Prologue: On writing about security today

Summary

Citizens of western countries are too ready to take for granted the relatively civilized political conditions they enjoy, forgetting that politics in most times and places has been thoroughly predatory. Achieving a type of politics that is less predatory, and geared to some conception of the public good, is not easy under any circumstances, and may be impossible in the absence of certain preconditions. One of these preconditions seems to be a collective people, sustained by myths and capable of generating and monitoring political power. (Canovan 2005: 138)

There comes a moment in the historical development of any field of social enquiry, or at least in the formation of one's own thinking about its objects, when it seems necessary to return to basics; to dig up the foundations in order to subject to sustained reflection elements of the field, and the relations between them, that have come to be collectively taken for granted, treated as the unexamined presuppositions of research programmes. We believe that this moment has been reached in the social and political analysis of security and its relationship to the modern state.

Support for this judgement lies all around us today, both in respect of the profound and perplexing transformations that appear to be affecting the state's capacity to act as the pre-eminent guarantor of security to its citizens, and in the competing responses that these have provoked.