival good, that the security of some members of the community
at best necessarily implies the security of all, and at least should not
and need not come at the expense of the security of other members of
the community.
Yet, as with many candidate cases, particularly in technologically
advanced, highly mobile and informationally sophisticated societies
(Hardin 1999: 66), the purity of security’s credentials as a public good
in the economic sense do not withstand close enquiry. Excludability is
only partly a function of the intrinsic nature of a good. It is also in some
measure a consequence of variables such as the state of technological
development and of other structural conditions including the nature of
the built environment and the prevailing regime of property rights.
Adjustment to these variables may work either for or against exclusive
provision. So technology can generate new non-excludable goods, as
with street lighting. New technology, however, can also allow us to
target particular audiences, as with the encryption of broadcasting or
electronic road tolls, or, more pertinently for present purposes, with
restricted codes and communication mechanisms for accessing and
alerting specialist security services. The concentration of populations
involved in the long-term process of urbanization intensifies mutual
dependence in countless ways and makes it difficult to avoid or control
‘spill-over’ risks in matters such as public health, fire and, of course,
security against crime and public disorder. But by the same token urban
planning can help to design out crime for particular locales and their
148 Securing states of security

discrete communities, as in the case of the location and layout of build-

ings and building access to allow blanket coverage by CCTV cameras.
And, as the growth of ‘mass private property’ in the form of shopping
malls and various other forms of widespread public access to sites of
commercial activity in much of the western world in the last half-
century indicates (Shearing and Stenning 1983), regimes where prop-
erty rights are individually or collectively assigned tend to be more
amenable to the targeted control of risks and distribution of goods,
including the good of security, than common systems of property
enjoyment and access.
None of this indicates an ineluctable trend towards the corruption
and erosion of the public good of security. It does, however, suggest a
number of points which, if taken together, underwrite the precarious-
ness of the instrumental argument in favour of the public provision of
security. In the first place, the excludability of the good of security is a
question of circumstance and degree. Not only does technological
innovation and market demand consistently generate new security
commodities – burglar alarms, electronic security hardware and so
forth – which are perfectly assignable, but even those forms of security
provision whose benefits are less easily targeted towards particular
individuals may nevertheless be concentrated on determinate groups.
Benefits might be difficult to restrict, but the task is by no means impos-
sible. Some economic agent or social collectivity may discover the
‘enlightened self-interest’ required to seek to supply security services
discriminately that might otherwise be left to the indiscriminate provi-
sion of the state. As the paradigm case of ‘gated communities’ reveals,
across many societies active or affluent citizens are increasingly taking
the initiative to ‘club’ together in order to generate a safe environment
by excluding others from it (Elliot 1989; Blakely and Snyder 1997;
Caldeira 2001; Low 2003).4
In the second place, the fragility and contingency of the argument
from non-excludability both alerts us to and reinforces similar deficien-
cies in the argument from non-rivalness. As with non-excludability, the
immunity of security from considerations of scarcity and subtractability

14
This possibility is acknowledged within the economic literature on public goods,
the term ‘club goods’ being reserved for those which are excludable but which
remain non-rival within the membership of the predefined club (Jordan 1996;
for applications to security, see Hope 2000; Crawford 2006).
The good of security 149

in consumption is always a matter of circumstance and degree. We saw

in our discussion of the uniform and equal quality of aspects of the pro-
vision of general order in chapter 4 that sometimes security clearly does
possess the attribute of non-rivalness. To protect one member of the
community from a terrorist attack is also, and without additional cost,
to protect all other members. To apprehend a serial killer as he stalks his
prey is also to protect all potential future victims. To restore public order
in response to the complaints of some locals is also to provide a tranquil
environment for the rest of the neighbourhood. Yet general provision is
by no means always a necessary and necessarily cost-free incident of par-
ticular provision. Much policing and much security work generally is
more discretely targeted – whether incident-specific, victim-specific,
offender-specific or otherwise locale-specific – and to that extent it is
transformed into a scarce resource with unequal distributive conse-
quences. And while this is true even of the broadest and presumptively
non-excludable public scheme of policing and security provision, it is
more emphatically the case where exclusionary arrangements are devel-
oped. To the extent that civilly generated or commodified security and
‘enclavization’ creates safer environments for insiders and purchasers
(Bayley and Shearing 1996), this is patently not matched among those
who lack the economic or social capital needed to transform policing
and security into a ‘club good’.
What is more, those who can afford to indulge in such exclusionary
security practices may achieve protection at the direct expense of the
less economically advantaged or socially well-positioned citizens and
groups – the ‘clubbing’ of security existing in almost inverse relation to
the distribution of crime risks (Hope 1997). The provision of club
goods, in other words, not only sacrifices the ‘externality benefits’ of
non-rivalness by reintroducing targeting and treating resources as zero-
sum, but actually introduces new ‘externality costs’ (Hope 2000). By
displacing crime to excluded and less well-protected areas, it con-
tributes to their ghettoization and social marginalization. And the
resulting inequality of security distribution and overall disutility may
be exacerbated by the harsh treatment of intruders within the bound-
aries of secured enclaves, or the plight of victims of the ‘illegal, violent,
retributive, arbitrary and judgmental’ manifestations of those forms of
‘civil policing’ which descend into vigilantism (Johnston 1999: 153).
Moreover, any kind of exclusionary private or civil security framework
may also ultimately frustrate or curtail the aspirations of insiders. Its
150 Securing states of security

strategy is necessarily premised upon the existence of and danger posed

by a hostile wider environment, thus providing a constant and poten-
tially debilitating reminder of the self-limiting, costly and contingent
quality of the version of security to which it subscribes.5
Taken together, these points suggest an inherent instability in the
economists’ conception of security as a public good. If reduced to a
question of how to produce a benefit which might otherwise be treated
as a private good in terms of the conditions, manner and significance
of its enjoyment, then the status of security as a public good is doubly
vulnerable. On the one hand, those qualities that make it particularly
amenable to public provision are shown not to be inherent and self-
evident, but to be contingent upon a wide complex of variables and of
disputable relevance to any particular set of circumstances. On the
other hand, at least some of these variables, including the nature and
distribution of property rights and the development of a demand for
and supply of commodified security, are within the control or sphere
of influence of those who would prefer to see either security in general,
or at least their security, provided other than within a non-exclusive
public framework. So there may be a self-fulfilling element in the
undermining of security as a public good conceived of in these thin
terms.6 It may become vulnerable to the broader arguments of welfare
economists discussed in chapter 2 concerning the presumptive inferi-
ority to an ‘exit’-sensitive market system of any regime of public pro-
vision, with its dependence on ‘voice’ mechanisms and its susceptibility
to capture or unequal influence. It may also become vulnerable to the
more narrowly self-regarding calculations of those whose relevant con-
ception of the public goes no further than those with whom they share
short-term ‘clubbing’ interests and capacities, and who are as uninter-
ested in negative externalities as they are oblivious to the longer-term,
self-undermining implications of their social myopia.
In summary, a purely production-orientated conception of public
goods can neither provide a compelling normative argument in favour
of the monopoly or dominant provision of security within one privi-
leged or indeed any particular site of production, nor can it in fact

15
It is in this deep sense that the very concept of private security may be consid-
ered oxymoronic (Loader 1997b). See also note 12 below.
16
This self-fulfilling element is at the core of the spiral of fragmentation, one of the
pathological syndromes of modern security discussed in chapter 8 below.
The good of security 151

guarantee such a framework of production. The institutional potential

of the classic public goods approach is undermined by the contingency,
fragility and circular presumptiveness of its foundations. In particular,
it is undone by its inability to locate the good reasons and the actual
motivation to invest exclusively or predominantly in this rather than
any other ‘public’ or ‘private’ community in anything other than argu-
ments about the functional benefits of aggregate collective provision
that presuppose that the good reasons and actual motivation for such
an exclusive or predominant mark and measure of collective self-
identification already exist.

Security as a social good

If the understanding of security as a public good and the argument in
favour of the public provision of security is not to be open to these
types of critique and susceptible to these kinds of undermining, an
additional dimension is clearly required. If we cannot just argue that a
general scheme of public provision trumps all other contenders in its
simple capacity to deliver – and in the acceptance by all members of
the relevant public of its capacity to deliver – a level of security cover-
age that could not otherwise be guaranteed, then our argument for
public provision must appeal instead to something distinctive in the
character of such public provision. We must locate the significance of
a public mode of provision by shifting from a quantitative to a quali-
tative mode of analysis; by looking beyond the bare calculation of
whether and how security gets produced for an aggregation of indi-
viduals to the question of the value of the good so produced or sup-
plied. Or in Waldron’s (1993: 358) terms, we must seek out those ways
in which, if at all, security possesses a societal dimension that cannot
‘be adequately characterizable in terms of its worth to any or all of the
members of that society considered one by one’.
Yet we should note at the outset that there is a reluctance to concede
much, if at all, to a more social conception of security, and by no means
just from those who view state and social production as no more than
a poor substitute in the event of market failure. For example, Charles
Taylor, no friend to an individual-centred social ontology, explicitly
contrasts the merely ‘convergent’ (1995: 191) good of security – one
that corresponds to the economists’ version – with those goods that are
in some way intrinsically and irreducibly social. To take but one more
152 Securing states of security

example, Joseph Raz, in the course of a notable attempt to justify liberal

rights by reference to their promotion of a public culture that serves the
common good, nevertheless wants to exclude a category of ‘personal
rights’ that includes personal security from the liberal lexicon – arguing
that their primary justification lies instead in their intrinsic value to the
right-holder (1986: 255–62).
Why such reluctance? We may speculate that the reasons are as
much ideological as intellectual. Ideologically, given the deeply
ambivalent position of security in the modern social and political imag-
inary as both condition of and standing threat to individual freedom
(a matter discussed in chapter 2), we should not be surprised to
encounter a widespread squeamishness about thinking of security in
ways that register the collective rather than the individual dimension
of its virtue. Intellectually, it appears insufficiently appreciated – for
reasons not unrelated to such squeamishness – that consideration of
the social dimension of security raises not one but several questions,
each of which suggests quite different answers. In one respect, as we
shall see, the recognition of a social dimension to the value of security
is quite uncontroversial, but does not decisively advance the case for
the public provision of security. In a second respect, such recognition
is clearly excluded. In a third respect, the answer is more nuanced but
perhaps most crucial, as it points us towards what is the most distinc-
tive social dimension of the good of security, and what in the final
analysis is the most promising way of justifying public provision. Let
us deal with each of these social aspects of security in turn.
The first and, in principle, least controversial social aspect of secu-
rity concerns the social effects of the enjoyment of security. As with the
economists’ definition, we find an instrumental logic at work, but in
this case the causal relationship is reversed. We are not here concerned
with the social means required to produce the individual good of secu-
rity, but rather with the subsequent link or links in the causal chain –
with how the widespread production of that individual good in turn
may have socially valuable consequences. On this view security, and
the liberty that is guaranteed by security, provides the platform for the
development of the common good – or at least some common goods –
however conceived. This common good may itself be viewed in highly
individual-centred terms. As we have seen, it is axiomatic even to the-
ories of the minimal state that without measures put in place to protect
the person and property of individuals through some framework of
The good of security 153

coercive self-organization, those individuals will be unable to pursue

their ends free from interference or the endemic threat of interference.
Equally, however, the basic security of person and property may be
seen as instrumental to all sorts of other collective goods that are
necessary to a more expansive or positive conception of human
freedom – one that comprises the well-being or wherewithal to enjoy
negative freedom fully. For example, it is impossible to envisage stable
and reasonably inclusive and responsive democratic decision-making –
for many, an important collective good in itself and one that may also
be conducive to other individual and collective goods – without the
prior and continuing guarantee of private freedom (Habermas 2001).
Equally, the various infrastructural goods which many associate with
a more positive conception of freedom, such as widespread availabil-
ity of health provision, social security and even a common public
culture, cannot be conceived of without the baseline of security – of
negative freedom – and the stability of democratic politics and public
administration which flows from this. Further, to the extent that we
might want to treat some collective goods such as solidarity as valu-
able components of the good life in themselves, quite apart from their
instrumental contribution to a more positive conception of individual
freedom – a deeply complex and controversial issue between liberals
and communitarians to which we shall return – then again the security
baseline is indispensable. In sum, however modest or expansive our
conception of freedom, and irrespective of whether negative freedom
and other individual-centred values are the key entries in our index of
the good society or whether and to what extent other collective goods
consequential upon security are deemed to have their own instrumen-
tal significance or even independent value – all matters of disagree-
ment – security is a constant foundational presence as the most basic
instrument to the realization of any particular conception of the
common good.
The strength of the consequential approach towards security as a
social good is also, however, its weakness. The social dimension, while
not as thin as in the production-centred approach of the economists, is
still conceived in a somewhat attenuated or detached fashion. The
emphasis merely on social effects leaves unexamined the more intimate
question of the intrinsic social dimension – if any – of security. Indeed,
we are offered little encouragement even to approach that question
indirectly, by asking what kind, or quality, of good security has to be
154 Securing states of security

in order to provide the effects we associate with the common good. For
precisely because there is disagreement about the content of the
common good towards which security is deemed instrumental, we
might on closer analysis find that different conceptions of that conse-
quential common good require or permit rather different understand-
ings of the prior security instrument. The overlapping consensus on
security as a necessary platform towards any conception of the
common good security may, in short, mask considerable disagreement
as to the social properties of that platform.7 And just as the platform
hypothesis dramatizes the strength and urgency of our convergent
commitment to take security seriously, it again begs the question of
how we are supposed to take it seriously – and in particular the basis
upon which and the form in which a common and broadly acceptable
scheme of public provision might, if at all, be justified and guaranteed.
If consequentialism offers a suggestive but, in the end, precariously
thin way in which to conceive of goods in social terms, at the other
extreme we can also discount an inappropriately thick understanding.
On this view, a good is social because the very manner in which we enjoy
or experience the good in question is irreducibly social. We are talking
here about what Taylor (1995: 190) calls ‘immediately’ common
goods – where the good lies in the simple fact ‘that we share’. That is to
say, the generation of the good for one person and its enjoyment by that
person is wholly, directly and reciprocally dependent upon its simulta-
neous generation for and enjoyment by certain others (Waldron 1993:
358–9). We can indeed imagine such goods at various levels of abstrac-
tion – from our shared enjoyment of a conversation or a party, to spe-
cific social institutions such as friendship or comradeship or love, to the
most general sentiments of valued sociality such as fraternity or solidar-
ity. Security is clearly not a constitutively other-regarding sentiment in

17
As a rough rule of thumb we may assume that highly individual-centred con-
ceptions of the common good – those that emphasize the importance of freedom
of choice and minimize the value of collective goods – are more likely also to
view possible ‘social’ aspects of the prior instrumental good of security, such as
the degree of redistribution of private resources allowed for its comprehensive
and equal provision, in minimalist terms, whereas those who hold to a more col-
lectivist conception of the good are more likely to countenance collective means
to its realization. This is a matter both of consistency and coherence of value
commitments at different points within a single theoretical worldview and of
instrumental logic – the more socially ambitious the solution sought, the more
socially ambitious the means required.
The good of security 155

the sense of these other goods. My security and your security are more
than simply a product of our relationship. Whatever the forms and
degree of mutual dependence of our respective states of security, they are
not exclusively mutually constituted.
What is more, it is important to note that even if security were
appropriately conceived as a social good in the purest and most imme-
diate sense that would be a strong argument against rather than for its
public provision. What immediate common or public goods have in
common, after all, is precisely their insusceptibility to social engineer-
ing through public plan and provision, whether this is on account of
their intimate texture, their spontaneous motivation, or their necessary
grounding in long-standing experience or practice. Any attempt to fab-
ricate such goods in the public domain is doomed at best to produce a
poor replica of the real thing – as with the ‘organized fun’ and false
conviviality of many official celebrations – and at worst to provide a
sinister perversion of public purpose – as in George Orwell’s Ministry
of Love. And if the paternalistic – indeed imperialistic – impulse to tell
people ‘how to’ experience associative benefits or to dictate what
counts as the authentic way of experiencing such benefits must be
resisted even in the case of genuinely immediate goods, then, as we
shall shortly have cause to recall, we must treat with even greater sus-
picion any lurking temptation to stretch the meaning of security in the
same constitutively other-regarding direction.
If, however, we move beyond the extremes of consequentialism and
immediacy, it is possible to imagine a third and more promising sense
in which security may be considered a candidate social good. What we
are here concerned with is that part of the social dimension of security
that rests neither upon its consequences nor upon the manner of its
expression and experience, but upon the fulfilment of certain social
preconditions. To begin to unpack this idea, we need to identify two
separate but connected senses in which the security of any individual
is dependent upon the action and attitudes of others, each of which dis-
plays a characteristic that is quite unique to the good of security.
First, and most obviously, there is what we might call the objective or
intersubjective dimension of security. When we think of the objective
‘security situation’ of any individual, we have in mind the relationship
between the catalogue of person- and property-securing measures
in place to protect that individual, on the one hand, and the propen-
sity of third parties to threaten that individual’s security interests
156 Securing states of security

notwithstanding the catalogue of protection, on the other. Both aspects

of the situational calculus depend crucially upon the actions and atti-
tudes of others. The positive side – the catalogue of protective meas-
ures – rests in large part upon the commitment and cooperation of public
security providers and others – commercial security agents, neighbours,
friends or concerned co-citizens – who are strategically located such that
they are able to contribute to an individual’s objective security situation,
as well as, at a further level of remove, on the preparedness of the citizen-
taxpayer to fund the provision of public security.
So far, so familiar. All public goods, including material public goods
such as clean air, transport or utilities provision, require a high degree
of social coordination and regulation as well as a measure of public
funding for their successful provision. It is only when we turn to the
negative side of security conceived of objectively – the propensity of
third parties to avoid or overcome the security measures in place and
threaten or harm our security – that we encounter its first truly dis-
tinctive feature. For unlike purely material public goods or even those
collective contributions to the common good such as public education
or a common artistic heritage whose accomplishment is wholly or
partly concerned with the quality of how we live together and so reg-
isters in the social or cultural domain, the public good of security has
the added dimension that it addresses a root problem that is itself
socially generated. Whereas the solution to the ‘problem’ addressed by
public goods is invariably social at least in terms of the means required
and perhaps also in terms of the quality of the end desired, in all cases
other than security the problem in question is defined simply as the
absence of the desirable good. Only in the case of security does the
problem describe a pathological state – insecurity rather than merely
non-security – whose pedigree itself is entirely social.8 So security refers
not only to the provision of the objective measures of safety put in
place in the form of police officers, crime prevention equipment, a
safety-aware built environment, etc., at the level of ‘problem-solution’
but also, and more fundamentally, to those risks and dangers that are
inherent in and a product of the social environment.

18
In many other cases, such as education and health, the problem to which the
public good responds, respectively ill-health and ignorance, may of course be
exacerbated by certain features of the social environment. Yet unlike insecurity,
the ‘bads’ of ill-health and ignorance are not purely a product of social relations.
The good of security 157

But, in the second place, even at the level of ‘problem-solution’, the

individual’s sense of security does not just depend upon the person- and
property-securing measures objectively put in place and sustained by
others, but also upon how these objectively constituted measures are
subjectively interpreted and experienced by the individual. This double
foundation indicates a second peculiarity of security as a social good.
On the one hand, whereas many public goods may be accomplished
and ascertained in purely objective terms, albeit various positive states
of mind may flow from their realization,9 the socially inflected experi-
ence of feeling or not feeling secure is itself internal to and partially
constitutive of what we mean by (in)security. On the other hand,
whereas immediate public goods refer only to (shared) states of mind,
albeit many objective benefits may flow from their realization,10 secur-
ity, as we have seen, also and in the first instance depends upon and is
constituted through certain objective accomplishments.
How does the second, experiential dimension of security manifest
itself, and in what sense or senses is it socially preconditioned?
Individuals, in order to feel secure, must be confident that they can
pursue their ends without harmful interference or its threat, and so in
turn must feel reasonably secure that the conditions for the effective
and ongoing realization of their objective security are themselves rea-
sonably secure. That is to say, there is an internal relationship between
the experience of security and the existence of stable social expecta-
tions. And this means that our current sense of security is always to
some extent based upon a prediction about future security. Not only
must we feel safe in the here and now, but we also need to be reason-
ably assured that the conditions guaranteeing our safety will continue
for the foreseeable future (Waldron 2004). Such confidence is a func-
tion of two sets of factors, each of which has a strong social dimension.
In the first place, it depends upon the individual’s perception of a
complex social ‘fact’, namely the objective state of and prospects for
his or her security, which in turn depends upon the individual’s sense
not only of the current propensities but also of the long-term commit-
ments and resilient attitudes of official security providers and other

19
For example, the sense of social confidence that one may derive from education.
10
For example, all kinds of material benefits may be derived from a sense of friend-
ship or, on a wider social canvas, from a sense of solidarity, but we understand
these benefits as consequential upon rather than intrinsic to the goods in question.
158 Securing states of security

individuals whose behaviour may be capable of having a bearing upon

his or her security. In the second place, it depends upon how and where
this impression fits in terms of the individual’s personal threshold of
manageable fear, of vulnerability to intimations of insecurity. We will
have more to say about this type of vulnerability in due course; suffice
it to say that it, too, is socially conditioned in the sense that the more
citizens possess a sense ‘of effortless secure belonging’ (Margalit and
Raz 1990: 447) to a particular community the less they will be prone
to unease about marginal security risks. In sum, then, the overall
measure of an individual’s sense of security is the extent to which that
individual feels free of anxiety about the existence, extent and stable
reproduction of the objective or intersubjective conditions of his or her
security. Clearly, the objective ‘security situation’ of the individual is a
highly significant factor influencing his or her level of anxiety, but, just
as clearly, its significance is mediated by a number of other social
factors.11
We may have begun to identify what is distinctively social about the
good of security, but it is by no means yet clear what this implies for
public provision. Even if we accept that security is intrinsically socially
conditioned or dependent in the ways elaborated, the specification of
the optimal conditions for the generation and provision of a low-risk
and anxiety-free security environment remains complex and far from
uncontroversial. There may be a temptation, having produced the
social card and revealed something of the scope and intensity of our

11
As has been demonstrated by countless studies of the non-linear relationship
between people’s ‘fear of crime’ and their antecedent levels of objective risk (see
Hale 1996). It should also be clear from the foregoing discussion that we are
breaking with the psychological reductionism that one sometimes encounters in
the ‘fear of crime’ debate, a reductionism which says that such fear is rooted in
the make-up of ‘vulnerable’ individuals. To conceptualize security as having a
subjective dimension in the manner we have just done is precisely not to resort
to the common-sense notion that some people are ‘resilient’ while others are
‘fragile’, thereby making security a question of individual mindsets. Our point,
rather, is that the emotional states which are bound up with (in)security –
anxiety, fear, vengeance, hope, pleasure, etc. – are deeply social and that differ-
ent political arrangements permit or constrain the production and expression of
them. Just as we have plenty of historical evidence of social conditions that are
more or less likely to licence and foster the so-called ‘authoritarian personality’
(Adorno et al. 1950), so it is possible to imagine and (re)configure states that are
more or less likely to supply the material and symbolic resources which enable
individuals to be resilient in the face of the risks posed by their environment.
The good of security 159

reliance on others for our security, to start the bidding high by claim-
ing that the optimal fulfilment of our sense of freedom from anxiety
about security depends upon the equal fulfilment of the sense of
freedom from anxiety about security of all others to whom we are
socially ‘connected’ inasmuch as they may affect the conditions of our
security. In other words, we may be encouraged to conclude, pace the
economists, not that the security of each implies the security of all, but
that the security of each depends upon the security of all, and in that
way to reassert the priority of a comprehensiveness of coverage that
only a system of public provision can ensure. Yet this temptation
should be resisted, as such a proposition rests on assumptions that
cannot be convincingly sustained.
In the first place, the proposition would hold in conditions of precise
equality of vulnerability and of strategic deployment of harm capacity
between all individuals in a community. Where each were as able and
willing as each of his or her significant others to affect the security of
each of his or her significant others (full symmetry of vulnerability),
and if this were fully mutually acknowledged (full consciousness of
that symmetry), we would be able to conceive of mutual security in
terms of a self-reinforcing social equilibrium. But absent a Robinson
Crusoe-type scenario, this does not describe the conditions of any
actual human society. Secondly, short of these conditions of equality of
influence, if we could nevertheless envisage conditions of full mutual
empathy and altruism as regards the security concerns of significant
others (however widely defined), then again we might be able to sustain
the strong mutual dependence thesis. If our anxiety about security
could not be assuaged unless and until we were sure of the security of
others, just because we defined security as a good which was devoid of
value unless enjoyed by all and so were unable or unprepared to take
comfort in our own security unless and until it was equally guaranteed
to these others, then our very moral orientation would be such as to
guarantee security as a collective virtue. Again, however, beyond the
scale and scope of ‘immediate’ social units such as families or other-
wise tightly knit groups where the affective ties of friendship or loyalty
may be particularly strong, this is an implausible assumption to make
about actual human societies. Indeed, if made without qualification
such a claim would seem to redesignate security as an immediate public
good – the good residing in its sharing – in a manner we have already
explicitly rejected.
160 Securing states of security

The two scenarios of reciprocal vulnerabilty and altruistic concern

do however offer a clue as to how we can begin to flesh out the social
dimension of security. Our level of anxiety is, after all, affected in at
least some measure by our appreciation of the capacity of others, offi-
cials and laypersons, to affect our security, and by our appreciation of
how our capacity and propensity to affect their security influences their
attitude towards our security. So in the day-to-day monitoring of our
anxiety about security and evaluation of the conditions of such anxiety,
we do take account of the relationship between the threat posed to us
by others and the threat posed to them by us, even if there is no equal-
ity of mutual influence and even if we understand others’ propensity to
affect our security as being of a different order than our propensity to
affect theirs. Moreover, since, as noted, our (in)security has a reflexive
dimension – as anxiety about our security is itself a form of insecurity
and as a sense of assurance about our security is itself an augmentation
of our security – to the extent that our monitoring of our levels of
anxiety preoccupies us and our evaluation of our conditions of secu-
rity requires sustained vigilance, then this itself is an indication that our
existential state of security is suboptimal, that we are too vulnerable to
our perceptions of insecurity.12 It follows that we typically aspire to a
situation where our monitoring of our security environment may be a
highly tacit and routine affair, an activity which takes place largely at
the level of ‘practical’ rather than ‘discursive consciousness’ (Giddens
1984); one where we rarely feel it necessary to peep round the veil of
our security cover, and our checks when we do so need only be cursory.
So, ideally, our level of trust in our security environment should be very
high, the reminders of our vulnerability few and routine, neither pal-
pable in our physical environment, intrusive in our daily routines, nor
prominent in our discursive consciousness.
As well as reinforcing our appreciation of the importance of the
strategic nexus connecting our security to others, this sense of the
exacting conditions of optimal security also helps to explain how more
altruistic considerations may enter the security equation. We need
make no assumptions about altruism being a natural human condition

12
One may, among many illustrative instances of this, cite the case of gated com-
munities and other affluent middle-class enclaves, environments where condi-
tions of objective security tend to coexist with a pervasive sense of subjective
insecurity, especially in relation to the conditions and possibility of social life
‘beyond the walls’ (see, on this, Girling et al. 2000: ch. 5).
The good of security 161

to conclude that in our techniques for monitoring and reducing anxiety

about security, concern for the security of others finds certain prompts,
some contexts in which it can come to appear to us as ‘natural’ – as a
necessary virtue. For our strategic monitoring of our own security con-
cerns inevitably makes us aware of the security concerns of others, and
our desire to lower the anxiety ‘transaction costs’ of taking care of our
own security anxiety may lead us to conclude that the best guarantee
– the most transaction-free insurance policy – of our own security is
the equal guarantee of the security of others to whom we are connected
and by whom we may be affected. And in this complex and iterative
calculation, it becomes easier to appreciate the security of others as a
good in its own right. That is to say, the very circumstances of security
anxiety are such that we may become educated in the virtues of secu-
rity altruism and endorse a qualified version of the very proposition
whose pretensions to innateness and universalizability we criticized
above; namely, that the enjoyment of security by others does indeed
have a positive bearing on our enjoyment of our own security in a
manner that goes beyond its function as a strategic prerequisite. And
though there will be limits to that altruism, in some circumstances the
practical coincidence between prudent self-interest and independent
concern for the security of others may be sufficiently strong, sustained
and self-reinforcing that these limits are not regularly put to the test.
These arguments are far from resurrecting the boldest proposition
that might emerge from an analysis of the social prerequisites of secur-
ity; namely, that the optimal security of each depends upon the security
of all. They do, however, suggest a much more conditional proposition
along the same lines; namely, that there is a tendency for the quality of
security, with its distinctive twin traits of a socially generated problem
and a subjectively experienced solution, to be enhanced in the case of
any particular individual when the security of those with whom that
individual shares a social environment is also reasonably attended to.
And while this does not provide a compelling argument in favour of the
comprehensiveness of coverage that only a system of public provision
can guarantee, it does supply one consideration in its favour.

