In the twenty-first century, ‘vulnerability’ has become central to the governance of security, migration, integration, social care and mental health. But what does it mean to govern through vulnerability? Perhaps, we might optimistically think, vulnerability signifies a new-found commitment to precarious lives on the part of policymakers. But if this is so, why do associated policy recommendations appear to transform welfare state provision – moving away from provision to those in need, and towards the remoulding of subjects so that they do not become ‘costly’ or ‘risky’?

This book responds to the rise of vulnerability in the fields of public health, psychology, international security, political administration, post-colonial African and Middle Eastern politics, policing and migration. Across this policy landscape, we show that vulnerability has become central to the reinvention of social governance. When policymakers wish to extend social control further into communities and their municipal structures, the language of vulnerability can help to appropriate the spaces previously administered by the welfare state.

How is the language of vulnerability so powerful and transformative? At its core, ‘vulnerability’ implies a pre-emptive temporality – it is used to denote the potential for something negative to occur. The reorganisation of security and social policies around vulnerability works to centre a preventive, anticipatory temporality. This invents a landscape of intervention before a particular phenomenon manifests. Acting upon the future opens new spaces for policymakers, who can expand their remit by making claims on the society to come and how the present day shows signs of the nascent threats and costs that will later beset us.

Importantly, the language of vulnerability goes beyond that of risk. Large scholarly literatures have shown how the discourse of risk entered security and social politics in the late twentieth century, enabling policymakers and stakeholders to increase surveillance, restrict liberties and to extend their governing mandate by invoking threat and danger (Amoore and De Goede 2008; Beck 1992). The deployment of risk, crucially, exceeds the realm of statistical calculation. Policymakers do not now calculate the statistical likelihood of a threat manifesting and then act proportionately to prevent it; rather, the twenty-first century has seen the proliferation of pre-emptive risk technologies, which drive political action where the likelihood of a threatening outcome cannot be calculated. Here, the present is governed through a security logic of the possible, which must at all costs be prevented – even though its likelihood is unknown or incalculable (Amoore 2013; Aradau and van Munster 2007).

Vulnerability does not deploy the same overtly securitising moves as risk. It does not operate on the register of ‘catastrophe’, nor does it simplistically affirm the need for public protection from future threats. Vulnerability, in the case studies documented in this book, represents the complex intertwining of two distinct logics – that of social provision and that of public protection. Vulnerability brings together the mandate of the welfare state (to provide for those in need) with that of security and policing (to identity and disrupt dangerous plots and persons). By targeting social provision at those who might become disordered, delinquent or deviant, vulnerability-oriented interventions deploy welfare in order to secure the future from additional costs, disruption and potential insecurity. They imagine that signs of need or disadvantage foretell a future of crime, disorderliness or even terrorism.

By weaving together the logics of individual need with potential danger, these pre-emptive interventions echo the original political intent behind the formation of the first welfare states. The welfare states (and public ‘relief’ systems) of Europe and of Roosevelt’s US were all developed to counter domestic political agitation from workers’ organisations, which, in times of hardship, threatened to destabilise public order or even overthrow political elites (Fox Piven and Cloward 1971; Neocleous 2006). The interest of the state in social insurance was originally premised upon undermining support for collective mobilisations that threatened the state and capitalism. The ‘wretched’, it was understood, brought significant potential for organised disorder. The concept of “national security”, Neocleous argues (2006), emerged from the concept of “social security”, because it drew more heavily on the original logic of the welfare state than it did the “national defence” logic that organised the military.

Historically, then, social security and national security systems share a common goal – the preservation of the political and economic system from uprisings, destabilising events and disruptions. So why should it look so strange to a modern audience that vulnerability-oriented policies blur the sectors of social and national security? This is a pertinent question. Alison Howell suggests that, in the fields of international relations and security studies, scholars have adopted an impoverished and ahistorical understanding of security, problematically limited to existential threats to the nation-state (Howell 2014). As such, the field fails to understand, she argues, the origin of both social and national security in the early and mid-twentieth century attempts to govern populations. More broadly, the popular discourses of the welfare state as a provider of care to those in need have proved highly attractive and have eluded its original function of preventing the overthrow of capitalist systems. Beveridge’s delineation of social insurance schemes as protecting individuals from the evils of “want, disease, idleness, ignorance and squalor” remain noble, but the political elite did not implement welfare schemes until they saw their own interests (economic and political stability) as being served through social provision.

