Abstract
Allan Cochrane and Deborah Talbot (eds), Security: Welfare, Crime and Society, Open University Press: Maidenhead, 2008; 192 pp.: ISBN 9780335229321 (pbk)
In academia, the topic of security has historically belonged to the domain of scholars of war and international politics. Their focus is on security of the state. Following Lipschutz (1995) and Buzan et al. (1998), what is called national security is related to the ability of a state to take a position in relation to the interests of other states. A set of institutions, technologies and expertise, including the military, border patrol and intelligence services, enable a state to position itself within the realm of global state relations. Security is a matter of relations between states in such a way that the stability and survival of one state can be threatened by the interests and activities of other states. When the politics of other states are identified by a particular state as threatening to its national security, that state claims the right to act in whichever way it deems necessary to protect its interests. This is so because threats to state interests are seen by a state as directly undermining its survival. This claim to the right to act in order to protect national security means the power to suspend all other problems and the capacity to mobilize all available resources to this end. Through its ties to state defense, security is associated with the right to act, the power to suspend, and the capacity to mobilize.
Recently, all sorts of everyday social situations and cultural phenomena have come to be associated with security, including crime and welfare. By associating everyday life situations with a threat to security, security can rise above all other values central to liberal democracies and be elevated to the top of collective priorities so that security becomes the dominant principle of social organization (Bajc, 2011). Research about how security as a dominant ordering principle of social life shapes the ways in which we relate to each other, our cultural understandings of safety and order, or our individual and collective decision making locally and globally is an urgent matter. No less urgent is the need to teach about security. This spread of security into all domains of social life, from the individual to the collective and the global, calls for the development of curricula for the study of security across academic disciplines. In fact, I suggest that thinking critically and analytically about security is so important that it should be included in university education in much the same way that studies of gender, ethnicity and race have come to be a part of the academic landscape.
Security: Welfare, Crime and Society is a welcome attempt to teach security to undergraduates in criminology. Its subtitle speaks to the series of three textbooks, Social Justice, Security and Community, which together provide students with social scientific understanding of the complex relationship between crime control and social welfare. The second in the series, Security, thus addresses how security concerns shape individual lives and policy initiatives in this realm. Notably, this is a collective effort of eight scholars who combine their expertise in crime control, globalization, criminal justice, welfare, urban studies, family studies, and related local and global policy. The authors choose not to discuss the genealogy of the concept of security alluded to above. Rather, the introductory chapter positions the notion of security in relation to insecurity. They demonstrate that what is perceived as security and insecurity is very much subjective and varies historically and culturally. For these reasons, policy perspectives on security will also vary.
The first section of the Introduction outlines four questions to be addressed in the book: why has security become so central; why is so much invested in the pursuit of security; how do the dynamics between security and insecurity shape social welfare and crime control policy; and why do all these efforts tend not to deliver security? In the second section of the Introduction, students are given the opportunity to analyze different kinds of thinking around the concept of security through two texts which see economic change, mass migration and terrorism as threats to security. The first text sees these threats as a justification to change the approach to civil liberties and criminal justice, while the second offers social and individual welfare as their solution. The next section of the introductory chapter briefly outlines how scholars have explained these developments. Mass migration, cultural globalization, and changing notions of family and community are associated with rapid social changes and new patterns of inclusion and exclusion. There is an expectation that opportunities are available to everyone equally, yet it is age, gender, class, ethnicity, race, and access to money that influence the extent to which opportunities are made available. Such tensions cause resentment, leading the poor toward crime and those better off toward punitiveness.
In the fourth section of the Introduction, the book shows how these dynamics are reflected in crime control and social welfare policy. Four types of policies are discussed. To reflect on draconian laws passed by governments, students are provided with statistics which show rising rates of incarceration and indicate a relationship between social marginalization and punitive responses by governments. Policies designed to influence behavior by altering physical and social environments are presented through excerpts from a qualitative study of young female offenders to show how risk management shaped definitions of sexual behavior in youth custody centers in Canada. To illustrate the impact of policies based on expectations that individuals be responsible for their own well-being, students are presented with the data about home ownership in the UK between the 1950s and 2007 and encouraged to think about how the rising prices of homes may be related to crime and attitudes about crime. The fourth type of policy discussed is the regulation of everyday life. Through a qualitative case study of licensing policies of the night-time economy in London, students deliberate whether law can be an effective mechanism to decide what is best for community as a whole. The chapter concludes with a review and reference to further reading.
The remaining chapters are structured in much the same way. Chapter Two addresses how social fears are generated through first-hand experience and disseminated by mass media, and outlines social mechanisms through which people separate themselves from what they find threatening. Gated communities and sports utility vehicles are used as examples and students are asked to reflect on how such enclaves may allow individuals to live an urban lifestyle without its harsh realities, while at the same time also fostering a sense of fear and vulnerability.
Chapter Three is focused on the family as a set of relationships in which people can experience a sense of safety as much as vulnerability, and as a site of government interventions which are sometimes more and other times less successful. The lesson is to understand that policies are developed around an idea of what leads to security in family life where, by implication, those who depart from these expectations are criminalized and punished.
Chapter Four addresses the tendency to criminalize conduct by classifying certain kinds of behavior as threatening to the norms of behavior thought to be crucial to security. Antisocial behavior and hate crimes are given as examples; the former results from breakdown of informal control within communities, while the latter arises from the inability to be tolerant and deal with difference. As civil law is brought to bear on social behavior, it comes to formulate and enforce what counts as acceptable behavior, replacing kinship obligations and community reciprocities. Students are encouraged to reflect on the implications of the juridification of such behavior and think about how this tendency to criminalize may lead certain groups to be differentially policed and disciplined.
In Chapter Five, war, health and disease are used as examples to show how core dilemmas associated with the entanglement of crime control and welfare are reflected in a global context by juxtaposing policies related to national security to those of human security. It is in this chapter that examples and explanations are provided to understand how it is that the concept of security is associated with the right to act, the power to suspend, and the capacity to mobilize. Here, the authors emphasize that tensions between human and national security at a global level are analogous to those between welfare and crime control at national and local levels. Students learn that while the pursuit of human security may enhance national security, so too human security can be mobilized to support military intervention.
The Conclusion revisits the four questions outlined in the Introduction, summarizes the answers provided in the book, and, most importantly, reflects on how evidence was used to support the answers.
There is no telling how effective this textbook will be in helping students think critically and analytically about the ways in which security intermeshes what have traditionally – and for good reasons – been two separate fields, crime control and social welfare. The authors limit their focus mainly to the UK, with some references to the US. Also, the book seems overly structured for a regular classroom setting, but would likely be very effective for online courses. With UK students in mind, this may well be a good approach for the purposes of this textbook. More broadly, however, if the central goal is to teach students to think analytically and critically about how the security imperative is changing various domains of individual and collective life than we should explore not only a variety of approaches to teaching but also ways in which their effectiveness could be evaluated and communicated to other educators. Since this is a relatively new academic topic outside international relations and military studies, it would be beneficial for those of us in various academic disciplines and in different parts of the world who are developing courses on this topic to find ways to communicate with each other about the effectiveness of various pedagogical approaches in different cultural contexts.
Department of Sociology, Methodist University, North Carolina