Security as a constitutive public good

Yet the more important message to be drawn from our analysis of
the socially conditional aspect of security, as indeed of the socially
162 Securing states of security

consequential aspect of security, is indirect rather than direct: it con-

cerns the way in which this aspect connects to our final constitutive
dimension of security. What we refer to here is how security as a social
or collective good of the sort we have begun to describe in consequen-
tial and in conditional terms is implicated in the very process of con-
stituting the ‘social’ or the ‘public’.
Such an approach has to overcome an initial objection, one that
would doubt the very validity of a distinction between constitutive and
other social dimensions. For is our sense of the ‘social’ or the ‘public’
not merely the fluid, context-dependent and diversely manifest
outcome of the multifarious situations in which individuals put or find
things in common? Clearly our understanding of who ‘our’ relevant
public is and the nature of our social bond is indeed constantly medi-
ated through new experiences, new strategic and affective contexts of
coming together. But this does not do justice to the independent and
constitutive role of the public in the social imaginary. Our most basic
anthropological understanding of human sociability tells us that the
symbolic organization of ‘publics’ and of the ‘public domain’ is more
than a random series of ripples in the stream of social consciousness.
Our sense of societal organization and identity, rather, helps to embed
and direct the flow of social meaning, and is typically continuous
across different situations and progressive over long periods of time.
Fundamentally, there are two reasons for this relative stability, and
these refer to the capacity of large social groups to meet two sets of
purposes. First, there is their instrumental significance for resolving
collective action problems: this allows us to achieve under conditions
of relatively stable agreement what we cannot do in the absence of
these conditions. Secondly, there is their significance for consolidating
a social sense of self: this provides an identity whose self-affirming
traits, the way it speaks to positive conceptions of self generally such
as personal dignity and a sense of personal authenticity (Smith 2001:
25–33), recognize and draw upon the irreducibly social character of
our experience.
Now, it is clear that in any actual context of social development these
two sets of factors – instrumental and affective – will be closely linked,
indeed mutually interdependent. As we suggested earlier in our discus-
sion of the economic conception of a public good, the instrumental
reasons for getting or staying together to resolve collective action prob-
lems are finally insufficient, for in stressing the functional benefits of
The good of security 163

such an approach in overcoming the short-term self-interest and infor-

mational deficiency of the market model they assume the very collec-
tive commitment to put things in common in this rather than any other
group that it is their burden to demonstrate. If the missing factor is not,
should not and cannot be (or, at least cannot only be, certainly in the
long term) this or any other variant of strategic action, such as the
brute persuasion attendant upon the coercive potential and display of
some already powerful group, then the glue can only be supplied from
a non-instrumental source, and in particular from an ongoing invest-
ment in a sense of social identity and aspiration. This affective dimen-
sion, conversely, needs to be grounded in the many particular lessons
of social experience, in the varied contexts of practical reason from
which the very idea of social identity derives meaning. It must, there-
fore, be predicated upon a set of actual or projected ends which vin-
dicate the very value of conceiving and pursuing ends as common
ends and which as such provide ongoing corroboration of our self-
understanding as social animals. It demands, in short, some reference
to and some grounding in the experience of instrumentally effective
collective action. In other words, action presupposes identification
which is vindicated by action.
In saying that for communities of purpose to stabilize and to enjoy
sustained instrumental success they must also be affective communi-
ties, and that affectivity is itself generated through a commitment to
common purpose, we are not pointing to some abstract ontological
puzzle of first causes, but to countless mutually reinforcing dynamics
of cause and effect. And in the operation of these dynamics, it is
inevitable that the sense of social identity that is cultivated in the gen-
eration of stable communities is itself heavily infused with the content
of the instrumental purposes that both ground and are abetted by that
sense of social identity – as well as with the practical means and con-
ditions conducive to the pursuit of such instrumental purposes, most
notably common language and common territory. The wish for
common security is one of these instrumental purposes; indeed,
perhaps, for the very reasons we rehearsed in chapter 2 in discussing
security’s foundational role in the collective project that is the consti-
tution of liberty, the most important such instrumental purpose.
Accordingly, it is no surprise, as we have already remarked, that the
celebration of or yearning for common security against internal and
external threats often looms so large in the materials – the mentalities,
164 Securing states of security

metaphors and iconography – through which stable communities reg-

ister and articulate their identities as stable communities, as indeed
does the sense of common language and common territory.13 This,
then, is the sense in which we can talk of security, just as we can of lan-
guage and territory, as a constitutive public good – one whose actual-
ization or aspiration is so pivotal to the very purpose of community
that at the level of self-identification it helps to construct and sustain
our ‘we-feeling’ – our very felt sense of ‘common publicness’.
How does the idea of security as a constitutive public good help with
our basic task of justifying the public provision of security? It does so,
quite simply, by bringing together external and internal registers of
explanation – by showing that the best external account must pay key
attention to the process of accounting internal to the social world under
investigation. For what the constitutive dimension introduces, crucially,
is an idea of reflexivity. It pinpoints how and why social collectivities,
given the inextricability of collective purpose and social sense of self and
the centrality of the idea of common security in the forging of that
inextricable link, come to think of themselves and sustain thinking of
themselves as social collectivities, such that they both possess and may
further pursue a common sense of and collective commitment to
security and to various other collective-commitment-presupposing and
identity-vindicating common goods. A vital dimension of that reflexiv-
ity, moreover, points to an as yet unconsidered sense of security as an
irreducible social good – one that overlaps with but crucially differs
from the rejected idea of security as an immediate social good. Security,
in this adjusted perspective, is irreducibly social not in the sense that the
good lies exclusively in the fact of sharing but in that, alongside its
objective and individuated conditions of achievement, it nevertheless
provides an example of goods that ‘essentially incorporate common
understandings of their value’ (C. Taylor 1995: 140). That is to say, our
capacity to reach some level of common understanding and recognition

13
See chapter 4 above, where the historical relationship between policing and state
building and state maintenance was discussed. At that point, we simply sought
to show that the close dependence of state building and state maintenance on
policing and security produced a symbolic dividend or legacy. In taking the
analysis a stage further, we now want to stress how that security-signifying sym-
bolic dimension and the affective sense of identity that it helps to articulate
should be viewed not just as an effect of political community whose most basic
motivation lies in other factors, but as co-constitutive of the very idea of polit-
ical community.
The good of security 165

of the terms of our collective security is itself a contributory factor to

that collective security.
Common security, then, is simultaneously and recursively, first, a
motivating factor in the formation and sustenance of reflexive publics;
second, a way of social being or common sensibility of such a public;
and, third, a platform of public power from which material provision
for objective security can be made. Not only is each element – reflex-
ive mobilization, collective self-understanding and instrumental capac-
ity – crucial, but their relationship is symbiotic. These different
elements of security, now conceived of as public-constitutive, allow us
to rethink the various social dimensions of security introduced earlier
so as to help vindicate our ‘internal account’ of the indispensability of
public provision.
First, the very sense of common publicness, the mobilization and sus-
tenance of which owe something to the instrumental and affective
dimensions of the idea of common security, helps generate the com-
mitment necessary for this community to provide the stable material
and regulatory wherewithal required for a general scheme of security
provision – something that theorists of the minimal state and those of
nodal governance have both neglected. Regardless of the possible
divergence of our views on the more remote beneficial consequences of
a scheme of common security supplied at different levels and in differ-
ent forms, provided we have a common sense of who ‘we’ are and a
constitutive commitment to put things in common, we will be able to
fund and order the mix of steering and rowing mechanisms required to
provide whatever indispensably minimum level of common security we
can agree on.
Secondly, given that, as argued, the objective security situation of the
individual depends not only upon the commitment to public provision,
but also upon the propensity of some to aid or cooperate in the provision
of one’s personal security cover and on the disinclination of others to
threaten one’s personal security, both the collective self-understanding
associated with the security-mediated constitutive achievement of
relatively stable political community and, again, the instrumental capac-
ity of affective political community have a crucial role to play. On the
one hand, and most directly, to the extent that the sense of common
social identity presupposed by and nurtured within a stable political
community can encourage a sense of confident and committed member-
ship of that community, this can lead to more active support for and
166 Securing states of security

cooperation with official and unofficial security arrangements, or at

least to less intense threats towards these arrangements. On the other
hand, more indirectly, such a community can use the ‘battery of power’
(Canovan 1996: 72–5) it derives from its common affective commitment
to put things in common to combat socially generated insecurity; to
provide through distributive measures the spread of resources and asso-
ciated forms of social status likely to minimize the mutual resentments,
antipathies and indifferences which lead to non-cooperative or hostile
and directly security-threatening behaviour. This combination of direct
and indirect influences may, in short, help to trigger a ‘virtuous circle of
crime control’ (Audit Commission 1993: 49) – the optimal use and effec-
tive supplementation of the scarce resources of security provision, and
the minimization of the pressures on these resources, necessary for
achieving effective levels of objective security.
Thirdly, and finally, we should note that the relationship between the
constitution of political community and the uniquely and irreducibly
social condition of security is not just causal, in the complex ways sug-
gested above, but finally also conceptual. Freedom from anxiety about
security, as we have argued, is a function not just of one’s objective secu-
rity situation, but also of one’s perception of the adequacy of one’s secu-
rity coverage, which is also in some part derived both from one’s sense
of the long-term stability of the social environment and one’s place in it
and from one’s ongoing general threshold of psychic vulnerability, or
manageable fear in the face of one’s social environment. These appre-
ciations depend, in turn, upon a more general sense of ‘ontological
security’ – of ‘confidence or trust that the natural and social worlds are
as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self
and social identity’ (Giddens 1984: 375). Where this sense of ‘ontolog-
ical security’ comes from is of course a deeply complex and multilay-
ered question, but as Giddens himself intimates, one crucial level is that
of social identity. A sense of dignity and authenticity, of ease with and
acceptance within one’s social environment, are crucial to ontological
security: and, as we have seen, it is these very aspects of social identity
that are implicated in the collective self-understanding attendant upon
the accomplishment of political community. In other words, to be a
member of a stable political community and to feel oneself confident in
that sense of membership is already to raise one’s threshold of vulnera-
bility – to possess crucial resources in the management of fear and
avoidance of security anxiety.
The good of security 167

Towards axiomatic security

Let us, then, conclude our discussion and finish our preparations for the
reintroduction of the state by revisiting a theme introduced in chapter
1 and seeking to demonstrate that to conceptualize security as a thick
public good along the lines set out in this chapter is, at the same time,
to think about and promote it as an axiomatic element of lived social
relations. In summarizing our argument using this term, we mean to
recall and emphasize a number of things. The first is that security is a
necessary platform for any kind of political society, irrespective of the
range of other goods that it chooses to value and pursue. But it is to
argue, further, that security is an education in society.14 Security con-
cerns educate, they teach people how to be with each other, they offer
a daily tutorial in the rudiments of being social. Thus it is, or so we have
argued, that the social dimension of security inheres, first, in the fact
that it responds to a root problem – insecurity rather than non-security
– whose provenance is inescapably to do with one’s relations with
others and, second, that security is partly constituted by a subjective
feeling of freedom from anxiety and an attendant confidence in one’s
capacity to manage the dangers posed by one’s environment. While the
security of each may not depend on the security of all in any founda-
tional sense, the security of each is clearly enhanced if the security of all

14
The idea of security as having a value in educating people how to live together
owes much to a similar analysis Niklas Luhmann once made of trust (1979: 64).
For Luhmann, the practice of ‘winning trust’ can easily and very plausibly be
analysed in strictly instrumental terms. People make themselves seem trust-
worthy in order to win the confidence of others and increase their influence with
these others. Moreover, often this is a two-way or multiple-way process – a
drama of mutual display. However, over time, the initial instrumental motiva-
tions tend to be become habitualized, and strategic interaction is often replaced
by or augmented with what is literally a more ‘educated’ sense of the virtues of
trust (both personal and impersonal) – by a greater appreciation of and sympa-
thy with the standpoint of the other and by the development of an affective
mutual orientation on the basis of that enhanced appreciation and sympathy.
Security can be seen as providing a similar vehicle towards deeper forms of
sociality. The whole thrust of our analysis is to suggest that while initial orien-
tations towards mutual security may well be strategic – a question of establish-
ing a ‘low platform’ of convergent interests – the regular alignment of mutual
behaviours in terms of these initial orientations can also have an educational div-
idend. As with trust, it can sharpen our mutual appreciation of, and mutual sym-
pathy in the face of, vulnerability in a way that is both mutually enlightening
and helps generate and sustain relations of mutual affect.
168 Securing states of security

is reasonably attended to. Equally, while security is not a good whose

value and benefits lie in the sharing of them with others such that it can
be described as a good akin to solidarity or friendship, the condition of
security is not independent of the common understanding we come to
have of it.
To arrive at this conclusion is to defend a conception of security
which stands radically opposed to one that holds – or makes – security
pervasive and, in so doing, to dispute that the broader purpose of polit-
ical community is reducible to security. Security, it seems to us,
becomes a pervasive feature of social and political life precisely when
it is absent in its axiomatic sense. Under such conditions, security – or
rather insecurity – exists on and across the expansive surface of social
consciousness, becomes a recurrent trope of political discourse, and
tends to colonize other fields of social practice. Or else – under the
guise of a ‘securitized’ form of ontological security – it is elevated to an
unhealthily hegemonic category and comes to mean the unreflexive,
parochial and anxious cleaving to a security-driven conception of a
risk-free society, such that when its seemingly fixed terms are threat-
ened or called into question, hostility to others, and a heightened
concern with security shallowly conceived, are never very far away.
The good of security is not to be found, in short, in a situation in
which ‘security’ is ‘shallow’ and ‘wide’ – a precarious, routinely
fretted-over effect of the supply and presence of (ever-)increasing
numbers of policing and crime-control measures. Nor is the good of
security to be found in a situation where it is ‘deep’ and ‘wide’ – where
it is reified as the overweening end rather than the modest beginning of
social policy. Whereas the former ‘shallow’ and ‘wide’ conception errs
in either ignoring the ontological depths or collapsing them into
surface considerations of physical security, the latter ‘deep’ and ‘wide’
variant errs in the opposite direction of treating physical (in)security as
but the symptom and consequence of ontological (in)security. The key,
instead, is to think of the surfaces and depths of security as in a rela-
tionship of recursive mutual causality – with neither reducible to the
other. The pursuit of security, in other words, is best thought of as
‘deep’ and ‘narrow’, sensitive to the fact that the physical dimension
both responds to and reinforces the ontological dimension, but resis-
tant to any project that would mortgage the entire field of social policy
to the dogmatic pursuit of that ontological dimension. The lodestar of
that ‘deep’ and ‘narrow’ conception should be the accomplishment of
The good of security 169

a stable condition grounded in the tacit confidence individuals have

that their diverse and common legitimate expectations and their
diverse and common loyalties as members of a political community are
acknowledged in ways that afford them the material and symbolic
resources required to manage, and feel relatively at ease with, the
threats that are or may be present in their environment. It is security
understood and configured not as a form of perpetual striving, but as
a state of well being – a state in which we are able to live – and live
together – securely with risk.
 7 The necessary virtue of the state

W
e have in the previous chapter described and defended the
merits of security conceived of as a thick public good and
suggested that the practical realization of such a conception
requires that security in some significant measure be publicly provided.
In staking out that position we argued for the indispensability of the
social in the generation and sustenance of individual security, and for
the indispensability of some constitutive idea of ‘publicness’ and of
political community to the full flowering of the social – conditions
required even if we want the provision of individual security to be tai-
lored to ends whose value may be calculated in strictly individual
terms. But an additional level of argument has to be negotiated before
we can allocate the state a primary role in the provision of security so
conceived. In particular, we must face two further challenges and
address two further series of questions. First, why and with reference
to what particular tasks or functions should any particular public
entity be allocated a pre-eminent or primary role, or – as we prefer for
reasons we explain in due course – take priority in the matter of secu-
rity provision? And if we conclude that some such entity should indeed
be allocated such a role and if we decide what form such priority ought
to take, why need the entity in question be the state rather than some
other species of political community? Secondly, even if we can make a
persuasive prima facie case for the priority of the state, we still have to
deal with and overcome its propensity towards meddling, favouritism,
monoculturalism and stupidity. In this, and the following chapter, we
set out to address these two series of questions in turn.
The agenda of the present chapter, then, is to identify what has to be
done in order effectively to pursue the more equitable and solidarity-
enhancing conception of the good of security that we set out in chapter
6, and to demonstrate why and how the state is best placed to take the
lead in this endeavour. The two limbs of our argument are intimately
related. If the public good of security is to be practically fostered and

170
The necessary virtue of the state 171

sustained, there is a certain amount of cultural and ordering work

that must necessarily and routinely be accomplished. If, in addition,
we understand these tasks to be in various ways mutually dependent
and mutually reinforcing, it follows that we should locate some
species of political community which can take responsibility for the
performance and coordination of all of these functions, and to that
extent assume a position of priority. We need not, of course, call that
entity the state. But, whatever our squeamishness about labels, we
would be bound to accept the indispensability of a form of political
community that is distinctive inasmuch as it, and it alone, is capable
of combining and coordinating the various requisite ordering and cul-
tural tasks.
In a nutshell, the answers we suggest to these two questions are as
follows: first, such is the importance and degree of interconnectedness
of the core cultural and ordering work that it is indeed necessary that
some single entity take priority in the provision of security as a public
good; and secondly, that given both its track-record and its continuing
scope to perform the tasks necessary to such provision, the state alone,
or its functional equivalent, is capable of exhibiting the ‘necessary
virtue’. If we are interested in civilizing security, we have no choice,
accordingly, but to accept that necessity, in so doing seeking to recover
and extend what is indeed virtuous about the state tradition while
finding ways to eradicate or minimize its vices. This, we suggest by way
of conclusion to the present chapter, translates into what we shall call
an anchored pluralism. In chapter 8, we then examine more closely
how the state’s vices manifest themselves in contemporary security pol-
itics and practices, before seeking to develop the idea of anchored plu-
ralism in terms of the institutional principles and design that can tip
that always precarious balance between the state’s virtue and its vices
in favour of the former.

The priority of the state

Let us recall the rudimentary terms of our puzzle. What needs to
happen if collective security understood in the terms outlined in the
last chapter is to be realized, and who needs to do it? Our answer to
the first element of this puzzle is that there exists a range of tasks
or functions the fulfilment of which meets certain key conditions of
security production: namely, identification, resource mobilization and
172 Securing states of security

allocation, deliberation, regulation and commitment. We will have

more to say about what each of these tasks amounts to and just why
each is vital shortly. Before that, however, we should say something
about how the tasks hang together and how this informs our answer
to the second element of the puzzle.
Three closely connected points are worth highlighting. In the first
place, these tasks or functions form an aggregate whole in the sense
that they are each indispensable to the public good of security. These
tasks, secondly, are not only separately prerequisite to the optimal pro-
duction of security as a public good, but are also mutually implicated
and so must also be considered an integral whole. That is to say, the
successful accomplishment of one is to no avail without the successful
performance of the others – the parts of the jigsaw are meaningless
or essentially incomplete unless and until constituted as a whole.
Accordingly, the tasks have to be performed in harness with one
another and any attempt to parcel one or other of them up and hive
them off to different agencies is likely to prejudice this. Finally, the
integrity of the various tasks rests most fundamentally on a basic rela-
tionship of mutual dependence and mutual support; for, as already
noted, these various tasks possess wide-ranging cultural and ordering
dimensions that exist in relations of mutual synergy. That is to say, they
entail the crafting of stable social identities which both supply the
motivational force behind any infrastructure of order and help nurture
a social environment in which civility is relatively high and security
risks are relatively low (cultural work), as well as providing the order-
ing infrastructure itself – the rules, resources and administrative capac-
ity – necessary to the sustained production of collective security
(ordering work).
Each of these three points indicates a reason for which the state or
its functional equivalent is required to perform a distinctive and prior
role. First, there is a question of responsibility. If the five tasks are
indeed indispensable, then unless some entity takes responsibility for
all of these tasks, there is simply no guarantee that each and all will be
effectively performed, or even performed at all. Secondly, there is a
question of coordination. If the tasks are mutually implicated, some
entity must be aware of and must be able to monitor and shape these
mutual implications. Thirdly, and underpinning the first two justifica-
tions, there is a basic question of capacity. The various tasks are indis-
pensable and mutually implicated on account of the fact that the
The necessary virtue of the state 173

functions they serve are mutually dependent and supportive, but just
because these relations of dependence and support do indeed hold in
such intimate ways and across such a wide canvas, they cannot simply
be reassigned or transferred from one responsible and coordinating
centre to another. The range of cultural tasks of the state and the
synergy between the cultural and the ordering tasks of the state are
deeply embedded in particular forms of social organization, and
indeed, as we saw in chapter 2, deeply coded in certain social imagi-
naries, and we simply cannot discount that massive legacy when
thinking through our security arrangements – particularly given the
enduring ‘centring’ imperatives of responsibility and coordination.
It is important, however, to be clear about what is and what is not
being postulated here. What precisely does the triple imperative of
responsibility, coordination and capacity entail in terms of the distinc-
tiveness and priority of the state role? On the one hand, we should not
claim too much for the state. It is no part of our argument that the state
should perform a monopoly role in the provision of security conceived
of as a thick public good. Indeed, this disclaimer applies to two differ-
ent variants of the monopoly idea – to both strong and weak versions.
In the first place, palpably nothing in the claim to priority requires that
the state be the exclusive source of active security provision. Pointedly,
the five vital functions we enumerated all concern how to secure the
social and political preconditions of security, so to speak, and do not
include the basic ‘rowing’ function of the security practitioners itself. It
follows that the actual providers of policing and security services cer-
tainly need not be ‘state operatives’ – a concept whose legal translation
and operationalization in different national settings in any case indi-
cates diverse and by no means necessarily cumulative criteria of rele-
vance, and so defies reduction to any single threshold test.1 In the

11
Legally relevant factors which may indicate different answers include: (i) iden-
tity of formal employer and source of remuneration; (ii) source of detailed per-
formance control and sanctions, including dismissal; (iii) repository of legal
liability in case of wrongful conduct; and (iv) locus of political accountability
and answerability for operational choices. Not only do different legal systems
stress different factors or combinations of these factors as relevant to the formal
legal status of police officers, but even within a particular system the answers to
different questions may tend in different directions. For example, within the
British system, traditionally viewed in terms of a balance between constabulary
independence and local government control, a more detailed consideration of
these various questions suggests different answers or a combination of answers
174 Securing states of security

second place, priority does not require that the state be solely responsi-
ble even for these ‘steering’ functions where its contribution and coor-
dination is indispensable. That the state must take a key role in
identification, mobilization and allocation, deliberation, regulation and
commitment, and also in the coordination of these tasks, does not mean
that it need monopolize all or indeed any of them, as we shall see. What
is more, in searching for an appropriate vocabulary short of monopoly,
it is precisely because the state is typically one actor amongst many
others in a shifting assemblage of security provision that we prefer a
relational term such as ‘priority’ to one with more absolutist connota-
tions such as ‘pre-eminence’, or with a more rigidly hierarchical sense
such as ‘primacy’. Crucially, as our discussion of anchored pluralism
should make clear, such ascendancy as the state possesses is always
articulated and affirmed in and through its dynamic relationship with
a plurality of other actors, without any requirement that the state need
at all times and in all respects be the most prominent actor or even the
loudest or most influential voice in security production.
On the other hand, however, we should not claim too little for the
state. Clearly, the state does not take priority if it is treated as just one
of many equal partners with other subnational and transnational
public and private bodies. Nor is it enough to view the state as no more
than primus inter pares, if that implies, as it does in at least some ver-
sions of the increasingly influential network or nodal model of security
governance which we addressed in part I, an entity whose priority is
merely circumstantial and so empirically contingent.2 The joint imper-
atives of responsibility, coordination and capacity argue against either

Footnote 1 (cont.)
including not just local government and the police themselves, but also, and
increasingly, central government (in particular, in the novel form of the Serious
Organized Crime Agency, which from 2006 has taken over and integrated the
functions of the erstwhile National Crime Squad and National Criminal
Intelligence Service) and various other politically independent central institu-
tions such as the Inspectorate of Constabulary and the National Policing
Improvement Agency. See, for example, N. Walker (2000).
12
See, in particular, chapter 5 above. We present this proposition in a carefully
qualified form for a number of reasons. In the first place, the nodal governance
literature is a large and burgeoning one (e.g. Shearing 2001, 2006; Johnston and
Shearing 2003; Shearing and Wood 2003a, 2003b; Dupont 2004; Cherney
2005; Johnston 2006; Wood and Shearing 2006) and we simply cannot and
should not assume that all who speak within that literature do so with the same
voice. Secondly, it is also a dynamic literature, one still in a state of theoretical
The necessary virtue of the state 175

the likelihood or the acceptability of any realignment of functions

which would have the effect of denying the continuing precedence of
one particular centre of security governance. What is required in our
model of state priority, then, is something rather more than fortuitous
ascendancy, even if less than fixed pre-eminence or constant primacy.
What remains distinctive to the state’s role in the tasks of identifica-
tion, mobilization and allocation, deliberation, regulation and com-
mitment is that its exercise of each must in the last analysis take
precedence over the exercise of a similar role at any other public or
private site.
At this point, however, abstract definition and purely conceptual dis-
tinctions and differences reach the limit of their utility. We cannot illu-
minate further the meaning of priority, nor the importance of the
coordinating role of the state in linking the functions in which it has such
priority, without considering each of these functions separately – a task
to which we now turn.

Securing the preconditions of security: five tasks of the state

While it is no part of our purpose to suggest that the cultural and
ordering dimensions of the state security role are neatly divided up
between the five tasks – quite the contrary – we can nevertheless draw
a rough distinction between those tasks where the cultural dimension
is more obviously to the fore and those where the ordering dimension

flux – as for example in the increasing preference in some quarters for an empha-
sis upon the fluidity of the nodes and of their originary power to mobilize knowl-
edge and capacity, rather than upon the strength and resilience of the network
which connects the nodes and provides a grid for the heterarchical transmission
and coordination of power and influence (e.g. Burris 2004; Shearing 2006).
Thirdly, it is a literature with which we have engaged on previous occasions
(Loader and Walker 2001, 2004, 2006) and to which we have received con-
structive responses that seek to emphasize and develop the degree of common
cause underpinning our respective approaches (e.g. Johnston and Shearing 2003;
Shearing and Wood 2003a; Johnston 2006; Shearing 2006). With regard to such
a richly diverse, fast-moving and theoretically open literature it is therefore dif-
ficult and probably invidious to draw definitive conclusions. In particular,
although in principle nodal theory is often at pains to deny ‘conceptual priority
to any particular locus of power’ (Johnston 2006: 34) including the state, in
practice it has often not been slow to acknowledge either the continuing – and
perhaps increasing – strength of the state ‘node’ (e.g. Shearing and Wood 2003a:
208) or the location of that strength in frameworks of authority and in regula-
tory and resource capacities of enduring viability and importance.
176 Securing states of security

is more obviously to the fore. We will begin, therefore, with the three
‘cultural’ tasks of identification, mobilization and allocation, and
deliberation – paying particular attention to the core ‘cultural’ task of
identification – before moving on to the two ‘ordering’ tasks of regu-
lation and commitment.

Identification
In chapter 6 we discussed the ways in which political community is con-
stituted through a mix of the instrumental and the affective – the indi-
vidual and the social – and how central security has been as a medium
for these mutually supportive processes of constructive imagining and
of imaginative construction. What we are concerned with here is the
latter dimension – with the state’s actual and potential role in the imag-
inative construction of identity and in the constructive contribution that
work of imagining makes to collective security. In arguing that the
state’s identification work is indispensable, and takes precedence over
other forms of political identification in securing the preconditions of
collective security, our argument proceeds in several stages.
In the first place, there is of course a significant empirical legacy.
Historically, it is the state – and typically the nation state – that has at
least sometimes and in some places stepped forward as the form of polit-
ical community equipped to perform the various kinds of public-consti-
tutive affective tasks outlined in the previous chapter. We must recognize
that nation states have thereby been strongly implicated in the develop-
ment of a sense of belonging, dignity and authenticity in the form of
national membership. In so doing, they have often also been engaged in
crafting social identities which provide both the motivational impetus
necessary to establish and maintain an ordering infrastructure for secu-
rity and the sense of empathetic familiarity prerequisite to a social envir-
onment in which civility is relatively high, security risks relatively low,
and the ordering infrastructure thus reasonably sufficient for its task. We
must, equally, allow that the identity-construction work of the nation
state, quite apart from this complex of instrumental benefits, has also
sometimes and in some places been importantly continuous with the
very sense of social rootedness and secure belonging that makes the self-
management of unease and anxiety a manageable task. And in accept-
ing that the state can succeed, and in some cases and to varying degrees
has succeeded, in performing these tasks, we must also remind ourselves
The necessary virtue of the state 177

that it is at the level of the nation state rather than any other candidate
form of political community that notions of security – just because of
their deep inscription in the kind of purpose and practices for which
political communities are formed and through which they are sustained
– provide an important part of the vernacular of collective identity for-
mation (Walden 1982; Emsley 2000), reformation (Glaeser 2000) and
maintenance (Loader and Mulcahy 2003: ch. 2).
In the second place, the fact that the state has frequently demon-
strated that it can do this kind of security-enabling identification work
points us precisely in the direction of the capacity-based justification of
its indispensability and priority standing. The capacity argument, we
may recall, concerns the remarkable and self-reinforcing ability of
states to accomplish a wide range of complementary cultural and
ordering tasks in various areas including – in the complex ways set out
above – security work. Yet a capacity-based argument can never offer
a full explanation. The very fact that at other times and in other places
the state has not found or has not effectively exploited the capacity to
develop a wide-ranging instrumental facility and an inclusive sense of
affective community in a mutually supportive fashion, but has either
simply failed or has allowed undue rein to its meddling, partisan, impe-
rialistic or obdurate tendencies, suggests as much. And underlying that
empirical qualification, the capacity argument also reveals a theoreti-
cal gap. There are two related elements to this. First, and most obvi-
ously, just because it is about potential rather than achievement, the
capacity-based argument begs the question of what is necessary in
order to turn potential into achievement. Secondly, au fond the capac-
ity-based argument is a functional one, and as such it suffers from the
basic limitation of all functional explanations. It can show, through its
demonstration of beneficent outcomes, why it might have been a good
reason to adopt – and, even more so, why it would have made sense to
many to maintain once adopted – a particular set of arrangements or
course of action in certain circumstances. But it cannot by reference to
these same outcomes offer a full explanation of why a particular set of
arrangements or course of action was in fact adopted or maintained –
or not, as the case may be – in any particular circumstances.3

13
Within the literature on nationalism, functionalist thinking has played an
influential role – sometimes explicitly so and sometimes only implicitly –
especially within those schools of thought which link nationalism exclusively or
178 Securing states of security

This, then, forces us to move our argument to a third stage. If the

state is not a functional machine, if, as is palpably if inconveniently the
case, it cannot be guaranteed to develop its role in social and political
identification in a particular manner just because of the beneficial con-
sequences for collective security that might ensue, then how can we
nevertheless insist upon the indispensability and necessary priority of
its role as an identifier of political community? To answer this, we have
to go back to the actual circumstances under which modern statehood
emerged, and so to the discussion we developed at length in chapter 2.
As we saw there, it is the very shift in the social and political imaginary
away from a predetermined order of social and political relations and
towards the individual as the basic unit of moral worth that reveals the
dual foundational motivation of the modern state. It accounts for why
the modern state was concerned to provide a framework for instru-
mentally beneficial mutual relations amongst formally free and equal
individuals. Yet it also explains why the modern state was concerned
with the facilitation and recognition of a sense of active and purposive
political community, and indeed offers both positive and negative
reasons for this. Positively, the new sense of universal and equal moral
agency made it possible for the first time to found a sense of belonging
and of primary associative ties on the basis of collective authorship and
its secular potential or accomplishment. Negatively, with the fading of
older notions of natural or transcendental hierarchy, the possibility of
an alternative grounding for large-scale affective community in any
case began to recede.
But there remains the fundamental problem of the reconciliation of
these individual and collective dimensions. If these are not adequately
reconciled – and, to repeat, we cannot just assume the serendipitous
development of a functional feedback mechanism as the ignition or
motor of that reconciliation – then as a framework for collective action
and affect the modern state courts the opposite dangers of being too
‘thin’ and under-motivated or too ‘thick’ and culturally imperialist.
That there is indeed widespread acknowledgement of this problem can
be seen from the most cursory examination of the terms in which
modern statehood has tended to be conceptualized, and, in particular,

Footnote 3 (cont.)
predominantly to the development of the social and economic conditions
of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’. For a useful overview, see Lawrence (2005:
ch. 4).
The necessary virtue of the state 179

in the development of various tense couplings. Witness, for example,

the uneasy marriage of nationalism and citizenship (Cox 1987), of the
particular and the universal, of affinity and proximity (Waldron
2003b), of common fate and common membership, or even of idem
and ipse – of identification as a recognition of prior sameness and of
identification as a reflexive process for developing and refining a sense
of collective selfhood (van Roermund 2003). We also see the same
dynamic at work in certain neologistic constructions that bring
together divergent themes in intendedly productive but also question-
begging – some would even say oxymoronic – ways, whether we are
talking about ‘constitutional patriotism’ or ‘abstract solidarity’ or
‘contextual universalism’, or even that seemingly bland modern
favourite, ‘civic nationalism’ itself (Fine 1999). The examples could be
multiplied, but the immediate point is simply to record that these kinds
of conceptual juxtapositions and innovations tend to illuminate and
perplex in equal measure. They illuminate in that they go immediately
to what is at stake and what is unresolved in the development trajec-
tory of the modern state. They perplex in that the ‘nested oppositions’
through which they frame the world do not easily permit them to go
beyond the antinomies that they identify.
There is, thus, a well-known narrative which unfolds in many and
colourfully diverse theoretical languages around the ambivalent
meaning and ambiguous development of the nation state. On the one
hand, the conjunction of nation and state hints at the alchemy of
abstract solidarity. Under the sign of citizenship in particular, the
nation state has helped cultivate the notion of a community of
strangers bonded only by a democracy-enabling impersonal sense of
interlocking circumstance or common predicament grounded in shared
possession of a territory rather than, as in the case of pre-modern con-
stellations, by interpersonal connection and allegiance or through
common fidelity to some transcendental order (Habermas 1996;
Brunkhorst 2005). On the other hand, some deeper sense of common
purpose has frequently been invoked to inspire, invited to homologate,
or urged to corroborate a common commitment founded on the acci-
dent of geographical proximity. Nationalism, as an ideology which
links territory to common history, language and culture, has provided
a powerful and protean candidate for this task (see, for example, Yack
2003). Yet nationalism carries with it the enduring danger of reifica-
tion – partly a legacy of pre-modern collectivism and partly a tendency
180 Securing states of security

within any process whereby social meaning is imputed to a collective.

