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(Résumé)
m (Late Modernity and he rise of Private Security)
Ligne 35 : Ligne 35 :
  
 
===Late Modernity and he rise of Private Security===
 
===Late Modernity and he rise of Private Security===
* Modern societies are "risk societies" (Ulrich Beck), calling for the identification, management, containment of danger, while remaining open to social defintion and construction (p. 58). The growth of PSC reflects the ever-expanding security agenda. It is a local ang global phenomenon, articulated though a myriad of discourses. To understand it, we must "examine how security privatization and its globalization is linked to three interrelated aspects of late modernity: neo-liberalism and responsibilization, new attitudes towards crime and punsihment, and, finally commodification and the increainsg aslience of risk in perceptions and practices of security" (p. 59).
+
* Modern societies are "risk societies" (Ulrich Beck), calling for the identification, management, containment of danger, while remaining open to social definition and construction (p. 58). The growth of PSC reflects the ever-expanding security agenda. It is a local ang global phenomenon, articulated though a myriad of discourses. To understand it, we must "examine how security privatization and its globalization is linked to three interrelated aspects of late modernity: neo-liberalism and responsibility, new attitudes towards crime and punishment, and, finally modification and the increasing salience of risk in perceptions and practices of security" (p. 59).
* Neo-liberalism and the responsaible security consumer. The rise of neo-liberalism has had various consequences:  
+
* Neo-liberalism and the responsible security consumer. The rise of neo-liberalism has had various consequences:  
** Usally the rise of private sector is associated with decreasing budgets ("fiscal contraint") and the need for the private sector to fill a gap. But in the North, the rise of PSC went hand in hand with increase in security budgets. In the Southn IMF and World Bank programs contributed to privatization and outsourcing, and also weakened the state and increased nepotism with in turn let to the need to intensify "regime security".  Hence there is a pluralization of the centers of power.
+
** Usually the rise of private sector is associated with decreasing budgets ("fiscal constraint") and the need for the private sector to fill a gap. But in the North, the rise of PSC went hand in hand with increase in security budgets. In the South, IMF and World Bank programs contributed to privatization and outsourcing, and also weakened the state and increased nepotism with in turn let to the need to intensify "regime security".  Hence there is a pluralization of the centers of power.
** Neo-liberalism also a plays a role in the rise of PSC trough the specific mode of subjectivation it entails.In the words of Nikolas Rose, it leads to the "instrumentalization of a regulated autonomy". The state incentivize non-state actors and organization to promot a new kind of indirect action, leading to networks of less directed, more or less informal form of crime control, which extend the formal controls of the criminal justice state (cf. Garland, "Culture of Control"). Individuals and communities are called to minimize processess of vicitimization by looking after themselves. MArket and quasi market comme to supplement the work of the police and justice systems (community-watch, etc.) (p. 67). Power is being reconfigured in new security arrangements. "While the numerous processes associated with neo-liberal governance have resulted in a pluralization of actors involved in security delivery and governance, this development cannot be read as a simple extension of state power. Even in the most powerful states, with efficient and well-functionning bureaucracies, private actors once empowered are often able to set agendas and to influence them and act according to their own interests. Moreover, private security initiatives have emerged not only at the instigation or encouragement of the state but alos in situations where the state has, or is perceived to have, a reduced capacity to provide protection. In sum, although the neo-liberal approach leads to a proliferation of security actors, and these actors do not exist in separation from the state, we cannot assume a priori that the state is in a position of controlling and directing them". (p. 69).
+
** Neo-liberalism also a plays a role in the rise of PSC trough the specific mode of subjectivation it entails.In the words of Nikolas Rose, it leads to the "instrumentalization of a regulated autonomy". The state incentivize non-state actors and organization to promote a new kind of indirect action, leading to networks of less directed, more or less informal form of crime control, which extend the formal controls of the criminal justice state (cf. Garland, "Culture of Control"). Individuals and communities are called to minimize processes of victimization by looking after themselves. Markets and quasi markets come to supplement the work of the police and justice systems (community-watch, etc.) (p. 67). Power is being reconfigured in new security arrangements. "While the numerous processes associated with neo-liberal governance have resulted in a pluralization of actors involved in security delivery and governance, this development cannot be read as a simple extension of state power. Even in the most powerful states, with efficient and well-functioning bureaucracies, private actors once empowered are often able to set agendas and to influence them and act according to their own interests. Moreover, private security initiatives have emerged not only at the instigation or encouragement of the state but alos in situations where the state has, or is perceived to have, a reduced capacity to provide protection. In sum, although the neo-liberal approach leads to a proliferation of security actors, and these actors do not exist in separation from the state, we cannot assume a priori that the state is in a position of controlling and directing them". (p. 69).
 
