Securing the people (or state?): efforts in governing through fear

Abstract

Traditionally conceptualised as pertaining to the state and achieved through its safeguarding against the interests (territorial or otherwise) of other states, security has become an increasingly and intensely contested concept. Two assumptions that structured the field of security studies – grounding the meaning of security and determining the mechanisms and strategies for its attainment – have been fundamentally challenged. The widening and deepening of the security agenda has called into question both the privileging of the state as the primary object of security, and the narrow definition of what constitutes a threat. A multiplicity of sub- and trans-national subjects and objects – refugees, migrants, sleeper cells, ecological systems, networks, technologies, cultures, religions, children, youth, pandemics, rights – are now perceived as either security threats, or as in need of securing (that is, under threat)