It risks being naturalized as a self-corroborating story of collectively
motivated but individually predestined belonging and exclusion, one
that comes with strict criteria of exclusion and diversity-denying stan-
dards of inclusion. And, of course, what is true of the cultural dimen-
sion of the nation state generally is emphatically true of its constitutive
preoccupation with security. As a contributing ingredient of national
identity construction, the idea of common security, as we have seen, is
also delicately balanced between instrumental and affective poles. And
depending on how this balance is struck, the discourse of security can
either underpin an impersonal and difference-accommodating solidar-
ity or unduly thicken cultural community, and so be either broadly
inclusive and accommodating or narrowly exclusive and divisive (see
chapter 4).
Whatever conceptual language we use to convey its origins and
abiding legacy, then, the identification function of the state is a double-
edged sword, and ineluctably so. It is at the root of the cultural work
of the state, and therefore crucial not only to the internal relationship
between belonging and security but also to the common mobilization
effort required for an ordering infrastructure to address problems of
insecurity. Yet it can also be the catalyst for many of the state’s patholo-
gies, in particular its intemperate meddling and its cultural imperial-
ism. In the final analysis, if we are to overcome rather than dramatize
this, we have to go beyond grand abstractions and accentuated oppo-
sites. Rather, and this is the fourth and final move in our argument, in
order to resolve the ambivalence of the nation state’s identification
function in a civilizing rather than a tribalizing direction, it is crucial
that we look in closer detail at the novelty of the sense of the political
imaginary it frames. In so doing, we may come to see its priority as a
site of political identity as an intrinsic part of the solution rather than
as a question begged or as an aggravating part of the problem.
Let us again take up and pursue the thread of chapter 2 in order to
make this point. As we noted there, the modern state is not just a
new and experimental recipe for politics, with ‘abstract solidarity’ or
some other ‘x’ factor as its key (and elusive) ingredient, but a new
dish entirely. For the modern state is the harbinger of the very idea of
politics conceived of as a comprehensively unified, separate and
specialized public domain that in its operative logic is distinct from
the society over which it rules, and so no longer as an untidy and
The necessary virtue of the state 181

overlapping series of decisional spheres in each of which collective

action concerns and special interests are deeply intertwined. The new
specialized system of generic politics possesses the dual attributes of
immanence and self-limitation. On the one hand, it purports to be self-
legitimating, in that what justifies the continuing claim to autonomous
authority of the generic political domain and what fuels the impersonal
solidarity that may lend it the requisite sociological support is nothing
more or less than, first, the procedural promise of the operation of the
generic political domain itself as one in which all matters of common
concern beyond intimate face-to-face contexts of community can be
treated in common without fear or favour of special interests, and, sec-
ondly, the substantive promise or bounty of these public goods, such as
security, that are both defined and enabled – and, moreover, enabled at
a suitably ‘economic’ scale – through the operation of that generic polit-
ical domain. On the other hand, and as the flipside of this, alongside the
idea of a generic political and public sphere, there emerges the corre-
sponding and complementary idea of a generic sphere of purely private
action and negative freedom that lies beyond either the specialist sphere
of generic politics or the now redundant special mixed regimes of public
and private right and obligation based upon prior forms of privilege or
advantage (Habermas 2001; Loughlin 2003: ch. 3; Grimm 2005; N.
Walker 2006c). And as we have repeatedly noted, however difficult it
may be to define its precise boundaries, such a private sphere – the zone
of forbearance or non-interference with the integrity of individual
choice and action on the part of public or any other authority – also
makes a crucial contribution to security as a public good.
These twin attributes – a generic politics dedicated to the identifica-
tion and delivery of public goods and the protection of a private sphere
from excessive meddling – both require the priority of the state as a site
of political identity over other sites to be internalized. For in each case
the guarantee – of generic scope and of protection of a private sphere –
relies upon the legitimacy of the state’s claim to political community pre-
vailing over other more local or specialist claims to legitimate authority
and the sense of political identity that underscores these. That is to say,
the distinctive potential of the state as a site of political identity and com-
munity, and the source of its peculiarly encompassing contribution to
the generation and protection of public goods amongst adjacent and
closely interconnected populations, and so of the plausibility of its
continuing claim to authority before the ‘people’ that comprises these
182 Securing states of security

populations, lies, in an ultimately circular and self-justifying manner, in

its priority in the last instance over other levels of political community
being acknowledged. It follows, of course, that for the state to do the
cultural work necessary to identify and pursue the best sense of its col-
lective purpose in the pursuit of public goods and the protection of
private freedoms, it should be able to play with as full a deck of cards
as possible. It should, that is, be able to rely upon the equivalent prior-
ity of its other functional attributes – to be discussed below – in support
of and in coordination with its basic nurturing of a sense of common
politics and political identity.

Mobilization and allocation of collective resources

Charles Tilly (1985) has famously characterized state-making at
various points through the pre-modern and modern ages as a form of
‘organized crime’. On his provocatively one-sided view, the state may
be conceived of as the ‘quintessential protection racket’. But, as with
Nozick’s (1974) ‘dominant protective association’, which under the
‘invisible hand mechanism’ gradually evolves into the ‘ultra-minimal’
and then finally the ‘minimal state’, it is one that gradually acquires the
power to define itself otherwise. Beyond the arresting metaphors, Tilly
points us towards something fundamental here. One of the central fea-
tures of state activity and one of the key indices of state capacity is the
extraction of resources – or what states themselves call the ‘taxing’ of
population. This work of extraction has often been historically justi-
fied by and stimulated by war-making and external security (see also
Mann 1986: 486; Herbst 2003), although extraction clearly also serves
the closely related purpose of internal security. However we precisely
understand the dynamic of extraction, there is no doubt that when har-
nessed to the imperatives of security it can operate as a self-reinforcing
dynamic. The costs of war stimulate the demand for resources, while
the costs of servicing the expanded territory that is the spoils of suc-
cessful war demand yet more resources; expanded territory also pro-
vides an extended population from which to extract these resources.
Equally, in a non-expansionary scenario, the consolidation of internal
security can strengthen the tax base, and in turn further reinforce the
state’s wherewithal to enforce internal security. And, of course, it takes
only a slight change of perspective to see the business of resource
extraction and the development of administrative capacity in response
The necessary virtue of the state 183

to intensified resource extraction as being about ends rather than

means – as concerning the vested and proactive interests of state elites.
At this point, furthermore, the argument from resources feeds easily
into our discussion of the dangers both of partisanship (see chapter 3)
and of cultural imperialism (see chapter 4) in the state’s pursuit of inter-
nal security.
While these considerations serve as a salutary warning against too
idealistic a reading, we must acknowledge that resource mobilization
and (re)allocation are nevertheless crucial tools in any endeavour to
craft security as a public good.4 They provide key mechanisms for
channelling whatever sense of affective identification and associative
obligation exists within a population towards two complementary sets
of ends. They enable the securing and servicing of the ordering infra-
structure, whether or not directly provided by state functionaries. And,
through the raising and deploying of resources for other purposes –
education, housing provision, social security, healthcare, etc. – they
also serve to alleviate those forms of relative deprivation and social
exclusion whose alienating effects may act both as a stimulant to crime
and as an aggravator of security anxiety. In so doing, they help to
reduce the forms of ontological insecurity that can give rise to a height-
ened focus on security shallowly conceived.
But none of these arguments necessarily implies the priority of the
state in matters of resource mobilization. Indeed, that brand of
scepticism which sees the incessant call for ‘more resources’ to be
both narrowly self-serving for the state bureaucracy as well as more
broadly self-defeating in its tendency to tackle the symptoms rather
than the causes of insecurity would be understandably suspicious
of any attempt to place too much emphasis on this aspect of state

14
Whether the distribution of resources in the forms of public expenditure of tax
revenue is aptly conceived of as a redistribution or reallocation of the private
wealth or income of those presented with the highest tax bills is itself a moot
point. Some would argue (e.g. Murphy and Nagel 2002) that the state’s overall
control of the regulatory environment, including its property laws and labour
laws, means that our notions of pre-tax wealth and income are themselves arti-
fices – no less dependent on the particularity and partiality of public policy than
the tax regime itself. To the extent that this argument is persuasive it alerts us to
the myriad other ways in which the state is involved in matters of distributive
justice as well as helping shift the burden of proof from those who would oth-
erwise have to justify any progressive taxation before the charge that it is a form
of expropriation.
184 Securing states of security

functioning.5 Nevertheless, for at least three reasons, it remains

important to affirm the prerogative of the state to command the level
of resources it deems necessary and to allocate in the manner it deems
appropriate to the direct and indirect service of security, and to ensure
that the capacity of any other potential resource provider does not
interfere with or prejudice that prerogative.6 These concern, in turn,
the depth, the flexibility and the ‘security’ of state resources.
The argument from depth is based on the premise that the call for
additional security resources is more likely to be a function of scarcity
than of plenty. As the evidence of failed or failing states indicates, or
indeed of any state where the tax base of public expenditure is put
under unusual pressure, the political claim for security spending tends
to become more strident the more depleted the overall level of public
resources, the sharper the competition between the demands of differ-
ent services, and the less matters of ontological security are being
attended to.7 What is more, as security rhetoric is typically most seduc-
tive where the choices can be presented as starkest and most urgent,
such claims are often successful in their own myopic terms, as it was
with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election promise to ‘spend more on law
and order as we economize elsewhere’. Yet as the largest territorial
level of government charged with basic matters of internal security in
particular and public service provision in general, the central state – at
least in principle and notwithstanding these sharp exceptions – retains
the widest and deepest tax pool from which to draw. It follows that it
typically remains easier for the state than for any other public or
market provider to immunize itself against the problem of scarce

15
See, in particular, the discussion of the authoritarian syndrome in chapter 8
below.
16
While other levels of government can (and, especially in federal systems, fre-
quently do) possess independent resource-raising capacity in matters of security
and in other matters indirectly relevant to security, this should not be at such a
level or involve such decisional autonomy that it effectively undermines or threat-
ens to undermine the capacity of the central state to shape the overall level and
distribution of tax revenue. Equally, private spending on security should not be
allowed to such a level and across such a range of activities that it encourages or
permits an effective opt-out on the part of physically or metaphorically ‘gated’
communities from state provision and its financing, and so from the consideration
of the complex trans-neighbourhood externalities associated with state provision.
17
For example, in the neo-liberal governments elected by many western states in
the 1980s, including the Thatcher government in the UK. See, for example,
Reiner (1980), Gamble (1988).
The necessary virtue of the state 185

resources and the excessive or disproportionate claims on behalf of

shallow security concerns which may flow from that.
The argument from flexibility follows a similar logic. A government
genuinely concerned with deploying resources most effectively in
pursuit of increased security will want to find an optimal balance
between direct and indirect forms of spending, between spending on
policing and protective services and guaranteeing those types of wider
social provision that can prevent (in)security becoming pervasive. It
will want, in other words, to engage in ‘joined-up’ thinking about and
‘joined-up’ funding of the right mix of policies. This is easier to achieve
against a backdrop of a wide tax base and a multifunctional remit.
Where the tax base is narrower and the functional remit more
restricted, tax demands may become more closely linked to specific
programmes and services in electoral politics in a manner which again
threatens to pit different sectoral needs against each other and to
present overstylized choices. Once more, a shallow and wide concep-
tion of security – and of its appropriate funding – may be the most
likely outcome of this dynamic.
Finally, there is an argument that stresses the assured quality of state
funding. As we stressed in the previous chapter, security as a public
good is strongly future oriented. The promise that security will be well
served – and so adequately financed – tomorrow as well as today is part
and parcel of what makes us feel secure today. The state, with its broad
and deeply embedded tax base, is in a better position than other puta-
tive providers – whether commercial or communal – to issue that
promissory note, and to guarantee funding when other security
providers prove fleeting or unreliable.

Deliberation
By deliberation we mean the various ways in which the state encour-
ages decisions to be made in the field of security provision on the basis
of careful consideration of arguments and evidence and through the
development of good reasons. Deliberation in politics, including secu-
rity politics, serves a variety of different functions, five of which we will
briefly consider in due course. Before we do so, however, we should
acknowledge that if, by separate or cumulative reference to these func-
tions, we can demonstrate that the state effectively promotes delibera-
tion, by necessary inference we will also have demonstrated that the
186 Securing states of security

state should assume priority in the last analysis over other deliberative
forums. This is so for the simple reason that deliberation as we have
defined it is internally related to decision, and since the priority of deci-
sion at the state level has already been argued for in the case of alloca-
tive decisions and will in due course be argued for in the case of
regulatory decisions, no additional justification is required for the
deliberation process itself.
The first four functions of deliberation can be roughly divided into
those that serve the ‘input’ requirement of a democratic polity and
those that help meet its ‘output’ requirements (Scharpf 1999). The two
major input requirements concern representation of and responsive-
ness to diverse interests and the dignitarian virtue of participation
respectively. As regards representation and responsiveness, delibera-
tion implies a basic commitment to recognize and include representa-
tives of the broadest range of constituencies within the wide political
community of the state in the range of decision-making over the
balance of preferences in security policy. As regards the direct value of
participation, there is clearly some trade-off between opportunity and
gravity of input. Not all who want to can necessarily be involved in the
most consequential forums of central deliberation. However, this can
be compensated for through mechanisms of institutional design – both
in the form of ‘top-down’ delegated or secondary spheres of local
decision-making and through ‘bottom-up’ channels of consultation.
The two major output functions of deliberation concern its encour-
agement of compliance and its epistemic quality respectively. Each has a
special resonance in security politics. Clearly, as the resilience of the
‘policing by consent’ label demonstrates, policing remains highly com-
pliance-dependent. As we saw in the previous chapter, a unique feature
of security as a public good is that the problem which it seeks to treat –
insecurity – is itself socially generated. What is more, the dispersed
nature of insecurity-generating activity means that the police remain
heavily dependent upon public support for basic operational informa-
tion conducive to the detection and repression of such activity (Kinsey
et al. 1986; Tyler 2004). To the extent that deliberative involvement in
policy-making may encourage a more supportive and understanding
attitude towards the problems and predicaments of security profession-
als, therefore, there is a high premium on encouraging such involvement
on the part of those affected by and capable of making a difference to
the implementation of security policy.
The necessary virtue of the state 187

Professionalism is a more central theme as regards the other output-

centred deliberative function. Here what we are concerned with is the
way in which deliberation and the power of the better argument can
improve the intrinsic quality of security decision-making. Unlike the
other functions of deliberation, the advantages of state-centredness,
such as they are, have less to do with the relationship of decision-
making to the wide state-level ‘demos’ and more to do with knowledge
and coordination gains associated with the pooling of expertise and
information. As we will discuss in due course, strong claims are often
made about the importance of professional discretion and the superi-
ority of professional decision-making in matters of security policy,
where knowledge may be, or may be asserted to be, arcane or experi-
ence-dependent and confidentiality at a premium.8 And while such
claims may be countered by the argument that a broader base of
decision-making consultation can bring a wider and more detached
cross-section of views and considerations to the table, there is no doubt
that the epistemic argument is in some tension with the more directly
democratic justification of the other deliberative arguments. What is
more, this reflects a broader trend in deliberative theory and delibera-
tive politics. Partly in response to the increased vulnerability of the sup-
porting framework of representative politics, including the secular
decline of mass political parties, contemporary thinking about deliber-
ation has undoubtedly accorded greater priority to the epistemic and
problem-solving dimension (e.g. Dorf and Sabel 1998; Estlund 1999).
So much so, indeed, that some writers have begun to talk about the
emergence of a depoliticized form of democracy (Pettit 2004) or about
‘democracy without the demos’ (Mair 2005).
Yet if we consider a fifth and final case in favour of deliberation, the
value of widespread public involvement at the level of the wide politi-
cal identity of the state is reasserted. Building significantly on the com-
pliance argument, this line of enquiry concerns the extent to which, as
discussed in chapter 6, not just the ‘implementability’ but the very
standing of security as thick public good between different groups with
presumptively different immediate security concerns depends upon its
being a matter of common understanding between them. For insofar
as we can find a common resolution of our understanding of security
requirements and priorities – insofar as we can thereby articulate

18
See the discussion of the paternalism syndrome in chapter 8 below.
188 Securing states of security

meaningfully what security means to us – then in that measure we have

already developed the very ‘we-feeling’ which is itself a basic ingredi-
ent of security. Here, unlike the four other arguments from delibera-
tion, questions of ‘input’ and ‘output’ legitimacy – of process and
outcome – merge. Here, moreover, the idea of an inclusive framework
of deliberation over security at the level of the anonymous but deeply
interconnected political community of the state finds its clearest and
most distinctive vindication.

Regulation
That the state should assume priority in the overall system of normative
order associated with security is on reflection perhaps the least contro-
versial aspect of state ascendancy to assert in principle, if the most
complex to develop in practice. On first impressions, however, even the
in-principle assertion of state priority might seem to rest on distinctly
shaky ground. There is a huge literature – literatures in fact – which seek
to question the old Westphalian view of the state as the fount of all
regulatory authority. Whether we look at work on the concept of gover-
nance (e.g. Kjaer 2004), or in regulation studies (e.g. Parker and
Braithwaite 2003; Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004) or in legal pluralism (e.g.
de Sousa Santos 1995), we see a formidable range of challenges to a
command-and-control model of state regulatory authority. Such critical
perspectives, which often owe much to the kinds of scepticism about the
centralization of social intelligence portrayed in chapter 5, hold that the
idea of the state as the only legitimate regulator in and for society, if ever
it was a reasonable claim, is now no more than a quaint anachronism.
Moreover, even a rather more subtle variant of the Westphalian idea that
allows the existence of regulators other than the state, but which holds
that whatever legitimacy attaches to these other regulators is merely a
delegated legitimacy – still owed to and dependent upon the imprimatur
of the state – is also increasingly treated as outmoded and inappropriate.
Rather, it is claimed, we have to take seriously the myriad forms of order-
ing we find in society – private, hybrid, substate, suprastate as well as
state – in their own terms, without assuming any monopoly of recogni-
tion or authorization on the part of the state (N. Walker forthcoming b).
What is more, there is no sense in this new literature that policing in
particular and security in general are or should be considered as an
exception to the trend towards the ‘post-regulatory state’ (C. Scott
The necessary virtue of the state 189

2004). Quite the opposite in fact. As a harbinger of the contemporary

turn towards nodal policing, an influential thesis has gradually taken
hold over the last decade or so to the effect that state policing is under-
going a post-Peelian ‘third wave’ (Shearing 1996) – one where not only
is the direct ‘rowing’ of the Peelian phase in decline but even the
broader ‘steering’ functions inherited from the pre-Peelian phase are
under threat (e.g. Johnston 1992; Bayley 1994; O’Malley and Palmer
1996; Loader 2000; N. Walker 2000: ch. 10). And in the work of such
scholars (e.g. Grabosky 1995; Johnston and Shearing 2003; Parker and
Braithwaite 2003), we see a significant cross-fertilization between the
particularity of security ordering and regulation in general, with stu-
dents of security sometimes even taking the lead in innovatory forms
of post-state regulatory thinking.9
Crucially, however, just as we have argued that the state retains a key
role in coordinating its various indispensable functions, so too, and as
a necessary incident of that very task of functional coordination, it
must retain a key role in harnessing the various systems of normative
order that are developing in a post-Peelian age. It is indeed perfectly
possible, as many scholars of the new wave assert, to allow that forms
of security regulation other than the state – whether in local or sub-
federal government, or at transnational or supranational sites, or in
forms of private orderings – possess a legitimacy which is prior to and
by no means eclipsed by the state’s authorization. At the same time, we
may continue to insist that some authority-in-the-last-instance is
required to ensure both that these systems are in mutual harmony, and
that they neither frustrate those aspects of the state’s conception of
security as a public good that conform to widely agreed standards of
distributive justice or are otherwise the fruit of broad deliberative input
and consensus, nor threaten such side-constraints as are in place to
ensure the universal protection of a sphere of private autonomy.
In other words, we can and must divorce pedigree from priority. We
can happily acknowledge that there are many pedigree lines – many
forms of original authority in matters of security as elsewhere – within
any social formation. That does not mean, however, that we should

19
Apart, again, from the work of Les Johnston, Clifford Shearing and their various
collaborators on nodal policing, we can think of other interesting ‘bridging’
analyses such as the growing body of work by criminologists on restorative
justice and on the innovative regulatory model of the Truth Commission. See,
for example, McEvoy and Newburn (2003) and Roche (2003).
190 Securing states of security

leave the mutual coherence of these forms of authority unattended.

Neither does it mean that in some respects – in particular in terms of
its breadth of democratic input and its power over resources – the state
does not possess a stronger pedigree and should not prevail in the final
instance. Against this, the crucial feature of the claim of priority that
saves it from the charge that in giving precedence to the state it allows
it a potentially unbounded ‘power to decide the extent of its power’ is
simply that it concerns the priority of a normative order. The state may
not be bound by any other site of authority over the extent and use of
its security power (with the possible exception of the supranational
authority of the European Union, discussed in chapter 9), but it is
hedged in by the discipline of the operative norms themselves, and by
the broader framework of constitutional law within which these rules
are generated and by which they are checked. These ensure both, for-
mally, a level of generality, predictability and accountability in pursuit
of these rules and, substantively, whatever degree of respect for the plu-
rality of security centres and diversity of security concerns may be
reflected in the content of these rules. The devil, of course, remains in
the detail of the institutional design, a point to which we will return in
our discussion of anchored pluralism below.

Commitment
We argued in chapter 1 that perhaps the most potent image feeding
state scepticism, and certainly one that helps fuel each of the featured
variants of scepticism, is that of the state as bully. Underlying this
image is a simple – perhaps overly simple – connection. On the one
hand, we have the famous Weberian understanding of the state as the
monopolist of the legitimate use of force. On the other hand, we have
policing, a practice understood as the key societal ‘mechanism for the
distribution of non-negotiable coercive force’ (Bittner 1970: 46). The
fear is that if we put the two together then the police and other simi-
larly endowed central security services simply become tools of the
state, the vehicle of its violence; and since when force meets other forms
of power or authority – of resources, of reason, of culture and affect –
force tends to prevail, the idea that such force be ‘legitimate’ may
become redundant, no more than an empty boast.
The danger, borne out many times in the history of the modern state,
that state officials may exploit the police to undermine rather than
The necessary virtue of the state 191

promote the security of those they are charged to protect – the deepest
paradox of police power – arises out of just this connection. Yet we need
not succumb to fatalism in the face of this paradox. Instead, two sets of
answers are called for. The first is a prudential answer. It simply reiter-
ates the importance of the other functions of the state considered above
in securing the preconditions of security as a public good, including, min-
imally and most immediately, the prevention of a ‘police state’. As we
have seen, the police can be shaped and civilized against this possibility
by political culture, by resource decisions, by deliberative processes and
deliberated decisions, and by the general authority of rules. The second
response is more difficult but equally necessary. It stresses that while the
dangers of state excess can indeed be addressed with some confidence
through the proper deployment of the state’s other security functions, the
idea of the state bedrock of the ‘legitimate use of force’ as referring to
something other than everyday police capacity remains a viable one, and
one that is valuable precisely in terms of its indication of an independent
mechanism to underpin the proper and effective use of that everyday
police capacity. What is more, it is a mechanism which needs itself to be
separately acknowledged within the litany of the state’s priority func-
tions. This we set out to do under the heading of ‘commitment’.
What do we mean by commitment as an indispensable and priority
function of the state and how precisely does it connect with the legiti-
mate use of force? Drawing in very broad terms on the insights of insti-
tutional economics, we may think of the state as an institution or as a
cluster of institutions involved in ensuring ‘credible commitments’ (e.g.
North 1993). Furthermore, we may understand the capacity to ensure
the credibility of commitments as applying both to the actions of
the state itself and, in a close reciprocal dynamic, to the actions of
others – institutions and individuals – with whom the state stands in a
relationship. For the likelihood that these other actors will honour
their commitments to the state will, in some measure at least, depend
upon the degree of confidence and trust they have that the state can
and will keep its own promises as registered in the array of positive and
negative incentives at its disposal, whether through the constancy of its
rule following, the effectiveness of its rule enforcement, or the contin-
uing guarantee of its capacity to raise and deploy resources.
Of course, like all forms of power, this is most effective when it oper-
ates in latent mode, based on ‘the rule of anticipated reactions’
(Friedrich 1963: 199) rather than upon repeated shows of strength.
192 Securing states of security

Nevertheless, it remains the case that the state’s ultimate and overriding
capacity to deploy force does help to secure the credibility of its com-
mitments to tax, to apply rules, and to enforce sanctions and so to
underpin the credibility of the commitments of others to comply with
the rules and directives of the state, which in turn further reinforces the
credibility of the commitments the state can make, and so on. In this
regard, crucially, there is nothing special about policing and security.
The meta-level coercive potential operates in the area of policing in
exactly the same way as it operates in respect of other public goods
under state influence, such as education or health, which unlike policing
are not also coercive at the point of delivery. In all cases, the ordering
and resourcing infrastructure needs some kind of coercive underpinning
in the final instance for reasons which bear upon effectiveness and reli-
ability of delivery in general without influencing the detailed enforce-
ability of any particular operation. What the state’s priority role in
ensuring its commitments provides, in short, is just that guarantee of the
security of its security (or health, education, etc.) ordering and resourc-
ing powers that allows people to invest in them and their civilizing qual-
ities with a degree of confidence in their effectiveness.

On anchored pluralism
Could not, however, the state sceptics respond to our invocation of the
necessity and indeed necessary priority of the state in these various
interconnected functions with a necessity clause of their own? The flip-
side of the historical record of instrumental and cultural work is
another historical record which traces the propensity of the state to
meddle, to reflect and enact the bias of the most powerful, to mobilize
and celebrate an intolerant idea of cultural uniformity, and to decide
without sufficient knowledge or foresight. Equally, the flipside of the
state’s continuing potential to perform this ordering and cultural work
effectively towards the production of security as a thick public good is
the danger that it will merely consolidate or reinforce its pathologies.
Perhaps, moreover, the two are intimately connected and the vices are
the unavoidable downside of the virtue; and that any attempt to mobi-
lize the positive face of state policing is fated, in the long run at least,
to stimulate and mobilize the vices. The only answer to that concern,
and the note on which we will finish this chapter, is to focus in more
detail on the deliberative and regulatory elements within the state’s
The necessary virtue of the state 193

functional catalogue and argue for two things: first, as much openness
to concerned interests in the production of security and the reduction
of insecurity as possible, and as many checks as can be incorporated
against undue meddling, bias, uninformed decision-making and cul-
tural imperialism in the ordering and cultural work of the state; and
secondly, as much recognition as possible of the ordering and cultural
work of other sites of collective security as is consistent with the ele-
ments of state priority set out above.
This argument is elaborated at length in the second half of the next
chapter. Suffice it for now, by way of conclusion, to say that it trans-
lates into what we would call an anchored pluralism. The state, in the
senses set out above, should remain the anchor of collective security
provision, but there should be as much pluralism as possible both,
internally, in terms of the constitutional inclusiveness, representative-
ness and minority and individual protection mechanisms of the demo-
cratic and administrative processes through which the aspiration of
collective security is reflected upon and pursued and, externally, in
terms of the recognition of the appropriate place of other sites of cul-
tural and regulatory production above, below and otherwise beyond
the state. In this second and external dimension – the prospects of the
flourishing of which are of course intimately associated with and
dependent upon the openness of the first or internal dimension – the
role of the state in the ordering field should be as a meta-regulator and
in the cultural field as a wide boundary of social and security identity
within which other sorts of social and security identities may be nested
and encouraged.10
In both cases, the aim of the state is both positive and negative.
Positively, it is to ensure the widest possible community consistent with
the minimum affective ties necessary to deliver the regulatory and cul-
tural infrastructure of a single security space, with all the risk-reducing
and fear-abating benefits that such a common security environment can
bring. Negatively, it is to ensure two forms of limitation. First, there is
the auto-limitation of a private domain protected by rights from those
forms of intervention by security authorities in general – including most
urgently the state itself as the most powerful and wide-ranging security

10
It remains an open question of course, in the light of the development of trans-
national forms of security practice, whether it must or should be the widest
boundary of social and security identity. This point is addressed in chapter 9.
194 Securing states of security

authority – that in the name of security threaten in fact to undermine

security. In the final analysis, any system of multilevel governance
(Marks et al. 1996), including our model of anchored pluralism, must
be alive to those issues of justice and fairness apt to be resolved not by
parcelling out authority and separating powers, but by specifying areas
out of bounds to any form of collective power. Secondly, there is a form
of external limitation. The state must ensure that other ordering and
cultural sites, for all that they can contribute in more knowledgeable,
responsive and intimate ways to the production of more localized or
more practice-specific security spaces, do so in a way which does not
frustrate the attainment of a more inclusive regulation of security and
security of regulation, either through regulatory norms which contra-
dict the wider regulatory field or through forms of parochial solidarity
which may be inconsistent with membership of the wider security com-
munity, or indeed, with the equal security of their own members.
The challenge remains one of finding the requisite commitment and
institutional imagination to strike the optimal balance. It is a challenge,
in our view, that can only be effectively addressed by abandoning a
priori scepticism towards the state and by reasserting its necessary
virtue and the qualified priority that this implies.
 8 The democratic governance of
security

I
n the previous chapter we outlined what we characterized as the
necessary virtue of the state in delivering the public good of secu-
rity and argued that, in environments in which a multiplicity of
actors are engaged in its production or the promise thereof, this virtue
is best harnessed through the idea and practice of an anchored plu-
ralism. This entails, we further suggested, seeking to maximize the
degree of pluralism within the anchor of state institutions whilst facil-
itating as much pluralism of delivery outside the state as is consistent
with the latter’s necessary priority. Having reached this point, two
tasks now lie before us. We must first address the question of why, if
these virtues are so compellingly virtuous, they appear to remain so
thinly, or barely, or even non-existently, evident within so many set-
tings of contemporary security practice. We need, in other words, to
consider how and why it is that the state’s vices – its propensity to
meddle, to be partisan, to impose cultural orthodoxy, and to be idiotic
and stubborn – more often shape the politics of security than what we
take to be its virtues – a fact about the present that allows state scep-
tics to lay claim to the mantle of sober, illusion-free, worldliness. Our
first task then is to revisit these vices, which were presented in an intel-
lectually stylized form in part I, with a view to grasping how they in
fact manifest themselves within the pathologies of modern security
practice and with what effects.
Our second, more constructive, purpose is to examine how the
vicious circles that these pathological syndromes give rise to, or tend
towards, might be broken, or at least loosened, in ways that can
foster and sustain a practice of security that is better placed to
harness the virtue of the state tradition while seeking to suppress or
minimize its vices. Our starting point here is Philip Pettit’s (2001a:
ch. 7) recent application to democratic theory of the idea of ‘false
positives’ and ‘false negatives’. These notions, we argue, can fruit-
fully be developed as ‘hinge’ concepts that permit us, on the one

195
196 Securing states of security

hand, to glance backwards in a bid to sharpen our critique of the

pathologies we have identified and, on the other, to project forwards
with a view to thinking through the kind of institutional matrix
required to give practical effect to the idea of anchored pluralism
and, with it, the prospect of trying to embed, in what remains an
inhospitable climate, the conditions under which security may
become an axiomatic, rather than pervasive, element of our social
imaginary and political institutions.

Four pathologies of modern security

In the settings in which security problems are today framed and
responded to, the virtues of the state tradition are at best unevenly
manifest, at worst absent or in retreat. While states do today promise
frameworks of conviviality independent of prior affinity, raise and
allocate resources, facilitate public deliberation about crime and
policing, as well as authorizing, regulating and underscoring the com-
mitment of the full range of security practitioners, these virtues are
rarely combined in ways that conduce to the solidaristic and egali-
tarian security practice we are seeking in this book to defend. Instead,
we are witness today to practices and discourses of security seeking
which are much more likely to embody and enact the state’s prob-
lematic capabilities. We devoted considerable space in part I to
describing these, though we did so there as a means of illustrating
certain prevalent tendencies within state theory. Our focus now is on
various pathological syndromes that we think are manifest within
modern security practice and on the ways in which these syndromes
hail and reproduce the state’s vices. We address ourselves, in turn, to
four such pathologies which we call paternalism, consumerism,
authoritarianism and fragmentation. In describing these syndromes
and their effects we are not claiming that they exhaust the terrain of
modern security, or seeking to understand the full range of ways in
which they are interconnected, or mutually reinforcing, or else in
tension. Nor are we aiming to establish sociologically their recent tra-
jectories and current salience – matters that will vary from jurisdic-
tion to jurisdiction and consideration of which would take us far
beyond our purposes in this book. We merely wish to claim that these
syndromes can be found within, and continue to structure, the prac-
tices of modern policing and security in ways that variously help to
The democratic governance of security 197

give security its pervasive, uncivil forms and which stand as obstacles
to realizing the benefits of security as a thick public good. Let us con-
sider, in each case, how this is so.