* Security, crime and punishment in risk society! Neo-liberalism and led to a change in socially dominant attitudes around security.
 
* Security, crime and punishment in risk society! Neo-liberalism and led to a change in socially dominant attitudes around security.
** Crime has moved from being a problem to be solved through welfare intervention to a technical problem to be managed through security logics. "Crisis of penal modernism" and humanist penal policy towards more predictive, deterministic, individuallistic and moralist approach to crime. This process depoliticize the issue and leads to technical, managerial and technological responses. This, in turn, legitimize the intervention of expert, private security providers.
+
** Crime has moved from being a problem to be solved through welfare intervention to a technical problem to be managed through security logics. "Crisis of penal modernism" and humanist penal policy towards more predictive, deterministic, individualistic and moralist approach to crime. This process depoliticize the issue and leads to technical, managerial and technological responses. This, in turn, legitimize the intervention of expert, private security providers.
** Moralization of criminality and rise of victimization discourse, which are spread globally through Western development actors. This lerads individuals to belive they must contribute to their own security, whjile private prisons and prisoner management services expand.
+
** Moralization of criminality and rise of victimization discourse, which are spread globally through Western development actors. This lerads individuals to belive they must contribute to their own security, while private prisons and prisoner management services expand.
* Security becomes a commodity subjet to market mechanisms. The opening of the security sector to private actors is also pushed at the multilateral level (WTO, EU directives). Security becomes a fashion for daily practices, something embedded in horizontal social relations and micropolitics. The commodification of security leads to a "risk mentality", concerned with organizing modern complex spaces in a a away that can collect knowledge, exert control and allow effective agency on risks. Security operates in a web of "security institutions" (Ericson and Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society). It spreads at the global level for instance through the political risks analysis and other techniques of risks management used by global firms and their security service providers.
+
* Security becomes a commodity subject to market mechanisms. The opening of the security sector to private actors is also pushed at the multilateral level (WTO, EU directives). Security becomes a fashion for daily practices, something embedded in horizontal social relations and micropolitics. The commodification of security leads to a "risk mentality", concerned with organizing modern complex spaces in a a away that can collect knowledge, exert control and allow effective agency on risks. Security operates in a web of "security institutions" (Ericson and Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society). It spreads at the global level for instance through the political risks analysis and other techniques of risks management used by global firms and their security service providers.
* Security, governance and global power: In the neo-liberal context, hierichical conceptions of governùent no longer capture the structure of security provisions, which is increainsgly dispersed geographically, functionally, normatively and institutionally. It is made of fragmented but overlapping networks and structures of collaborations between state and non-state actors (p. 82). These networks are structured around nodes of discourses and practices, sites of knowledge, capacity and resources that govern security provisions in a relational and contingent process (cf. literature on "nodal security governance", which is rooted in criminology and overlooks issues of power reconfiguration)
+
* Security, governance and global power: In the neo-liberal context, hierarchical conceptions of governance no longer capture the structure of security provisions, which is increasingly dispersed geographically, functionally, normatively and institutionally. It is made of fragmented but overlapping networks and structures of collaborations between state and non-state actors (p. 82). These networks are structured around nodes of discourses and practices, sites of knowledge, capacity and resources that govern security provisions in a relational and contingent process (cf. literature on "nodal security governance", which is rooted in criminology and overlooks issues of power reconfiguration)
  
 
===Power and Governance: global assemblages and the security field==
 
===Power and Governance: global assemblages and the security field==

Version du 3 avril 2015 à 13:14

Référence

Rita Abrahamsen et Michael C. Williams, 2011, Security Beyond the State, Cambridge University Press, volume, numéro, pages. Web

Catégorisation

Résumé

Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource enclaves, the provision and governance of security takes place within assemblages that are de-territorialized in terms of actors, technologies, norms and discourses. They are embedded in a complex transnational architecture, defying conventional distinctions between public and private, global and local. Drawing on theories of globalization and late modernity, along with insights from criminology, political science and sociology, Security Beyond the State maps the emergence of the global private security sector and develops a novel analytical framework for understanding these global security assemblages. Through in-depth examinations of four African countries – Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa – it demonstrates how global security assemblages affect the distribution of social power, the dynamics of state stability, and the operations of the international political economy, with significant implications for who gets secured and how in a global era.

