Despite the present-day attraction of ‘security’ as an attention-grabbing word in politics and the public sphere, the study of security is a missing chapter in many state-of-the-art surveys of historical literature. Its central relevance for the modern statehood has been obvious for centuries in the European context. In Thomas Hobbes's mid-seventeenth-century Leviathan, written in the context of the devastating English civil war and previous religious wars, government was given the fundamental role in guaranteeing security. Over the course of the twentieth century, intellectuals have constantly debated Hobbes's ideas and concepts about security and societal peace. Especially after the second world war, security has found major attention in the fields of International Relations and its sub-discipline security studies. Security studies evolved during the nuclear age and were originally foremost about the study of the threat, use and control of military force, as one proponent of security studies, Stephen Walt, stated. They were mainly concerned with military strategy and giving policy advice to the military. Since the cold war, the study of security has come a long way. Most importantly, as Emma Rothschild has reminded us, during the past two decades or so, the concept was first extended downwards from states to individuals, upwards from the nation to the biosphere and horizontally from the military to the economic, social, political and environmental.Footnote ¹ It is the reflection of this dynamic change in theory, methodology and empirical research that connects most of the books under review in this article.

Providing helpful analytical and theoretical reflections of the field is definitely the strength of the two handbooks on security studies published in the Routledge Handbooks series – The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies and The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies. Both handbooks are not just limited to ‘taking stock’ of the various analytic and theoretical dimensions applied to the social science study of security. They also present a variety of thematic fields relevant to security studies and show new directions for future research. Nevertheless, both have slightly different aims. The handbook edited by J. Peter Burgess seeks discuss about the ‘novelty’ of the ‘new thinking’ in security studies as well as about the continuities and discontinuities ‘with what remains of the cold war tradition’. The book, as Burgess states himself, is less about approaches and methods in the field than about its interest in the ways security is enacted and given meaning through its application. Therefore ‘new security subjects’ and ‘objects’ such as financial security, the biopolitics of security, food security and cyber-security are included. And in the last section, titled ‘New Security Practices’, one finds articles, for example, on surveillance, new mobile crime and migration. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer's volume covers a whole panoply of past and present theoretical approaches to different aspects of security. It also deals with contemporary and regional security challenges, such as the Middle East, the western Balkans and China. Not least, it presents provides outlines of specific security measures, such as human intervention, global governance and peace operations.

While both handbooks give advice for policy implementations and application, on closer examination the main difference can probably be found in their starting points. Burgess clearly is devoted to a constructivist approach. Cavelty and Mauer also integrate such an approach. But they also shed light on different schools of thought within security studies, such as the traditional, state-centred version of the ‘realist’ and ‘neo-realist’ approach en vogue in the first few decades after the Second World War. Yet, the two handbooks also meet at relevant points. All editors believe that a comprehensive understanding of security requires the inclusion of a wide variety of threats as well as a shift in focus to objects outside of conventional approaches. The reference to a strongly constructivist approach and the securitisation theory growing out of the Copenhagen School – contesting the traditional ‘realist’ version – is integral to both handbooks. Also both collections of articles show the importance of specific ‘new’ debates and perspectives within security studies. Broadening the agenda of security studies to include, for example, questions of gender or ‘human security’ requires that the sectors of security are expanded beyond the military to include questions of environment, social and other factors. Yet each handbook approaches such themes in different ways. The ‘human security’ debate, for example, which has recently filled the pages of specialised journals such as Security Dialogue as well as guided political discussions on development issues and political violence inside states, mainly departs from the dominant state-understanding of security to redirect the view towards the security of the individual human being. The ‘human security’ concept emerged with the end of the cold war and as a response to the proliferation of new security threats that did not fit into the narrow confines of the traditional, state-centric national security paradigm. Although both handbooks thematise the human security debate in depth, the article in the Burgess handbook by Taylor Owen, titled ‘Human Security: A Contested Contempt’, mainly deals with the wide range of definitions of human security reaching from a ‘narrow’ approach encompassing the protection of individuals and communities from violence to a ‘broader’ understanding which includes a whole range of threats such as hunger, disease, repression as well as sudden calamities. By contrast, the article by Pauline Kerr on ‘Human Security and Diplomacy’ in the Cavelty and Mauer handbook is more concerned with the practical agenda for human security and the special role of diplomacy as a means for implementing specific human security agendas.