Intriguingly, and over time, the first welfare states became concerned with the ‘morality’ of workers and their families. These concerns were not oriented towards preventing strikes and mobilisations, but rather demonstrate the objectives of the welfare state adapting towards increasing economic productivity (as is wonderfully demonstrated in Chapter 4 by Laura Jung). The introduction of public health measures (neo-hygienism) in the early twentieth century functioned to ensure the readiness (and sobriety) of workers to work, and thereby to sustain the capitalist system. The expansion of the welfare state then turned to policing proper conduct through “welfare workers”, known as “social work”, to ensure the “fitness” of the population (Rose 1985: 152–155; see also Rose 1996).

So, the logics of welfare and state security/policing have always been intertwined. Furthermore, the politics of public administration look significantly less progressive than we might otherwise assume when populations and individuals are targeted for reform to serve the needs of the state and the economy.

But, as the inheritor of this complex security politics, what does the contemporary discourse of vulnerability do? Is it unique in any way? Vulnerability merges the functions, operations and goals of contemporary public sector governance. Whereas security, policing and welfare have been significantly siloed in modern public administration, vulnerability brings them back together – deploying targeted welfare responses not just to meet individual need but to reduce future disorder and deviance by doing so. While vulnerability governance can be understood as replicating many functions of the original welfare state, it is novel in one regard: it deploys pre-emptive interventions at the individual level.¹

Governing ‘through vulnerability’ fully embraces the pre-emptive logic of contemporary risk governance. The signs of need, made apparent in an individual’s presentation or conduct, are read as indicating their ‘pre-delinquency’, the danger they might present in the future if their life course is not rectified, and their securitised potential is not addressed (Heath-Kelly and Shanaah 2022). Here, the operations of population governance are not targeted at the level of population, like the operations of twentieth-century biopolitics. Instead of using statistics to direct the governance of national, regional or local populations, the remit of vulnerability governance is that of the individual. An individual’s need, or disadvantage, can be read through the vulnerability paradigm as future risk and danger (Brown 2016).

Vulnerability governance is a particularly localised phenomena; as a result, its discourse often legitimises profoundly invasive interventions on individual lives – once they are framed as potentially disruptive or dangerous to the future. Operating through the enormous and complex systems of public administration and welfare of the contemporary era, we often find vulnerability governance accompanying local social provision, local integration programmes, and in healthcare premises, schools and workplaces. By accompanying the mechanisms of welfare and provision, vulnerability governance has brought the operations of security into the local arena. This is not the traditional security landscape of international politics or terrorist conspiracy. Rather, vulnerability governance frames proximity to everyday lives as ‘earlier’ in the ‘prevention chain’. A prime example of this is found in the discourse of the Radicalisation Awareness Network of the European Union (EU). Its many working groups are united by the common commitment to a spatio-temporal localism of threat detection and prevention (Melhuish and Heath-Kelly 2022). The closer to individual lives that radicalisation prevention can be embedded (within social and public services), the earlier it is assumed that threat can be detected and intervened upon by welfare officers. ‘Closer’ means ‘earlier’, in the operations of vulnerability governance.

Finally, vulnerability governance foregrounds the concept of resilience, although not as governance from a distance (Joseph 2018), but rather an individualised, corrective and dynamic intervention, designed to re-establish the resilience of those deemed vulnerable (Amery 2019; Aranda et al. 2012). The individual is to be identified by local public sector professionals as potentially disruptive or costly; their conduct and behaviours are then to be modified through soft power interventions, sustaining their own personal resilience – but also that of the state and the economy.

This ‘locality’ of vulnerability governance brings risk assessment (for future dependency, disorder and delinquency) into the remit of social care professionals and educators, but it also, surprisingly perhaps, brings social provision into the work of security and policing personnel, who identify and resolve counterterrorism concerns through the work of multi-agency radicalisation panels. Our book is organised around this multidirectional movement of care and policing, such that vulnerability brings security and risk into care sectors, while it simultaneously brings care professionals and logics into counterterrorism.

