Security and Crime

Converging Perspectives on a Complex World

Alison Wakefield

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526453679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Security and Crime is an authoritative and multidisciplinary analysis of the relationship between security and crime, addressing much of the confusion about its nature and meaning, clarifying its relevance to criminological analysis, and giving due attention to the interdisciplinary nature of the topic. Providing an historical and prospective look at issues within security the book will:

• trace the development of ?security? across disciplines
• situate this contested concept within criminological discourse and concerns
• explore the rising attention in politics and academic scholarship to ?security? issues as they relate to crime
• examine the nature and organisation of interventions to deliver security
• establish clearly the relationship between security, crime and criminology.

International in scope, and broad in coverage, Security and Crime sets out the need to broaden the study of security in a clear, concise style that is easy for students to digest. With comprehensive pedagogical feature including chapter overviews, key terms, study questions, further reading and a glossary, this book is essential for students studying security in criminology, criminal justice, international relations, and related disciplines.

1 Introduction: Navigating a Complex World

Chapter Outline

• Exploring global complexity, 2
• Conceptions of security, 5
• The intersection of security and crime, 8
• Dimensions of security and the plan for the book, 12
• Study questions, 16
• Further reading, 16

Chapter Overview

This chapter provides:

• A discussion of the drivers of change and future security trends that are expected to shape our world over the coming decades.
• An appraisal of the contested concept of security and its multiple applications and meanings.
• An assessment of the relationship between the two concepts of security and crime, and the capacity of a crime-focused criminology discipline to adapt to the increasingly security-focused agendas of politicians and policy-makers.
• An outline of the aims of the book and the dimensions of security to be addressed in each of the ensuing chapters.

Key terms

• Cold War
• Foresight studies
• Globalization
• Human security
• International relations
• Risk
• Securitization
• Security
• Security governance
• Security studies

Exploring Global Complexity

Our world today is characterized by rapid change, interconnectedness, complexity and uncertainty. The acceleration of globalization and technological advancement have revolutionized international trade, communication and travel, and average standards of living are higher than they have ever been. At the same time, the continuing advancement in the speed of change across multiple areas of human activity, and our reliance on interdependent systems, leave us exposed to innumerable and uncertain threats, as demonstrated so profoundly by the cascade of health, economic, social and political effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic.

Insights into the extent of the challenges confronting national governments as they plan for the future are provided by security and defence foresight studies, particularly those published periodically by government national security agencies. Such analyses, which employ a variety of methodologies, are military in origin and can be traced back to the period between the First and Second World Wars (Dreyer and Stang, 2013). They examine the major political and social trends likely to impact on the future of global security, providing strategic intelligence to inform governments’ long-term strategic planning, policy-making and capability-building. They also serve to ‘alert readers to changes that are likely to become threats but may, if addressed promptly, provide opportunities’ (Ministry of Defence, 2018: 11). Foresight research projects may be privately or publicly funded, and national or international in focus (Jordan, 2017), examples including the Global Trends reports of the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC) and the Global Strategic Trends publications of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD). Both series are in their sixth edition at the time of writing, with the next US edition due out in 2021, the US analyses having been launched in 1997 and the UK's in 2001. Others that are publicly available include those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union and the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, which are discussed and compared by Jordan (2017) in a review of foresight studies produced by official defence and security bodies in North America and Western Europe between 2007 and 2017.

For the purpose of this book, the latest NIC and MoD reports have been the main focus. A central theme is the changing balance of power in the world, with the dominance of the West now being challenged, politically and economically, and power shifting eastwards. The international system of institutions, regulations and mechanisms that developed after the end of the Second World War in 1945, shaped by the victorious powers, must adapt significantly to accommodate these shifts. Global risks and threats on the horizon are becoming more complex and difficult to predict, and the relative power of states is reducing in parallel with the expansion in number and influence of non-state transnational actors, such as inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations, multinational companies, media organizations, and criminal, ethnic and religious groupings.

While both reports observe that inequality between countries has reduced, largely due to rapid economic growth in Asian countries, they highlight the problems of rising inequality within countries, particularly in central Asia, Europe and North America. This is seen to be eroding social cohesion and fuelling political populism and nationalist sentiment, particularly in states where there is a lack of trust in government institutions or economic instability, with signs that many governments are becoming more authoritarian. The reports highlight the challenges facing national economies, which need to manage the costs of technological advancement while confronting budgetary pressures in key areas of public spending like defence, health and welfare, as well as trying to manage the expectations of citizens who have become accustomed to a continuing rise in living standards. The implications of the ongoing shift towards a more automated world, encapsulated in the concept of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (4IR) (Schwab, 2017, 2018b), are explored, and the automation of work, the expanding information space and challenges in its regulation, human enhancement technologies, and artificial intelligence (the capability of machines to perform human-like tasks such as learning, problem-solving and decision-making) are identified as being among the technological trends presenting the greatest future implications.

