The diversity of contributions assembled in this book and their contrasted perspectives, as well as their implications for future research, highlight the stimulating challenges presented by our efforts to understand security: how it is experienced, produced, governed, and the price there is to pay for our insatiable need for it. This thriving area of inquiry is grounded, as Shearing reminds us, in an intellectual tradition which looks upon the state as the main provider of security. From Hobbes to Weber, the idea that a social contract binds citizens together and allows the state to devise, adjudicate and enforce rules in order to maintain good order and guarantee peace of mind has been prominent in post-feudal societies. The state is supposed to guarantee a universal coverage in exchange for a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force. But everyday reality tends to be impervious to such political or philosophical considerations, and this book has highlighted the intrinsically plural nature of security governance.

The domination of philosophical and legal thought over matters pertaining to social control and policing has for a long time sustained the fiction of the monopoly of the monolithic state over the legitimate provision of security. However, recent historical and sociological discoveries have uncovered a complex web of private and hybrid agencies that have always co-existed with the state, exploiting the flexibility of the market to cater for unfulfilled needs (Morn 1982; Johnston 1992; Nadelmann 1993).