Critique of Security

The contemporary political imagination and social landscape have been almost overwhelmed by worries about security. These concerns have led to the emergence of a minor industry generating ideas about how to define security, how to defend and improve it, how to civilise and democratise it. In Critique of Security Mark Neocleous takes an entirely different approach.

Challenging the common assumption that security is an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been used in the service of a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity become an integral part of human experience. Treating security as a political technology for liberal order-building and engaging with a wide range of thinkers and subject areas - 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 that underlies the politics of security, the ideological links between security and emergency powers, and the fetish for security that is dominating modern politics.