The hardly perceptible difference in the titles of the two collections, which were both published in 2010, may be somewhat confusing for the reader. It is not quite clear what is specifically ‘new’ about Burgess's The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies that does not appear in Cavelty and Mauer's handbook plainly titled The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies. Is it merely the omission of older schools of thought and the main focus on the constructivist stance of the ‘new’ security studies in the Burgess handbook? That may be so but, despite certain overlaps, both handbooks read together are helpful in obtaining an idea of the multitude of debates surrounding and the concepts and objects of security in the social sciences that have rapidly developed during the past two decades.

If the nature of handbooks allows for a broader discussion and a more generalised view on the burgeoning field of security studies, the book edited by Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik deals with security from a more specific angle.

The editors and authors are mainly interested in the question of ‘political agency in relation to specific contestations of protection’ (p. 2). Again, the book follows the trend of the past decades in international relations and security studies to think beyond the limits of state sovereignty and military threats by including ‘non-state referents’. Thinking about the interconnectedness of different security practices, the editors and authors want to analyse how the techniques of policing, defence and securing humanity and the environment are interrelated. Following a sociological, situated analysis of political agency, the book's underlying theoretical understanding is mainly informed by the ‘widening debate’ in security studies evolving in the 1980s and 1990s which pushed the notion that insecurities are ‘socially and politically constructed through processes of representation’ (p. 5). Yet, by introducing the concept of ‘protection’, the book goes a step further. The emphasis is on the politically contested nature of claims of protection and insecurity, in terms of their legitimacy and the techniques of administering them. Who can legitimately claim a need for protection and who exactly is going to do the protecting? Not simply constructed by discourse and bureaucratic routines, the claims of protection are always embedded in fields of contestation structured by power relations between participating agencies. The focus of many of the articles is, therefore, on the claims of insecurity made by non-state actors such as refugees, human rights organisations and others. The articles dealing explicitly with migration in the book vividly exemplify this aspect, since the police and military have increasingly encroached on the lives of migrants and refugees, as the articles by Raffaela Puggioni and Peter Nyers show. Puggioni's article on Italian refugee and migrant camps offers a critical reading of Giorgo Agamben's articulation of camps as spaces of exception and his focus on the juridico-political structure of the camp. Instead she reads this specific space as a location that mediates and shapes agency. Her interest is mainly in analysing the ways in which ‘people inside and outside understand, and are engaged with that very space’ (p. 69) – therefore delivering an often-neglected view of those kept in camps. Puggioni's investigation of the extent to which acts of resistance may emerge from within the population in refugee camps contradicts Giorgio Agamben's image of camps as manifestations of ‘bare life’ Protests against the measures of Italy's Berlusconi government, increased charges against camp administrators and police forces, attempts to escape and other acts of open dissent have put public pressure on law-makers and camp administrators to change these measures. Opposing a situation of prolonged insecurity and a system of patronage shows how different agencies were intervening in a field of often asymmetrically defined power relations. This contestation of power relations was linked to situations of insecurity is also the focus of several other essays in the volume. Nyers, examining the political agency of non-status refugees in a case study on Algerian refugees living in Canada, demonstrates how the activism of politicised migrants questioned the monopoly of the state over matters of protection as well as the widely held notion that ‘refugees are no more than “speechless emissaries”’ (p. 51, according to Liisa Malkki). Hunger strikes, physical resistance, media presence, the creation of solidarity networks with supporters, unannounced delegation visits to immigration offices as well as other activities were part of the creative individual and collective processes of ‘sovereignty's retaking’, as Nyers states in his article. But how successful and effective are these ‘amateur’ activities really in the face of mostly highly asymmetrical power relations between non-state actors and security managers authorised with the power to decide over the lives and deportation of refugees? This stays up for debate, though Nyers stresses the importance of the articulation of the excluded as a radical political moment. Generally speaking, The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency impressively shows how a view on the concept of protection and situated agency of plural actors can expand our understanding of the importance of the subjectivity of non-state actors and everyday (and often invisible) practices related to security policies.

Whereas the book edited by Huysmans and colleagues is exemplary of how to tackle the issues of (in)security and political agency, Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective, edited by Ariane Chebel d'Appollonia and Simon Reich, would seem to be just the contrary. Dealing with the contested issues of migration and integration in relation to questions of security in United States and Europe using a comparative approach, it is certainly in step with the current zeitgeist. But, to state right from the outset, the book is missing a solid definition of its object of investigation, even in the introduction. During the past decade, the terms (or rather concepts) security and integration have both triggered considerable theoretical and conceptual debates that are scarcely reflected in the volume. Compared with the aforementioned books, it is not quite clear what the theoretical or methodological approach to security or integration is.

