9 - Security as a global public good

Summary

We began this book by trying to distance ourselves from some of the more immediate manifestations of the security debate and some of the more exotic articulations of security practice. In particular we sought to stand back from the post-9/11 debate on terror, just as we declined the Herculean – even Sisyphean – challenge of a comprehensive mapping of the real world of security provision in all its ever-increasing diversity and intensity. We provided what we claimed were good prudential reasons for these choices. We did not want our thinking about such a highly charged concept as security to be distorted by our taking as a point of departure perhaps its most ideologically sensitive location, that of contemporary international – indeed post-national – terrorism. Equally, we did not want to become bogged down in a level of detail that would threaten our efforts to provide a sharp overview of what is at stake – politically, culturally and institutionally – in the security debate.

Yet, even if, as we maintain, these arguments are persuasive in their own terms, is there not a danger of their carrying one unfortunate and, for us, highly significant side effect? For, the critic might suggest, perhaps it is just too convenient for an argument that seeks to rehabilitate the state's prior role in security that its proponents situate themselves at some remove from the very events and very trends which point most insistently away from the state as the symbolic and instrumental centre of security work.