Vulnerability literatures

What have others said on the question of vulnerability? What can we add to their discussions by paying attention to the co-constitution of social policy and security? As Kate Brown (2016) demonstrates in her remarkable study of vulnerability-oriented policies, definitions of the concept outside its use in political policies are remarkably varied. Some philosophers understand vulnerability, in and of itself, to represent the fundamental equality of human beings through their propensity to be wounded, arguing that vulnerability theory should replace the legal and political models of the subject (as formally equal in rights and autonomy). Martha Fineman (2019) and others argue that proper attention to vulnerability would characterise a state that is properly responsive to questions of social justice and disadvantage. Judith Butler offers a complementary reading of vulnerability. She suggests that attentiveness to the universal vulnerability of lives to harm and death forms the groundwork of global ethical obligations (Butler 2012; 2020), while also recognising that vulnerability is produced by deeply engrained economic and social systems (Butler 2020).

For other scholars, vulnerability does not offer a progressive political vision, but rather is immersed in stigmatisation (Wishart 2003) and reflects the dominance of therapeutic culture and psychologisation in modern societies (Furedi 2004). The most detailed account of vulnerability and its place in social care policy and practice comes from Kate Brown, who argues that “attention to vulnerability opens up difficult questions about deservingness, human agency, care and social control” (Brown 2016: 1–2). The ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’ has resonated through drug prevention (Wincup 2019), in relation to disability (Clough 2017) and education (Ecclestone and Rawdin 2016). Vulnerability, according to Brown (2016: 1–2), operates as a categorisation employed by authorities and professionals to designate an individual as requiring of correction, assistance and even control. By categorising someone as vulnerable, an extended range of interventions can be performed upon them – both protective and controlling in nature.

A paradigmatic example of this disciplinary regime can be found in the Care Act 2014 (UK Parliament 2014), applicable to healthcare and social care provision in England and Wales. The Care Act formalised the responsibilities of care professionals for vulnerable people, establishing that having care needs (such as disability, addiction or mental illness) can sometimes – but not always – render a person unable to protect themselves from abuse. If a risk of abuse exists (such as financial abuse, sexual abuse or physical abuse), then care professionals are tasked with making a safeguarding referral for vulnerable people, because they might not be able to adequately protect themselves. Local authority agencies can then be required to step in to provide alternative housing or support.

Safeguarding those vulnerable to abuse, who cannot protect themselves, is of course a noble and worthy aim. But the attribution of vulnerability to an individual does, in safeguarding processes, renegotiate their agency as a person, a political subject and as a decision-maker. Through safeguarding, local practitioners are empowered to exercise a significant level of control of choices made by that individual – steering them towards more socially conventional living arrangements, as well as protecting them from harm. With vulnerability comes a mediation of choice and freedom through social control.

No one would object to the rescue of an abused elderly person from accommodation where they are victimised. Nor would any right-thinking person object to the rescue of a domestic violence survivor from cohabitation with their abuser. But not all safeguarding processes, or attributions of vulnerability, are so clear cut. The logic of vulnerability has expanded beyond urgent protective measures that resolve situations of victimisation. As national economies and social service provision reorients around preventing future need (rather than responding to need in the present), vulnerability has become a language for the reorganisation of social provision around risk and potential disorder, rather than need. In this scenario, vulnerability is the matrix through which social welfare is provided on a preventative basis – through interventions in the lives of those deemed likely to engage in criminal careers or antisocial behaviour.

To save the future costs of prosecuting, incarcerating and rehabilitating these offenders, many welfare states have been reorganised around the prospect of prevention. Prevention, it is argued, is cheaper to fund than retroactive response. The Scottish Christie Commission report is paradigmatic in this regard. Responding to the prospect of decreasing funding from the Westminster government, Scottish authorities commissioned a report on the future of welfare in the country, led by Dr Campbell Christie. The Christie Commission (2011) framed rising demand for welfare services as a long-standing failure of the government to address the causes of disadvantage and vulnerability. To resolve the ‘failure demand’ (of people seeking support for their needs and their disadvantages), Christie recommended that welfare spending be immediately reprioritised on preventing negative outcomes – not responding to them, as had been the previous commitment to welfare provision.

Recharacterising the provision of welfare according to needs as failure demand (spending that could have been avoided by earlier targeted interventions (Christie Commission 2011: 7)) demonstrates the ascendence of prevention as a modality and logic for governing the social. It reframes social expenditure as an unwanted occurrence for government, highlighting the neoliberal context for welfare reform and the turn to preventive interventions. It also centralises an assumption that people and groups can be identified as heading towards potential costliness, in advance, and steered away from unwanted behaviours. These are the logics of social control and risk that accompany the reorganisation of the welfare state around vulnerability.

