The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Order by Marc Schuilenburg

Excerpt

Security, arguably the founding myth of modern statecraft, is not what it (supposedly) once used to be; big Leviathan would be the monolithic safeguard of public order in the not-so-distant past, yet virtually all contemporary Western societies display a pronounced tendency towards a hybridization of security tasks by means of public-private partnerships and the concomitant shift from “police” to “policing”. While there is still significant debate in terms of theoretical as well as normative evaluations, the phenomenon itself has received scientific attention since the 1970s and is by now mostly uncontested. Indeed, many criminologists have come up with new conceptual frameworks and analytical vocabularies to cope with the phenomenon at stake, drawing upon all kinds of metaphors running the gamut from “networks” and “bubbles” to “archipelagos” and “quilts”. …