Introduction

  • Private security is quickly becoming a central and pervasive part of everyday life, across the globe. It shows the need to move security studies beyond analysis of the state.
  • Privatization does not come to undermine the power of the state and its monopoly of violence :
    • "Rather than private security eroding the power of the state, or threatening its power and authority, its proliferation is linked to changes inside the state, and its power stems not primarily from the barrel of the gun but from its links to public forms of power and authority. These transformations have led to the emergence of what we call global security assemblages' new security structures and practices that are simultaneously public and private, global and local" (p. 3).

    • Private security necessarily leads to abuses, lack of accountability, etc. But it is enmeshed in broader political processes.
    • One starting point to analyze it is the "historically constitued division between the public and the private": traditionally, citizens are protected by public officiers. This public-private distinction is historically constituted seemingly fixed categories, embedded in the most powerful institutional and conceptual expressions of modern sovereignty. They are used to affirm or challenge relations of power. This leads to a set of methodological processes:
    • "Sociologically, we need to capture not only the historical relationship between public and private force, but also the new social forces and rearticulations of the public and private that are part of the striking resurgence of private security" (p. 8)
    • "Theoretically, we need to explore how specific articulations of the public-private-security relationship are constitutive features of modern liberal politics and the international system, and how they too are being influenced, challenged and rearticulated through contemporary processes of security privatization".
  • The authors appeal to Bourdieu's take on Weber, seeing the state as a field of power, where the holders of capital of different species struggle for power over the state. This view can make private security a capital nholder in that field, overcomoing the somewhat simplistic public-private distinction.And indeed, private policing for the state has been common in Europe until the late 19th century. True also in the US. Private forces were central in colonization and global power structures.
    • The significance and impact of security can only be understood by moving beyond the public-private distinction, with the recognition of how these distinctions are being reconfigured into networks and practices indicative of new relations of power.
    • New perspectives and methodologies are needed to capture the reconfigured security field witin global seucrity assemblages.
    • Need to break with state-centirc approach, especially in the neo-liberal ideological framework.

The Untold Story

  • Growing number of analysis and scholarly commentary on private security firms. The market is to reach around 200 billion by 2015 (for updated numbers, see the last available Securitas annual report). Represents a huge workforce, much superior to the number of public police. We are moving towards public-private "networks of power" (Ian Loader), but little attention is paid to private security besides military privatization.
  • Chapter argument: Privatization is not a challenge to prevailing structures of authority, but is embedded in, and inseperable from, transformations in governance. (p. 23). To do so, they address three dimensions of what they call the "mercenary misconception".
  • Mercenary misconception and the lilegal, illicit and invisible: The end of the Cold War and the downsizing in military forces acted as a push and pull. It supplied personnel and equipment to the private sector, while superpower were less willing to intervene in their ally countries. But there are broader economic, political movement that also explain its take-off. Many authors classify PSC as illicit, like mafias and organized crimes in that they are a form of organized violence (power without consent and authority). But here again, they miss the point that PSCs are often not used in oppostion to state authority but on behalf of it. Conversely, some authors working on the rise of public-private partnerships, but here again they often tend to exclude it from the discussion as a marginal phenonmenon. This leads also th generalizations about Africa as the usful other where PSC is "rampant", while the West remains a field of a state monopoliy of violence, even when the latter is being reconfigured (p. 37).
  • The story of privatization: 70% of the market share of private security is located in the Europe and North America. PSC are highly specialized, knowledge-intensive and expertise-oriented providers of "integrated security solutions" (manned guarding, alarm systems, surveillance, close protection services and assets in transit to satellite tracking (p. 41). Authors provide a historical account of the biggest PSC groups: G4S and Securitas. Authors quote Securitas, which presents in this way new market opportunities the "huge econoic welfare revolution in Asia and other markets undergoing rapid exonomic expansion" (p. 46).
  • Securing liquid modernity: Zygmunt Bauman's work on liquid modernity described the workd as increasingly formed by flows rather than rigid demarcations. Extraterritorial elites have a global reach: they are the diplomats, the businessmen, the tourists. They need to be protected from the vagabonds who move to survive within their local reach, through guards, fences, boundaries (around ATMs, hotels, global firms, migrant detention centers, flight rapatriations, private prisons, etc.).
  • Conclusion: need to looking beyond Private Military Companies and beyond the state.