But this raises the thorny question of the relationship between neoliberalism and vulnerability governance. Many authors have proposed a relationship between neoliberal economic and social transformations and the reorganisation of welfare states around the prevention of claims, the reduction of expenditure and the pre-emptive reform of at-risk individuals. As Stephen Webb writes:

Certainly, the operations of the welfare state in the current historical moment centralise anticipatory intervention on those lives deemed ‘troubled’ in order to reduce future cost through law enforcement and corrective rehabilitation. In a particularly striking example of this, Joe Turner delineates how the UK government’s “troubled families” programme was established in 2012 to “transform the lives” of “Britain’s most troubled families” – understood as those imposing the most costs on the welfare state through antisocial behaviour, crime and entrenched unemployment (Turner 2017). The scheme provided families with a family intervention worker, who would induce appropriate forms of responsible citizenship and domesticity in the home. In the event of non-cooperation, sanctions would be imposed upon the family by the state.

Like the Scottish Christie Commission’s identification of needs that exist in the present as a failure to prevent them in the past, the Troubled Families programme is an initiative borne of the desire to cut costs – by intervening before they arise, on the basis of risk flags. The governance of population occurs here through the targeted application of welfare support (the family intervention worker) to an individual family, as contrasted with the population-wide safety net of social insurance. The vulnerability of those target families is framed almost entirely through the risk (and cost) they pose to the future welfare and criminal justice system.

But to what extent is this neoliberal? The reorganisation of welfare states around prevention is disciplinary, distasteful and coercive, for sure. But the extent to which we can call this a ‘neoliberal’ variant is questionable. This supposedly ‘neoliberal’ welfare still rests on the provision of (some kind of) social assistance. While social assistance is reduced, compare this to the complete abandonment of disadvantaged populations to their fate, or to incarceration resulting from poverty survival strategies, in sociologies of neoliberal penality in the US (Wacquant 2009). Indeed, the criminologists behind the major academic studies of neoliberal welfare retreat and punitive crime policy, David Garland, Bernard Harcourt and Loïc Wacquant, all argue that neoliberalism sees the (American) state withdraw funding for social policy and welfare – and then extend militarised policing and mass incarceration into its place. They each argue that the neoliberal state abandons welfare but simultaneously doubles down on its criminal justice mission, using repression and incarceration to ‘resolve’ the social issues left by this deliberate retreat from social assistance (Garland 2002; Harcourt 2011; Wacquant 2009). Unsurprisingly, each of the authors writes about the experience of the US and not Europe.

So, the unveiling of new, targeted and disciplinary social assistance programmes that try to reform ‘troubled’ families or intervene in at-risk lives before they become costly to the economy are not immediately apparent as neoliberal. Rather, they are often coercive, paternalist and pre-emptive welfare interventions. Unbridled neoliberalism undertakes to remove social assistance and to criminalise the communities left in precarity. The idea of a neoliberal welfare society (Webb 2006: 50), then, could be viewed as a contradiction in terms – but, of course, we must recognise that European welfare states employ the welfare/neoliberalism matrix to differing degrees. So why has the idea of a profound shift from a welfare state to a neoliberal welfare state been so popular? The academic investment in a neoliberal welfare society results from viewing preceding social insurance systems of the mid-twentieth century as uncoercive and undisciplinary, meeting needs for the sake of meeting those needs. The denigration of contemporary (neoliberal) welfare systems for their targeted, risk-based, cost-cutting objectives is partially reliant upon a utopian understanding of social insurance in the early and mid-twentieth century. But the contrast is not as marked as we might think.

Earlier in the chapter we explored how the original purpose of social insurance was to protect the state against the prospect of strikes and disorder. It was a state security technology, designed to weaken support for trade unions and mass mobilisation. Then, the ‘moralising’ efforts of twentieth-century social workers (to ensure sobriety and responsible citizenship among the population) and public hygiene initiatives described by Rose (1985) are further indications that social policy functions to protect the state economy, even while it meets individual needs. Foucault’s historical studies on the growth of disciplinary and bio-political governance should also convince us that public and social policy serve the interests of the state, through the governing of population. As such, the contrast between neoliberal welfare society and the good old days of social welfarism is exaggerated. Particular administrations might occasionally adjust the balance between cost-cutting and generosity, but there has been no paradigm shift in the nature of the welfare state. It has always constituted borders between those deemed worthy of economic support and those deemed unworthy, generating a significant disciplinary effect on the conduct of the population.

