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This book explores citizens’ perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, drawing on perspectives from International Security Studies and Political Psychology. The empirical chapters are based on twenty focus groups across six British cities and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. These data are used to investigate the extent to which diverse publics share government framings of certain issues as the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of specific security threats ranging from terrorism to environmental degradation, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened by these issues than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics such as harbouring stereotypes of minorities or prioritising public spending on border control over health, and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats and attempts to change citizens’ behaviour as part of the risk management cycle. The book demonstrates widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. The concluding chapter summarises the findings and discusses their implications for government and public opinion in the future. While this study focuses on the British case, its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to scholarship produced in Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies.
everyday security practices that tend to apply primarily to ‘international’ (that is, overwhelmingly white) staff. 10 As we will discuss further, the prevailing sense among interviewees was that this was not necessarily out of concern for staff but rather due to concerns about insurance policies and public perceptions – indeed, some prefer to credit a 2015 court case, where aid worker Steve Dennis sued his former employer, with the rise of ‘duty of care’ (see Merkelbach and
This book explores how different publics make sense of and evaluate anti-terrorism powers within the UK, and the implications of this for citizenship and security.
Since 9/11, the UK’s anti-terrorism framework has undergone dramatic changes, including with the introduction of numerous new pieces of legislation. Drawing on primary empirical research, this book examines the impact of these changes on security and citizenship, as perceived by citizens themselves. We examine such impacts on different communities within the UK, and find that generally, whilst white individuals were not unconcerned about the effects of anti-terrorism, ethnic minority citizens (and not Muslim communities alone) believe that anti-terrorism measures have had a direct, negative impact on various dimensions of their citizenship and security.
This book thus offers the first systematic engagement with ‘vernacular’ or ‘everyday’ understandings of anti-terrorism policy, citizenship and security. Beyond an empirical analysis of citizen attitudes, it argues that while transformations in anti-terrorism frameworks impact on public experiences of security and citizenship, they do not do so in a uniform, homogeneous, or predictable manner. At the same time, public understandings and expectations of security and citizenship themselves shape how developments in anti-terrorism frameworks are discussed and evaluated. The relationships between these phenomenon, in other words, are both multiple and co-constitutive. By detailing these findings, this book adds depth and complexity to existing studies of the impact of anti-terrorism powers.
The book will be of interest to a wide range of academic disciplines including Political Science, International Relations, Security Studies and Sociology.
led to new ones – gaps that we wish to identify and start to address in this book. A further lacuna in academic understanding of public perceptions and experiences of everyday security threats exists as a result of the absence of any serious engagement between the IR and Security Studies literature on the one hand and that in Political Psychology and Behaviour on the other
insight into how blue-helmet security practices are seen, and in turn how these (usually) taken-for-granted practices contribute towards perceptions of security’ by exploring the everyday security through its ‘embodied, spatial and performative dimensions’. Drawing on everyday urban geopolitics, Lemay-Hébert ( 2018 ) studies the ‘securitization of the everyday in Haiti’ by analysing the security mapping performed by the UN peacekeeping mission to regulate the everyday of UN expats in Port-au-Prince. He demonstrates how securitisation practices contribute to social
to a non-expert audience, be that the general user, business or even government officials, the frequent usage of a non-technical language and perhaps even a tendency to prefix ‘cyber-’ to a host of other better known threats certainly makes sense. Even the most complex of these threats can have fairly straightforward effects and the intersection of the technical with everyday security practices means that it often pays for the industry to communicate the threat in such a way as to raise awareness, generate understanding and sell products. Given this, the
or everyday security practices, they are usually implicit in this literature. Moreover, distance is usually referred to in geographical terms and rationalisation is often linked to the idea of the Weberian state. The PARIS approach to securitisation takes rationalisation and distance seriously. To take an example, Bigo ( 2008 , 17, emphasis added) argues that policing activities such as surveillance ‘now take place at a distance , beyond national borders’. Again, he writes that policing through surveillance is carried out by networks of
misses the insights that can be gained only from attempting to map social relations, non-elite repertoires of knowledge, and patterns in how and what diverse publics think and perceive. We argue that a new approach that triangulates methods in the study of everyday security threat politics is therefore necessary. One of the possible reasons for the reproduction of this fissure between the respective
. Linking social and penal policies resolves what would appear to be a doctrinal contradiction, or at least a practical antinomy, of neoliberalism, between the downsizing of public authority on the economic flank and its upsizing on that of the enforcement of social and moral order. If the same who are demanding a minimal state in order to ‘free’ the ‘creative forces’ of the market and submit the most dispossessed to the sting of competition do not hesitate to erect a maximal state to ensure everyday ‘security’, it is because the poverty of the social state against the
demonstration of the apparent universal applicability of cybersecurity across society and the manner in which it speaks to ‘everyday security practices’ ( Hansen and Nissenbaum, 2009 , p. 1165). The industry recognises the potential breadth of its client base in an increasingly computerised world. On occasion we see this more generic position being eschewed and deliberate efforts being made to hone in on specific audiences. Notable examples include the way in which business (in particular small and medium business), parents/families and smartphone users are addressed directly