Security

Lucia Zedner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135249007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Just a decade ago security had little claim to criminological attention. Today a combination of disciplinary paradigm shifts, policy changes, and world political events have pushed security to the forefront of the criminological agenda. Distinctions between public safety and private protection, policing and security services, national and international security are being eroded. Post-9/11 the pursuit of security has been hotly debated not least because countering terrorism raises the stakes and licenses extraordinary measures. Security has become a central plank of public policy, a topical political issue, and lucrative focus of private venture but it is not without costs, problems, and paradoxes. As security governs our lives, governing security become a priority.

This book provides a brief, authoritative introduction to the history of security from Hobbes to the present day and a timely guide to contemporary security politics and dilemmas. It argues that the pursuit of security poses a significant challenge for criminal justice practices and values. It defends security as public good and suggests a framework of principles by which it might better be governed. Engaging with major academic debates in criminology, law, international relations, politics, and sociology, this book stands at the vanguard of interdisciplinary writing on security.

1
THE SEMANTICS OF SECURITY

Security is a promiscuous concept. It is wantonly deployed in fields as diverse as social security, health and safety, financial security, policing and community safety, national security, military security, human security, environmental security, international relations and peacekeeping. For security to keep such varied bedfellows as these, it must be not only promiscuous but also inconstant, appearing as different objects of desire in different places and at different times. Yet security wears these multiple identities so lightly it is easy to overlook the fact that it is not a single, immutable concept but many. As Valverde has observed: ‘[t]he abstract noun “security” is an umbrella term that both enables and conceals a very diverse array of governing practices, budgetary practices, political and legal practices, and social and cultural values and habits’ (Valverde 2001: 90).

Once primarily the domain of international relations, political science, public international law, and military studies (for an overview of this literature, see Kolodziej 2005), security was traditionally conceived as the defence of the sovereign state against external threat. It remains a central concept in war studies and international relations but it has developed new usages and meanings in many other fields: finance, economics, health, and development studies being among the most prominent. Only relatively recently has it become a prominent theme in criminological literature (for example, Dupont and Wood 2006, Jones 2007, Loader and Walker 2007, Wood and Shearing 2007).

Security is now changing the very nature of criminological endeavour and eroding important criminological categories and presumptions. Previously clear-cut distinctions between policing and security services, between crime and terrorism, between domestic and national security, between community safety and international peacekeeping are being blurred. The embryonic dialogue consequently emerging with international relations is but the latest iteration of a long history of interaction with and borrowing from other disciplines. The study of security is increasingly characterized by convergence and cross-fertilization, generating in turn a new corpus of transdisciplinary security scholarship. It follows that although the focus of this book is on its usages in contemporary crime control and policing, security cannot properly be understood other than within the context of larger debates. In short, security is too big an idea to be constrained by the strictures of any single discipline.

Linguistically, security is a slippery and contested term that conveys many meanings and has many referent objects, ranging from the individual to the state to the biosphere. Notwithstanding its inherent imprecision, or perhaps because of it, security has gained considerable prominence across disparate policy fields. Its lack of definitional clarity permits expansive interpretation and wide application. The resultant ambiguity about what is promised, provided, sold, or sought when security is invoked is a form of licence. It allows the sellers of security to peddle their wares without specifying what exactly is on offer and consumers to buy into security policies or products for quite different reasons without needing to articulate or reconcile their differences (Loader 1999). Imprecision allows diverse measures and policies to be justified in the name of security. Little wonder then that the capaciousness of security has been recognized by politicians as a lever to attract votes and augment state power, as well as by salesmen as a means to boost consumption of security products and services.

Security is often deployed in universalist terms that pay little attention to the ways in which it is articulated, understood, and pursued in different legal cultures. Superficial similarities in terminology (security, securité, Sicherheit) mask widely varying usages across jurisdictions deriving from differences in local history, social structure, and legal and political cultures. It is not enough to observe the different meanings given to security in different languages: the institutions and practices that make up the lives of security need to be studied too. Significant differences in perceptions and tolerance of threats, ordering practices, and patterns of social cohesion shape local perceptions of security (and insecurity) and dictate how it is mobilized politically. Security varies in its importance; in its location between state, private, and civil society; and, not least, in its very meaning even within that supposedly homogenous entity that is Europe. Universalizing claims about the convergence of crime control practices under conditions of late modernity (Garland 2001) does not withstand comparative analysis of the varieties of local culture, organization, and distribution of security between, and even within, nation states (Sparks 2001, Newburn 2006). For example, although poverty as a threat to security may have been displaced by terrorism in most Western jurisdictions, in developing countries it remains a primary source of insecurity. It follows that security is also an idea ripe for comparative analysis in order to establish the varied meanings that attach depending on location and context (Zedner 2003a).