So where does this leave vulnerability? If there has been no paradigm shift between ‘progressive’ and ‘neoliberal’ welfare state models, and the provision of social security has always been tied to the preservation of national security and the conservation of economic and political elites, then vulnerability governance is the latest form taken by the social/national security nexus. It overtly reflects the original relationship between social security and national security, deploying social assistance to prevent potential costs (both economic and in terms of crime and disorder) down the line. But rather than acting upon entire populations, as social insurance did, vulnerability governance targets those individuals deemed “at risk of becoming risky” (Heath-Kelly 2013). It is an increasingly localised performance, often performed by multi-agency partnerships upon individuals within a municipality (Gressgård and Lozic 2020). ‘Closer’ is read as ‘earlier’, in the prevention of future disorder (Melhuish and Heath-Kelly 2022).

Importantly, the governance of radicalisation vulnerability is a particularly novel development, where – for the first time – practitioners outline the particular socio-economic and cognitive vulnerabilities that can lead individuals to accept extreme ideologies (see the chapters 6 and 7). Here, individual pathways have been envisaged for the path towards insecurity and rebellion. Contrastingly, twentieth-century welfare states could not conceive of the ‘pathways’ that lead individuals to revolt against the state; rather they simply provided concessions to slightly improve the conditions of workers, hoping to prevent the fomentation of political mobilisation.

Vulnerability is the palatable language through which risk (to the state, the public or the economy) is identified, assessed and corrected in individuals – securitising marginalised populations on account of their potential futures. By appropriating social welfarist language and mechanisms of care, interventions can reach further and deeper into society – promising to remedy the vulnerability of certain groups (and thus their future conduct and its effects). This circumvents the costly demands of regulating deviancy through law, as in pre-emptive justice (Zedner 2021), although the target group significantly overlaps. As Kate Brown argues, vulnerability is the “shadow concept of risk” (Brown 2016: 2). It is a complementary discourse that allows moralising or policing interventions to penetrate deeper into communities and to ‘correct’ those lives deemed antisocial, risky or undesirable.

From care to risk, and from risk to care – multidirectional applications of vulnerability

Vulnerability governance presents an overlap between welfare and care systems with policing and national security structures. While this overlap is not in itself novel, the language of vulnerability – and the distinctively targeted methods of state intervention (targeted at individuals) – are new. Crucially, the language and methods of vulnerability governance have produced multidirectional exchanges between care and policing sectors. It is not just that policing and security techniques of assessing risk and the potential for disorder have entered social care; rather, technologies of care have also passed into some national security work. Particularly in the governance of radicalisation, police agencies now lean heavily on techniques drawn from psychology and social work to understand (and attempt to reverse) the individual’s transition to terrorist violence.

Our book tackles the transformation of the welfare state and the security state in modern politics, such that care and repression can no longer be firmly distinguished. To do this, we use Part I to study the move from care to anticipatory risk assessment in social policy sectors; whereas Part II explores the importation of vulnerability and care logics into national security work (attempting to produce a realm of early intervention before threat develops).

In Part I we collect together chapters that look at social policy sectors where caring work has begun to incorporate threat/security framings and objectives (and the economic context for this transformation of welfare and social provision towards risk). These chapters focus attention on the development of ‘vulnerability governance’ across policy sectors (and its relationship to risk governance). Each explores how traditional understandings of vulnerability (as necessitating care and need) are overturned in favour of assessing future risk from designated groups, and the political economic context that facilitated the integration of policing for future risk.

Part I begins with the intervention of Randi Gressgård and Vanja Lozic. In Chapter 1 they explore migrant integration programmes in urban Swedish areas, which target Arabic-speaking mothers as vulnerable. Carefully unpacking the effects of the integration of resilience discourse into Swedish welfare programming, the chapter shows how the women have first been identified as vulnerable (in the sense that they are culturally and linguistically disenfranchised from Swedish communities), before this vulnerability is rapidly reconjured to mean the potential for disorder, and even terrorism, in these neighbourhoods. Through interviews with police and agency stakeholders in the multi-agency Kraftsamling programme, Gressgård and Lozic show how engagement, community collaboration and knowledge exchange have become security practices that, in the minds of practitioners, reduce vulnerability and thus reduce the threat of disorder.