Paternalism
This syndrome elevates professional expertise and authority – of gov-
ernment officials, police officers, intelligence agencies, the operatives of
the criminal justice and penal system – to pride of place in determining
the contours of security practice. It is the view which says that police
and cognate security agencies possess the education, training, experi-
ence, skills, knowledge and habitus needed to ‘know how to act’, to be
able to judge the causes, scale and likely impact of security threats and
to manage public demands for order accordingly – with the requisite
good sense and prudence – for the benefit of all. It is thus a position
which privileges not popular sovereignty – whether in the form of
unmediated (or, rather, mass mediated) public demands or the will of
elected political actors – but that of detached, relatively autonomous
and apparently impartial bureaucratic expertise.
There can be little doubt – as we have known from Max Weber
onwards – that the story of modern security is in large part the story
of the formation and rise to ascendancy of bureaucratic, expert, pro-
fessional institutions for knowing about, and deploying the resources
to deal with, crime and other risks to public order and security. There
can also be little doubt that police, criminal justice and penal bureau-
cracies, and their attendant forms of expertise, remain significant ele-
ments of the present security constellation. But it is also the case that
the extent of such ascendancy, and the scale and impact of the chal-
lenges to professional paternalism, has varied and continues to vary
across national boundaries. There are, of course, many authoritarian
societies across the world where police and security agencies do not
possess the kinds of autonomy from political regimes that can enable
one to speak accurately of them possessing professional security
bureaucracies operating with their own logic of practice. Conversely,
one can refer to a state tradition in continental western Europe – in
societies such as France and Germany notably – where relatively
autonomous, professional public bureaucracies have long had, and
retain today, a firm hand on the levers of power within police, crimi-
nal justice and penal systems, and operate at some remove from the
198 Securing states of security

claims of political and popular will (Whitman 2003). Though much

less developed in the USA, with its history of subjecting policing and
prosecutorial officials to electoral judgement, and in England and
Wales, with its ideology of state-sceptical localism, the claims of pro-
fessional paternalism have nonetheless found strong footholds in
both locations – not least during the reign from the late 1890s to the
1970s of a liberal, elitist penal welfare state and its commitment to the
expert capacities of, inter alia, probation, psychiatry and criminology
(Garland 2001; Loader 2006a). In the policing field, one can reference
here the hegemonic status enjoyed by ‘professional policing’ in the
USA, and the close to canonical status assumed by the doctrine of ‘con-
stabulary independence’ in England and Wales during much of the last
century – both notions which claimed that policing was best deter-
mined by police expertise insulated from political pressures and
accountable to law and law alone (N. Walker 2000: chs. 2–4). The
related notion that street-level policing is an opaque craft, acquired
only by practice and known only to those that practise it, one that
depends on the exercise of an officer’s situated commonsense judge-
ment, stands as an exemplar of the same basic idea (Muir 1977).
In recent decades, this syndrome has, in these settings at any rate, been
called into dispute – victim to some significant sociocultural develop-
ments and their neo-liberal articulation. Perhaps the most telling of these
has been a transformation of public sensibilities towards social and
political authority, trends that have taken the form of declining levels of
deference towards and trust in governmental authorities, on the one
hand (‘you do not know best’), and a simultaneous heightening of expec-
tations towards those authorities, on the other (‘we demand you do
this’). This has been coupled with a dramatic growth in the period since
1945 of both levels of crime and public anxieties towards crime and dis-
order, and an attendant saturation of social relations and public life by
crime talk and imagery. These, in turn, have served – across the Anglo-
Saxon world especially – as ingredients for neo-liberal governments who
have attacked and attempted to rein in professional autonomy in the
police and criminal justice system; rulers who – faced with what they
hold to be a febrile, emotionalized climate of fear – have sought to speak
for and give voice to the claims of ‘ordinary people’ against those of
remote, liberal-minded professional expertise. The ever-present popu-
larity, and seemingly permanent reinvention and relaunching, of com-
munity policing can easily be interpreted within this framework – as an
The democratic governance of security 199

effort to get ‘professional’ police authority to listen and attend to the

communities they serve. More broadly in the penal field, the turn against
elite paternalism can be registered in such developments as the ideolog-
ical assaults on the rehabilitative ideal, the advent of minimum manda-
tory sentences (or ‘Three Strikes’), the reappearance of antique
punishments such as boot camps and chain gangs, and zero-tolerance
policing (see, generally, J. Young 1999; Garland 2001; Simon 2006).
One thus finds today that professional paternalism – in the many
jurisdictions in which it has become subject to active dispute – is
defended from several different quarters. Some liberal commentators –
horrified by what they think are the harsh outcomes of more respon-
sive, ‘democratic’ forms of policing and punishment – have sought to
shore up or reinstate the practices and values of expert professional
actors insulated from public and political pressures (Zimring and
Johnson 2006). Professional elitism is, in this case, mobilized as a
bulwark against majoritarian tyranny. Others have sought to counter
such ‘populism’ by investing in technocratic crime prevention and
control strategies that create and empower new cadres of security pro-
fessionals and put to use a broader range of expertise and professional
authority – in, for example, situational prevention, urban planning,
programme evaluation, community safety, risk assessment and cogni-
tive behavioural therapy (e.g. Smith and Tilley 2005).
But, in the post-9/11 environment, this security syndrome is also
promoted by those who claim that the scale of the current threat
demands that we empower and (once again) trust the police and intel-
ligence agencies and give renewed primacy to their knowledge and
expertise – a rhetoric that is routinely deployed in defence of the
numerous anti-terrorism measures states have enacted since 2001. One
has witnessed in this climate a certain clawing back by the state of plu-
ralized security authority in favour of a reassertion of the importance
of ‘old’ state security agencies (the police, intelligence services, mili-
tary), as well as the formation of ‘new’ ones such as the Department of
Homeland Security in the USA and the Serious and Organized Crime
Agency in the UK. Beyond this, we may also cite the ways in which the
development of policing and security capacity in the international and
transnational arena has taken shape largely in the form of new collab-
orations between, and networks of, policing and intelligence profes-
sionals – often in forms far removed from public concern and oversight
(Sheptycki 2000; Goldsmith and Sheptycki forthcoming).
200 Securing states of security

We are concerned then with a syndrome that is perhaps rather less

secure than it once was, but a powerful presence nonetheless, a situation
in which public bureaucracies and their logics and practices remain sig-
nificant security players. Whether it remains hegemonic, contested, in
defensive retreat, or an aspiration, there is little doubt that professional
paternalism persists as a significant template for thinking and acting in
the security field – an available and for many deeply resonant security
heuristic. We must, thus, pay due care to its pathological dimensions – to
the ways in which giving primacy to security professionals and their
‘expertise’ is bound up with the vices of the state tradition. Here, we
should remind ourselves of how acting paternalistically in the security
interests of others may nonetheless be to meddle illegitimately and
without proper cause with individual rights and interests. We should note
that professional security interests may not necessarily equate with the
public good but act, rather, as a mask for the pursuit of factional inter-
ests. We should remain alive to the propensity of police actors to seek to
impose cultural uniformity whether in the name of formal bureaucratic
equality or professionally constituted security imperatives. And we
should beware, perhaps above all, of the difficulty that professional elites
encounter in generating the information about their environment needed
to guard against the above three vices, and thereby act efficiently and
effectively towards goals that have been reflexively deliberated upon by
all affected interests rather than imposed by elites from above.
It may well be, for reasons we elaborate upon below, that profes-
sional expertise and bureaucratic authority have a necessary and legit-
imate part to play within an institutional matrix oriented to realizing
security as a public good. It is also relatively easy to think of security
settings, such as post-conflict situations, or societies which lack mature
and functioning state institutions, where creating such expertise and
authority stands among the most pressing political tasks. But it remains
dangerous, and injurious to a democratic and equitable security prac-
tice, to leave professional paternalism unchecked, or permit it too
much room for manoeuvre. For by seeking to act in the interests of cit-
izens who cannot thereby be treated as full partners in dialogue, pater-
nalism lacks an adequate brake upon its pathological propensity to
become opaque and self-corroborating, and to prove and renew its
own security worldview and that worldview’s attendant priorities and
expansionary dominion in ways that may not necessarily coincide with
the values, concerns or interests of those whom it purports to serve.
The democratic governance of security 201

Consumerism
We have opted to term the second security syndrome we wish to con-
sider consumerism. In so doing, we have in mind what Phillip Bobbitt
(2002: ch. 10) describes approvingly as the ‘market-state’, and
Margaret Canovan (1996: 80) rather less so as the ‘service station
state’. These terms signify the advent of a state that does not disappear
or withdraw entirely from the task of securing goods for its citizens
(albeit that it promises much less) but, instead, redefines and articulates
its constitutive task as delivering, or facilitating the delivery by others,
of certain basic services to individuals now understood as consumers
with preferences the state must elicit and satisfy. It is not so much the
replacement of the state by the market (at least in fields, such as secu-
rity, where markets are prone to failure), as the insertion of market
logics and disciplines within the state itself. In the field of policing and
security, this syndrome finds expression in the idea that the state’s task
is to take steps to discover people’s preferences and then seek to meet
demands for order – for particular styles and levels of policing, or for
certain forms or quantities of punishment – in the terms in which they
present themselves. This, of course, represents an inversion of the
claims of professional paternalism. It is now the consumer, not the gov-
ernment official or police officer, who ‘knows best’. Ours, the state
says, is no longer to reason why.
Given the way in which this syndrome is bound up with a critique of
professional authority, it is best illustrated with reference to examples
flagged in the previous discussion. In the policing field, consumerism
has in recent decades increasingly come to underpin the promotion of
‘ambient policing’ (Loader 2006b). By this we mean the family of polic-
ing strategies that share a critique of professional law enforcement and
which appeal to, and claim to be able to quench, the demands for order
that consumers of policing services make. Some of these – ‘quality of
life’, ‘broken-windows’, or ‘zero-tolerance’ policing – draw inspiration
and guidance from Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) influential, if contro-
versial, account of the connection between policing and neighbourhood
disorder (Kelling and Coles 1996; cf. Harcourt 2001). Others – ‘com-
munity’, or ‘multi-agency’, or ‘problem-oriented’ policing – proffer a
critique of police reacting willy-nilly to calls from the public, proposing
instead that they ‘join up’ with other agencies in search of holistic solu-
tions to social problems of which crime and disorder are symptoms
202 Securing states of security

(Goldstein 1990; cf. Herbert 2006). Their latest incarnation in Britain –

‘reassurance’ or ‘neighbourhood’ policing – aims to redress what is
alleged to have become the insecurity-generating remoteness of police
authority from everyday life (Innes 2004). There are, to be sure, some
significant ‘internal’ differences between these approaches, as we noted
in chapter 5. But they can usefully be corralled together under the
umbrella of ambient policing in so far as they share an express or
implied commitment to raising overall numbers of policing operatives
present in the local environment (whether employed by the police, the
local state or the private sector), coupled with a conception of the polic-
ing purpose that is expansive, proactive and visible. By supplying police
resources in a bid to meet public demand, ambient police strategies seek
to reduce the legitimacy-sapping distance between police and the
policed and satisfy the ‘needs and expectations’ of the former’s today
more demanding, less brand-loyal customers (Innes 2004).
But one also encounters something closely akin to this consumerist
logic in play across the field of crime control and penality – at least in
respect of those sectors of it where the state still aspires to being the
principal or monopoly provider. In recent years a whole raft of crime-
control and penal measures – especially in the USA and UK – have come
to be justified using what Canovan (2005: 77–8) calls ‘politicians’
populism’. This involves a claim by elected rulers that they are speak-
ing for ordinary people – or, more to the point, the ‘median voter’ –
acting in the name of their experiences and concerns and giving effect
to their practical wisdom. In respect of the resort to mass imprisonment,
minimum mandatory sentences, anti-social behaviour orders, commun-
ity notification statutes and cognate controls on sex offenders, crack-
downs on asylum seekers, new powers against terrorism and the like, it
is now routinely proclaimed that such ‘tough’ action is required to
satisfy the security concerns and demands of the public. A range of
alternative measures – cutting the prison population, increasing com-
munity penalties, taking economic and social measures to tackle crime
and disorder – are, conversely, ruled out or never even reach the agenda
of practical politics because they require the hard work of ‘selling’ an
unfamiliar brand to apparently punitive and hence hostile consumers.1
11
It is important to acknowledge that what Anthony Bottoms (1995) called
‘populist-punitiveness’ is neither the only discernable penal trend, nor the only
possible interpretation of current trends – as Bottoms himself was quick to rec-
ognize (see, also, Matthews 2005). As many analysts have pointed out, these
The democratic governance of security 203

When one couples together the policing and penal dimensions of this
syndrome one is tempted, with Baudrillard (1983: 36–7), to draw the
conclusion that the state has ‘faked its own death’. Not only has it
traded ‘rowing’ for ‘steering’, ‘providing’ for ‘enabling’, and ‘judging’
for ‘umpiring’ (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Bobbitt 2002: 235), but it
has even in those domains where it still aspires to be a pre-eminent
actor lost confidence in the possibility of mobilizing its own resources
and authority for any social purpose beyond that of meeting the
demands of emboldened, contingently loyal consumers whom it stands
in fear of disappointing and driving away. It is, on this view, simply no
part of the task of political authority to challenge, to elicit reasons, to
put another view, to enter dialogue, or in any sense seek to temper or
restrain the security demands its citizens legitimately make of it.
There is some evidence – and still more ideological affirmation
(Bobbitt 2002; Günther 2005) – suggesting that, while this syndrome
may not yet be hegemonic, the tide of history is moving decisively in
its favour; that in late modern societies this is the only form in which
the liberal democratic state can reconnect with what are today more
expectant, choice-conscious consumer-citizens. Part of our broader
purpose is to stand firm against the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992)
move which announces the inevitable triumph of the market-state and
to suggest, instead, that it remains possible to imagine and give insti-
tutional effect to another viable and legitimate role for the state in the
production of citizen security. But first we must pinpoint what exactly
is pathological about the consumerist prospectus and the practices that
it licenses. Here, four points can usefully be made.
First, consumerism tends too readily to presume that public
demands for order are entirely benign. This is an improbable depiction.
That many individuals today are or feel insecure and make demands
for greater policing resources can hardly be disputed. But these

‘populist’ penal measures form but one strand of a ‘volatile and contradictory’
field that includes, inter alia, the application of managerialist strictures and risk-
based, actuarial thinking to policing and punishment (O’Malley 1999; Garland
2001; Harcourt 2006). However, it is at least possible to interpret such ‘counter’
trends, and the new forms of professional knowledge and organization that they
give rise to, not as alternative security syndromes of the kind that may warrant
separate treatment here, but as techniques for enabling government to bend the
will of, say, police or probation officers to the express preferences of their cus-
tomers. On this reading, managerialism and actuarialism are for consumerist
populism.
204 Securing states of security

demands seldom take shape merely as measured calls for action based
upon cool, sober calculations of risk. Rather, public sensibilities
towards, and demands for, order are often laced with emotions (anger,
resentment, fear, anticipated pleasure, etc.); situated in narratives
about the trajectory of one’s personal biography, or the past, present
and possible futures of one’s local or national community (Girling et al.
2000); and not infrequently motivated by parochial desires for injus-
tice, xenophobic antipathy towards others, or unattainable fantasies of
absolute security (Markell 2003). When, in other words, people speak
of crime and disorder, and make claims for this or that level of security
provision, they are always also giving voice to a series of fears about,
and hopes for, the political community in which they live, and to the
insecurities that flow from their sense of place within it. They may do
so, moreover, in ways that are by no means consistent with the idea
that security is a good available, by reason of their membership alone,
to all members of that community.
Second, this syndrome assumes that consumer preferences for par-
ticular styles and levels of policing can and ought to be met. This is an
implausible aim. Such demands lay claim to resources that are finite,
and which have to be funded and prioritized. They may articulate com-
peting visions of what policing objectives and styles should be. They are
often pressed by middle-class constituencies replete with economic and
social capital in ways that risk distributing policing resources in inverse
relation to crime risks (Hope et al. 2001). And they make claims that
are not easily sated in the terms in which they are presented – claims
that all too easily result in a vicious, self-propelling circle whereby lay
demands and the security measures put in place in a bid to meet them
are both endlessly ratcheted up. Yet at the same time, demands for state
policing express forms of solidarity towards strangers and an implicit
attachment to the idea of public provision. They indicate, in turn, a
prior commitment to putting security in common and pursuing it
through democratic institutions and practices – a commitment to the
exercise of ‘voice’ rather than ‘exit’ (Hirschman 1970). All this, rather
than pointing in the direction of implicitly endorsing, and uncritically
seeking to satisfy, demands for policing in the name of consumer-
responsiveness, suggests that such demands are best recognized by
being brought within institutional arrangements that subject them, and
their supporting identities, narratives and resource claims, to the
scrutiny of democratic dialogue.
The democratic governance of security 205

Third, consumerism evinces little express concern for the interests of

the routinely policed, those once graphically referred to as ‘police prop-
erty’ (J. Lee 1981) who either lack the economic and cultural clout
needed to make their claims as consumers tell, or whose cumulative
experience of policing leads them to the conclusion that it is futile and
foolhardy to bother to press those claims. This syndrome tends, in
other words, to efface questions to do with public consent to, and the
regulation of, police power, and devote insufficient thought to what we
have labelled the central paradox of state policing; namely, that as a
monopolist of coercive resources the police stand simultaneously as a
guarantor of, and threat to, citizen security. This is especially pro-
nounced, and not especially surprising, in official discourse – as, for
example, in the British government’s rhetorical talk of ‘the law-abiding
citizen’ driving police reform (Home Office 2004: 43). But one finds
the same omissions – and, implicitly, the same majority constituencies
being mobilized and appealed to – in academic defences of community
and related forms of ambient policing, where it is complacently
assumed that all social groups find policing interventions benign,
welcome and reassuring, and where a silence about police disorder has
long been strikingly common (Harcourt 2001: 138–9). In their efforts
to remodel the state along market lines, and to subject it to competi-
tive pressures, proponents of the new consumerism have tended to
neglect the vices that flow from the state’s capacity to act as a – med-
dling, or partisan, or intolerant, or idiotic – bully. In so doing, they
have proceeded as if some perennial questions to do with constraining
and regulating police power, and some still vexed problems pertaining
to how disadvantaged groups are policed, have somehow been settled,
or ceased to matter.
Fourth, consumerism radically misconstrues the contribution that
policing agencies most fundamentally make to citizen security in a
democracy. The police relation to security is, on this view, shallow but
wide – to recall one of our framing formulations. It is ‘shallow’ in so far
as that contribution is limited to a claim to be able to protect person,
property and neighbourhoods from the threat of crime and disorder.
Policing in this sense is oriented to answering the questions ‘How safe
am I in the here and now?’ and ‘How well ordered is my immediate envi-
ronment?’ (Innes 2004), rather than towards any more encompassing
notion of the good of security of the kind we described in chapter 6. It
is ‘wide’ because, conceived as such, the policing contribution to public
206 Securing states of security

security lies principally in the visible display and activation of police

authority across the broad range of local social relations that may carry
or threaten ‘disorderly’ consequences. Security, on this view, depends on
the unmediated presence of uniformed officers. The greater their
numbers, the more visible, familiar and active they are, the more secure
individuals will be or, as importantly, feel. The problem here is that, by
seeking to deliver security through the police-centred strategy of sup-
plying a high-visibility policing package in an unthinking bid to satisfy
individual preferences, consumerism risks making security not an
axiomatic but a pervasive feature of social relations and political life.

Authoritarianism
Security, as the above discussion reminds us, may be said to be ‘perva-
sive’ when it becomes the prevailing discourse for understanding social
problems, the lens through which they are defined, examined and acted
upon. It is pervasive when it begins, in these ways, to acquire a certain
colonizing force, or ‘everywhereness’, when its claims and values (to
take ‘tough’ policing and punishment-centred measures to protect ‘us’
from ‘them’) prevail in areas of public life and policy (housing, or edu-
cation, or urban planning) where they have no proper business. When
security becomes pervasive it generally coincides with a sense of impa-
tience and urgency; with calls for the unhindered, speedy hand, and
visible display, of executive authority; with deepening levels of intoler-
ance towards minority groups and practices; with evident frustration
at, and calls for the curtailment of, basic rights and liberties. When
security practices and discourse take this form, one can usually be sure
that individuals are, in fact, feeling insecure. The practices of pervasive
security also generally do little to confront the conditions generating
that insecurity, and much that serves to fuel and deepen it. A vicious –
insecurity-sustaining – circle is thereby joined.
Authoritarianism – the third security syndrome we want to address
critically – constitutes one form that such insecurity-perpetuating
spirals may take. This spiral runs – ideal-typically – something like this.
Individuals who live under conditions of pervasive in/security tend to
make demands for what they judge to be ‘hard’ anti-crime measures
(more police, more police powers, crackdowns on this offence or those
suspects, stiffer sentencing, harsher penal regimes and so on) in ways
that display impatience with informed democratic deliberation, seek to
The democratic governance of security 207

suspend or curtail basic rights, foster hostility towards minorities and

outsiders, and risk melding their interests and identities with those of
the state whose ‘protective’ power they seek to mobilize and shelter
under. This process, once initiated, tends to be vicious and circular
because once such demands are met in the terms in which they are pre-
sented it becomes difficult to create the political and cultural conditions
wherein the pace of such measures can be slowed, or a change or rever-
sal of direction effected – thereby setting in train a potentially endless
‘ratcheting-up’ in police numbers, or incarceration rates, or restrictions
of basic liberties. And if such actions are perceived to have ‘failed’, or
are ideologically depicted in those terms – because crime rates go up,
or a child is abducted, or a group of youths run amok, or another ter-
rorist outrage occurs – this overwhelmingly prompts calls for still
‘tougher’ measures, only this time with a heavier dosage. A democracy-
and liberty-eroding spiral is thus entered in ways it becomes hard to
escape. A form of security politics gets entrenched that does much to
put at risk democratic principles and basic rights, while doing little
to make citizens either any safer or any more secure. As the ‘war on
terror’ is reminding us once again, anxious citizens make bad democ-
rats (cf. Neumann 1957; Rorty 2004).
Authoritarianism – with its constitutive tendency to reach for, invest
in and defer to footloose executive power – can flow out of either the
paternalist or consumerist syndromes we have discussed so far. It is, in
this sense, a pathology of the pathological. In the former case, it sur-
faces when government, or police, or other security actors determine
– from the ‘top-down’ – that the threats of crime, or disorder, or vio-
lence are such as to require the grip of strong rule, and the curtailment
of dissent or restraint, in order that government can deal effectively,
as it deems fit, with the internal or external foes that confront society
– rule which frequently demands that its subjects stand either ‘for us’
or ‘against us’. In the latter, one encounters – typically weak – gov-
ernments taking up, articulating and acting upon whatever revealed
preferences they are faced with – in this case the ‘passion for authori-
tarianism’ (Gilroy 2004) that can bubble up ‘from below’ in the face
of what are, or are perceived to be, serious and pressing problems of
crime and violence, and which take the form of calls for the firm hand
of state power to act swiftly and decisively against them. In the set-
tings of security politics, these top-down and bottom-up tendencies
tend to be locked in a firm, mutually reinforcing, embrace, such that
208 Securing states of security

it is hard to isolate a year zero in which it becomes possible to spot the

chicken and the egg. Authoritarian spirals tend, in other words, to
involve elements of relatively untutored lay anxiety, fantasy and cries
for action and the mobilization, utilization and reinforcement of
public sensibilities by political, professional and media actors for spe-
cific political ends.
The practical effects of authoritarian spirals are in any case suffi-
ciently similar as to render such an exercise in hermeneutic recovery
unnecessary. They conduce – whether from ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-
up’ – to outcomes that manifest and magnify the vices of the state tra-
dition while often depicting these vices as virtues. Authoritarianism, in
short, calls forth an over-investment in, and over-identification with,
the coercive capabilities of the state. Its product is thus typically a state
that is overweening, excessively powerful and subject to insufficient
legal constraint, few mechanisms for rectifying mistakes, and limited
sites of countervailing power. This, in turn, gives rise to a security pol-
itics that promises and pursues security at the expense of other valued
social goods (liberty, rights, democratic practices) and, ultimately, of
security itself – at least in the axiomatic form whose benefits we have
sought to elucidate. If the state does indeed have a propensity to
meddle with individual rights and interests, to champion sectarian
causes, to flatten the cultural landscape, and to proceed without the
knowledge required to accomplish its purposes, then the political and
cultural dynamics of authoritarian rule merely compound these ten-
dencies. Individual rights tend to count for little in political systems
that valorize the pursuit of security by strong executives; authoritarian
governments – for all their rhetorical homage to the ‘national’ interest
– tend in practice to shore up specific rather than general order
(Marenin 1982); pluralism is generally believed to be, and is depicted
by official actors as being, a dangerous luxury that society permits at
its peril; and by keeping individuals in a state of what Kant called ‘per-
petual infancy’, and marginalizing or suppressing the institutions,
practices and habits that sustain conversations about how to live
democratically with risk, authoritarian states generally cut themselves
adrift from the sources of information that are in fact prerequisite to
their effectiveness.
As a pathology of the pathological, moreover, authoritarianism
tends to be the medium and outcome of the ‘thicker’ variants of per-
vasive security, or securitization, to which we have referred in earlier
The democratic governance of security 209

discussion – those that are both ‘wide’ in their claimed ambit of policy
relevance and ‘deep’ in their attempts to harness that wide jurisdiction
to a highly prescriptive formula of ontological security. But even in its
deep and wide incarnations, authoritarianism can be as much a matter
of drift as design, and as likely to be coded as a project of social con-
servation as one of transformation. For in the security politics of demo-
cratic societies, authoritarian politics seldom travels under its own
name or announces its arrival in the corridors of power. This, though,
is all the more reason to stay on guard against the authoritarian sensi-
bilities that such societies continue to harbour and the dangers that its
superficially seductive programmes can unleash.

Fragmentation
The fourth security syndrome we want to consider – fragmentation –
is a close cousin of consumerism. Though ‘third way’ proponents of
the latter – notably, in recent years, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair – have
conceived of the consumerist reconfiguration of the state as a means to
stave off the former, it is at least arguable that by endorsing the
market’s self-image, and traducing the ethos of the public domain (cf.
Marquand 2004), consumerism may in fact ferment further fragmen-
tation of, in the present case, policing and security. Having interpel-
lated individuals as consumers of public provision, there is still less
standing in the way of them acting as such and turning their backs on
what the state has to offer (Loader 1999).2
To speak of fragmentation is to refer to the residualization of the state
as a security actor (whether as provider or regulator of provision), as
individuals, communities, organizations and corporations define and
find ways of managing or seeking to eliminate their own security risks –
most pertinently by purchasing tailored protective services and hard-
ware in the marketplace. The market for such goods has today – as we
illustrated at various points in part I – become booming business. In situ-
ations of armed conflict, and post-conflict peacekeeping and recon-
struction, the ‘market for force’ and a range of ancillary police and

12
This is not, it should be said, the view of neo-liberal writers like Bobbitt (2002:
237) who seem to accept that the market-state will in future evolve hand in hand
with ‘devolution and privatization’. Bobbitt cites with approval Martin van
Creveld’s prediction that ‘the day-to-day burden of defending society from low-
intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business’.
210 Securing states of security

military services is presently mushrooming and in rude health (Avant

2005). In societies where states lack the capacity or will to protect their
citizens – from South Africa, to Brazil, to Russia – affluent constituen-
cies routinely turn to hired (often armed) security or seek refuge in for-
tified enclaves (Caldeira 2000), while people in poor neighbourhoods
are left to their own meagre resources to protect themselves in the
absence of – or indeed from – the state. And there is now plenty of evi-
dence demonstrating the extent and scale of the private security indus-
try in western democracies as states struggle to meet the demands that
citizens, neighbourhoods or corporations have for protection of their
person and property (Jones and Newburn 2006). These are the contexts
in which the application of market logics – even where intended to quell
the commodification of security – may simply add fuel to the flames.
These propensities of the present also contain within them the poten-
tial to assume a vicious spiralling quality – in this as in respect of other
basic goods (such as education and healthcare) where state and market
provision coexist, compete or are in conflict. The logic in the security
field runs something like this. Individuals or social groups who feel
insecure or unprotected by the state tend increasingly to search for
alternative security solutions, either by organizing local forms of
autonomous communal ordering (in corporate or residential enclaves,
or through citizen patrolling) or by turning to the market in order to
purchase desired levels or types of security personnel and hardware
(patrols, static guards, alarms, surveillance systems, etc.). The more
widespread these practices become the less willing such individuals and
groups are to support, fund and engage in dialogue about general
forms of policing and security provision. This results in social frag-
mentation in so far as it erodes people’s sense of being participants in
an ongoing collective project whose members are committed to putting
and pursuing security in common, which, in turn, undermines the
‘architecture of sympathy’ (Sennett 2003: 200) through which this
shared purpose takes practical shape. The security, and forms of polit-
ical freedom, associated with the sense of belonging to, and identifica-
tion with, a political community is thereby placed in jeopardy, and with
it the collective capacity to forge and realize common purposes, includ-
ing security purposes (C. Taylor 1995: ch. 7). Society fractures into a
world of markets and tribes.
The problems – or pathology – here arise not so much from the state’s
overweening presence and the attendant manifestation of its vices, as
The democratic governance of security 211

from the relative weakness or absence of state authority and the conse-
quent impotence of the political actor best placed to foster and give
effect to the sense of collective purpose associated with the realization
of security as a public good. This results, on the one hand, from the for-
mation of individual subjects who come to think of themselves as sov-
ereign consumers utilizing their resources as they see fit in pursuit of
security and, on the other, from the development of new security com-
munities – along, for example, class, or ethnic, or territorial, or inter-
est-based lines – who seek to organize or purchase protective services in
order to meet their self-defined, particularistic needs in ways that func-
tion exclusively for the benefit of members of that ‘club’ (Hope 2000;
Crawford 2006). Two problematic outcomes, in particular, surface
when one or other of these variants of fragmentation takes hold.
First, as consumers or communities pursue, or organize themselves
around, their own conception of what it means, and what it takes, to
be secure, security itself again tends to become pervasive. It is a con-
stitutive feature of markets that consumers are not called upon to
justify the preferences they utilize their purchasing power to satisfy.
They are thus free – or as free as their resources permit – to operate as
‘sovereign’ actors seeking to assuage their security anxieties as they see
fit, as well as to deal with disappointment, or a perceived increase in
risk, or actual instances of victimization, by returning to the market
in search of enhanced levels of protection. Similar problems arise in
respect of particularistic communities organizing, or pooling resources
to purchase, their own security requirements – as we argued in chapter
5 in discussion of Shearing and others’ promotion of the Zwelethemba
model of local capacity building. But the problems of restraining
‘appetites’ for security, and of enabling others to influence the way in
which it is framed and pursued, are compounded in this case by con-
cerns about how minority voices within communal groupings are
regarded and by the tendency to disregard the security interests of
those defined as outside the ambit of communal sympathy and protec-
tion. In other words, the more security provision fragments, and the
weaker public regulatory authority becomes, the more likely it is that
security becomes an expression of the ‘desire for sovereign agency’
(Markell 2003: 22), a condition pursued with little or no acknowl-
edgement of the mutual uncertainty, vulnerability and dependency that
flows inescapably from ‘the activity of living and interacting with other
people’ (Markell 2003: 7).
212 Securing states of security

Fragmented security leads, secondly and relatedly, to an accumulat-

ing loss of the memory and experience of living in a democratic polit-
ical community (Lindseth forthcoming). The more security is sought
by shoppers in a marketplace, or within the bounds of particularistic
enclaves, the less routine will be people’s experience of having to tol-
erate, be civil towards, and ‘rub along’ with, strangers with whom they
coexist and share public space as members of that polity; and the less
likely they are to acquire, retain or sharpen the ‘habits of democratic
citizenship’ (Sandel 1996: 332) that flow from the practice of having
to think about one’s security ‘preferences’, and the resource claims that
they entail, in relation to those of other members of the society with
whom one dwells and in dialogue with them. The more the security
situation of different groups – of, say, ethnic communities, or socio-
economic classes, or the young and old – grows apart and comes to be
thought about and acted upon in isolation, the less likely such groups
are to experience or understand their fates as shared and the less moti-
vated they will be to make affective and material investments in ‘public
things’ – including collective security (Keenan 2003: 148). This –
applied to the field of security – is precisely the vicious circle of public
disinvestment of which writers such as Charles Taylor (1991) and
Michael Sandel (1996) warn – one in which the effect of such disin-
vestment becomes the cause of further democratic impoverishment
(Keenan 2003: 146–51). The question that lies before us, and the task
that confronts anyone committed to a more democratic and egalitar-
ian practice of security, is how to transform this – and the other vicious
spirals that attend the pathologies of modern security – into a virtuous
circle. It is to this task that we now turn.