The prominence of security in contemporary society is most obviously explained by reference to the extraneous threats that have recently provided the very justification for security laws, policies, measures, services, and products. The events of 9/11, subsequent terrorist atrocities, the threat of guns, drugs, international serious and organized crime (to say nothing of military conflicts, genocide, pandemics, and environmental disasters) license extraordinary and exceptional measures; the suspension of normal rules and procedures; derogation from rights and principles; and even states of emergency (Ackerman 2004, Tribe and Gudridge 2004, Agamben 2004). In the name of security, things that would ordinarily be politically untenable become thinkable. As Freedman observes: ‘censorship can be imposed, political rights suspended, young men conscripted, and aliens deported all in the name of security’ (Freedman 2003: 752). The pursuit of security signals an urgency and importance that stifles debate as to priorities, resources, and countervailing interests. To invoke security is a move to foreclose debate as to the wisdom of a policy or the necessity of a measure. In short, security has all the qualities of a fire engine, replete with clanging bells and flashing lights, whose dash to avert imminent catastrophe brooks no challenge, even if it risks running people down on the way to the fire.

But without clarity the concept remains unwieldy, scarcely capable of rational analysis. Precision not only is conceptually and analytically important; it also serves as a restraint on the claims that can be made in the name of security. It is for these reasons that this book adopts a deliberately cool, dispassionate look at what it means to invoke security. This is all the more important at a time when, in addition to justifying public policy, security is being marketed as a valuable commodity. Security is produced by private security firms, sold and traded commercially, and enjoyed as a club good available only by those who buy access or rights to it (Crawford 2006b). Even in the public sector ‘security’ has become akin to an industry and public officials, quite as much as their commercial counterparts, seek profit in selling security policies and solutions. Its antonym ‘insecurity’ drives crime control, policing, anti-terrorism policies, and corporate security production and is largely responsible for the rise of ‘reassurance policing’ and community safety programmes, as well as the proliferation of security hardware, services, and technologies (Zedner 2008a). More recently, ‘security’ has been invoked adjectivally to describe the forms of relations by which it is distributed – hence ‘security assemblage’, ‘security networks’, ‘security nodes’, ‘security quilts’, and ‘security bubbles’ (all of which will be analysed further in Chapter 3). Finally, its derivative ‘securitization’ denotes the, generally adverse, ethical and analytical consequences of structuring diverse policy issues in terms of security (Waever 1995). Securitization recognizes that it is not only an analytical category but also a category of practice or ‘speech act’, a way of framing and responding to social problems.

The applications of security in the public and private spheres span the end goals of objective safety from threat; the subjective condition of feeling secure; and the assurance or guarantee thereof. In these different guises, security carries a normative meaning as a public good that must be defended by the state (Loader and Walker 2007). Because security in either objective or subjective guises can rarely be said to be attained, the word ‘pursuit’, be it of national, military, public, community or personal safety, perhaps better describes the ongoing venture that is security. Finally, security has a symbolic quality which varies by, and within, jurisdictions, as well as over time. It is the product of local conditions and local understandings of what threatens and how best to protect against it. These meanings of security – objective, subjective, pursuit, practice, and symbol – will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

SECURITY AS OBJECTIVE STATE

The state of security refers to two quite distinct objective and subjective conditions. The objective state of absolute security implies a condition of being without threat, which, even if it could be achieved today, always remains liable to negation by new threats tomorrow. Although we may aspire to the state of security, it makes sense to recognize that its perfect attainment is unachievable, not least since security is predicated on the continuing presence of that which threatens it. Understood this way, security is the condition of ‘being protected from threats’ – whether through their neutralization, through avoidance, or through non-exposure to risk. Advertence to threats implies a temporal quality to security: it persists only in as much as and for so long as threats are annulled or avoided. As Valverde observes, it is a political and grammatical fallacy ‘to mistake “security” for a concrete noun’:

‘Security’ is not something we can have more of or less of, because it is not a thing at all. It is … the name we use for a temporally extended state of affairs characterized by the calculability and predictability of the future.

