Everyday security threats

Perceptions, experiences, and consequences

Daniel Stevens, Nick Vaughan-Williams

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719096068
• eBook ISBN: 9781526109002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

This book explores citizens' perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, based on twenty focus groups and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. The data is used to investigate the extent to which a diverse public shares government framings of the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of security threats, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats. We demonstrate widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. While this study focuses on the British case, it seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies.

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Perspectives on security threat politics

Introduction

As governments – particularly, though not exclusively in the global North – responded to what they commonly framed as a ‘new threat’ from terrorism after 9/11 (Croft and Moore, 2010; Thrall and Cramer, 2009), they felt compelled in turn to outline the security strategies that this shift and other perceived threats in the post-Cold War world necessitated. Thus, whatever continuities we may seek to delineate before and after 9/11 – including the political move to claim the novelty of a given era for particular policy ends – the international political landscape in which Britain and other liberal democratic states operate is presented by policy elites as having been transformed dramatically. No longer are interests at ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ portrayed as being under threat from particular states, but rather from a complex web of security issues that undermine the domestic/international distinction and are commonly said to include: international terrorism; biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction; conflict and state ‘failure’; migration and immigration; pandemics; and transnational crime (Cabinet Office 2008, 2010). A genealogical account of this perceived shift in the nature and location of security threats – and socioeconomic and ideational factors that may have given rise to this transformation – is beyond the scope of this study (for more on this theme, see Hammerstad and Boas, 2015). What matters more in view of our specific aims and objectives is the way in which governments in Britain and America in particular have pledged not only to develop a resilient security architecture designed to identify and mitigate against the effects of the emergence of these perceived threats but, as key policy objectives, to reassure their citizens, to heighten collective levels of security among populations, and to reduce subjective feelings of being ‘threatened’ on the one hand, while including citizens as agents of national security on the other: this constitutes the main problematique with which the book as a whole engages.

Indeed, against this policy backdrop, diverse publics have been given unprecedented prominence in the formulation and exercise of national security policy. In the US, for example, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said:

Citizens are a necessary and absolutely irreplaceable asset in this fight. Since that day [9/11], we have come a long way to motivating our citizens to do their part to prepare and ready their families and friends for any potential disaster, whether natural or man made . . . They have all helped us to engage and empower citizens to embrace a direct role to accept the responsibility to secure your family, your freedom, and your community.

(quoted in Jarvis and Lister, 2010: 178)

In Ridge's articulation, citizens are active participants with the state in threat preparedness and are also ‘empowered’ as resilient subjects by performing this role. In accepting, indeed ‘embracing’, the challenge, Ridge suggests that citizens can enhance their own individual security, that of their communities', and by implication the nation's.

Similarly, successive governments in the UK have published US-style NSS documents that outline the principal threats facing the nation, divided into three tiers from most to least pressing, and discuss the roles of government and citizens in mitigating them. Jarvis and Lister (2010: 174) describe this approach as ‘conscripting “ordinary” citizens into the state's security apparatuses’ and refer to citizens as ‘stakeholders’, while Vaughan-Williams (2008) employs the term ‘citizen-detectives’ to describe their role in maintaining vigilance in public spaces (see also Malcolm, 2013). The term ‘conscription’ suggests that the participation of citizens in national security architectures is not entirely voluntary. There are, in addition, obvious ambiguities in terms of both the effects of these new demands on citizens and the extent to which publics are reassured or made to feel more anxious as a result, as Jarvis and Lister (2010, 2015) among others acknowledge (see also Marshall et al., 2007; Massumi, 2005; McDermott and Zimbardo, 2006). Moreover, liberal democracies also rely on citizens to limit state responses to threat and to hold governments accountable for the illiberal choices they may make in the name of protecting society as a whole from threats and so there is a fundamental political ambivalence surrounding the relationship between vigilance and threat perception (Chalk, 1998).

This contemporary focus on security threats and citizens' roles in threat preparedness and response begs questions of how diverse multiethnic publics conceptualise, experience, and narrate their understandings of security and threat. While spending on national security in the UK since 2001 has more than tripled to £3.5 billion (Cabinet Office, 2008), it remains unclear how threats are conceived by and affect the British public, whether they are aware of and/or understand government security strategies and objectives, and whether citizens feel more or less ‘secure’ as a result. Despite changes in discourses surrounding the role of citizens in the formulation and implementation of national security policy and increases in government security budgets, little is actually known about public attitudes towards and experiences of security threats, what sorts of issues citizens find threatening, whether everyday security concerns comport with those of government, and the connection between security concerns writ large and other political attitudes and behaviours. In short, we do not know in any empirical depth what the ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ of the concept of security to which IR and Security Studies scholars often refer might mean at the level of the everyday.

As we suggested in the Introduction to this book, our knowledge of public perceptions and experiences of threats tends to be confined either to discrete policy areas such as terrorism and anti-terrorism (Jarvis and Lister, 2012), or as they relate to specific areas of personality, predispositions, or attitudes such as authoritarianism (Hetherington and Weiler, 2009; Stenner, 2005) and tolerance (Gibson and Gouws, 2003; Marcus et al., 1995). We know relatively little about the range of issues that citizens regard as security threats, their causes, or the levels at which such issues are perceived as threats – for example, as global or national threats.

One aspect of this lacuna is a broader lack of social scientific research, including a tendency within IR and Security Studies – and across the so-called ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ divide (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2014) – to focus on elite perceptions and constructions of security threat rather than public opinion, non-elite knowledge and experience, and the issue of audience reception of acts of securitization (Balzacq, 2010; McDonald, 2008). In this context, a national frame for understanding security threats is still predominantly shared by national governments and, though increasingly to a lesser extent, academia, but the extent to which members of the public share this framing is largely unknown. Equally, extant research has yet to offer any real depth of insight into convergence and/or divergence between ‘official’/‘elite’ and ‘popular’/‘non-elite’ knowledge, constructions, and understandings of the concept of security, public encounters with and negotiations of security threats in everyday life, and the sorts of factors affecting citizens' perception of threat – let alone the possible consequences of such divergence between official and popular understandings as they relate to government projects of enhancing societal resilience.

Another aspect is a lack of understanding of the political psychology of different threat perceptions as opposed to singular threats, such as from international terrorism, immigration, or environmental degradation, and of the consequences of different threat perceptions for other political attitudes and behaviours. Research has tended to be either on discrete threats when, as work in IR and Security Studies tells us, individuals deal with multiple threats simultaneously. Beyond authoritarianism, we know little about how individuals construct and make sense of the range of potential threats they face on a day-to-day basis, and even among authoritarians it is unclear whether their disposition to panic encompasses both sociotropic and personal risks or whether sociotropic concerns, about the fate of society and the groups with which authoritarians identify, may dominate.

Against this backdrop, this opening chapter has three purposes. First, we discuss previous research on these issues in the otherwise discrete literatures produced in the fields of IR and Security Studies on the one hand and Political Psychology on the ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Perspectives on security threat politics
• 2 The 2012 study ‘Public Perceptions of Threat in Britain’
• 3 The scope of security threats and their causes
• 4 Security threats and their consequences
• 5 Government, perceptions and experiences of security threats, and citizen involvement in the risk management cycle
• Conclusion
• Appendix Coding of variables
• References
• Index