Demographic change is a central theme of both reports, with the global population projected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2019: 5). Rapid population growth is expected in many developing countries, where populations are becoming younger and more male due to female infanticide, child neglect and sex-selective abortion. In such countries, investment in education and employment, as well as measures to address gender imbalances, are deemed essential to mitigate consequential rises in crime and violence, including human rights violations against women and girls. In the developed world, as the reports note, very different demographic challenges apply: the population is ageing and will require much greater spending on health and social care. Both reports note the risks of pandemics and epidemics and the factors that heighten those risks, including a greater propensity for the transfer of zoonotic diseases (those transferred from animals to humans), associated with increasing global connectivity and changing environmental conditions; growing population density in urban areas; and unaddressed deficiencies in national and global health systems for disease control. They predict increasing migration flows within and between countries, motivated by economic opportunity and flight from conflict or worsening economic conditions, and driving rapid urban expansion, particularly in developing countries where it will be more difficult to manage. Continuing and growing pressures on the environment are expected, with the growing world population increasing the demand for resources including water, food and energy, raising the costs to governments of climate change and mitigation measures. The governance of the global commons – the management of areas and resources beyond sovereign jurisdiction, specifically the oceans, polar regions, air space, outer space and cyberspace – is an increasingly pressing concern as competition grows for access to natural resources, and rivalry intensifies between the US and other major powers, particularly China.

The two analyses anticipate increasing risk of conflict as the global balance of power changes and the interests of major powers diverge, the threat of terrorism grows, weak states remain unstable, and weapons of mass destruction proliferate. While recognizing that countries’ economic interdependence provides a check on intra-state aggression, the reports predict that many of the issues and trends identified in the reports and the interplay between them will raise tensions within and between countries. Weak and fragile states are presented as a significant concern, being viewed as potential breeding grounds for terrorism, organized crime, pandemics or mass movements of people, while global interconnectedness and the cumulative effect of these threats create vulnerabilities for others who are thousands of miles away. Rising inequality and unemployment within countries, along with social fragmentation and the weakening of communal values, amplified and exacerbated by social media, are expected to increase the risk of disorder, crime and extremism.

With longstanding vulnerabilities as well as new, complex and cascading threats on the horizon, we have reached an ‘inflection point', according to the MoD (2018: 3), and face an ‘unsettled geopolitical landscape’ (World Economic Forum, 2020: 6). The NIC declares that the characteristic feature of our era is that we are ‘living in a paradox', with a future being shaped that is ‘both more dangerous and richer with opportunity than ever before’ (2017: ix). For today's governments to address the strategic challenges for defence and security that confront them, it is argued that they need to make fundamental changes in approach, to one that is ‘permanently innovative, adaptable, responsive and proactive’ (MoD, 2018: 3). The NIC (2017) emphasizes the importance of ‘long-term thinking', based on the likely future consequences of actions, and the fact that major concerns like terrorism, cyber attack and climate change can only be addressed through multi-stakeholder dialogue and sustained collaboration. Their report implies that it is states’ capacity to do this effectively that will separate the winners and losers in the decades to come, observing that ‘the most powerful actors of the future will draw on networks, relationships, and information to compete and cooperate’ (p. ix).

Conceptions of Security

Such challenges can be placed under the broad heading of ‘security', which is a universal concern and one of the major challenges facing humanity. Indeed, Crawford and Hutchinson argue that it may now be ‘the key problematic of our time’ (2016: 1050, emphasis in original). While it has no obvious disciplinary home, as a theme that has relevance to many, if not most, academic fields, it is a foundational concept of international relations and, as the discipline expanded and broadened, became the central concern of its ‘most prestigious sub-field’ (McSweeney, 1999: 25), security studies. The term is derived from the Latin word securus, meaning ‘free from care', yet it serves as a versatile and ‘essentially contested’ concept (Buzan, 1983: 6; Smith, 2005: 27) – one that defies precise definition and means different things to different people – being an area of particular contention within international relations scholarship.

Booth (2007) observes that security is an instrumental value: not an end in itself, but a means towards living a fulfilling life beyond basic survival. Alluding to Maslow's (1970) well-known ‘hierarchy of needs’ psychological theory, Martin similarly describes it as ‘a basic human need', allowing us to go about our lives ‘freely and without harm', liberating us ‘from the disruptive fear of harm', and building ‘confidence to invest in the future’ (2019: 1). Booth (2007) illustrates his point using three distinctions: between survival and security, as already implied; absolute and relative security; and objective and subjective threats. Security is a relative concept, in that it is difficult to envisage in absolute terms, and likely to be undesirable if such an end-state could be reached. This means that, in practice, it is based on calculations of the likelihood and consequences of undesirable events taking place, and trade-offs being made between security and competing factors such as cost, convenience and personal privacy or liberty.