(Valverde 2001: 85)

Others take a less sceptical position, viewing security as a concrete and necessary precondition to human flourishing. Shue, for example, argues:

No one can fully enjoy any right that is supposedly protected by society if someone can credibly threaten him or her with murder, rape, beating, etc., when he or she tries to enjoy the alleged right. Such threats to physical security are among the most serious and – in much of the world – the most widespread hindrances to the enjoyment of any right. If any right is to be exercised except at great risk, physical security must be protected.

(Shue 1996: 21)

Even in its objective condition, security may take more or less concrete forms. While Shue perceives objective security as protection against physical harm, Wolfers, for example, took the view that ‘security, in any objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values’ (Buzan 1991: 17, Lustgarten and Leigh 1994: ch. 1). The physical and political aspects of objective security are often related: that which threatens physically commonly also poses a threat to values or the stability of a political system. But there is no necessary relation between the two. For example, the threat posed by terrorists to the political regime and its core values may far outweigh the physical harm posed to its citizens – a fact recognized by those terrorist groups that give warnings prior to attack.

Substantively then, objective security is defined by reference to that which is deemed to be a threat: financial security defends against theft and deception, military security against armed conflict, and the newly coined ‘homeland’ security is generally defined by reference to terrorism. Security is at once both contextual and relational: its attainment measured by how far policies succeed in reducing or eliminating the particular threat against which they are intended to ward. A lot of hidden work is being done by the supposed peril against which security guards and the very idea of threat can usefully be unpacked. Arguably the real impossibility of objective security is a function of the fact that threats are, at least in part, subjective constructs. Something is regarded as a threat to be secured against only if it raises the prospect of depriving someone of something that they value. Given that any individual’s understanding of value is subjective and constantly changing, what is considered a threat is also constantly in flux and it follows that objective security is arguably less readily distinguishable from the subjective state than at first appears.

SECURITY AS SUBJECTIVE STATE

Security is also used to refer to a second state, namely the subjective sense we have of our own safety. In this second sense, security is all in the mind: though of course our subjective sense of safety derives in part from material and social conditions. The subjective state of security as tranquillity or freedom from care has long historic roots that are traceable to the Latin securitas and the German Sicherheitsgefühl, both of which denote the feeling of being secure (Rothschild 1995: 61). Subjective security can take the form of either the absolute condition of feeling safe or, more usually, a qualified condition of freedom from anxiety or apprehension because feelings of insecurity have been allayed. Here both ‘security’ and its antonym ‘insecurity’ refer to an existential state that varies not only according to objective risk but also according to extraneous factors such as individual sensitivity to risk and danger.

Subjective security may be correlated with objective security but may equally be quite unrelated to the level of objective threat faced. For example, young men often remain fearless despite the fact that statistically they are most at risk from assault, whereas women and the elderly may modify or curtail their movements outside the home despite the lower statistical likelihood of their being victims of violent assault (Hoyle and Zedner 2007: 465–6). This is not to say that the insecurities suffered by the latter group are irrational. Although the likelihood of an attack is lower, its consequences may be considerably greater for a vulnerable victim’s ontological sense of safety. Less readily rationalized is the fact that perceptions of security threats are often quite unrelated to risk. Fear of flying persists despite the evidence that the risks of road travel are much greater than those posed by air transport. Note that an American study found that the probability of being killed in one non-stop airline flight ‘is about one in 13 million (even taking the 11 September crashes into account), while to reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads, rural interstate highways, one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles’.¹

The important point is that subjective insecurity has a life related to but not necessarily closely correlated with objective risk and that failure by governments to take seriously concerns that are genuinely held only exacerbates this sense of vulnerability. As Pavarini has observed of Italy:

The growing social demand for security against crime reflects subjective feelings of insecurity, regardless of whether this sense of insecurity is or is not well founded and the results of an objective state of diminished security. This growing demand for security manifests itself as a protest against the institutional and public offerings of social defence. Institutional and public efforts to provide safeguards against criminality are perceived as being unable to meet the social demand for security.