Turning vicious into virtuous circles

We wish now to strike a generally more constructive note and to begin
the process of redeeming, by addressing matters of institutional prin-
ciple and design, the idea of security as a thick public good we eluci-
dated in chapter 6. We want, in particular, to think through the kind
of institutional matrix within which it becomes possible to suppress,
or at least minimize, the state’s vices whilst at the same time harness-
ing the virtues of the state tradition with a view to making security less
pervasive but more axiomatic. How, in other words, can we begin to
unsettle, or even break, the vicious circles of modern security practice
The democratic governance of security 213

in ways that enable that always precarious balance between the vices
and virtues of the modern state to be tipped in favour of the latter?
Our point of departure for this exercise is Philip Pettit’s (2001a: ch.
7) recent application to democratic theory, and our understanding of
republican political freedom, of the idea of ‘false negatives’ and ‘false
positives’.3 Pettit is concerned, as we are, with trying to specify
forms of political authority, or state power, that can promote non-
dominating social relations, and hence individual freedom, by ‘track-
ing’ and taking account of the ‘common avowable interests’, and only
such interests, of all parties affected by its decisions and practices. He
describes this, in an early formulation of the argument, as the ‘all-and-
only formula’ (Pettit 1997: 292). For Pettit, interests are ‘avowable’
when they ‘are conscious or can be brought to consciousness without
great effort’, as opposed to being imputed by government bodies; and
they are ‘common’ if they are the product of ‘co-operatively admissi-
ble’ considerations rather than those which are self-interested or
parochial (Pettit 2001a: 156). Discovering such interests, he argues,
requires institutional processes that seek to eliminate ‘false negatives’
(the legitimate but unheard or unreasonably disregarded claims of cit-
izens) by searching for, identifying and including in democratic delib-
eration every relevant candidate for determining how, in the present
case, security resources can be distributed and brought to account in
ways consistent with it being a thick public good. It requires, further,
the removal of ‘false positives’ by rigorously scrutinizing and disal-
lowing claims – which may be pressed insistently, or with great noise
and passion, by well-organized constituencies – that cannot reasonably
be encompassed in any negotiated conception of common interest
(Pettit 2001a: 156–60).

13
Pettit’s mobilization of these notions forms part of his wider intellectual effort
to revive and defend a neo-Roman theory of republican freedom and govern-
ment, other elements of which we will have cause to draw upon in the arguments
that follow (see, especially, Pettit 1997). The contrast between Pettit’s neo-
Roman republicanism, with its concern to create institutional forms that pre-
serve individual freedom understood as non-domination, and neo-Athenian
republicanism, with its view of participation in public life as intrinsic to human
flourishing, is important here and is usefully discussed in Maynor (2003: ch. 1).
Pettit has himself, of course, both singularly and in collaboration with John
Braithwaite, applied republican political theory to criminal justice and punish-
ment, if not to questions of security more generally (Braithwaite and Pettit 1990;
Pettit 2001b).
214 Securing states of security

This, in our view, is a powerful and valuable idea. We want, as such,

to develop the notions of false negatives and false positives as hinge con-
cepts that enable us, on the one hand, to pivot ‘backwards’ with a view
to taking further and sharpening the critique we have offered of the
pathological syndromes of modern security practice and, on the other,
to lean ‘forwards’ with a view to prescribing the elements of an institu-
tional matrix within which to develop a deliberative and democratic
practice of security. This short section thus itself functions as a ‘hinge’
between the critical and constructive components of this chapter.
How then do the syndromes discussed hitherto fare when measured
against the republican criteria of ensuring that ‘common avowable’
security interests are not systematically overlooked or disregarded
(the problem of false negatives) and identifying and holding to
account sectional or partisan security claims (the problem of false
positives)? Paternalism fails to recognize and cannot deal with the
issue of false negatives because it imputes, rather than actively track-
ing, the interests and ideas of those whom security professionals claim
to act in the service of. It similarly leaves open the possibility that
professional priorities may be biased, partial and incestuously self-
reproductive, and therefore themselves false positives. Consumerism
can, in principle, handle the problem of false negatives provided that
the mechanisms it uses to elicit consumer preferences are sufficiently
inclusive – though in practice it often faces difficulties in encompass-
ing the concerns of constituencies whose alienation makes them reluc-
tant to press their claims as consumers, those the British government
took for a time to calling ‘hard-to-reach groups’ (Jones and Newburn
2001). But consumerism does far less well with the issue of false pos-
itives because, as mentioned, it lacks mechanisms for scrutinizing,
and judging the merits of, the preferences that any consultative or
participatory process may generate. Authoritarianism fails to address
the question of false negatives, either because it simply assumes the
will of the executive and those who endorse it to be the only legiti-
mate security consideration, or because it holds that the process of
seeking alternative views will destabilize strong government or put at
risk vital security imperatives. By similarly treating the question of
false positives as a non-problem, this syndrome can provide no check
against the possibility that governments are resolutely but blindly
pursuing partisan concerns or shoring-up factional interests.
Fragmentation, finally, fails to eliminate false negatives because it
The democratic governance of security 215

generates and responds to the claims, and only the claims, of those
with economic capital to spend in security markets or the social
capital necessary to develop their own autonomous protective capac-
ity; at the same time, it possesses no means of identifying and remov-
ing false positives because it operates to privilege the interests and
claims of those with ‘the loudest voices and the largest pockets’
(Shearing and Johnston 2003: 144).
The prevailing syndromes of modern security practice do not, it
seems, perform well when put through the ‘road-test’ set by Pettit’s
republican theory. The democratic credentials of each of them are, for
the major part, found wanting in ways that further expose their short-
comings and strengthen the case for a security practice which can tran-
scend them. With this in mind, our aim now is to ‘turn’ these ideas to
constructive effect. We want, in particular, to revisit the concept of
anchored pluralism introduced in conclusion to the previous chapter
with a view to putting some institutional flesh on the skeleton notion
we sketched there. In so doing, we hope to be able to indicate how the
necessary virtues of the state may be harnessed and given practical
effect in ways that offer all citizens the assurance – and sense of secu-
rity – that flows from having their ideas and interests routinely tracked
and considered by the institutions of a democratic political community
of which their membership is fully acknowledged and to which they
experience a feeling of confident belonging.

The practice of civilizing security

How, then, can we configure, or more accurately reconfigure, the polit-
ical authority of the state in order that it may effectively expedite the
meta-regulatory, or anchoring, role whose necessity and value we
argued for in chapter 7? What kind of institutional matrix is likely to
permit such a preponderant political authority to be able to exercise
sufficient vertical oversight and control over the plurality of agents and
agencies who today promise or deliver security, whilst at the same time
ensuring that the state anchor remains, in both its delivering and reg-
ulatory dimensions, subject to adequate democratic contestation and
public and legal scrutiny? Can we, in other words, give effect to the
necessary priority of the state in a fashion that enables it – in Pettit’s
(2001a: 173) words – to ‘protect its people from domination without
itself becoming a dominating instrumentality’?
216 Securing states of security

Our task in this section is to address this question and suggest an

affirmative answer to it. In so doing, we are not seeking to offer a
ready-made – still less utopian – blueprint for institutional design that
can somehow be packaged, exported and transplanted into whatever
national setting one might wish to embed it in. We have no option, in
seeking to civilize security and to release its civilizing potential, other
than to begin with actually existing institutional practices of state and
civil society, with all their attendant vices, and to act through and upon
them. One cannot, in other words, create a civilized security politics ex
nihilo; one has to work, instead, with the institutional materials at
hand along the lines suggested by the metaphor of ‘rebuilding the ship
at sea’ (Elster et al. 1998; Shapiro 2003: 54). Conversely, however, we
are not in the business of trying to specify in fine-grained detail – with
the ‘i’s’ dotted and ‘t’s’ crossed – the precise shape and modus operandi
of the institutions of democratic security practice, or to work through
the implications of our argument for contemporary debates in policing
and security policy in their diverse national settings (cf. Patten 1999).
We are seeking, in short, to chart a course between, on the one hand,
being unduly and conservatively hemmed in by the constraints that
extant political realities impose upon our capacity to think imaginatively
beyond the present and, on the other, writing what can rapidly be dis-
missed as a letter to Santa Claus. Our purpose is to set out the elements
of an institutional matrix that seems capable of mobilizing and allocat-
ing the policing and other collective resources that security requires;
democratically governing the demands, appetites, expectations, resent-
ments and conflicts that attend contemporary struggles in the security
field; and subjecting to scrutiny and account the coercive power that
individual and collective security sometimes inescapably entails in ways
that contribute towards a practical realization of the idea that security
is a thick public good. We shall call these elements – whose beneficial
effects are optimized only when they are combined together – the four
Rs of civilizing security practice: resources, recognition, rights and
reasons. Our task in what remains of this chapter is to describe each of
them – and their purpose, value and relation to each other – in turn.

Resources
The question of resources speaks to the role that the state is uniquely
able to play in mobilizing and distributing the collective funds that are
The democratic governance of security 217

indispensable to the realization of security. We set out in chapter 7 the

reasons why the state, or some functionally equivalent form of politi-
cal authority, is pivotal to solving problems of resource mobilization.
We are concerned here with how, building upon that foundation, it can
be tasked with directly allocating policing and security resources, and
also with indirectly intervening in the pattern of resource allocation rel-
evant to security both through its broader work of income redistribu-
tion and social service provision, and through its regulation and
monitoring of the allocative power of non-state security actors – in all
cases guided by the pursuit of the public good of security. We alluded
earlier, in our critique of consumerism, to the necessarily finite nature
of the policing and cognate capabilities that can be drawn upon and
put to use in the pursuit of security. It follows from this that the prac-
tice of security must entail the determination of priorities as between,
say, competing styles of policing, or between policing and other pre-
ventative or protective measures, or in deciding between making inter-
ventions in the realm of policing and crime control, or public policy
more broadly. It follows further that security politics, like politics
proper, involves the exercise of choice in deciding which demands for
order, from which constituencies, are to be responded to and how.
Acknowledging the abiding presence of these constraints, and the pol-
itics of prioritization and resource allocation that comes with them, is
indeed a vital part of the constitution of a civilizing security practice –
not least because insisting upon their acknowledgement is to place a
check on those lay sensibilities, or social movements, or political pro-
grammes which yearn for total security in ways that wish them away
or strive to override them.
In this respect, the role of the state as anchor within a pluralistic
security environment is threefold. There is, first of all, a necessary and
legitimate role for the actors and agencies of the state in insisting upon
and explaining the limits imposed by resource constraints in the secu-
rity field, and thereby seeking to ‘re-direct’ (Loader forthcoming b)
often emotionally charged demands for order towards a reflexive delib-
eration on how security for all can best be furthered and on the conse-
quences of the competing paths that may be followed. To iterate and
reiterate the language of constraint and restraint is to offer a reminder
– in contexts where those who seek more protection, and the non-state
actors who promise to provide it, have little incentive to do so – of the
competing values and social purposes that are at issue and which can
218 Securing states of security

be undermined when societies move to protect their members. It

requires, further, that the state highlights and publicizes the value
trade-offs that competing courses of action may entail; thinks reflex-
ively about the balance between the direct and indirect resources that
can best contribute towards public security; and acts as a broker and
disseminator of what is reliably known about the likely effects and
effectiveness of alternative preventative or protective measures. In each
of these respects, one needs to create institutional processes that can
embed and grapple with the consequences of resource constraint, such
that demands for order are not greeted by fantastical promises to
quench them in the terms in which they appear. These demands must,
instead, be brought into arenas of public conversation and contesta-
tion with a view to ‘satisfying’ them in ways that are less unmediated
and superficially responsive, but which are ultimately more conducive
to the realization of common security. We flesh out further below what
this entails in our discussion on the complementary importance of
‘recognition’ and ‘reasons’.
The state’s second legitimate and vital task is to allocate the
resources it has mobilized, and which it deploys directly or indirectly
in pursuit of security objectives, in a manner that contributes to, rather
than detracts from, the production of a civilizing security practice.
This, as mentioned, requires mechanisms of resource distribution that
aim to ensure that policing and security resources track the common
interests and ideas, and only those interests and ideas, of all citizens
affected by its allocation decisions. The task here is to find ways of
guarding against the state allocating resources, and intervening in
social life in pursuit of security goals, in ways that depend upon the
unchecked professional calculations of its actors, or serve the factional
interests of only some of those with a legitimate stake in its actions, or
else reproduce the inequalities of access to security generated else-
where, notably through the market. In the practical contexts of con-
temporary security, this underscores the importance of forms of
political authority that are capable of registering and addressing the
inverse relationship that so often obtains between levels of crime risk
and people’s ability to access policing or other preventative or protec-
tive resources. It signals equally the value of institutions that are able
to think and act holistically within a pluralized and fragmented secu-
rity landscape and thereby bring some reflexive coherence to it. This
means, in particular, the state taking cognizance of the deep inequities
The democratic governance of security 219

in security provision generated by and through commercial security

practices, and by the discrepancies in economic and social capital that
afford individuals and groups such differential access to security capac-
ity, and acting to deploy collective resources in order to bolster those
constituencies who repeatedly lose, or do not even get to play, the
market game. This can, of course, take the form of compensatory
adjustments in resource allocation within the public police service.
More broadly, it can also involve ensuring that the funding of wider
forms of social provision is sufficient to prevent undue demands being
made for state security resources shallowly and reactively conceived.
More particularly, it can lead to the state using its tax revenue to
support non-state policing and security initiatives in locations that
suffer from security deficits.4
The third role required of the state in this regard is to exercise the
regulatory capabilities that it alone can bring to bear within contem-
porary security constellations – its power to fund, to contract, to
license, to set conditions for entry to markets, to monitor, to forbid –
in ways that seek to accomplish the more equitable forms of provision
that are conducive to security becoming and remaining a public good.
Broadly this means trying to tame the worst inequalities that current
patterns of security allocation give rise to. More particularly, it means
putting in place regulatory frameworks that structure the plurality of
agents and agencies who today promise security in ways that ensure
that their particularistic or profit-oriented calculations are politically
‘fenced-in’ behind arrangements oriented to fostering and sustaining a
more solidaristic security practice. There are several mechanisms that
one can envisage and develop along these lines – not least in terms of
setting stringent, socially oriented conditions for licensing security
companies; laying down threshold conditions that such firms, or forms
of communal security provision, must meet in order to operate; and
establishing attendant forms of inspection, monitoring and account-
ing. But the task in each case remains essentially the same: to deploy
the special capacities of public political authority in ways that anchor
the sites of dispersed power that have today been unleashed under con-
ditions conducive to pervasive security so as instead to bring market
and communal practices of policing and protection within the ambit of
an institutional architecture oriented to keeping alive and give effect to

14
Some of the ways in which this may be done are discussed in chapter 5.
220 Securing states of security

a security practice that acknowledges the security interests and aspira-

tions of each and all. Such an approach, then, certainly does not deny
the possibility of ‘value-added’ security in local or functional non-state
settings. Rather, it insists that the test and standard of non-state provi-
sion should be precisely that; namely, that the new forms of security
provided for in or by particular constituencies, including those who
view themselves as political communities in their own right, should
indeed not detract from or neutralize the value of security as a thick
public good in the broader political community framed by the state.

Recognition
Recognition registers the vital importance of a state that governs secu-
rity by fostering routine democratic deliberation among all those
affected by its decisions about security problems – about how and
whether demands for order can be met, how the state should allocate
its limited resources, or how it is to wield its regulatory capacities. The
task here is to devise and sustain mechanisms of public conversation
and contestation in respect of security problems and how to apprehend
them, mechanisms whose guiding orientation is that of inclusion. The
value of recognition lies, in short, in recognizing the value of institu-
tional arrangements which make it ‘possible for the significantly dif-
ferent voices in the society to express themselves in a way that others
have to hear and honour’ (Pettit 1997: 131).
The benefits of recognition are essentially twofold and have broadly
to do with legitimacy and effectiveness – with both inputs and outputs.
In the first place, recognition is indispensable to addressing the
problem of false negatives; that is, to preventing state and non-state
security actors operating in ways that prematurely and illegitimately
disregard the interests and ideas of those who can reasonably claim a
stake in the outcome of their decisions. Processes of inclusive public
deliberation which track these interests and ideas thus form a vital
bulwark against domination, a check against the possibility of state
actors proceeding on the basis of their own self-defined and self-
corroborating worldviews, or in defence of whatever sectional interests
have succeeded in catching or capturing the state’s attention. These
processes enable all the recipients of state action and inaction – and
especially those disadvantaged constituencies whose voices are often
unheard or systematically dismissed – to see their claims and concerns
The democratic governance of security 221

reflected in the means by which decisions are arrived at, such that they
can understand themselves as being in part their author as well as their
addressee (Habermas 1996). The principle of recognition is, in this
sense, key to creating within and around the state a public sphere
which can sustain an informed dialogue about problems of insecurity
and how they are framed and responded to, one capable of ensuring
that all voices with a stake in that problem are elicited and considered.
Its purpose is to stimulate more informed conversation about security
in order that the interests and identities of different constituencies are
not only reciprocally acknowledged, listened to and accorded due
respect, but also disputed, relativized and unfixed in ways that facili-
tate possibilities of mutual understanding and learning – a prospect we
elucidate further under the heading of ‘reasons’ below. The institutions
of a public sphere may also, more specifically, foster watchful observers
and critical scrutinizers of state practices as well as being a conduit
through which the state can engage in dialogue about what it means to
think about and seek to realize security as a public good.
Recognition is beneficial, secondly, in seeking to reduce or minimize
the tendencies of the state towards idiocy; that is, in countering the dif-
ficulties that it routinely encounters in obtaining the social information
required to accomplish its purposes, including its security purposes.
This problem of cognitive deficits is not peculiar to states, but is a
feature of the relationship between all organizations and their environ-
ments. It is thus not easily rectified, still less wished away. Democratic
processes based on the principle of recognition are nonetheless impor-
tant here not only to grounding the democratic credentials of public
institutions, but also to improving the knowledge base upon which
decisions are based, and hence their likely quality. Eliciting and listen-
ing to the views of the widest range of affected individuals, social
groups, non-governmental organizations, professional associations and
other voices in civil society is itself to recognize that the state has no
monopoly on wisdom. It is also to tap into, and put to use, the practi-
cal knowledge whose benefits pragmatist democrats from James C.
Scott to Charles Sabel to Clifford Shearing quite properly insist upon.
In either respect, the aim is to generate allocative and regulatory prac-
tices that are informed by, and take notice of, the experience of those
who are going to be affected by them, and to seek to make good through
public conversation the respective information deficits that bedevil not
only public authority, but all agents and agencies that promise or seek
222 Securing states of security

to deliver security. In so doing, one is striving through practices of

democratic conversation and contestation to inject into practices of
security a permanent and dynamic reversibility – the capacity to exper-
iment, to learn from experience, to rectify mistakes. One is further
seeking, through such mechanisms, to break the well-documented
vicious circle which sees remote and information-poor policing institu-
tions being required to act coercively in ways that erode still further
their legitimacy and effectiveness (Kinsey et al. 1986) and to foster,
instead, the kind of virtuous circles within which legitimacy and effec-
tiveness become, and are seen as being, mutually reinforcing (Audit
Commission 1993; Tyler 2004).
There are an array of mechanisms that can be deployed or devel-
oped to give effect to the principle of recognition and its benefits, some
of which one finds more or less embedded in actually existing democ-
racies, others that take shape for now in the writings of democratic
theorists or the demands of social movements (Shapiro 2003). These
include using electoral processes – and the forms of publicity and
exposure which equitably funded and properly regulated elections
release – for constituting broadly targeted ‘policing’ rather than nar-
rowly focused ‘police’ boards or commissions (Patten 1999; Loader
2000; N. Walker 2000: chs. 6 and 10). To this one might add mecha-
nisms – both face-to-face and virtual – for public consultation and
participation; procedures that guarantee the representation of disad-
vantaged groups; practices of deliberative polling and proposals for
deliberation days; citizens’ panels and juries, notice-and-comment
procedures and many more.5 One may further pinpoint the impor-
tance of ensuring that these mechanisms search for and identify the
interests of affected parties in ways that ‘respect an individual’s or a
group’s method of communication’ (Maynor 2003: 84; see also I. M.
Young 2000: ch. 2). And one must be alive today to the possibility that
the constituency of the affected may no longer be neatly coterminous
with the boundaries of local or even national political communities
(Benhabib 2004) – the implications of which we explore more fully in
the final chapter.

15
There is an extensive theoretical and ‘applied’ literature on deliberative democ-
racy upon which one can draw in this context. Notable theoretical contributions
include, inter alia, Habermas (1996); Bohman and Rehg (1997); Dryzek (2000)
and Gutmann and Thompson (2004). More practice-oriented interventions can
be found in Fishkin (1991) and Ackerman and Fishkin (2002).
The democratic governance of security 223

These suggestions of course raise deep, perhaps intractable, issues of

democratic theory and many tricky questions of institutional design.
They also confront some acute practical problems with respect to how
to develop or extend them within the settings of mass-mediated, con-
sumerist, post-ideological societies plagued by citizen apathy towards
politics, or embed them in societies that lack mature democratic
institutions and cultures. For now, however, it is less important to
embark on a journey into these terrains than it is to insist upon the
value of recognition as a regulative ideal and on the corresponding
importance it affords to the formation of institutional arrangements
that offer citizens what Nancy Fraser (2003: 36) calls ‘parity of par-
ticipation’. This does not entail that the interests and identities that one
seeks to track through such processes need be uncritically endorsed or
authenticated (McBride 2005), for reasons we elucidate under the
heading of ‘reasons’ below. Fostering processes of inclusive democra-
tic conversation and contestation is the key here. It matters, most
immediately, in respect of trying to generate forms of public authority
in the field of policing and security that are legitimate and effective in
the ways we have described. But it is also important to point out, recall-
ing the discussion in chapters 6 and 7, that processes of recognition
associated with politically constituted authority are themselves an
important ingredient of security. Inclusive democratic processes for
governing security implicitly and expressly signal to all citizens that
they will not be left to suffer in silence, that their anxieties and
demands for a secure existence will be actively elicited and listened to,
that their claims and concerns as full and equal members of a political
community will be tracked and weighed. In so doing, such processes
supply forms of assurance that contribute to making security axio-
matic in ways that are prior to, and relatively independent of, the polic-
ing and security outcomes they generate, but which lead us to suppose
that those outcomes must not themselves undermine that reassurance
(Loader 2006b). Recognition offers, in short, a guarantee of confident
membership that enables citizens to raise their thresholds for manag-
ing anxiety and be better able to live securely with risk.

Rights
Let us, thirdly, consider the value and significance of rights. In so doing,
we want to articulate a conception of rights not as a counterpoint to
224 Securing states of security

the claims of security against which the latter must be ‘balanced’, but
as a vital ingredient of a civilizing security practice (Waldron 2003a;
Loader forthcoming a). We want, further, to temper the inflated hopes
and ambitions that are sometimes associated with the idea of rights –
such that rights become the organizing principle of contemporary pro-
gressive politics, or the closest that western secular culture comes to
having an article of faith – whilst at the same time recognizing their
place within any plausible conception of the good society (Ignatieff
2001). Our aim, in short, is to situate rights within our four-pronged
heuristic for reconfiguring security, and thereby to emphasize their con-
tribution to the practice of civilizing security – a theoretical move that
leads one to highlight three indispensable elements.
A regime of rights seeks, first of all, to place a check on the coercive
capacities of the state. By guaranteeing all members of a political com-
munity certain basic political and civil freedoms – to free expression,
political association, a free press, privacy, family life, a fair trial, against
cruel and degrading punishment and so forth – legally enforceable
human rights prevent the state from acting as an arbitrary dominating
force, and stop it from meddling illegitimately with the basic entitle-
ments of citizens. They further require that these constraints upon state
power are given practical force through the creation of plural mecha-
nisms of enforcement and redress, ranging from an independent judi-
ciary, to ombudsmen, to specialist agencies tasked with monitoring and
exposing rights abuses and generally facilitating a human rights culture
(Patten 1999). Rights, in this classic ‘first-generation’ sense, do provide
a particular check against those political and social forces who seek to
make security pervasive – pursuing it with impatience towards, and dis-
regard for, the limits that rights necessarily place on the unbridled
pursuit of public protection. This accounts, at least in part, for the
depiction of an opposition between security and rights that has become
commonplace within political and legal discussion of these issues (cf.
Goold and Lazarus forthcoming). In so far as this routine depiction has
a rational kernel, it inheres in the counter-majoritarianism that is the
hallmark of rights regimes – in particular, the protections they offer
unpopular minorities whose interests the state can easily be tempted to
move against in the name of security.6

16
It is for this reason, as we intimated in chapter 1, that the idea of a right to secur-
ity has to be approached with great caution. If, as we find in some of the classic
The democratic governance of security 225

In the above respects rights protect individuals against the state’s

tendencies to meddle, to enact bias, or to quash cultural difference.
But in settings wherein a range of non-state actors – private security
firms, forms of communal self-policing, transnational security bureau-
cracies – also promise to deliver security, rights assume a second, addi-
tional, importance. We have argued that these modes of non-state
security can, in the absence of adequate regulation, act in ways that
disregard the interests of non-customers or evince intolerance towards
minorities within local neighbourhoods or other particularistic com-
munities within civil – or uncivil – society. Human rights protections
are vital here as a means of trying to harness the practical benefits of
pluralized security whilst protecting the basic interests of those who
are rendered vulnerable by the untrammelled operation of market or
communal policing. Rights in these settings are not bulwarks against
the state. They demand, rather, that the state put in place legal and reg-
ulatory regimes, and their attendant remedies, that are able to protect
individuals from the effects of fugitive commercial power or the enact-
ment of local tyranny. Such legal guarantees of one’s basic rights offer,
in either case, a significant part of the social benefit that flows from
successfully anchoring pluralized security in the institutions of the
state.
Rights are necessary, thirdly, as a precondition of, and as a constraint
upon, the practice of recognition. They operate in the former instance
as guarantees of private freedom of the kind that enables citizens to feel
able to participate with confidence in democratic political processes.
As Stephen Holmes (1995: 31) nicely puts it: ‘Citizens will not throng

post-war international rights charters, security is treated merely as a constituent

or reinforcing aspect of the individual’s right to liberty against the encroachment
of the state, then this is an innocent usage, and indeed serves to emphasize that
in one important respect the normative ground covered by security and liberty is
identical. However, the more expansive version of the right to security that seeks
to impose a positive duty on the state to free the citizen from all forms of vio-
lence – a version often mobilized today in public and media discourse, and which
has been enshrined, for example, in the South African Constitution (Lazarus
forthcoming) – is incompatible with the conception of security, and its relation
to rights, that is being advanced here. The right to security in this more expan-
sive sense is dangerous, precisely because, by placing the entitlement and duties
associated with the combating of violence on the same normative and deontolog-
ical level as the basic right to liberty, it neutralizes the counter-majoritarian,
populism-trumping, state-constraining properties that give the liberty right and
other basic rights their value and force.
226 Securing states of security

voluntarily to the public square if their homes can be ravaged at will

by the police.’ There exists, in other words, a conceptual symbiosis
between, and a historical co-originality of, basic rights and democra-
tic principle. Political autonomy always presupposes private autonomy
and vice versa (Habermas 2001a). In the latter regard, rights place
parameters around the substantive outcomes that can flow from demo-
cratic processes based on a principle of non-exclusion. They prevent
these processes arriving at decisions that conflict with the fundamental
entitlements of those who are affected by them and thereby stop demo-
cratic fora undermining at the level of substance what recognition
seeks to accomplish in terms of process. Rights here offer a further
counter-majoritarian check – this time against the potentially illiberal
effects of a democratized security practice. They shield minorities from
politically constituted majorities in ways that embed within the insti-
tutional matrix of security governance the idea that security needs to
be pursued in a manner that remains consistent with other goods and
values that democratic political communities cherish and seek to
uphold (Zedner forthcoming). Rights also, finally, provide a more
general symbol and reminder of the type of affective community which
the modern democratic state at its best aspires to be and which itself
speaks to and promotes a security-generative sense of inclusive, confi-
dent belonging – a community where, as we noted in the previous
chapter, the open-ended egalitarian potential of a generic public polit-
ical sphere goes hand in hand with the inviolability of a generic private
sphere.
Thinking about the value of rights in these ways, within the frame-
work of a solidaristic and egalitarian practice of security, brings to the
fore several things. First and foremost, it challenges the idea that rights
exist in deep tension with the pursuit of security. In so doing, it calls
into dispute the terms of trade that serve, curiously, as common ground
between the ‘security’ and the ‘liberty’ lobbies – as we noted in chapter
1. Conceived of in the terms described above, rights become not only
or mainly a matter of protecting the individual from the power of the
overweening state – as liberals so often contend. Nor are they an indul-
gent, security-threatening burden upon the capacity of the state to
protect its citizens – forcing the state, as police officers, politicians and
pundits are sometimes wont to put it, to work ‘with one arm tied
behind its back’. They are, rather, a significant prerequisite to the prac-
tice of civilizing security. Rights, in short, are for security.
The democratic governance of security 227