The marking of vulnerable populations by policymakers as the locus for potential threats becomes even more extreme in Chapter 2, by Andrew Fletcher and Ali Fuat Birol. They explore the migrant detention centres at the southern border of the US, which (under multiple administrations) have detained the most vulnerable newcomers to the country, who are simultaneously designated as potential threats to the nation. Using the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Fletcher and Fuat Birol explore the inversion of vulnerability in migrant detention centres – such that unaccompanied children are detained in traumatic conditions, on the basis that they pose a threat to the US. Rather than responding to frightened children with a recognition of the shared vulnerability that could unite people in solidarity, the authors demonstrate the purposeful dehumanising of detained migrants in the centres. This functions, they argue, to reconstitute the performance of American national identity, against the spectre of threatening, anonymised outsiders.

In Chapter 3 Jana Fey then turns our attention to mental health awareness campaigns and their discursive transformation during the COVID-19 crisis. As public health measures, mental health awareness campaigns have historically attempted to make responsible those living with depression and anxiety to become ‘resilient’ to their distress – a significant motif of neoliberal approaches to health, which advocate self-care. Indeed, the UK’s public health discourse on mental distress tends to associate the need for corrective measures with the economic cost of sick days for conditions such as anxiety and depression. Fey then explores the transformation of mental distress discourse during the pandemic, where mental health vulnerabilities became the signature motif of anti-lockdown campaigning. In the midst of the pandemic, groups deployed their vulnerabilities to mental distress as a political argument against restrictions. Physical vulnerability to a virus was pitched against mental health impacts of lockdowns – reimagining the pandemic society through the competing vulnerabilities of different groups.

Laura Jung continues the focus on public health in Chapter 4, moving our attention to the tensions between trauma diagnoses and social insurance in the world’s first welfare state under Bismarck. In 1889, traumatic neurosis was recognised under the workplace accident law, providing small pensions for those disabled by a workplace accident. Using fascinating excerpts from German psychiatric debates, Jung shows how attributions of vulnerability were made not only towards the disabled workers (and, later, World War I veterans), but also towards the state economy, which became responsible for funding their pensions. The chapter foregrounds how associating the traumatic neurosis diagnosis with a social insurance payment generated medical contestation of the illness, of the veracity of those presenting with symptoms. Some doctors framed claimants as a ‘threat’ to the economy, arguing that their symptoms were hysterical, yet subconscious, manifestations of the desire for a pension. Even in 1889, it seems, the liberal political desire to make individuals responsible for their own health and financial solvency, against the spectre of escalating welfare payments, was apparent.

Finally, Part I concludes with Chapter 5, by Charlotte Heath-Kelly, on the integration of psychiatry within counterterrorism and public protection in the UK. The chapter explores the waxing and waning of who is deemed vulnerable to radicalisation by policymakers, according to economic imperatives. The chapter explores how ‘whole-of-society’ approaches to radicalisation prevention (like the UK’s Prevent Strategy) have appropriated the language of safeguarding vulnerable people from the public sector. By recasting counterterrorism as a public sector safeguarding duty, all education, healthcare, social care and policing professionals have been mandated to receive government-produced training on who is vulnerable to becoming involved in terrorism. National security is being performed through a safeguarding pathway, so that potential terrorists are identified and provided with support. Recently, however, the consolidation of right-wing actors in politics has undermined the discourse of ‘vulnerability to becoming a terrorist’. Prevent is now increasingly supplemented with programmes that securitise those in mental distress, detaining them under mental health law for reasons of public protection, while framing the state as that which is vulnerable (to terrorism).

Part II collects chapters that look at the transformation of counterterrorism through logics of ‘individual vulnerability’, through the expansion of P/CVE (preventing/countering violent extremism) programmes. Whereas Part I looks at the inclusion of risk and security within care sectors (under the rubric of vulnerability governance), Part II tracks the steady proliferation of care professionals and logics within national security work. The conceptual malleability of vulnerability is such that it can be used to transform counterterrorism – bringing national security into the duties of local authorities and social providers – while also moulding more traditional social policy work around the prevention of future costs and insecurity.