Objective and subjective conceptions of security reflect a distinction between an ‘absence of threats’ and an ‘absence of fears’ (Wolfers, 1962: 149), expressed in the primary definition of the concept in the Oxford English Dictionary (2011): ‘The state or condition of being or feeling secure’ (emphasis added). Objectively, security is the relative certainty that one is safe from certain threats, the level of threat is minimal, or the necessary precautions are in place to mitigate any discernible risks. This perspective carries the presumption that security can be measured and quantified. By contrast, subjective considerations relate to a sense of security, absence of fear, or level of confidence that one is secure. Efforts to pursue objective security can be symbolic and enhance subjective perceptions of security, speaking to people's ‘ontological insecurities’ (Giddens, 1991) or fears of uncertainty. However, Valverde questions whether it is possible to measure security objectively, in the way that lawbreaking can be measured, arguing that insecurity ‘is not a series of objectively measurable events, but rather a tendency, or what would soon come to be called a probability (and much later, a risk)’ (2014: 383).

These considerations bring to light a further distinction, as to whether security is a passive condition or an active process. Security may be conceived simply as a state of being, but the term is also used to describe activities undertaken to enhance that state. The actions that we take, or products and services that we purchase to protect ourselves or others, serve not only as means of protection, but as enablers of risk-taking. They allow people or organizations to undertake activities that would otherwise expose them to hazards or liabilities, the focus of Ulrich Beck's (1992) influential ‘risk society’ thesis on human adaptations to living in a highly developed, more complex and less controllable world. Security ‘actors’ or ‘providers’ can put processes in place to identify, analyse, evaluate and manage security risk, requiring an awareness and understanding of both the threats being confronted and the vulnerabilities that are present. Such processes will often address both objective indicators and subjective perceptions of security, since stakeholders will not necessarily have informed understandings of threat levels, and certain measures may serve to be primarily symbolic, providing reassurance that ‘something is being done'.

The rhetorical power of the concept of security is exemplified in the advertising of security products and services, politicians’ promises to address voters’ personal or community safety concerns, and security awareness campaigns employed by police forces, governments and employers to influence individual behaviour and reassure people that their concerns are being taken seriously (Zedner, 2009). Security has become a ‘buzzword’ (see Cornwall, 2007), with an ‘allure’ that ‘has seen it attached to a long line of neologisms … that deliberately use the term to mobilize political support and economic resources’ (Zedner, 2009: 22). There is ample room for unscrupulous security providers to take advantage of people's fears, profiting from unassuaged demands for security products and services: the ‘commodification of security’ (Spitzer, 1987; Loader, 1999; Neocleous, 2007). On the other hand, the ‘right kind of security', according to Martin (2019: 2), is ‘a basic building block of civil society', ‘intelligent and proportionate to the risks', and ‘concerned with safeguarding lives, property, information, wealth, reputations, and societal wellbeing'.

Two further dimensions of security that have been heavily debated in international relations relate to its referent object – the question as to whose security is the focus of concern – and what constitutes a security issue. The discipline's traditional focus has been the state and its security from external threats, thus placing a primary emphasis on ‘national security'. This perspective has been increasingly challenged since the early 1990s, however, in growing calls for a shift from a state-centred to a human-centred approach (‘human security'), particularly within United Nations (UN) development circles. State-centred conceptions of security have traditionally prioritized military threats to a nation's territories, people and government, and reflected the primary threats to the major powers through the World War and Cold War decades when the international relations discipline emerged and developed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union – officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – in late 1991, what soon came to be distinctive about the post-Cold War world was the broader set of issues coming to be conceived as international security threats, which could be military, economic, political, societal or environmental in nature (Buzan, 1983), a political process described by Wæver (1995) as ‘securitization'. The human security perspective takes account of a still wider range of issues, an influential UN report breaking the concept down into the sub-categories of economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security (UN Development Programme [UNDP], 1994).

Tadjbakhsh (2013) adds to the fundamental questions of ‘whose security?’ and ‘security from what?’ a third question of ‘security by what means?', inferring that the causes of human security challenges can be complex and require long-term and multi-faceted solutions – not just narrow, military interventions, for example. The ‘human security approach’ therefore lies at the heart of the UN development agenda, informing the Sustaina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Table of legislation, conventions and treaties
• 1 Introduction: Navigating a Complex World
• 2 Securing the globe
• 3 Regional security
• 4 Securing the nation
• 5 Securing communities
• 6 Security and the individual
• 7 Securing the internet
• 8 Securing corporations
• 9 Securing the seas
• 10 Conclusion: Building a resilient future
• Glossary
• References
• Index