The contemporary political imagination and social landscape are saturated by the idea of security and thoughts of insecurity. This saturation has been accompanied by the emergence of a minor industry generating ideas about how to define and redefine security, how to defend and improve it, how to widen and deepen it, how to civilise and democratise it. This book takes an entirely different approach and offers the first fully-fledged critique of security. Challenging the common assumption that treats security as an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been deplo ... More

The contemporary political imagination and social landscape are saturated by the idea of security and thoughts of insecurity. This saturation has been accompanied by the emergence of a minor industry generating ideas about how to define and redefine security, how to defend and improve it, how to widen and deepen it, how to civilise and democratise it. This book takes an entirely different approach and offers the first fully-fledged critique of security. Challenging the common assumption that treats security as an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been deployed towards a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity have been inscribed into human experience. Treating security as a political technology of liberal order-building, engaging with the work of a wide range of thinkers, and ranging provocatively across security studies and international political economy; history, law and political theory; international relations and historical sociology, Neocleous explores the ways in which individuals, classes and the state have been shaped and ordered according to a logic of security. In so doing he uncovers the violence which underlies the politics of security, the ideological circuit between security and emergency powers, and the security fetishism dominating modern politics.