(Pavarini 1997: 79)

Security in this subjective sense is better captured by the German concept of Innere Sicherheit, which makes more explicit reference to the psychological costs of insecurity than does its English-language counterpart. Bauman observes that the German term Sicherheit embraces three distinct ideas: security, certainty, and safety (though we might question just how distinct these ideas are in English). This, he argues, renders security open to a particularly powerful form of political exploitation:

In an ever more insecure and uncertain world the withdrawal into the safe haven of territoriality is an intense temptation…. It is perhaps a happy coincidence for political operators and hopefuls that the genuine problems of insecurity and uncertainty have condensed into the anxiety about safety: politicians can be supposed to be doing something about the first two just because being seen to be vociferous and vigorous about the third.

(Bauman 1998: 117)

The political capital inherent in subjective security derives also from the fact that expressions of insecurity about crime serve, in Taylor’s words, as ‘a convenient and socially-approved kind of metaphor through which survey respondents can articulate, in shorthand fashion, a much more complex sense of restlessness and anxiety – not least the general unease which a full-blown free market environment produces culturally and psychologically’ (Taylor 1998: 23). If Taylor is right, then it would be a mistake to expect feelings of insecurity to correlate in any direct way with levels of recorded crime since they may encapsulate a much larger set of concerns, coalescing perhaps around security of the environment, of health, employment, and the economy.

Like objective security, subjective security has a marked temporal quality. It is enjoyed only so long as the individual is persuaded that the protection he or she enjoys or the evasive action he or she has taken suffices to ward off threats. The vulnerability of subjective security to awareness of new sources of threat renders its attainment transient and its scope inherently expansive. Freedman has observed: ‘Once anything that generates anxiety or threatens the quality of life in some respect becomes labelled as a “security problem” the field risks losing all focus’ (Freedman 1998: 53).

Analytically therefore, subjective security is hazardous: it may mean almost anything anyone chooses. Normatively, the danger is that, widely cast, subjective security and, in particular, the need to assuage public insecurities become a justification for measures that may have adverse consequences for that minority of the population that must bear the brunt of them and which does little to improve conditions of objective security for the majority. A challenge, to which we will return below, is how to maximize subjective security at least cost to individual liberties and to unpopular minorities.

SECURITY AS PURSUIT

Conceiving of security as a pursuit rather than as an end goal means recognizing that it is probably unattainable and at best impermanent (Zedner 2000). An inherently relational concept (Freedman 2003), security must endlessly be tested against threats as yet unknown. The vulnerability or inadequacies of its provision are revealed only if and when those threats eventuate. Security must therefore be continually revised in the light of the latest challenge to its attainment, necessarily imperfect assessments of likely future threats, and its vulnerability to them.

Conceiving security as a pursuit also better fits its common usage across disparate spheres and does not tie security to any single referent object. National security, military security, and community safety can all sensibly be described as exercises in the pursuit of security without relying on this single word to capture the considerable differences in their scope, scale, and focus of operations. In each case security is a reference to a cluster of ongoing policies and practices which, like talk of security budgets, imply a continuing investment and little expectation that security, in its objective sense, will one day be realized. In many Western jurisdictions it was precisely the growing acceptance that crime is a ‘normal, commonplace, aspect of modern society’ (Garland 2001: 128) that shifted interest from strategies of crime control and reduction to those of security and community safety. Declining faith in rehabilitation and deterrence has meant that the goal of crime reduction has been at least partially displaced by the pursuit of security against enduring threats.

Given the considerable political and financial capital invested in security, it may not be too cynical to contend that, even if it were attainable, absolute security is not a state actually sought either by politicians or by the captains of private security corporations. In both public and private spheres, security is an industry whose continued flourishing is predicated upon the persistence of insecurities. Happily for its promoters, security threats are not easily eradicable. The apparent inevitability of continuing crime, terrorism, and other security threats underwrites the security industry and serves as an incentive for further investment.

Ironically, even where the pursuit of security succeeds in diminishing risks (for example, by reducing crime), a collateral effect of security policies and services is to foster awareness of threats and stimulate those insecurities that underpin continuing demand for the products of the security industry. Security providers, relian...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The semantics of security
• 2 A brief history of security
• 3 New distributions of security
• 4 Security, crime, and criminal justice
• 5 Security as industry
• 6 Security and counter-terrorism
• 7 Governing security
• Notes
• Bibliography