Part II opens with Chapter 6 – Barbara Gruber’s study of individual case management in the Netherlands, where crime prevention schemes have been adapted for those deemed at risk of radicalisation. Youth workers now attempt to restore the resilience of those vulnerable to radicalisation through psychosocial training as well as welfare assistance with finding employment, housing and education. However, Gruber tracks a noticeable shift in Dutch prevention programming, with emphasis on personal vulnerability factors in policy (and programming) increasing significantly over time – to the detriment of structural influences. Prevention workers attempt to make the migrant youth responsible for their own resilience to radicalising influences, classing this as a type of personal development work on one’s own conduct. It is thus a highly moralising intervention – demonstrated particularly sharply in the case of unreformable referrals to the counter-radicalisation system, who cannot be released from the system on account of their continued resistance to change. Gruber notes that this effectively recreates the deserving/undeserving binary of welfare provision within the Dutch radicalisation prevention system, creating ‘undeserving vulnerables’ who are unresponsive to resilience training.

The discussion then continues in Chapter 7 with Robin Andersson Malmros and Jennie Sivenbring’s discussion of Swedish and Danish multi-agency systems for radicalisation prevention. In these Nordic programmes, vulnerability appears through a typology of societal-level vulnerability factors, group-level vulnerability factors and individual-level vulnerability factors. They trace how vulnerability governance is largely targeted at the potential victims of extremist recruiters (meaning those who need protection) – but how these vulnerable targets are also framed as potential future risks in themselves. This creates a profound ambiguity in the meaning of vulnerability, as it is applied within radicalisation prevention. It is simultaneously individual safeguarding work and public protection work. Andersson Malmros and Sivenbring then undertake a close analysis of Danish and Swedish prevention work, to identify how each nation respectively balances the ambiguity through practice.

Subsequently, Part II shifts to explore the manifestation of vulnerability governance outside Western (or Northern Europe). The discussion begins in Chapter 8 with Jan Daniel’s study of the transformation of international development discourse around the notion of vulnerability. Framing his investigation through the interaction of United Nations (UN) officials and Western donor agencies with Lebanon, Daniel shows how development policies have pivoted towards the language and practice of P/CVE. Whereas Lebanon has historically been framed in international development discourse as a ‘failing state’ with insufficiently stable state institutions, the country is now ‘located’ and understood through discourses of weak social cohesion and the vulnerability of social groups to extremism. Daniel argues that the UN’s PVE (preventing violent extremism) agenda has elevated a new set of Lebanon’s problems for the attention of the international community. Institutionalist-focused accounts of underdevelopment have been replaced by a vulnerability frame, which characterises social formations as precarious due to their proximity – and thus susceptibility to – extremist groups and conflicts.

This sea change in development discourse should astonish us, as it exemplifies the power of vulnerability discourse for policymakers. Vulnerability enables the reframing of traditional problematics (of development, of civil wars, of crime) through the nexus between social policy and security sectors.

We turn in Chapter 9 to the experience of countries in northern and western Africa that have imported P/CVE programming from Europe but apply the vulnerability discourse outside the political context in which it originated. Fabrizio Cuccu begins by exploring how Tunisian authorities have implemented P/CVE, which has noticeable Islamophobic qualities in its European context, upon a Muslim-majority population. He shows us how the Tunisian state has opened space for international donor organisations to run community cohesion projects and imam training initiatives, dedicated to the promotion of a moderate Islam. But this has meant that international organisations have transported international concepts of vulnerability to Tunisia, and to the training of imams, without much local adaptation. This has led to the discursive reproduction of the good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy used by the previous Tunisian authoritarian regime to associate Tunisian Islam with moderation – and to denigrate political opponents. Vulnerability has been imported into the post-revolutionary Tunisian context and now serves local political actors in their efforts to denigrate religious others and to strengthen the Tunisian security apparatus.

Akinyemi Oyawale then explores, in Chapter 10, the difficult translation of P/CVE to the Nigerian context, which, like Tunisia, has seen the uncritical and un-adapted implementation of international discourse on radicalisation prevention. Akinyemi explores the post-colonial sovereignty of Nigeria through the lens of the P/CVE policies it has implemented, providing a wonderful analysis of the vulnerability of Nigerian state sovereignty. With significant portions of the country applying sharia law, the political elite in Abuja have difficulty castigating their opponents in the north because many have risen to prominence through association with extreme Islamist forces! By exploring the challenging foundations of post-colonial sovereignty in Nigeria, where imperial domination – rather than a social contract – led to the creation of the state apparatus, Oyawale explores how Nigeria used P/CVE to constitute a national identity against the extremist other but is simultaneously vulnerable in its efforts to do so.