Reasons
Reasons – or, more accurately, the idea of public reason – signal the
importance of bringing sustained social contestation to the practice of
security. Public reason bears in this respect a close relationship to
recognition, which it supplements in significant ways. Recognition, as
we have seen, is concerned with searching for and identifying the
claims of all constituencies affected by allocative and regulatory deci-
sions in the field of policing and security. It is, as such, geared to
addressing the problem of false negatives, to ensuring that the ideas
and interests of all citizens are tracked and considered in public dia-
logue and state decision-making. But recognition, if it operates in iso-
lation, evinces several lacunae. While resolving the problem of false
negatives it has no means of addressing satisfactorily that of false pos-
itives; in fact, practices of recognition can if they function well bring
forth a paralysing surfeit of claims which the principle of recognition
offers no way of discriminating between. Recognition lacks, further,
any means of resolving a potential and worrisome paradox of public
deliberation in the security field; namely, that the more citizens inter-
est themselves in, and talk about, security problems (qua security prob-
lems) the more threats they will unearth, the more anxieties they will
feel, and the more police officers they will demand to tackle or assuage
them. Recognition, in short, has a tendency to re-enact the pathologies
of consumerism, as well as the problems associated with certain vari-
ants of interest-group pluralism or multiculturalism (Pettit 1997: 205).
By continuing to treat naked preferences, or group identities and
demands, as fixed ingredients and raw materials of political life, recog-
nition risks translating into the field of security a ‘politics of identity
mired in social resentment’ (McBride 2005: 504).
Rights, as we have seen, go some way towards checking the illiberal
outcomes that the principle of recognition may licence. But if rights too
are treated in isolation, then the solution they offer errs too much in
the opposite direction. For rights offer only a negative, defensive reac-
tion to the problem of promiscuous demand, leaving individual pref-
erences and social identities unquestioned and in place. The idea of
public reason also in part has this negative quality, weeding out out-
comes that cannot satisfy common-interest considerations. But it seeks,
in addition, to give more constructive, purposive shape to public delib-
eration about policing and security. The exchange of reasons sets out
228 Securing states of security

to give practical effect to the fact that public conversation has as its
resilient ‘watchword’ that venerable maxim of natural justice – ‘always
listen to the other side’ (Skinner 1996: 15). But this brings with it a
refusal to accept that giving a proper hearing to all affected parties
within processes for allocating and regulating policing capacities
means that ‘we consider every possible demand for recognition as
morally legitimate or acceptable’ (Honneth 2003: 71). The practice of
civilizing security cannot and should not mean that. The principle of
public reason thus adds to the institutional matrix for governing secu-
rity the expectation that the demands raised in fora of public deliber-
ation are to be called into question, rigorously scrutinized, and
defended and revised, in a process aimed at identifying which security
claims can reasonably be said to be oriented to considerations of the
common interest, rather than being motivated by unbridled emotion,
or the pursuit of self or parochial interests. Public reason aims, in short,
to address the problem of false positives that is at least in part gener-
ated by efforts to guard against false negatives. It seeks to expose and
disallow those demands for order or public resources which are incon-
sistent with, or a danger to, the idea of security as a public good, and
thereby respond to lay demands and allocate resources in ways that
sustain the forms of democratic common life that supply their partici-
pants with a sense of shared identity and secure belonging.
There exist several different strands of writing on the idea of public
reason that one may mobilize and draw upon in this context, not all of
which are equally conducive to the above-mentioned purposes. One of
these – taking its cue from Rawls (1999) – tends to make the stipula-
tions of public reason too exacting, such that the test of reason
becomes overly determining of substantive outcomes – whether by
keeping certain hotly contentious items from the agenda of public
debate in the name of social cohesion or good governance, or by estab-
lishing decision-making protocols that narrowly circumscribe what a
rational outcome can look like. The danger here is that the demands of
public reason become so heavy that they strip citizens of the motiva-
tion to engage in deliberative processes of resource distribution and
problem-solving in the first place. The converse danger – one we asso-
ciate with proponents of agonistic variants of radical democracy
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mouffe 2000) – is that the demands of
reason are rendered too permissive. In an effort to avoid being overly
prescriptive of the outcomes of democratic processes, or of the kinds
The democratic governance of security 229

of claims and arguments that can legitimately be put within them, the
idea of reason is limited, on this view, to whatever the participants
decide they want it to be: the aim is to initiate processes of inclusive,
presumptively conflictual, public dialogue and let their participants
make of, and do with, them what they will. The risk here, in our view,
is that the idea of public reason stops doing any real work at all, offer-
ing neither ‘rules of the game’ whose at least partial insulation from the
game itself may find a principled basis of justification, nor sufficiently
robust mechanisms for ensuring the proper scrutiny of irrational, illib-
eral, sectarian or other false positives. One is left, in effect, with little
that has not already been supplied by the principle of recognition.
We want in the present context – taking our lead from the construc-
tivist universalism of Jürgen Habermas (e.g. 1996) – to develop and
deploy a third approach to the value of public, or communicative,
reason. This holds that something akin to Pettit’s (2001a: 156) notion
of ‘common avowable interests’ can serve as a regulative ideal for prac-
tices of public conversation and contestation around questions of secu-
rity, but that the substantive content of such interests, and the reasons
that are held to be admissible and inadmissible within institutional
processes guided by the search for them, and even the elementary
ground rules for allocating reason-generative voice within these insti-
tutional processes (Tully 2002), will be formed and reformed by and
within the process of reflexive discussion and justification. In the
context of the institutional matrix for the democratic governance of
security whose elements we are elucidating here, this conception of
public reason has both a negative and a positive component.
In the former respect, its purpose is to unfix, and open up to negoti-
ation, the claims and identities that are brought into forms of public
dialogue about security. The aim is to fashion deliberative institutions
which refuse to treat unreasoned expressions of preference, or emo-
tionally laced demands for order, or the claim of this or that group for
particular levels of policing provision or social protection, as
immutable facts of political life – demands that have uncritically to be
responded to in the form in which they present themselves. This is true,
in the first place, of the claims of economically and socially disadvan-
taged groups which, say, policing or security authorities may be
required to make special and methodologically imaginative efforts to
elicit and take account of. Having been thus recognized, the claims of
these groups must themselves be subject to democratic scrutiny and
230 Securing states of security

any pleas for special or additional minority protection justified on

common-interest grounds. Such scrutiny must also be extended to the
security preferences of those who ‘hold mainstream or prevailing con-
ceptions of the good’ (Maynor 2003: 87) – groups whose capacity to
organize for more than their ‘fair’ share of the public cake, or access
market resources, often mean that their demands are met in ways that
elude the democratic gaze – a fact that some radical commentators tend
to gloss over (Johnston and Shearing 2003). And one must seek ways
of redirecting towards forms of reflexive public deliberation the emo-
tionally saturated claims that so often structure the contemporary pol-
itics of security and the fundamentalist yearning for absolute
protection that anxious, insecure citizens can easily be moved, or
made, to feel.
In the latter, more constructive, respect, the principle of public
reason demands not that these various constituencies refrain from ini-
tially pressing their claims as passionately as they can in the manner
they deem appropriate, but that affected parties are encouraged to
apprehend their particular and particularistic security identities and
concerns in relation to those of others, and in terms of the insecurity
burdens which they may place upon them. This requires, in turn, that
in conversations about how to frame security problems, and deploy
resources to address them, these groups listen to and seek to under-
stand the claims of other affected parties, and of public security pro-
fessionals and bureaucracies. By so doing, participants are likely to
experience an unforced but insistent democratic pressure to, if neces-
sary, revise and reformulate their demands using criteria that are
considered ‘cooperatively admissible’ within the settings of public
deliberation within which they are being considered and weighed
(Pettit 2001a: 156) – fora of decision-making that foreground not the
collective will, or popular consent, but the practice of discursive reason
(Pettit 2004).
There is, of course, no guarantee that such processes will result in
negotiated agreement, and that public authorities established to allo-
cate and regulate security resources will be able to dispense entirely with
methods of bargaining, or compromise, or aggregative decision-
making. But such practices of inclusive and reflexive public reasoning
and justification at least maximize the prospect of political communi-
ties thinking about security, and acting upon security problems, in ways
that foster greater acknowledgement of the mutual vulnerabilities and
The democratic governance of security 231

social connectedness that exist among their members, and generate out-
comes that broadly sustain the forms of democratic common life, and
its attendant sense of publicness, that are indispensable to the secure
belonging of all citizens in ethnically and socially pluralistic societies.
The task, as such, is not to pretend that all claims can be acceded, that
all can or will be winners. It is, rather, to engage citizens in public rea-
soning about security in ways that enable them to see that the political
freedom of each and all is more likely to be guaranteed through their
participation with others in forms of common deliberation (the specific
outcomes of which they may not always concur with) than by pursuing
their own safety as individual ‘sovereign consumers’ in the marketplace,
or clubbing together within particularistic communities, or falling for
the seductive security promises of strong, superficially responsive rulers.
And in facing that challenge, we should be aware that the security div-
idend of a public reason of which citizens may be persuadable is only
in part the generation of a separate ‘how to’ knowledge product. It is
also, as we argued in the previous chapter, a dividend which is intrinsic
to the very process of seeking common cause, since a publicly reasoned
conception of security is one whose pursuit and provisional resolution
already gives us more reason to feel secure in our membership of the
public in question.

There is clearly more that can be said about each of these elements of
a civilizing security practice and about how one might seek, institu-
tionally, to embed them. But we hope to have done sufficient to demon-
strate how the state – conditioned in the ways we have described by the
four Rs of resources, recognition, rights and reasons – can democrati-
cally govern security in a manner that nurtures and sustains the forms
of abstract solidarity and trust between strangers that is the hallmark
of security as an axiomatic element of quotidian social and political
relations. Any political community, it seems to us, that wishes to civi-
lize security and release its civilizing potential will need to find some
way of giving practical effect to these four Rs, even if the institutional
means by which this is accomplished will necessarily be shaped by the
history, culture and social trajectory of a given society, and therefore
differ from one national context to another.
Axiomatic security, security understood as a thick public good, secu-
rity that is consistent with the republican ideal of non-domination, is
‘not maximised in a society in which each person cowers behind the
232 Securing states of security

heaviest, highest walls that they can build or that the state can provide’
(Pettit 1997: 266). In such a society, for reasons we have amply docu-
mented in this book, security, or rather insecurity, in fact becomes a
pervasive, self-fulfilling and ultimately liberty- and democracy-eroding
phenomenon. Axiomatic security – the capacity to live together
securely and confidently with risk – flows, rather, from the seemingly
paradoxical situation in which individuals are prepared to acknowl-
edge their mutual vulnerability to the intimates and strangers that they
dwell with and amongst, and willing and able to trust both the co-
citizens upon whom their security depends and the social institutions
that give practical effect to their membership of a democratic political
community.
Viewed in this light, the overriding purpose of regulatory arrange-
ments that aim to give effect to more axiomatic forms of security is not
to be the servant of partisan or parochial interests, or to satisfy without
scrutiny appetites for order that may be motivated by desires for injus-
tice, or xenophobic fears of the alien and unknown, or fantasies of
absolute or sovereign security (Markell 2003). Their purpose, instead,
is to subject those anxieties and desires to the power of reflection. It is
to make plastic the apparently fixed interests and social identities that
sustain them. It is to stimulate acknowledgement of the constitutive
vulnerability of life lived inescapably among others, of the dignity of
our interdependence, and of the virtues, but also the risky, unsettling
unpredictability, of the activity of seeking to address and resolve con-
flict politically (Warren 1996; Keenan 2003: ch. 4; Markell 2003:
177–89). It is in all these ways to subject demands for order to demo-
cratic governance. This mode of regulatory politics must, in so doing,
appeal to and mobilize those motivational feelings of identification
with, and belonging to, a common political community that presently
exist among members of such communities, and seek to deepen and
extend the expressions of solidarity with strangers, and commitments
to the security and political freedom of all citizens, that are an imma-
nent part of people’s sense of allegiance to an ongoing collective
project. If we take this as our lodestar, we can better orient ourselves
towards fashioning – along the lines sketched in the second half of this
chapter – the forms of minimal, rights-regarding policing practices that
can, materially and symbolically, underpin the confident assurance
individuals draw from being recognized as part of the ‘common public
culture’ of a democratic polity (Miller 1995).
The democratic governance of security 233

In arriving at this conclusion, one that has sought to specify and

defend the security-enhancing value of democratic political communi-
ties, we encounter one further, and far from insignificant, hurdle; one
that may lead readers to conclude, once again, that we are struggling
vainly to hold back the tide of current social and political development.
For, under conditions of globalization, and in the face of the burgeon-
ing transnational security practices that we have described at several
points throughout the book, one can no longer confidently assume that
the nation state can or should remain as the widest boundary of secu-
rity identity, or that it is the most plausible conduit for the articulation
and promotion of common security, whether within or beyond its
borders. It is to these doubts, and the challenge which they appear to
present to the case we have made for civilizing security, that we turn in
the next, concluding, chapter.
 9 Security as a global public good

W
e began this book by trying to distance ourselves from some
of the more immediate manifestations of the security debate
and some of the more exotic articulations of security prac-
tice. In particular we sought to stand back from the post-9/11 debate
on terror, just as we declined the Herculean – even Sisyphean – chal-
lenge of a comprehensive mapping of the real world of security provi-
sion in all its ever-increasing diversity and intensity. We provided what
we claimed were good prudential reasons for these choices. We did not
want our thinking about such a highly charged concept as security to
be distorted by our taking as a point of departure perhaps its most ide-
ologically sensitive location, that of contemporary international –
indeed post-national – terrorism. Equally, we did not want to become
bogged down in a level of detail that would threaten our efforts to
provide a sharp overview of what is at stake – politically, culturally and
institutionally – in the security debate.
Yet, even if, as we maintain, these arguments are persuasive in their
own terms, is there not a danger of their carrying one unfortunate and,
for us, highly significant side effect? For, the critic might suggest,
perhaps it is just too convenient for an argument that seeks to rehabil-
itate the state’s prior role in security that its proponents situate them-
selves at some remove from the very events and very trends which point
most insistently away from the state as the symbolic and instrumental
centre of security work. In the fraught days since 9/11, our newly ter-
rorized political culture has produced a fresh range of rhetoric, regu-
lation and routines that regularly transcends national borders (see, e.g.,
Chalmers 2004; Günther 2005). As constitutive elements of the ‘war
on terror’ launched in response to 9/11, we have witnessed, alongside
the unilateral assertion of US security interests and the strengthening
of state security institutions, an extension of cross-border surveillance
activity and information sharing, an enhanced role for opaque net-
works of police and intelligence chiefs in Europe, and the deployment

234
Security as a global public good 235

of soldiers, police officers and contracted security guards in post-war

‘peacekeeping’ efforts on the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq (den Boer
and Monar 2002; Lyon 2003; Sands 2005). What is more, in many
other ways that owe little or nothing to the terrorist threat, trans-
national policing has over a longer time-frame become an expanding,
diverse and complex field of activity, and so an increasingly important
dimension of any detailed security map. In the face of criminal organi-
zations and networks who operate across many states, and whose
modus operandi involves illicitly trafficking people, drugs, informa-
tion, nuclear materials or stolen goods across national borders, long-
standing international police institutions such as Interpol have been
joined, and arguably superseded in importance, by the international-
ization of US policing and by the development of new forms of police
networking and cross-border cooperation within the European Union
– notably in the shape of Europol and, more recently, Eurojust
(Nadelman 1993; Anderson et al. 1995; Deflem 2003; N. Walker
2003). The problem of weak or failing states engaged in armed conflict
for the control of territory, or harbouring criminal or terrorist groups,
has prompted overt and covert police/military interventions by outside
states, as well as intermittent UN or EU peacekeeping missions and
the harm-alleviating efforts of transnational NGOs (Caygill 2001;
Goldsmith 2003; Linden et al. forthcoming). They have, in addition,
provided new opportunities in the burgeoning industry of global
private security for transnational security and military firms to
promote and sell protective services either to weak states, or to multi-
national corporations seeking to do business in those states (Johnston
2000; Muthien and Taylor 2002; Singer 2003; Avant 2005; Leander
2006; Abrahamsen and Williams 2006).
These developments traverse symbolic as well as territorial bound-
aries. As we noted in chapter 1, they signal that a bundle of once clear
distinctions – between external and internal security; policing and sol-
diering; war and crime; state combatants exercising legitimate force
and unarmed civilian non-combatants – is fast breaking down (Kaldor
1999; Bigo 2000a; Andreas and Price 2001). They also indicate that
states acting alone, or solely within their own borders, are no longer a
sufficient means of producing security within those borders, still less
some more expansive notion of regional or global security. We inhabit
a world of multilevel, multicentred security governance, in which states
are joined, criss-crossed and contested by an array of transnational
236 Securing states of security

organizations and actors – whether in regional and global governmen-

tal bodies, commercial security outfits, or the rapidly expanding range
of non-governmental organizations and social movements that com-
pose transnational civil society. It is a world in which policing has,
however haltingly and unevenly, been both stretched across the fron-
tiers of states and charged with combating what are often overlapping
problems of global organized crime and political violence.
The purpose of this final chapter is to address the critical challenge
posed by these developments. It acknowledges that there has indeed
been and continues to be a shift towards transnational sites and net-
works of security provision, but insists that this need not diminish the
scope, still less undermine the normative framework, for civilizing
security that we have formulated thus far. In stressing the priority of
the state as a key site for the provision of security as a ‘thick’ public
good, we might seem to be implying either that security beyond the
state must in consequence be a ‘thin’ and anaemic affair, or, alterna-
tively, that the price of transnational thickening might be the loss of the
trademark thickness of the state level. As we shall argue, however, we
need not look at thick, or axiomatic, security in such zero-sum terms.
Rather, the very considerations which underpin our argument at the
state level are such that, with the necessary sociological and institu-
tional imagination, we can contemplate at least some degree of com-
plementary thickening in wider sites of political community and in the
global arena.
We must stress, however, that unlike the argument at the nation-state
level, the transnational argument remains predominantly aspirational
rather than grounded in concrete – if only selectively realized – cultural
and ordering configurations. As matters stand, the development in
transnational policing and security practice is matched neither by a pal-
pable shift in attitudes towards the proper location of security com-
munities nor by systems of regulation that adequately track these
developments. The state, as the traditional community of democratic
attachment, remains the principal – if by no means any longer the sole
– institutional locus of efforts to subject security practices to forms of
democratic steering, public scrutiny and human rights protection. This
asymmetrical pattern of development can, in turn, encourage opaque,
self-corroborating and fugitive sites of public and private power that,
in failing to nurture and provide institutional expression for broader
public identification with the relevant security projects, simultaneously
Security as a global public good 237

possess deficits of legitimacy and effectiveness. In asking the question

about the thickening of security as a transnational public good, there-
fore, we must be ever mindful that the very symbiosis of cultural and
ordering activity which is the key to the state’s special role underscores
the difficulty of building a similar dynamic beyond the state. Just as the
presence of an affective attachment and a regulatory infrastructure can
be mutually reinforcing, so their absence or relative weakness can be
mutually debilitating.
Our argument proceeds as follows. Taking as our point of departure
recent work on the topic of ‘global public goods’ conducted under the
auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (Kaul et al.
1999c; 2003c), we begin by identifying the issues that arise in seeking
to reconceptualize and deliver policing and security – with their con-
stitutive links to sovereign statehood – as global public goods. We then
briefly review five competing models of transnational security in this
light, examining the capacity of each to address and offer an adequate
resolution of the problems we identify. Having thus specified the merits
and deficiencies of each model, we conclude by sketching the outline
of our own thicker account of security as a global public good – one
that is sociologically tenable as well as normatively robust.

In search of the transnational public interest

In a recent statement of cosmopolitan intent, David Held has argued
that:

The provision of public goods can no longer be equated with state-provided

goods alone. Diverse state and non-state actors shape and contribute to their
provision – and they need to if some of the most profound challenges of
globalization are to be met. Moreover, some core public goods have to be
provided regionally and globally if they are to be provided at all. (Held
2004: 16)

How – in the field of policing and security – can we best make sense of
this project? How might policing be delivered and regulated in these
terms? Can we identify – at the level of normative principle and insti-
tutional articulation – a common public interest in the diverse, multi-
site, multi-actor field of transnational policing? It is a formidable
enough task, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to seek to mobi-
lize the four Rs of civilizing security practice – resources, recognition,
238 Securing states of security

rights and reasons – within the more familiar terrain of state policing,
and to do so in a sufficiently generous and integrated fashion as to
avoid the various and often linked pathologies of paternalism, con-
sumerism, authoritarianism and fragmentation. But these difficulties
are compounded in a transnational context. Paternalism is encouraged
by the introduction of another layer of private and public authority –
a further tier of professional bureaucracy even more remote from the
concerns of national demoi and even more self-confident in the
primacy of its security knowledge and imperatives (see, e.g., Bigo
2000b; Deflem 2003). Consumerist mindsets and methods are stimu-
lated by a focus on crimes of an economic or otherwise esoteric nature
(e.g. art fraud, currency counterfeiting) that are of primary interest to
specialist corners of the security market. Authoritarian tendencies may
encounter an environment made more receptive by the emphasis upon
another set of crimes of which most citizens have only mediated knowl-
edge and which, they are consistently informed through the relevant
political and professional intermediaries, represent threats that are
both existential and increasingly urgent (e.g. terrorism, nuclear theft).
And fragmentation is encouraged by the ad hocracy that attends a set
of developments which are diversely demand-driven and which lack a
prior sense of political community with which they can connect and an
established governance framework to which they are required to
adhere (Sheptycki 2002, forthcoming; Johnston 2006). How might we
steer a prudent course through these dangers?
A useful starting point here, and one that connects closely with the
broader analytical theme of the book, is the collaborative project con-
ducted under the umbrella of the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) on ‘global public goods’ (Kaul et al. 1999c;
2003c).1 This project begins with a standard economic definition of
public goods as those whose consumption is ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non-
rival’. We have criticized the deficiencies of such a thin definition at
length in chapter 6, and we will address the drawbacks of this limited
perspective for our understanding of transnational security in due
course. However, the very thinness of the initial definition is also helpful
in highlighting the formidable obstacles that a purely state-centred logic
and architecture places before the realization of global transnational
goods. Because of the externality and free-riding problems associated

11
This is also an important point of reference for Held (2004: ch. 6).
Security as a global public good 239

with the (market) provision of economically defined public goods, they

typically require some mechanism of compulsory collective action if
they are to be adequately provided or even provided at all, with the state
generally considered as the most appropriate such mechanism. While
global public goods share all the elements of domestic public goods,
according to Kaul et al. (1999a) they possess the added criteria that
their benefits – or, in the case of ‘public bads’, costs – ‘extend across
countries and regions, across rich and poor population groups, and
even across generations’ (Kaul et al. 2003a: 3). A pollution-free envi-
ronment and financial stability are cited as examples here, as, impor-
tantly, are peace and security.2
Let us try to tease out some of the more detailed implications of this
analysis. The gradual shift in the level of optimal provision of public
goods to the global level raises opportunities and dangers which are
different not only in scale but also in kind from those which pertain
where the major and most appropriate site of provision of public goods
is the state level. The differences in scale are self-evident. The prize of
the successful institutionalization of a mechanism of compulsory col-
lective provision becomes the inclusive and cost-efficient supply of a
good at a broader transnational or global level, while the penalty of
failure is exclusion, cost-inefficiency and perhaps, in a context where
the scope for negative externalities is greatly increased, an unravelling
of domestic solutions to problems of collective action, such that some
(and perhaps all) states become net losers in the endeavour to secure
the benefits of the relevant goods to their respective populations.
In order fully to appreciate these possibilities, however, we must turn
to the differences in kind in the structure of public goods provision as
we move from the national to the global. In the classic economic analy-
sis, the alternative and perhaps competing unit of supply of the good in
question is either, on the one hand, the market agent supplying the
private individual or group of private individuals, or, on the other, the
‘club’. In the latter case, a self-defining and so exclusionary group come

12
In the course of their analysis Kaul et al. make a valuable distinction between
‘final’ global public goods, which are outcomes (such as a pollution-free environ-
ment) rather than goods in the standard sense, and what they term ‘intermediate’
global public goods (such as international regimes) which contribute to the pro-
duction of these outcomes (Kaul et al. 1999b: 13). We might, in this vein, describe
security as a final global public good and transnational policing as an intermedi-
ate good that can, under the right conditions, contribute to its production.
240 Securing states of security

together to provide for their own consumption at least some of the ben-
efits associated with non-rivalness; namely, cost-efficient provision of a
good whose common supply is no detriment to individual enjoyment.
As we move to a context of high transnational interdependence,
however, not only do the number of market agents or clubs who are
candidate suppliers of the same or overlapping goods exponentially
increase, but other states also become relevant as alternative and
perhaps competing suppliers of the same or overlapping goods.
The introduction of other states into the equation changes the
picture dramatically, for a number of reasons. First, these other states
are typically authoritatively constituted in such a way that their role in
the solution or creation of collective action problems is, broadly speak-
ing, less easily controlled or influenced by the first state than if they
were private or club actors.
Secondly, and again broadly speaking, this matters so much precisely
because other states have a greater capacity for action, and so a greater
propensity not only to produce security-based public goods, but also
to prejudice the first state’s capacity to do likewise, than do other indi-
vidual or club actors. These prejudicial effects may register within the
classic matrix of external security – through aggressive acts of war or
their threat by other states directed against the first state, or through a
shift in the strategies of self-defence of these other states (e.g. the devel-
opment of new weapons systems or the forming of new alliances) so as
to leave the first state more exposed in terms of its actual and perceived
capacity for self-defence (Waltz 1993). Increasingly, however, the
power of other states to prejudice the internal security of the first state
operates through a logic that is more recognizably one of ‘internal
security’; that is to say, through those actual or perceived negative
externalities affecting the first state that are consequential upon both
the effective and ineffective development and pursuit of whichever
domestic policy agendas of these other states are directed towards their
own internal security. For example, these externalities might arise or
might at least be perceived to arise for the first state through the dis-
placement effect of the successful repression by other states of certain
criminal possibilities in areas such as drugs or organized crime, or of
their restrictive approach to asylum applications or other supposedly
‘security-destabilizing’ migratory movements. Conversely, externali-
ties for the first state might arise through the failure of other states to
‘contain’ their own security problems, whether through an ineffective
Security as a global public good 241

regime of monitoring the international movement of indigenous crim-

inals or inadequate control of cross-border transactions in illicit goods
and services, or, more broadly, through social and political policies
which lead to the flight or export of persons and groups capable of
posing a threat to the internal security of the first state.
Yet, thirdly, the introduction of other states into the internal security
equation invites commonalities as well as differences. Also being states,
these other states share with the first state the same general raison
d’état, the same broad set of priorities and incentives – and impor-
tantly, underlying this, the same deep cultural orientation or sense of
the political imaginary – to be the dominant provider of public goods
for their respective populations. Their relationship with the first state,
in other words, including those aspects of the relationship which are
potentially antagonistic or competitive, is structured not by their
efforts to provide the benefits associated with public goods from dif-
ferent motivations and by different means, as with private agents or
clubs, but by their aspirations in an interdependent world to bring the
same motives to bear, and to use the same means, for the primary
benefit of different populations.
We will return to some of these more detailed points in due course,
and in particular will have more to say about the cultural dimension of
the state’s production of public goods. For now, it is important simply
to register the conclusion of Kaul and her collaborators that in the
present institutional configuration of global politics the dangers in the
shift from a national to a global context of optimal provision of public
goods seem to overshadow the opportunities. They convincingly claim
that there is in the world today a ‘serious under-provision of global
public goods’ (Kaul et al. 1999a: xxi), a condition they attribute in very
general terms to ‘the absence of a global sovereign’ able to assume a
central coordinating role (Kaul et al. 1999b: 15) and which on closer
enquiry they locate in the combined effect of three crucial gaps. First,
there is a jurisdiction gap between global problems that span national
frontiers and demand transnational attention and discrete national
units and regulatory structures of policy-making. We find, in other
words, a mismatch between national policy-makers concerned about
losing sovereignty to the market and civil society and the imperatives of
an international policy environment, creating chronic difficulties with
regard to who is responsible for global issues, particularly externalities.
Second, there is a participation gap between those state actors involved
242 Securing states of security

in fora of national policy-making and international cooperation and

non-state actors in the market and civil society who are likely to be
affected by or to represent those affected by relevant decisions but who
have little or no hand in their authorship or in holding their authors to
account. There has developed, in short, a serious lack of symmetry and
congruence between transnational ‘decision-makers’ and ‘decision-
takers’ (Held 2004: 13). There exists, thirdly, an incentive gap between
the substance of stated national commitments and international agree-
ments and the realities of implementation on-the-ground. The absence
of effective supranational authority, coupled with weak or imbalanced
incentive structures, means that states and non-state actors will seek to
free-ride, or lack the necessary motivation to ‘do their bit’ in tackling
global problems (Kaul et al. 1999a: xxvi–xxvii).
If we examine these gaps in the round, we can plainly see the outline
of a dynamic of mutual impoverishment of the ordering and the cul-
tural dimensions – the instrumental and the affective – in the trans-
national and global domains, and we can observe how this produces
the linked problems of legitimacy and effectiveness to which we earlier
alluded. The combination of a jurisdiction gap with regard to the
development of an adequately empowered and regulated institutional
apparatus, the participation gap with regard to an adequately and
inclusively deliberated-upon policy agenda, and a gap in reliable incen-
tives to comply with or cooperate in whatever policies and with and
through whatever cooperative structures and implementation agencies
do exist, creates a series of linked problems. Foremost among them are
the lack of proper authorization of and support for policing capacity
and the failed or selective and unaccountable mobilization of that
capacity – problems that patently bear upon both the public accept-
ability of transnational policing and the quality of its output. Yet we
cannot assume that the pathological potential of these ‘gap effects’ will
have a positive effect in encouraging the closing of the gaps in ques-
tion. Rather, the danger is that the problems become exacerbated just
because, as seems likely, attempts to produce global public goods in the
presence of these gaps may fail to provide the experience of successful
common commitment and to fertilize the grounds of increased trust
and confidence apt to overcome the motivation problem responsible
for the gaps in the first place.
A simple – too simple – response to the difficulties that Kaul and
her collaborators pinpoint is that they are a function of the very
Security as a global public good 243

instrumental conception of public goods they work with. As we saw in

chapter 6, the instrumental conception always has a problem in identi-
fying the proper boundaries of political community, in locating the
optimal level at which the undoubted collective action problems which
attend the provision of any non-excludable or difficult-to-exclude goods
should be addressed. To explain why people in general should be moti-
vated to put things in common in terms of their individual and some-
times convergent security interests does not explain why any particular
combination of people should be sufficiently more motivated than any
other overlapping particular combination of people so as to make their
common motivation count decisively. The missing explanans, moreover,
means that the instrumental conception encounters special problems in
accounting for transnational or global cooperation. Faced with the
massive datum of state formation, the instrumental conception, not-
withstanding its lack of adequate theorization, can take for granted or
is bound to acknowledge that, for whatever reason and under whatever
constraints, people have already laid their collective action bets with this
or that state, which in cumulative consequence becomes the increasingly
credible and dominant source of public security solutions. It then
becomes all the more puzzling how and why they might make and
respect additional commitments to collective security provision at wider
levels of political community other than those commitments which are
parasitic on and articulated through the states themselves. On this analy-
sis, the fact that the state and its security interests remain so central to
the solution of transnational and global security begins to look like part
of the problem – a straitjacket on the prospects of better global security
management. But since it is precisely the dead weight of analytical
dependence on the building-blocks of the state as the default site for
addressing collective action problems that suggests the jurisdiction, par-
ticipation and incentive-based impediments to moving to wider concep-
tions of security as a public good in the first place, the instrumental
argument lies open to the accusation that it has boxed itself into this par-
ticular Westphalian corner through the circularity of its reasoning. The
basic assumption underscoring the economistic conception of public
goods employed by Kaul and her associates, in short, may seem persua-
sively to suggest just the state-centred and state-limited conclusion they
seek to move beyond.
Why this would be too simple a critique, however, is because it
depends upon our interpreting as conceptual blindness or prejudice,
244 Securing states of security

and dismissing as mere tautology, what may instead and more chal-
lengingly be viewed as considered sociologically grounded judgement.
If the answer to an unduly ‘thin’ conception of public goods that is
unable to account for any of its particular sites of articulations – in this
case transnational or global sites – is to replace it with a thicker sense,
we still need to demonstrate why and how the ingredients of that
thicker mix might become available at any particular transnational or
global site. How, in other words, does a more socially grounded sense
of security as a public good akin to that which we have sought to locate
at the state level begin to ‘catch on’ in the transnational context? How,
if at all, do we conceive of security provision at the transnational level,
like the statist template, as a platform for the achievement of other
goods of (transnational) political community? How, if at all, do we
conceive of security as an education in transnational society, just as it
has this tutorial role in national society? And how, if at all, do security
concerns and their treatment help constitute transnational publics
alongside similarly constituted national publics? For if we cannot
imagine that, and how at least some of these things in at least some
measure are happening or might happen at the transnational or global
level, then we cannot escape the limits of the instrumental conception
at the transnational and global level.
The very posing of these questions alerts us to just how difficult it
is to answer them with any degree of affirmation. In particular, we
cannot simply assume that the problem is one of time-lag, that in due
course transnational public sentiment and the structures which feed
off and refuel that common feeling will emerge alongside the brave
new practice of international security. There is a wealth of literature
that indicates that despite the deepening of global interdependence,
the growth of institutions of global governance, and an arguably
greater public consciousness of both of these developments, senti-
ments of trust, loyalty and abstract solidarity remain somewhat
‘stuck’ at national or subnational levels – a stubborn tendency that
continues to condition the development of even a relatively mature
post-national political order such as the EU (see, e.g., Grimm 1995;
Weiler 1999; Haltern 2003). There appears not to exist, in other
words, the common store of memories, myths, symbols and language,
or any equivalent basis of affinity, around which forms of identifica-
tion and belonging can coalesce and take shape at a regional or global
level (Held and McGrew 2002: 30). It may appear, then, that the cul-
Security as a global public good 245

tural bar for imagining and giving institutional expression to the

public interest in this cultural sense remains set at the level of the
nation state.3 Indeed, it is precisely the imbalance between strong
national cultures and weak post-national solidarity that in part
explains why the development of such new security institutions as
have emerged has often been driven by professional and bureaucratic
interests (Deflem 2003; N. Walker 2003), and why such interests have
been able to pursue technocratic security agendas in ways that are
remote from popular sentiment and demands, and insulated from any
effective form of democratic scrutiny. What is more, to the extent that
the development of transnational security does nevertheless register
in a deeper cultural sense, it may do so in ways that reinforce rather
than supplement nationalist sentiments. Under the combined influ-
ence of professional and bureaucratic interests and of the performa-
tive effects of a discourse of existential threat, the definition of public
interest within the transnational security configuration tends to be
presented in terms of narrowly drawn security registers. A strong,
exclusionary and threatened sense of we-feeling that trades in xeno-
phobic stereotypes of the criminal tends to develop in consequence,
as a key form of corroboration of a police-centred and militaristic
politics of security.
But we should of course be careful not to replace conceptual fiat with
sociological essentialism. There may be something embedded, but
there is certainly nothing inevitable about the present constellation of
identities and institutional architecture – nothing that says that they are
the only possible medium and outcome of a transnational security pol-
itics. It is our task in the remainder of the chapter to explore how other
possibilities might be imagined and pursued.