Late Modernity and he rise of Private Security

  • Modern societies are "risk societies" (Ulrich Beck), calling for the identification, management, containment of danger, while remaining open to social definition and construction (p. 58). The growth of PSC reflects the ever-expanding security agenda. It is a local ang global phenomenon, articulated though a myriad of discourses. To understand it, we must "examine how security privatization and its globalization is linked to three interrelated aspects of late modernity: neo-liberalism and responsibility, new attitudes towards crime and punishment, and, finally modification and the increasing salience of risk in perceptions and practices of security" (p. 59).
  • Neo-liberalism and the responsible security consumer. The rise of neo-liberalism has had various consequences:
    • Usually the rise of private sector is associated with decreasing budgets ("fiscal constraint") and the need for the private sector to fill a gap. But in the North, the rise of PSC went hand in hand with increase in security budgets. In the South, IMF and World Bank programs contributed to privatization and outsourcing, and also weakened the state and increased nepotism with in turn let to the need to intensify "regime security". Hence there is a pluralization of the centers of power.
    • Neo-liberalism also a plays a role in the rise of PSC trough the specific mode of subjectivation it entails.In the words of Nikolas Rose, it leads to the "instrumentalization of a regulated autonomy". The state incentivize non-state actors and organization to promote a new kind of indirect action, leading to networks of less directed, more or less informal form of crime control, which extend the formal controls of the criminal justice state (cf. Garland, "Culture of Control"). Individuals and communities are called to minimize processes of victimization by looking after themselves. Markets and quasi markets come to supplement the work of the police and justice systems (community-watch, etc.) (p. 67). Power is being reconfigured in new security arrangements. "While the numerous processes associated with neo-liberal governance have resulted in a pluralization of actors involved in security delivery and governance, this development cannot be read as a simple extension of state power. Even in the most powerful states, with efficient and well-functioning bureaucracies, private actors once empowered are often able to set agendas and to influence them and act according to their own interests. Moreover, private security initiatives have emerged not only at the instigation or encouragement of the state but alos in situations where the state has, or is perceived to have, a reduced capacity to provide protection. In sum, although the neo-liberal approach leads to a proliferation of security actors, and these actors do not exist in separation from the state, we cannot assume a priori that the state is in a position of controlling and directing them". (p. 69).
  • Security, crime and punishment in risk society! Neo-liberalism and led to a change in socially dominant attitudes around security.
    • Crime has moved from being a problem to be solved through welfare intervention to a technical problem to be managed through security logics. "Crisis of penal modernism" and humanist penal policy towards more predictive, deterministic, individualistic and moralist approach to crime. This process depoliticize the issue and leads to technical, managerial and technological responses. This, in turn, legitimize the intervention of expert, private security providers.
    • Moralization of criminality and rise of victimization discourse, which are spread globally through Western development actors. This lerads individuals to belive they must contribute to their own security, while private prisons and prisoner management services expand.
  • Security becomes a commodity subject to market mechanisms. The opening of the security sector to private actors is also pushed at the multilateral level (WTO, EU directives). Security becomes a fashion for daily practices, something embedded in horizontal social relations and micropolitics. The commodification of security leads to a "risk mentality", concerned with organizing modern complex spaces in a a away that can collect knowledge, exert control and allow effective agency on risks. Security operates in a web of "security institutions" (Ericson and Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society). It spreads at the global level for instance through the political risks analysis and other techniques of risks management used by global firms and their security service providers.
  • Security, governance and global power: In the neo-liberal context, hierarchical conceptions of governance no longer capture the structure of security provisions, which is increasingly dispersed geographically, functionally, normatively and institutionally. It is made of fragmented but overlapping networks and structures of collaborations between state and non-state actors (p. 82). These networks are structured around nodes of discourses and practices, sites of knowledge, capacity and resources that govern security provisions in a relational and contingent process (cf. literature on "nodal security governance", which is rooted in criminology and overlooks issues of power reconfiguration)

=Power and Governance: global assemblages and the security field

Divers