Security Unbound: Enacting Democratic Limits

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security Unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

This book introduces students to the central concepts in security studies and one of the most important issues in international relations. Jef Huysmans: explains recent conceptual and theoretical developments in security studies; introduces contemporary security questions and changes in dominant security issues since the end of the Cold War; draws on insights from security studies, criminology, and sociology and cultural studies of fear; introduces a political rather than strategic analysis of security practice; focuses on the tensions between international democratic political practice and security policies; uses a story-led approach to introduce concepts and theories.

This book is concerned with the political effects of diffusing insecurities. Like much of the author's work on security, it has its roots in the understanding that when security issues, institutions and practices take a prominent role in the organisation of social, political, cultural, and economic issues inequalities, exclusions, violence and other limits to democratic politics become more pronounced. The book is designed to be in the first instance an intervention in security studies. It is not a call for changing focus from security to analyses of democracy as such and does not try to offer a particular definition of democracy, give an overview of various interpretations of democracy or engage literature on crises of democracy. The analysis is driven first of all by a concern with how contemporary securitising brings limits of democracy in social and political play rather than with crises of democracy arising from changes in political practice and institutions, such as the rise of political apathy, changing nature of political parties, regional integration, and forms of populist politics. Security Unbound will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations and Security Studies.