13
Consider, as an instance of this, the following conundrum. Which constituencies
– beyond the immediate victims and their families or representatives – are likely
to be outraged or moved to action by an abuse or atrocity involving, say, Europol
officers or members of a UN peacekeeping mission? Possible answers appear to
include: (i) hardly anyone at all; (ii) co-nationals of the victims; (iii) members of
transnational human rights organizations; (iv) co-nationals of the officers con-
cerned; (v) European or globally conscious citizens ashamed that ‘our’ police
have acted in such a way. Our point here is that the answer is currently unlikely
to be (v). This does, however, cut two ways. The lack of affective attachment to
transnational police organizations makes it less likely that public audiences will
seek to deny that ‘our’ police could ever do such a thing, thereby laying the
potential ground for a less prejudiced politics of security (N. Walker 2002b).
246 Securing states of security

Models of transnational security

In this section, we begin to explore the wider frontiers of the transna-
tional security imaginary by bringing this initial problematization of
what a transnational public interest might entail into ‘conversation’
with various models of transnational security. These different models –
namely, the state-centric approach, unilateralism, security regimes or
communities, global civil society and cosmopolitanism – are drawn
from the current literature on international relations and globalization
and from the practical circumstances of transnational politics. They
have explanatory and normative dimensions – seeking to account both
for how the world of transnational relations is presently configured and
for what it ought and is likely to become. We can identify the key
assumptions underlying these explanatory and normative differences
and so usefully situate the various models in relation to one another –
and also to our preferred alternative – by reference to the thinness or
thickness of their conception of policing and security as public goods at
both domestic and transnational levels. This give rises to the range of
permutations depicted in figure 1. Security can (1) be produced as a thin
public good at both the state and at the transnational level (as proposed
by the UNDP authors, and, as we shall see, by many cosmopolitans). It
can (2) be thick at the state level and thin at transnational level (as in
various state-centric models and under unilateralism), or else (3) thick
at the transnational and thin at the domestic levels (a possibility implicit
in some cosmopolitan writing). Or, finally, security can (4) be under-
stood in thick, social and cultural, terms at both the state and trans-
national levels (a possibility implicit in some security regimes and global
civil society models, and more fully developed in our own approach).
The models overlap and are not necessarily mutually incompatible, yet

State Transnational

1 Thin Thin

2 Thick Thin

3 Thin Thick

4 Thick Thick

Figure 1. Dimensions of trans/national security

Security as a global public good 247

each continues to offer a distinctive range of perspectives on the current

practice, possibilities and prospects of political arrangements beyond
the state, and so of the current practice, problems and prospects of
transnational security. Let us consider each in turn.

The state-centric approach

This describes a wide umbrella of positions within the international
relations literature, and a still dominant set of attitudes within interna-
tional relations practice, that have in common an enduring attachment
to the state as the sole or main actor in global politics. Such an orien-
tation covers all the main variants of the realist and liberal internation-
alist schools, and the various hybrids that incorporate elements of
both.4 Traditionally, the distinguishing feature of the realist approach
has been its emphasis on the self-interest of state actors, the prevalence
of power politics and the consequent ‘anarchy’ of the international
system (Bull 1977) – similar to the Hobbesian state of nature but with
no credible Leviathan to impose international order.5 Accordingly, real-
ists see international cooperation as hard to achieve, difficult to main-
tain and always ultimately dependent upon the balance of state powers
and interests. In this picture international institutions and regimes can
do little to mitigate the anarchic impulses of the international order.
Whereas realism is commonly regarded as the dominant theory – and
even more dominant practice – in the history of international relations,
liberalism by contrast has been described as the ‘tradition of optimism’
(Clark 1989: 49–66). Unlike realists, liberal internationalists have

14
See, in particular, the so-called ‘neo-neo debate’ in which neo-realist and neo-
liberal institutionalists over the course of the 1980s and 1990s gradually con-
verged on a common agenda of debate and priorities, and even began to share
some founding premises (see Baldwin 1993).
15
The major difference within this school is between the classic realism typified in
the writings of Hans Morgenthau (e.g. 1948) and the structural realism of
Kenneth Waltz (e.g. 1959, 1993) and his followers. Whereas the former stresses
the self-interested character of the states themselves, the latter is more interested
in the instability of an international order defined by the absence of an over-
arching authority and asymmetry of power. However, whether the Hobbesian
problem of international relations is due mainly to the intrinsic ‘nature’ of states
or to their coordination problems, the same basically pessimistic conclusions are
drawn about the possibility of any framework of international cooperation in
which these initial state preferences are qualitatively transformed and deepened
by the very process of such cooperation.
248 Securing states of security

tended to believe in the possibility of international peace and order

being stably achieved through some harmony or concurrence of inter-
ests, or even through the sharing or development of certain ideals con-
cerning the proper conduct of international relations and its proper
respect for individual and collective values. For the liberal, the tendency
is not to see the interests of states as being purely homogeneous and
selfish, but as reflecting more fluid domestic coalitions of interest and
preferences and in turn as being more responsive to the fluid coalitions
of interests and preferences of other states. Self-interest, then, is always
mitigated by an enlightened view about the value of cooperation, and
perhaps about other more substantive values which different domestic
coalitions or segments of domestic coalitions find in common, and
peace and order may be stabilized or nurtured through a transnational
institutional framework in which success is defined not in terms of the
absolute interests of states – even the most powerful states – but in terms
of the prospect of ‘positive-sum’ gains for all.
For all of their sometimes stark differences of orientation as regards
the motivations of actors and the viability of transnational institutions,
realists and liberals, as already noted, continue to agree that the dom-
inant actors – in the first and last analyses – remain the states. States
are the main source of capacity, the main reference point of legitimacy
– thus consigning international institutions to a kind of delegated legit-
imacy at best – and the main source of both the definition of purposes
of security cooperation and the wherewithal to guarantee its effective-
ness. But whatever their merits under the traditional Westphalian
model of the international system, in conditions of exponentially
increased transnational exchange there is an inherent instability in
both these solutions. Such is the range and volume of interdependence
and transnational externalities involved in global security decision-
making, and such is the range of decision-making required to address
this, that the adequacy of each approach is acutely challenged. The
realists have severe problems in locating a stable balance of power to
cope with the increasing scope for an anarchy of colliding interests
emanating not only from state but also from non-state entities, while
the liberal internationalists find it difficult to locate an institutional
framework with sufficiently stable state support, and, in the face of dis-
agreement over ends and the limits of delegated power, with sufficient
decision-making economy and implementation capacity to cope with
the multifarious problems of interdependence.
Security as a global public good 249

This state-centred logic might, for example, help us make sense of

the chequered history of Interpol – the most venerable of the extant
international policing institutions. Born in 1923 and revived in 1946,
Interpol’s enduring record is as an organization of uncertain constitu-
tional status in international law, and, being perennially vulnerable to
the indifference and neglect or self-interested exploitation of the states
whose expedient resource it is (realism) or who are its contracting prin-
cipals (liberalism), as an entity that reflects the influence as well as the
restrictions and instability in both positions (see, e.g., M. Anderson
1989). The actual or predicted limitations of each position – realist and
liberal – can of course reinforce the claim of the other, and certainly the
political history of Interpol has remained resolutely state-centred. But
the common limitations of realism and liberalism can also lead in the
direction of a number of other, less state-centred approaches to be dis-
cussed below.

The new unilateralism

Before we turn to these other approaches, however, we should con-
sider one other possibility – one that is also state-centred, but in the
singular rather than the plural. What we are referring to is the new
unilateralism registered or advocated by those who see in the demise
of Cold War bi-polarity and the rise of the United States as by far the
world’s most powerful military actor, the empirical preconditions –
and, perhaps, the normative hope – of a new kind of empire. Again,
there are a number of variants on a position which sees the United
States as having the capacity and the legitimacy to be the ‘world’s
policeman’ (perhaps the most telling active metaphor for the gradual
merging of internal and external security concerns). At one end of the
continuum there is an ultra-realist perspective, which holds the United
States entitled to assert and defend its interests wherever they fall, and
treats the fate of all other interests as dependent upon non-interfer-
ence with, or even support for, American priorities (The White House
2002). At the other end of the spectrum is the ‘empire-lite’ brand
(Ignatieff 2003), wherein the United States provides a vehicle for
spreading certain ‘civilized’ values around the globe. In this second
kind of approach, the United States might indeed be projected and
viewed as a kind of surrogate for failed or faltering liberal interna-
tional institutions from the UN downwards, perhaps simply holding
250 Securing states of security

the fort until the structures damaged by Iraq and its aftermath are
repaired or replaced.6
What is true of all variants of the new unilateralism, however, is the
aggressively proactive approach of the USA in pursuit of its conception
of its interest or of the common good. Sometimes the suggestion is made
in the context of the new unilateralism or indeed the post-9/11 approach
to terror more generally (e.g. Ignatieff, 2003, 2004) that while aggres-
sive assertiveness may indeed be the price of a militaristic approach, a
policing-centred approach tends by its nature to be less monocular and
more cooperative. But this must be treated with great caution. To begin
with, as already noted, there is an increased blurring of internal and
external security mentalities, practices and personnel. Secondly, this is
entirely consistent with a logic of empire – or at least of an asymmetri-
cally centred world order – in which external policy tends to be treated
simply as the pursuit of the internal policy of the centre in another arena,
and, reciprocally, internal policy at the centre is pursued with a view to
securing domestic interests against external challenge and threat
(Andreas and Price 2001). As regards the foreign arm of domestic secur-
ity policy, whether it be the overseas activities of the FBI, the DEA
(Drugs Enforcement Administration) or the myriad other forms of
agency and liaison through which the USA establishes a police presence
abroad – and by no means only in its Latin American and Caribbean
‘neighbourhood’ – there is much evidence of the direct pursuit through
widely dispersed security institutions and networks of domestic US
policy agendas in areas such as drugs control, organized crime and
illegal immigration (N. Walker 2003). And, likewise, as regards the
domestic arm of foreign policy, the consolidation of previously discrete
specialist security capabilities and concerns (Immigration and Natural-
ization, the Coast Guard, Customs, Federal Emergency Management,
etc.,) after 9/11 in the Department of Homeland Security, alongside the
development of a more integrated and robust approach to the legislation
of US security interests in compact with the EU and other security areas

16
The post-9/11 (and post-Hardt and Negri 2000) literature on American empire
is voluminous indeed. It ranges not only from the realist to the idealist, but also –
and often cross-cutting the realist–idealist division – from the celebratory to the
denunciatory, and differs greatly on the degree of central control and unity of
purpose which the conduct of empire is claimed to entail. See, for example,
Ikenberry (2002), Barber (2003), Mann (2003), Todd (2003), Johnson (2004)
and Ferguson (2004).
Security as a global public good 251

(Bunyan 2004) on matters such as data on airline passengers, mutual

extradition, exchange of evidence and anti-terrorist cooperation, both
reflects and facilitates a much more concerted awareness of, and prose-
cution of, external interests in internal policy domains.
In this new hybridized world of security there are significant prob-
lems with both realist and liberal variants of unilateralism, and indeed
with the (more common) perspectives which involve some kind of com-
bination of the two. First, in terms of capacity, this position tends to
take a myopic approach towards the nature of power. ‘Hard’ military
power and, to a lesser extent, other types of internal security capacity
tend to be seen as the key to all power, and there is little or no recog-
nition of other ‘soft’ forms of power – economic, regulatory and cul-
tural – which continue to be dispersed across other sites, and which
may indeed be reinforced at these other sites by American security
activism and the opposition which this generates (Nye 2002). Secondly,
even if military power had not – once again – proved itself to be non-
fungible in Iraq, the idea of a single state imposing solutions to the
problem of global goods is profoundly lacking in legitimacy. This is
most nakedly the case from an ultra-realist position, where the ‘specific
order’ of the United States is treated as pre-emptive of, or at best co-
terminous with, the ‘general order’ associated with a global conception
of the public interest (Marenin 1982). Yet it is also true of a more
value-based approach – perhaps even more dangerously so to the
extent that this lends messianic support to a greater interventionism.
At worst this is merely the export of one set of understandings of how
to resolve the problem of global peace and security without any sensi-
tivity to other strategies, models and background cultural propensities.
At best it is a kind of ersatz liberal internationalism, with the United
States, like the crudest type of hypothetical social contractualist,
assuming what the diversity of states and peoples would decide was in
the general interest if only they could overcome their collective action
problems – a stance that allows little or no scope for genuine dialogue
in order to test and validate, still less generate, that sense of a global
public interest (Habermas 2006; N. Walker forthcoming a).

Security regimes or communities

The distinctiveness of the regime approach lies in its identification of
the ways in which states either with certain common interests or
252 Securing states of security

common values – again depending upon whether the underlying theo-

retical orientation is realist or liberal – come together in certain policy
areas – such as security, environment, economy or communication – or
in certain regional groupings – such as the EU or NAFTA – to provide
a framework of common rules of action and decision-making proce-
dures. There is an inherently optimistic flavour to regime theory to the
extent that it seeks to move beyond the vast problems of legitimacy and
effectiveness when the possibility of developing transnational politics
from and beyond national building-blocks is considered in the abstract,
and instead concentrates on more concrete and more discriminating
possibilities and achievements of collaboration and common cause-
making (Buzan 1991: chs. 4–5; Little 1997; Adler and Barnett 1998).
However, the strength of the regime approach is also its limitation.
Even if it could be assumed that there is some kind of equality of rep-
resentation and influence, and some level of general consideration of
the common good as opposed to mere strategic collaboration, within
particular regimes the regime approach is always left with a profound
problem of the ‘outside’. We return below to these positive assump-
tions about regimes, which are surely more valid in more broadly inte-
grationist and more deeply historically embedded regional regimes (in
particular the EU) than in many global policy-specific regimes, and
more plausible in areas where resources are more evenly distributed
than where there is a significant underlying asymmetry (as with mili-
tary capacity inside NATO). On the debit side, regimes can act and
understand themselves as universal nations or decentred empires
exporting a particular conception of the good (liberal) or certain ‘exter-
nalities’ as the cost of the internal preservation of the good (realist) to
those who have no voice and little capacity to influence that concep-
tion of the good. For example, in its ‘conditionality’ approach to east-
ward Enlargement and in its ‘neighbourhood’ policy generally in the
context of its Justice and Home Affairs policy engine, the EU is vul-
nerable to the charge that in making secure borders, the suppression of
certain kinds of criminality, and the exclusion or return of certain types
of undesirable ethnic groups its first priority, it tends to export insecu-
rity as the price of protecting its own security (Anderson and Apap
2002; Guild and Bigo 2002; Pastore 2002; Lindahl 2005, Melossi
2005). More generally, as with the famous ‘democratic peace’ thesis
(Doyle 1995; Brown et al. 1996), by which the ‘separate peace’ estab-
lished by democratic states is celebrated and preserved, the regime
Security as a global public good 253

approach can reinforce a process of global ghettoization and a myopic

or unreflectively superior approach to the needs of others.
Moreover, just as there are limitations to the effectiveness of modern
empires, there are limitations to the effectiveness and legitimacy of
regimes even on their own security terms, something that is exacer-
bated by two additional features of the context within which regimes
have emerged. First, regimes may have significant coordination prob-
lems or clashes of interest or values with other regimes in adjacent
policy areas or other regions – or indeed with other powerful states.
One need think only of the deterioration of US–EU relations – at least
at the level of ‘high politics’ – in recent years to see how regimes can
contribute to a new kind of instability in the balance of power follow-
ing the Cold War (Kagan 2003). Secondly, given that the success of
even the best-embedded ‘post-sovereign’ regional or functional regimes
in transcending the particular interests of the states within these
regimes remains limited and precarious (Morgan 2005), not only can
this lead to internal division and asymmetry of influence, but also to
under-capacity (Barcelona Report 2004), indiscriminate securitization
(Bigo 1996; Huysmans 2006) and the maintenance of an obstinate gap
between the development and diversification of supranational internal
security practice and its regulation. Notwithstanding the expansion of
the EU’s capability in policing and related matters – since the intro-
duction of the Europol office and various flanking forms of coopera-
tion in the Third Pillar of the EU Treaty at Maastricht in 1992; through
the embracing of new and more penetrative policy instruments and
fewer national decision-making vetoes in the Area of Freedom,
Security and Justice baptized at Amsterdam in 1997; to the attempt (so
far unsuccessful) at the overall constitutionalization of the European
supranational regime in the early years of the new century (N. Walker
2004; Guild and Carrera 2005; Kostakopolou forthcoming) – many
observers would testify to the resilience of these problems. For the con-
tinuing deep ambivalence of member states towards putting internal
security matters in common over and above purely domestic security
imperatives and priorities not only produces a recurrent problem of
internal trust and of credible commitments at the political and the pro-
fessional level. It also, and partly in response to default national
parochialism, leads to the accentuation of certain narrow and poten-
tially illiberal and exclusionary frames, whether organized crime,
illegal immigration, or, now, terrorism, as a means of mobilizing
254 Securing states of security

transnational bias – a trend that favours the prioritization of a nar-

rowly instrumental conception of concurrent security concerns.7 Here,
more than anywhere else in the field of transnational security politics,
and precisely because it is more developed than any other area of
transnational security politics, we see the re-enactment of the deep
struggle, transposed from its original state context, to develop the four
Rs of civilizing security practice – resources, recognition, rights and
reasons – in the face of and against the pathological tendencies of
paternalism, consumerism, authoritarianism and fragmentation.

Global civil society

One further, though partial, response to the capacity, legitimacy and
effectiveness problems of the traditional state-centred approach and
the unilateralist and regime alternatives to, or outgrowths of, that
approach lies in the emergence of transnational civil society (Kaldor
2003; Keane 2003). It is now well documented that there has been a
huge and spiralling increase both in the quantity and in the quality of
influence of international NGOs and other movements of ‘disorga-
nized civil society’ in recent decades (de Burca and Walker 2003;
Anheier et al. 2004). Global civil society responds to the democratic or
participation deficit in transnational politics in at least four ways. First,
it provides forms of representation of interests and values that are not
state-centred, but which track and help to generate common or con-
vergent preferences across states. Secondly, international NGOs in par-
ticular offer a vital means of monitoring abuses of individual and
group rights in the operation of international politics, a function that
is especially important in the area of policing and security – as the
activities of groups as diverse as Amnesty International, Statewatch

17
One consequence of this is a continuing propensity to reconceive of security
within the EU as a ‘club good’ – something more appropriate to particular
groups of closely aligned, integration-friendly countries than to the EU as a
whole. This was evident, for instance, in the initial Schengen initiative in 1985,
undertaken by a small group of countries who wanted to anticipate the general
dismantling of border controls within the EU and the new security measures
required to deal with a borderless regime. It has very recently resurfaced in the
form of the 2005 Prum Convention – an initiative by substantially the same
group of ‘core’ EU countries to push ahead with new and potentially wide-
reaching forms of cross-border police cooperation and common operations
outside the framework of the constitutive treaties of the EU (Balzacq et al. 2006).
Security as a global public good 255

and Interrights indicate. Thirdly, global civil society provides a key

means for developing the idea of a global ‘public sphere’, a space of
communication and interaction within which notions of a global inter-
est may be framed, debated and generated. It thus aspires to remedy
the underlying cultural base of the democratic deficit in international
relations, the lack of a genuine consciousness and articulation of
common interest on which transnational institutions can feed and to
which they must respond. Fourthly, global civil society, and the ‘anti-
globalization movement’ in particular, claims to offer a prefiguration
of an alternative paradigm of world politics – one in which states are
no longer the dominant institutions, violence is no longer power’s ‘final
analysis’, and/or capital is no longer the dominant transactional logic
and policy motor.
Clearly, any serious attempt to think through the possibility of devel-
oping a conception of a transnational public interest dedicated to the
articulation and implementation of global public goods must take seri-
ously the aspirations and achievements of global civil society. Yet
global civil society can only ever be one part of the jigsaw, and indeed
unless the other parts are also in place some of the effects of global civil
society can be perverse, acting to undermine as much as to advance the
best aspirations on which it is based. In the first place, global civil
society cannot replace the policy capacity of the present configuration
of state and transnational institutions, but only supplement and com-
plement it. And in so doing, it must avoid two opposite dangers. One
is of co-option, a danger well documented in the world of both national
and international NGO politics. The other is that of negative capacity,
the legitimate oppositional role of civil society threatening to descend
into a form of critique which cannot articulate a positive counterfac-
tual, or can only do so in the most vaguely utopian terms. This kind of
negative capacity, ironically, can lead to a kind of default statism, with
all attempts to put transnational interests or values institutionally in
common condemned a priori for their lack of democratic credentials.
In the second place, transnational civil society must attend to its own
legitimacy problems. Direct global democracy is of course not an
option, both on account of the scale and the diversity of policy areas
and the need for coordination between them, in which case global civil
society movements must be as attentive to their own deliberative pro-
cedures and representational capacity as the institutions they monitor
and criticize. Thirdly, and cumulatively, global civil society must be
256 Securing states of security

concerned with questions of effective implementation. In security pol-

itics, as elsewhere, an opposition culture must be seriously engaged
with the implementation gap – with the consideration that the ‘evil’ of
global politics in the face of unrealized global public goods lies as much
in false negatives as it does in false positives; as much in inaction – the
failure to translate concerns into policy and policy into normative reg-
ulation and normative regulation into effective application – as it does
in illegitimate action. This requires an approach that is at once critical
and constructive, as willing to support institutions for what they might
achieve as pillory them for what they have not, or hold them to account
for what they have wrongly pursued and accomplished.

Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolitanism has, since Kant, enjoyed a richly diverse develop-
ment (Kleingeld 1999) and been associated at its outer limits with ideas
of ‘federal’ global government and citizenship. But most contemporary
cosmopolitans do not pitch their ambitions in such terms. Instead,
many of today’s cosmopolitans want to emphasize and give precedence
to two sorts of developments (Archibugi et al. 1998; Held 2004; cf.
Waldron 2000, 2003b; Vertovec and Cohen 2002). First, at the level
of social ontology and normative theory, they want to stress, against
communitarian positions, that an appropriate focus of our attempts to
improve the world should be, and increasingly can be, either human-
ity as a whole or indeed any section of humanity regardless of whether
it is bound together by any special ties of affinity. In turn, this is based
on a conception of human nature which questions the dominance, and
in some cases even the continued relevance, of affective ties rooted in
the traditions and practices of particular state and substate political
communities.8 Rather, as global circuits of communication and inter-
dependence spread, and as institutions develop to articulate and track
these new circuits, this provides a practical context within which
transnational ties of trust, loyalty and common cause can be fostered.
And it is this new range of transnational institutions that provides a

18
A distinction may be drawn here between strict and moderate cosmopolitans,
with only the (less common) former category holding that the community of all
human beings is the exclusive reference point for moral community. See, e.g.,
Kleingeld and Brown (2002).
Security as a global public good 257

second focus of emphasis: not, as said, some rigid and utopian notion
of universal order framed by a world government, but a strengthening
and democratization of the existing mosaic of institutions at global and
regional level, with regions such as the EU given great emphasis as
much for their role as a prototype of the ‘civilian-power’-based possi-
bilities of ‘post-national’ collective action as for their specific contri-
bution to current transnational politics (see, e.g., Zielonka 1998;
Cooper 2003). Cosmopolitanism tends, furthermore, to emphasize the
strengths of global civil society movements and their role, in symbio-
sis with the new institutions, in forging new forms of transnational col-
lective identity and solidarity.
There is much that is attractive in the cosmopolitan vision. On the
one hand, its emphasis on the needs and aspirations of common
humanity – its insistence on regarding ‘nothing human as alien’
(Waldron 2000: 243) – puts the question of global public goods
squarely in focus, and does so within a basically optimistic intellectual
and political framework, one that rejects the sterile dichotomies and
stalled understanding associated with a certain type of conceptual or
sociological essentialism. On the other hand, the rejection of any
simple institutional solutions, or of any complacent sense that new
forms of political community will inevitably emerge around these insti-
tutions after a decent time-lag, and the stress on the need to nurture
forms of popular consciousness in conjunction with institutional devel-
opment sit well with the insight that effectiveness and legitimacy are
intimately related aspirations, and that effective implementation of
global policy – including global security policy – depends on both.
Yet cosmopolitanism remains somewhat predisposed to underplaying
the continuing relevance – and value – of national and other local norms
of political community, and so to making the opposite error to the kind
of preoccupation with national political community that we find in the
different variants of the state-centred approach to international relations
(Fine and Smith 2003: 484). Certainly, modern cosmopolitans do not
want to phase out national institutions. But this seems to be a pragmatic
concession – a recognition of their embedded influence over and thus
indispensability to the development of more robust transnational insti-
tutions – rather than an acknowledgement and appreciation of any irre-
ducible value in local political community and the goods which they can
articulate and provide. The danger, here, is that it is assumed that
because global public goods transcend domestic public goods in scope
258 Securing states of security

and jurisdiction, they also eclipse them in intrinsic value, and that the
appropriate model is one in which domestic public goods are simply
nested within and finally subordinate to the demands of global public
goods.
Such an approach would seem to rest upon one or both of two mis-
takes. In the first place, it may be that, as noted, cosmopolitans simply
fail to acknowledge any irreducible value in local community. And in
our immediate terms, this translates into a failure to view public goods,
including the good of security, as thick socially constitutive and socially
vindicatory goods rather than, as we see for instance in the case of Held
(2004: ch. 6), as merely convergent or instrumental public goods.
Alternatively or additionally – and returning finally to the zero-sum
thinking whose challenge we highlighted at the beginning of the
chapter – even if the thickness of the domestic good of security is
acknowledged, this may be seen as something to regret and to suppress
inasmuch as it is thereby concluded or assumed that a parallel concep-
tion of cosmopolitan solidarity sufficiently robust to address the
common security needs of wider levels of community is automatically
ruled out. On this view, the preferred options are either – much as with
the UNDP – the promotion of a ‘thin–thin’ conception of security at
the state and transnational levels (see figure 1 above), or else a politics
that seeks to build a thick ideal of the public interest at and only at the
global level precisely because it is the level that knows no boundaries
other than common humanity. Such a conclusion, we would argue, is
flawed both as a theoretical understanding of how and why people
come to place and retain matters in common and as a practical strat-
egy to draw upon the sources of social capacity and popular legitimacy
in building an effective framework for the development of global
public goods – including those of policing and security.