Finally, in Chapter 11, Part II concludes with Sadi Shanaah’s analysis of Czech P/CVE – which, in many ways, echoes the redirection of vulnerability seen in Chapter 10. Shanaah explores how Czech counter-extremism policy imagines democracy itself as vulnerable. Czech counter-extremism policy predates that of Western Europe and is born of its long historical experience of conquest by external powers. That history has caused significant political emphasis to be placed on protecting democracy. Rather than identifying vulnerability factors in individuals who could threaten the state, Czech policy deems the political system of the nation as vulnerable. What does it mean to characterise democracy as vulnerable? Shanaah analyses the exclusion of the Roma from populist renderings of Czech national identity and their continual presence in counter-extremism policy. Unlike Western counter-extremism, which associates threat with the excluded societal group (linking social cohesion directly to national security), the Czech policies frame the threat as emerging from right-wing extremists – who are provoked by the non-integration of the Roma in society. As such, the cohesion-security link remains dominant in Czech policy, but it plays out indirectly through the presumed effects that Roma communities have on the majority population. Rather than correcting the attitudes of the majority, the policy advocates that Roma integration must be prioritised to resolve the vulnerability it (indirectly) poses to the Czech state. As such, the escalation of violence by right-wing groups associating themselves with Czech national identity is identified as the threat to the state – but the minority-ethnic group are the ones at which corrective measures are identified.

This intriguing case study brings Part II to an end, with more questions potentially raised than are answered about the entry of care discourse and technologies into security and policing. The diversity of national experiences of vulnerability governance reflect the continuing relevance of post-imperial and post-1991 hierarchies in global politics. Established democracies in Western and Northern Europe are applying ‘vulnerability’ to individuals from minority backgrounds, in order to facilitate a multi-agency intervention that reduces the risk of terrorism. Newer democracies in the Middle East and Africa are, as we have seen, attempting to use P/CVE to consolidate their national sovereignty and security apparatus – but are more frequently the object of vulnerability characterisations by international organisations. Finally, the experience of central Europe – as documented through Czech counter-extremism policy – offers insights into the indirect securitisation of the Roma, whose conduct must be corrected to avoid further provoking right-wing violence that threatens democracy.

As vulnerability governance has blurred the sectoral division of social policy and national security, we have had opportunity to witness the anxieties that plague sovereignty. State security practice always betrays anxiety through the corresponding performance of military strength and masculinity – states are always ‘faking it’ (Weber 1999) – but the language of vulnerability has made this internal insecurity even more apparent.

Bringing the discussion to a close, our volume concludes with an epilogue by Hil Aked, who brings together the two parts of the volume (which respectively explore the import of security into social policy sectors, and the import of care into national security) through her discussion of the vulnerability support hubs and Serenity Integrated Mentoring (SIM) projects in the UK. Where the hubs purport to use psychiatric treatment to reform those most vulnerable to becoming terrorists (but actually are oriented towards monitoring the risk to public protection, acting through surveillance and, in extreme cases, detention), SIM uses police officers to divert those in mental health crisis from accessing crisis services. One project uses health practitioners to divert the vulnerable from policing interventions; the other uses police to divert the vulnerable from accessing care. In both projects, the economic costs of multi-agency or health services responses to need are deemed so extensive that alternative pathways are required. The language of vulnerability is, unsurprisingly, dominant in the discourse of each alternative pathway – justifying the need for a cross-sectoral intervention between policing and care.

As we have seen across the volume, this is the primary function of ‘vulnerability’ language: to legitimate a preventive intervention, at the individual level, across both the care and policing/security sectors. Vulnerability works to blur the responsibilities of these previously siloed sectors, to govern the at-risk subject of the present and reduce the costs they may incur for society in the future. By bringing the welfare state into this governance nexus, vulnerability can reach further into society than the risk discourse was able. Vulnerability governance has proliferated at the local level, where it claims ‘closer is earlier’ for mitigating future cost and future disorder.