8 - The democratic governance of security

Summary

In the previous chapter we outlined what we characterized as the necessary virtue of the state in delivering the public good of security 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 pluralism. This entails, we further suggested, seeking to maximize the degree of pluralism within the anchor of state institutions whilst facilitating 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 settings 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 sceptics 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 intellectually 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.