Security as a global public good

In the above section, we presented the attempt to cope with increasing
interdependence in global politics in general, and in global security pol-
itics in particular, in terms of a continuum marked at either end by solu-
tions which collapse their vision of a viable and legitimate politics into
a state-centred approach or into a universalist cosmopolitanism which
trumps particular ties and obligations. Each of these positions contin-
ues to gives insufficient recognition to one of the two key coordinates
Security as a global public good 259

in any viable and legitimate global politics of security. The other alter-
natives are also unsatisfactory, though for different reasons. The uni-
lateralist approach merely compounds the problems of the state-centred
approach. The regime approach and the civil society suggest important
institutional and cultural parts of the jigsaw respectively, but do not
solve the whole puzzle.
The way ahead, in our view, and the focus of our closing remarks, is
to provide a principled basis, grounded in a proper understanding of
the plural structure of public goods, on which to give proper recogni-
tion to both levels simultaneously – the universal and the domestic –
and from that starting point to begin to imagine the institutional and
social developments which would give best effect to that plural struc-
ture in terms of the maximization of the net overall state of security.
Such a principled basis starts with a reassertion not just of the virtue
of the state, but, as we discussed at length in chapter 7, of the neces-
sity of that virtue. Just because the public good of security, unlike some
public goods, is about more than the convergence of discrete individ-
ual interests but has in addition an inherently social dimension, and
just because, in consequence, this social dimension is woven into deep
cultural understandings of what it is to constitute a social group as a
public, we cannot ignore this deeper sociological dynamic in forging a
comprehensive framework. Objective security depends on the social
environment, subjective security depends on the quality of social rela-
tions, and our basic sense of preparedness to put things in common is
partly understood through a security sensibility and vernacular on
account of these thick social properties. This, in turn, reinforces the
very sense of trust and confidence, and of rootedness in the social
world, which is the stuff of (subjective) security as a public good. This
is a tightly enmeshed and self-reinforcing set of relations. It both pre-
supposes and consolidates the idea of a resilient unit of political com-
munity, and of a sense of location within that political community, the
paradigm form and basic level of which, as we saw in chapter 7,
remains the state. At this basic level of political community, therefore,
the social dimension of security simply cannot be wished away. It may
be a matter of regret if, building on the meddling, partisan, imperialist
or idiotic tendencies of the state, that social dimension develops in
accordance with a dynamic that encourages paternalistic, authoritar-
ian, consumerist or fragmentary trends, but it cannot be a matter of
regret that the inevitable exists in some form or other.
260 Securing states of security

However, and this is our second point of principle, the fact that there
remains a strong reinforcing dynamic in support of national political
community and national conceptions of security does not mean, as we
have said, that we need despair at the possibility of the parallel realiza-
tion of a global conception of the public good, or that we need conceive
of that higher level merely in ‘thin’ convergent terms. We need not, in
other words, especially if we are to develop the idea and practice of
axiomatic security in the transnational arena, conceive of security
between different and overlapping levels of political community in zero-
or negative-sum terms, and so we need not be resigned as a matter of
sociological default to a state-centred conception of security. Indeed, the
prevalence of such zero-sum thinking is a sign of how the pervasive view
of security we summarized at the end of chapter 6 currently structures
world politics, either in the form of an introverted, fear-laden, reactive
superficiality and its attendant police and militarized mindsets (its
shallow and wide form), or because of the operation in the international
arena of states seeking to defend their particular homogenous and secur-
itized conception of ontological security (its deep and wide form).
There are a number of reasons why we need not accept this state of
affairs and on the basis of which we can transcend such zero-sum cal-
culations. The first takes as its point of departure the purely conver-
gent conception of global public goods. As the ceaseless preoccupation
with international security of even the most state-centred realist schol-
ars eloquently indicates, the fact that states have such a strong self-
interest in security means that they are, and will always remain, willing
participants in collaborative strategies, notwithstanding the difficulties
involved in stabilizing these strategies in institutional terms. Indeed,
the problems of stabilization do not arise from a lack of awareness of
the interdependence, but rather, from an acute and constant awareness
of interdependence coupled with a sometimes unbridled determination
to assert one’s own national interest in the light of the factors of inter-
dependence. Secondly, as the content of the internal security impera-
tive of states is in all cases strikingly similar, states may be encouraged
nevertheless to think of the global public good as something more than
the optimal convergence of presumptively diverse individual state
interests. As we were reminded in chapter 4, perhaps more so than in
any other policy domain all states adhere to the same broad concep-
tion of general order – the same appreciation of (and appreciation of
their need to respond to) their populations’ desire to live in a state of
Security as a global public good 261

tranquillity and in a context of predictable social relations. Thirdly and

relatedly, states may also find common cause in their very understand-
ing of the social quality of the public good of security. Earlier, when
discussing alternative ways of providing security, we contrasted the
rivalry between states and clubs and private actors, on the one hand,
and the rivalry between different states, on the other. For all that their
particular interests may differ, states also have a common understand-
ing of the social and public quality of that which they seek to defend,
which in turn allows, however unevenly and intermittently, for a
greater imaginative openness to the possibility of other sites and levels
of social or public ‘added value’ in the accomplishment of security.9
The constancy and priority of international security needs (and the
urgency that arises from them) and the ‘mirror effect’ of regarding
other states in the process of pursuing these needs (and the empathy
which this entails) are clearly important ingredients of being able to
configure global security in positive-sum terms. But a crucial final
reason why we can begin to imagine a thicker transnational concep-
tion of security alongside thick individual national conceptions can
also be added to the mix and has to do with the very dynamic through
which the relationship between sociality and security is produced. In
the main part of the book, with its concern to think through the civi-
lizing of security first and foremost at the state level, we have tended
to view that relationship as something always already accomplished,
and to concentrate instead on avoiding the pathologies and pursuing
the promise of its self-reinforcement. What this tends to overlook, and
what is by contrast much more apparent and pertinent in the ‘unfin-
ished’ world of international society, is that in the making of political
community security possesses a chronological as well as a logical pri-
ority. When we summed up our discussion of axiomatic security at the

19
To return to the EU example, it is easier to think of ‘European security’ as a holis-
tic social good – as something whose value may increase just by the fact of its
being held in common – if one already has a sense of the same process at work
in the nurturing of domestic security. Indeed, the very fact that European secu-
rity ‘makes sense’ in these experiential terms is one of the reasons that the Area
of Freedom, Security and Justice has been pushed so strongly as a catalyst of EU
integration in recent years. Public goods which do not possess that strong social
element, such as the provision of utilities, carry less intuitive appeal when relo-
cated at new sites, although, by the same token, the fact that they do not possess
a thick resonance anywhere else means they are also less likely to provoke strong
resistance from those affected by them anywhere else.
262 Securing states of security

end of chapter 6 by referring to its dual catalytic role – as a platform

for and an education in society – we were alluding to just that dual
sense of priority. In turn, this helps us to think about how central the
practices of transnational security are to the very constitution of inter-
national society, however immature or frustrated such a project might
be. It is difficult for us to imagine, and, more importantly, difficult for
global decision-makers to imagine, the effective supply of other global
public goods without the stable platform supplied by the global public
good of security. Furthermore, it is difficult for us to imagine, and,
more importantly, difficult for global decision-makers to imagine, the
very idea of transnational society rather than merely relations between
discrete national societies in the absence of the salutary education a
common concern for security can provide in bringing together instru-
mental and affective registers of common action. What is more, the
‘social’ here is always more-or-less rather than either/or. Not only is
security necessarily ‘in at the beginning’ of new levels and points of
social relations, but just because of its catalytic role, its initial and con-
tinuing viability does not depend upon some prior standard of ‘social-
ity’ or ‘demos’ or ‘culture’ or whatever other basis of affinity or
measure of ‘we-feeling’ already having been reached, still less upon
these not having been reached or having been relinquished elsewhere.
Rather than in terms of absolute and mutually exclusive thresholds of
viability or success, therefore, the platform-building and societally gen-
erative work of security, if successfully initiated, can operate in accor-
dance with an incremental dynamic and with a different momentum in
various different sites – national and post-national – simultaneously.
Yet, of course, it would be naïve to assume that even democratic
states, if left to their own devices, will find their way to an optimal con-
ception of the global public good of security in addition to an optimal
conception of their own public good. We are claiming something much
more modest than that: namely, that states have a multiple and in some
measure mutually reinforcing structure of incentives to consider col-
laboration in protection of their security interests. Moreover, after a
century which has seen such defining state-transcending security events
as Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the nuclear arms race and, now, the rise
of network terror (Robertson 1992; Kaldor 2003: 112), they possess
some of the common vulnerabilities, value predilections and imagina-
tive tools to think at the same time about the possibility of a thicker
global model of security too – one in which they understand themselves
Security as a global public good 263

at least some of the time as representing not just national citizens but
also potential ‘citizens of the world’, and where to share a concern for
common humanity is both a necessary assumption and a constituent
part of a sense of regional or global security.
So we must start with states in building the institutional and social
framework necessary for the realization of some thicker notion of the
transnational public interest to parallel and complement state public
interests. But equally we must not and we need not finish with states.
Alongside states, and the bargaining structures and institutions set up
between states, we need some kind of influential regional and global
fora in which those who are not fettered by state interests, and whose
voice and ‘citizenship’ are not defined in exclusively statist terms, can
give fuller rein to their political imaginations and think through the
ways in which security may be achieved as a thick public good at the
global level. The reasons for this are not just ones of political morality
– concerning the increasing demands for a meta-democratic ‘reframing’
of the global order in recognition of these new and old constituencies
who are not well represented by states (Fraser 2005). They are also
intensely practical. States, we believe, are like any actors who have
much invested individually in a particular framework of collective
action, but who can nevertheless imagine another or additional frame-
work of collective action that might better serve the interests they hold
in common. That is to say, they may lack the individual will to seek, or
the collective negotiating dynamic to find, the optimal sense of these
common interests within the existing framework, yet just because of
their awareness of this, they will not necessarily or consistently be
averse to the construction or evolution of alternative frameworks which
do emphasize common rather than merely concurrent interests, and
which may provide both the cultural momentum and the adjusted
incentive structures to realize these common interests. Indeed, if this
were not true in principle, then it would be very hard to understand and
explain existing developments of international and supranational legal
and political regimes that move beyond the thin and unstable logic of
realism or other predominantly state-centred structures of control.
We must, even at this very late stage, remain vigilant in keeping the
promise made in the last chapter not to issue institutional wish lists – an
activity still more presumptuous and elusive in the volatile and precari-
ous world of contemporary transnational security than in the internal
structure of the state itself. In the most general terms, however, we would
264 Securing states of security

envisage an extension of our conception of anchored pluralism, now

looking upwards to transnational society as well as outwards to civil and
market society and downwards to substate society. The institutional
matrix should, and for the foreseeable future inevitably will, remain
anchored in states as the primary motors of common action and sources
of institutional initiative both within and beyond their boundaries. But
it should be pluralist in its principled and non-negotiable recognition,
not least by states themselves, that there are two levels of abstract polit-
ical community at which we can think of security as a thicker public
good that are not reducible to one another but which need different reg-
isters of debate and institutional fora for their articulation. At the second
level, transnational civil society and regional regimes would be impor-
tant additional sources of initiative and key participants, as they are
already defined in part in terms of their transcendence of national inter-
ests. Professional and administrative corps who have become distant
from national political contexts but, at their best, not from the security-
maximizing occupational ethics which drive situational decision-making
in these national contexts, would also, inevitably and potentially pro-
ductively, be significant players at this level.10 This, of course, would still
leave open the large ‘reframing’ question of how to address and resolve
the possible tensions between the ‘aggregative’ or convergent tendencies
of proposals or approaches arrived at in the purely national and inter-
national discourse and fora, on the one hand, and the more transcendent
proposals and approaches arrived at in regional and global fora, on the
other. But at least the tension, and the need for its negotiation, should
be institutionally recognized on the basis of a principled understanding
of the pluralism of levels of the public good of security, none of which
can hold a monopoly on ensuring or expressing security’s civilizing
virtue, if ever such virtue is to be optimized.

10
In particular, the work and research programme of Sheptycki (forthcoming) on
the idea of a transnational ‘constabulary ethic’ is suggestive here. This is partly
driven by the desire to turn the inevitability of high levels of police discretion in
transnational theatres into a virtue. But it is also partly based on a sense that the
idea of a common constabulary ethic is part of the constitutive self-understanding
of security operatives in many different contexts, and that this is driven not just
by professional self-interest or self-regard (of the type discussed under the pater-
nalism syndrome in chapter 8), but by a genuine structural continuity between the
dynamics of security-threatening situations across a broad range of national and
transnational contexts and a real sense of the value of a common policecraft in
repairing these situations.
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 Index

Abrahamsen, R. 235 ethnic minorities 80

Ackerman, B. 85, 90, 222(n) local policing 20
Adler, E. 252 authenticity, meaning of 17
Afghanistan Avant, D. 24, 210, 235
ghettos 23 Ayres, I. 136
military patrols 88, 235
policing 21, 123 balance of liberty and security 54–5
Agamben, G. 56(n), 83–4, 89–91 Baldwin, D. 247(n)
Ahire, P. 77(n) Barber, B. 3, 250(n)
Albrow, M. 79 Barnett, M. 252
Alderson, J. 121 Baudrillard, J. 203
Alexander, G. 126 Bauman, Z. 19, 24, 70–1, 82, 90, 107
Althusser, L. 75–6 Bayley, D. 28, 60, 62, 121, 123, 132,
al-Qaeda 3 133, 138, 149, 189
Anderson, B. 107 Beck, U. 19
Anderson, D. 113 Becker, H. 28
Anderson, M. 235, 249, 252 Belgium, police 62
Andreas, P. 235 Benhabib, S. 222
Anheier, H. 254 Benjamin, Walter 82, 83, 85
anti-terrorism legislation Benson, B. 67 (n)
UK, 86 Bentham, Jeremy 55
USA, 86, 87(n) Berki, R. N. 11
Apap, J. 252 Bernstein, S. 76
Aradau, C. 14 Bigo, D. 5, 9, 87, 88, 235, 238, 252,
Archibugi, D. 256 253
Area of Freedom, Security and Justice binary oppositions 12
(AFSJ) 87, 104 Bittner, E. 100, 191
Arato, A. 86 Blackstone, William 57
Argentina Blair, Tony 209
gang violence 23 Blakely, E. 148
legacy of state violence 132 Bobbitt, P. 201, 203, 209(n)
peace communities 138 Bodin, Jean 10, 41
societies in transition 77 Boer, M. den 126, 235
Association of Chief Police Officers Bohman, J. 222(n)
128 bombings
Audit Commission 128 Bali 2
Australia London 2
crime 9 Madrid 2

297
298 Index

bombings (cont.) Chalmers, D. 234

‘9/11’ 2, 3, 9, 10, 21, 56, 64, 74, 84, civil society 132, 136, 221, 236, 241,
85, 87, 88, 89, 112, 199, 234, 250 246, 254–6, 257
Bottoms, A. 202(n) civilization 10, 16
Bourdieu, P. 3, 27, 44(n), 107 civilizing security
Braithwaite, J. 130, 136, 188, 189 generally 215–16, 263–4
Bratton, W. 81, 123, 127 reasons 226–33
Brazil recognition 220–3, 227
ghettos 23 resources 216–23
society in transition 77 rights 223–6, 227
street kids 78 Clark, I. 247
Brewer, J. 112 Clinton, Bill 209
Britain Cohen, S. 75, 100, 103, 112, 135, 256
Crime and Disorder Act 1998 126 Cold War 21, 88, 249, 253
detention without trial 86 Coles, C. 122, 201
jurisdiction 20 Colquhoun, Patrick 57
private policing 22 Colombia
Brodeur, J.-P. 77 ghettos 23
Brogden, M. 74, 77(n), 113, 121, 136 treet violence 78
Brooks, T. R. 28 Commission on Human Security 15
Brown, E. 256(n) common good 133, 152, 153, 154
Brown, M. 252 communitarianism 5, 135, 153
Brunkhorst, H. 179 community building 136
Buchanan, K. 66 Community Support Officers 124, 125
Bull, H. 113, 247 Condorcet, Marquis de 53
Bullock, K. 128 Cooper, R. 257
Bunyan, T. 251 cosmic ordering 45(n), 47
Burca, G. de 254 cosmopolitanism 115, 237, 256–8
Burke, A. 14 Cowell, D. 79
Burke, J. 3 Cox, R. 38, 179
Butler, A. 128 Crawford, A. 15, 125–31, 211
Buzan, B. 11, 16, 85, 130, 252 Creveld, M. van 209(n)
crime, war on 11, 15, 17(n)
Cain, M. 123 criminology 4, 74, 189(n)
Caldeira, T. 77(n), 148, 210 critical security studies 13, 74, 83, 98,
Cambridge School 37–8 115
Camp Delta 89
Campbell, D. 83 Dalby, S. 92, 114
Canada Deflem, M. 235, 238, 245
ethnic minorities 80 De Lint, W. 130
police 9, 127 democracy
private policing 22 constraints 24
Canovan, M. 1, 69, 166, 201, 202 deliberation 213, 214, 220, 221,
Carrera, S. 253 222(n), 229
Cashmore, E. 75 democratic societies 9
Castells, M. 21 rights and principles 2, 12, 14, 92
Castoriadis, Cornelius 44 Della Porta, D. 79
Caygill, H. 88, 235 Dennis, N. 81
Index 299

Derrida, J. 84 France
Dillon, M. 5, 14, 83, 90, 92, 110, 115 civil disturbances 122(n)
Dixon, B. 124, 133 constitutional order 62
Dixon, D. 68, 99 jurisdiction 20
Douzinas, C. 88 penal moderation 197
Doyle, M. 252 police 62
drugs, war on 9, 11 Fraser, N. 223, 263
Dryzek, J. 222(n) Freeden, M. 52(n), 66
Dubber, M. D. 56–8, 61 freedoms
Dunn, John 4 fundamental 54, 84, 111, 207, 224
Dupont, B.1, 30, 121, 131, 133, 139, natural 51
174(n.2) negative 35, 40
Dyzenhaus, D. 90 Friedman, M. 66
Friedrich, C. J. 191
Edwards, A. 128 Fukuyama, F. 203
Elias, Norbert 17, 26, 59
Elliot, N. 67, 148 Gaebler, T. 24, 121
Ellison, G. 104, 123 Gambetta, D. 23
El Salvador 77 Gamble, A. 184(n)
Elster, J. 216 Gandhi, Mahatma 17(n)
Emsley, C. 27, 37, 113, 177 Gans, J. 127
equality of security provision 159 Garland, D. 67, 198, 199, 203(n)
Ericson, R. 11, 102, 127, 128 Germany
Estlund, D. 187 local policing 20
Etzioni, A. 145(n) penal moderation 197
European Gerstenberg, O. 135
Arrest Warrant 87 Geuss, R. 145(n)
cities 37 Giddens, A. 112, 160, 166
Crime Prevention Network 126 Gilmore, B. 87
Forum for Urban Safety 125 Gilroy, P. 207
languages 43 Girling, E. 204
European Convention on Human Glaeser, A. 177
Rights 13(n), 86 globalization
European Union (EU) 2, 3, 20, 21, 87, conditions of 1, 15, 16, 64, 108,
88, 123, 124, 135, 190, 235, 123, 246, 122(n.2)
250–2, 261(n) impact on states 18–19
Goldberg, D. T. 75
Falk, R. 106 Goldsmith, A. 62, 68, 77(n.1), 101,
Feldman, N. 89 123, 199, 235
Ferguson, N. 250(n) Goldstein, H. 121, 202
Ferret, J. 26 Goold, B. 224
Fielding, N. 101 Gordon, P. 76
Fine, R. 179, 257 Gorer, G. 109
Finer, S. 37, 39, 50 Gouldner, A. 109
Finland, police 62 governance
Fishkin, J. 222(n) generally 124, 130–2, 132(n.6), 194,
Font, E. 134 188, 194, 228
Foucault, Michel 27, 59, 107 global 244
300 Index

governance (cont.) individual 18, 36, 49, 138

multi-actor 121, 131 Ignatieff, M. 3, 85, 90, 224, 249–50
nodal 30, 120, 131–6, 165, 174(n) Ikenberry, G. J. 250(n)
of security 22, 30, 120, 126–8, ‘imagined communities’ 107
175, 195–233, 235 Innes, M. 121, 122, 202, 205
social 27, 59, 133 Inspectorate of Constabulary 128
Grabosky P. 189 ‘internal/external security’ 9, 21, 23,
Grimm, D. 181, 244 88, 98, 235, 240
Guild, E. 252, 253 international security studies 4, 5
Günther, K. 203, 234 Iraq
Gutmann, A. 222(n) military patrols 88, 235
quasi-sovereign states 21
Habermas, Jürgen 144, 153, 179, 181, US involvement 251
221, 222(n), 226, 229 Ireland, police 62
Haggerty, K. 11, 127, 128 Italy
Hall, S. 16, 81 ghettos 23
Haltern, U. 244 police 62
Harcourt, B. 201, 203(n), 205
Hardin, R. 147 James, C. L. R. 6
Hardt, M. 250(n) Japan, social discipline 63
Hayek, F. von 67, 118, 129 Jefferson, T. 74, 100
Hayes, B. 88 Jessop, B. 74
Held, D. 19, 22, 25, 237, 242, 244, Johnson, C. 199, 250(n)
256, 258 Johnston, L. 1, 22, 23, 24, 64, 99
Herbert, S. 128, 202 120, 125, 131–2, 136, 149,
Herbst, J. 182 174(n), 189, 215, 230, 235,
Hertier, A. 145(n) 238
Hirschman, A. 66, 204 Jones, T. 64, 123, 128, 130, 147,
Hirst, P. 19, 137 210, 214
Hobbes, Thomas 10, 40–4, 49–51 Jordana, J. 188
Holmes, S. 12, 85, 225
Honneth, A. 228 Kagan, R. 253
Hope, T. 149, 204, 211 Kaldor, M. 9, 235, 254, 262
Huggins, M. 77(n.1) Kant, Immanuel 5, 208, 256
Hughes, G. 5, 128 Kantorowicz, E. H. 43
human rights Karn, J. 125
language of 55, 224 Kaul, I. 239, 237, 241–3,
movements 13 Keane, J. 12, 17, 58, 254
protection of 76, 78, 92, 124, 137, Keenan, A. 212, 232
225, 236 Keith, M. 75
Hume, David 42 Kelling, G. 201
Huysmans, J. 14(n), 87, 89, 111, 253 Kempa, M., 65, 124, 126
Killingray, D. 77, 113
identity king
autonomy of individual 49–51, 55, as sovereign 43
71, 77 two bodies doctrine 43
collective 18, 115, 138, 162, 163, Kinsey, R. 139, 186, 222
165, 179 Kjaer, A. M. 188
Index 301

Kleingeld, P. 256 Mackinnon, C. 75

Klockars, C. 100 Maguire, M. 127
Knemeyer, F. 27, 57 Mair, P. 187
Kostakopolou, D. 253 Mann, M. 182, 250(n.6)
Krahmann, E. 1 Manning, P. 60, 127
Krause, K. 13 Marenin, O. 68, 73, 75, 77, 95, 123,
Kymlicka, W. 80 208, 251
Margalit, A. 158
Laclau, E. 228 Markell, P. 70, 111, 136, 137, 204,
Laurie, P. 60 211, 232
law Marquand, D. 29, 209
authority 101 Marx, Karl 21
international 85 Mawby, R. I. 63, 77, 79
natural 41 Maynor, J. 222, 230
public 4 Mayntz, R. 145(n)
rule of 76, 78, 99 Mazarolle, L. 64, 120
Lazarus, L. 13, 224 McBride, C. 223, 227
Leander, A. 235 McConville, M. 76
Lee, J. 75, 205 McCormick, J. 83
Lee, S. Y. 63 McEvoy, K. 189(n)
legal McGrew, A. 25, 244
coercive structure 39, 49 McLaughlin, E. 75, 128
constraints 24 Melossi, D. 123, 125, 252
Levi-Faur, D. 188 Michalowski, R. 77(n)
Levy, J. 108 Michnik, A. 9
Lewis, C. 62 Middle Ages 41
liberalism 51–6, 68–9, 73, 85, 90 Mill, John Stuart 53(n)
liberty lobby, 10(n), 12, 13(n), 15 Miller, D. 232
Liang, H. H. 26 Miliband, R. 74
Lindahl, H. 252 miners’ strike (UK) 79
Linden, R. D. 114, 124, 235 Monar, J. 88, 235
Lindseth, P. 212 Montesquieu, Baron de 61
Lister, R. 127 moral order 45, 49, 69
Little, R. 252 Morgan, G. 253
Loader, I. 26, 27, 54, 58, 65, 67(n), Morgenthau, H. 247(n)
70, 75, 76, 90, 110, 112, 120, Mouffe, C. 84, 228
129, 135, 150(n), 177, 198, 201, Muir, W. K. 198
209, 217, 222, 223–4 Mulcahy, A. 27, 76, 77(n), 81, 110,
local policing 20 111, 112, 177
Locke, John 41, 42, 53 Murji, K. 128
-Loś, M. 77 (n), 78 Murphy, L. 145(n.2), 183(n.4)
Loughlin, M. 43, 181 Muthien, J. 235
Low, S. 148
Luhmann, N. 167(n) Nadelman, E. 88, 235
Lyon, D. 86, 235 NAFTA 252
Nagel, T. 145(n), 183(n)
Maanen, J. van 100 nationalism
Machiavelli, Niccolò 41 as ideology 107, 177(n), 179
302 Index

nationalism (cont.) Pettit, P. 187, 195, 213, 215, 220, 227,

nationhood 38, 48, 176, 179 229, 230, 232
National Policing Improvement Pierre, J. 120
Agency 128 pluralism
NATO 252 anchored 31, 193–5, 196, 264
Negri, A. 250(n) generally 208, 231
Neocleous, M. 27, 83 pluralization 16, 34, 129
neo-liberalism 4, 68, 69, 73, 81–2, Pocock, J. G. 37
133, 139, 198 Poland, police 62
Newburn, T. 9, 64–5, 123, 126, 130, police
147, 189(n), 210, 214 accountability 62
Newman, S. 87, 90 as knowledge workers 127
New Public Management 128 cultural work 95, 96, 100, 105,
Neumann, F. 8, 207 113–16, 125
Nijhar, P. 121 generally 20, 26–7, 77–9, 100–5
Non-Governmental Organizations governance 58
(NGOs) 3, 92, 235, 236, 254 history 37, 51, 56, 57–62, 64, 65
non-state actors 2, 3, 7, 19, 20, 21, ordering capacity 63(n), 68, 102–6
24, 217, 22; see also UN and professionalism 60, 198
EU science 57, 60, 61
Nordstrom, C. 23 violence 28, 75
North, D. C. 191 Police Standards Unit 128
Northern Ireland policing
ghettos 23 ethnic minorities 80
policing 80 intelligence-led 127, 129
Nozick, R. 66 (n), 182 minimal 139, 232
Nussbaum, M. 108 populist 201(n.1)
Nye, J. 10, 251 private 22, 23, 65, 67, 121–7, 210
resources 4, 100
Oakeshott, Michael 118–19 sociology of 4, 26, 27–9
Oakley, R. M. 114, 124 studies 25
Ocqueteau, F. 125 transnational 8, 20–5, 123, 235
Offe, C. 70 zero-tolerance 81, 122–3, 127, 201
Olsen, M. 146(n) political community
O’Malley, P. 20, 67, 189, 203(n) membership of 38–9, 47–8, 69, 70,
Orwell, George 155 135, 158, 163, 176
Osbourne, D. 24, 121 solidarities of 5, 18, 25, 48, 99, 107,
108, 111, 130, 135, 138, 163,
Paine, Thomas 53 176, 226, 258, 262, 263
Palmer, D. 189 politics
Parenti, C. 81 allocation of resources 182–5
Parker, C. 188, 189 and security 5, 16, 217
Pasquino, P. 27 as commitment 243
Pastore, F. 252 as regulation 188–90
Patten, C. 81, 216, 222, 224 as technology 13, 115, 121
peace-keeping 21, 88, 124, 234 coercion 76
peace-making process 139 contemporary 3
Peters, A. 126 imagination 92, 110
Index 303

law and order 80, 84 Sabel, C. 135, 187, 221

rationalism 118–19 Sandel, Michael 212
third-way 209 Sands, P. 235
Poulantzas, N. 74 Santos, B. de Sousa 188
Power, M. 129 Scharpf, F. 186
Price, R. 235, 250 Scheuerman, W. 86
prisons 11 Schmitt, Carl 83–5, 110–11
Private Residents’ Association 126 Schulze, H. 39
private security 22–3, 64–6, 126, 136 Scott, C. 188
Private Security Industry Authority Scott, J. C. 119–20, 130, 136, 221
128 Scottish Enlightenment 57
privatization 209(n) secularization of authority 35
Prum Convention, 254(n) securitization 11–12, 16, 90, 130–1
public good security
economic 38, 48, 66, 148–50, actors 2, 3, 24
162–3 as a constitutive good 161–6
global 31, 234–7 as a global good 258–64
meaning of 5, 7, 92, 144–6, 181–3 as a good 10, 12, 91, 92, 139, 143,
thick 16, 25, 31, 38, 140, 173 211
public interest 136, 137 as a social good 151–61, 172
Pyle, D. 67 as a thick public good 144–6, 167,
191, 197, 212
Ransley, J. 64, 120 as an instrumental good 146–51
Rawls, John 42, 228 axiomatic 12, 167–9, 231, 232
Raz, Joseph 145(n.2), 152, 158 existential 11
realists, international relations 247(n), external/internal 9, 21, 23, 88, 98,
248, 249, 252 235, 240
reflexivity 131, 134, 164–5, 200, 211, human 9, 14
218, 230 inter-subjective 155, 156
refugees 87 lobby 10(n), 11, 12, 13(n), 14, 25,
Rehg, W. 222(n) 92, 226
Reiner, R. 61, 97, 102, 184(n) ‘network 21’ 131, 132, 137(n)
Reiter, H. 79 networks 2, 88, 129
republicanism 213–14, 231 ontological 15, 16, 112, 166, 167
restorative justice 123(n), 189(n) pervasive 12, 16, 131, 167–9, 205–6
Rigakos, G. 21–2, 65, 92 practice 3, 11
Roach, K. 86 private 22–3, 64–6, 126, 136
Robertson, R. 262 resources 4
Roche, D. 133, 189(n) right to 13(n), 224
Roermund, B. van 179 studies 25
Rorty, Richard 85, 89, 207 transnational 4, 234, 235–64
Rose, D. 3, 89 security institutions
Rothbart, M. 67(n) CIVPOL (UN) 114
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41, 57 Department of Homeland Security
Royal Canadian Mounted Police 109 173, 250
Royal Ulster Constabulary 80 Drugs Enforcement Administration
Runciman, D. 43 250
Russia, ghettos 23 Eurojust 235
304 Index

security institutions (cont.) gang violence 23

Europol 20, 87, 235, 253 legacy of state violence 132
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) peace communities 135, 138
250 private policing 22
Interpol 235, 249 society in transition 77
National Crime Squad 173(n) South Korea, social discipline 63
National Criminal Intelligence speech act 11
Agency 173(n) state
Serious and Organised Crime as cultural monolith 30, 94–116,
Agency 21, 173(n), 199 173, 176–82
Task Force of European Police as idiot 30, 120–40
Chiefs 87 as meddler 30, 35–72
security pathologies as partisan 30, 72–92
authoritarianism 206–9, 214 authoritarian 4–5, 77, 78, 124
consumerism 64–6, 201–6, 209, 214 building 114
fragmentation 209–12, 214 failed 4, 23, 78, 117, 235
meaning of 195–6 interests 14
paternalism 197–200, 214 modern 1, 7, 8, 18–31, 37, 48–50,
Selmini, R. 125 56, 58, 62, 71, 88, 99, 105, 106,
Sennett, R. 210 176–80
Shapiro, I. 216, 222 scepticisms 25–9, 35, 36, 60, 67–71,
Shearing, C. 22, 24, 28, 64, 65, 119, 74, 81, 90, 91, 94, 127, 139, 143,
124, 126, 131–7, 139, 148–9, 190
174(n), 189, 211, 215, 221, 230 sovereignty 18, 25–7, 59, 62, 83,
Sheptycki, J. 199, 238 106
Silver, A. 97 virtue of 170–94
Simon, J. 9, 20, 130, 199 Stenning, P. 126, 148
Singer, P. 23, 235
Skinner, Quentin 37, 43, 46, 228 Taussig, M. 78, 84, 110
Sklar, J. 52 Taylor, Charles 17, 38, 44–7, 61, 108,
Skolnick, J. 28, 79, 121 112, 139, 145(n), 151, 254,
Smith, A. D. 53 164–5, 210, 212
Smith, W. 257 Taylor, I. 235
Snyder, F. 148 technology 147, 148
Sparks, J. R. 9, 123 Terpstra, J. 125
Spitzer, S. 74 Terriff, T. S. 2
social analysis 5 Tester, K. 71
social anxiety 158–9, 160–1, 166, 168, terrorism
183, 204, 207 age of 9
social, imaginary 30, 44–8, 51, 54, 56, generally 11, 234
65, 70, 72, 105, 152, 162, 173 war on 2, 3, 9, 11, 21, 74, 84–6, 88,
176, 178, 196, 245 89, 207, 234
social sciences 36 Thatcher, Margaret 79, 184
social welfare 15, 183 Thompson, D. 222 (n)
soldiers 21, 88 Thompson, G. 129, 135
Sorensen, G. 39 Tilley, N. 122, 128, 129, 199
South Africa Tilly, Charles 25, 26, 182
Constitution 13(n), 224(n) Todd, E. 150(n)
Index 305

trust 167(n) Walden, K. 104, 177

Tully, J. 18, 106, 229 Waldron, J. 54, 145(n), 151, 157, 179,
Turner, V. 110 224, 256, 257
Tyler, T. 186, 222 Walker, N. 11, 26, 42, 60, 62, 63(n),
68, 85, 87, 90, 99, 123, 128, 135,
Uildriks, N. 77(n) 174(n), 181, 188, 198, 222, 235,
United Nations (UN) 3, 15, 124, 237, 245, 250, 251, 253, 254
249 Walker, R. B. J 14, 83, 84, 107, 115
Universal Declaration of Human Walt, S.14
Rights 13(n) Walters, R. 5
USA Waltz, K. 240, 247(n)
as global hegemon 85, 86(n), 249, war see terrorism and drugs
250 Warren, M. 232
constitutional order 62–4 Weber, Max 26, 37, 197
local policing 20, 29 Weiler, J. H. H. 244
police professionalism 198 Weimar Republic 81
populist policing 202 Weisburd, D. S. 127
private policing 22 Westley, W. 68
special relationship 112 Westmarland, L. 75
utilitarian calculus 13 Whitman, J. Q. 198
Williams, M. C. 235
Varese, F. 23 Williams, Raymond 44(n)
Vertovec, S. 256 Wilson, J. M. H. 114, 124,
Vijver, K. 125 Wilson, J. Q. 201
Vincent, A. 106, 108 Wood, J. 1, 20, 30, 124, 131–4, 136,
violence 139, 174(n)
privatization of 23 Wright, A.129
legitimate 39, 83–4
physical 7, 8, 15, 22, 26, 68, 88, 91, Yack, B. 48, 179
143 Young, I. M. 222
symbolic 7, 18, 22 Young, J. 28, 199

Wacquant, L. 81, 123 Zedner, L. 1, 2, 11, 58, 226

Wæver, O. 98, 111 Zielonka, J. 257
Waddington, P.A.J. 128 Zimring, F. E. 199
Wakefield, A. 126 Zwelethemba model 137(n), 211