As Chebel d'Appollonia and Reich state in their introduction, recent terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe have threatened ‘public safety in novel ways’. Coupled with the significant Muslim and Arab populations in the European Union and United States, these have created a series of challenges of threats. These threats are, for example, to national security posed by enlarged borders, to political and civil rights posed by a large number of non-citizen residents, or to racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance in civil societies posed by a potential ‘inside’. As a result of a collaboration between scholars working at the Institut d'Études Politiques (IEP) and the University of Pittsburgh, the editors and individual article authors raise several questions in the volume.

First of all, what about the historical antecedents of the dilemma posed by terrorism and immigration? Several articles demonstrate that both the European Union and the United States introduced measures in the policy areas of counter-terrorism, immigration and asylum-seekers as well as measures to tighten border controls on both sides of the Atlantic well before the events of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States. Jennifer M. Chacón, for example, convincingly outlines the historical evolutions of the doctrinal and practical links between national security and immigration enforcement in the United States. As Chacón shows, although the vast majority of the practices of immigration enforcement were traditionally not concerned with national security, the linking of security concerns with criminal law enforcement has a tradition dating back to the beginnings of the twentieth century. In this context, immigration control was understood as a security function and justified immigration detention and removal – which has shown continuous effects up to the present. Despite Chacón's hesitation to label the events of 9/11 as a watershed in United States immigration policy, her examples demonstrate a steady blurring of the criminalisation of immigration into the ‘securitisation’ of immigration policy since the events. The results are an enhanced monitoring of non-citizens, changes in the law of removal, an increased immigration enforcement budget and, accordingly, enforcement practices. External security measures and internal crime control in the United States can hardly be differentiated anymore.

A second set of questions tackled by several authors concerns the tensions created by the new constellation of security issues both between and within Western states and, thirdly, the consequences of the ‘securitisation’ of immigration policy. In this context, Didier Bigo makes a sweeping argument about the growing rhetoric of ‘global insecurity’ based on the notion of ‘global terrorism’ which has led to the need for a ‘global security response’ (p. 93). Whereas the ‘global insecurity’ narrative was already well developed after the end of the cold war, it became the basis for a new paradigm of resistance and for justifying increased surveillance and more oppressive laws, especially after the attacks in the United States and the transit bombings in Europe. The end of the ‘territorialized enemy’ (p. 80), according to Bigo, has created a new class of ‘global security experts’ (p. 68) and led to the development of technologies of mass surveillance as an answer to the nature of the new threat. The main effects of the globalisation of insecurity can be seen in the merging of internal and external security measures under the pressure of globalisation. However, the former domination of national sovereignty and the role of national borders are also called into question as the development asks for a global response. The global security narrative has led to a global governance dominated by the big states in the West, although it has permitted a variety of discourses which have separated the United States and United Kingdom from other European countries. Not only do national differences frame the security understanding, but also within the internal world of security professionals contentious debates exist concerning the relevance of national borders and the degree of threat to national identity. Bigo, rightly, points to a multiplicity of security discourses competing with one another. Yet, despite competing discourses, none of the groups focuses on the civil liberties side of the security continuum. Unfortunately, Bigo only brings little historical evidence and concrete examples to substantiate his broad arguments.

Further debates are addressed in this volume, such as the different character of narrative adopted on both sides of the Atlantic as well as within Europe; the reliance on the policies of border control and technologies of surveillance; the question of co-operation across and within states; and the prospects for successful integration of new immigrants. The major findings show how contested these issues are, also among the authors. But, as Chebel d'Appollonia and Reich state in their introduction, most authors agree that both the European Union and the United States introduced measures to tighten border controls as well as measures in the policy areas of counter-terrorism, immigration and asylum-seekers well before the events of 9/11. Nevertheless, they also argue that the events had an impact on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of consolidating the shift toward linking immigration with security. Chebel d'Appollonia, for example, shows how the construction of immigration as a security issue in the European Union has taken place in three consecutive stages; in a first step, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, immigrants were portrayed as job-takers and therefore a threat to the native employees; in a second step, from the mid-1980s onwards, anti-migrant groups accused them of endangering the cohesion of national identity; and finally, since the mid-1990s, in a complex combination of former immigration and asylum policies with old security issues and new humanitarian measures, the strive for equal treatment of all residents has gone hand in hand with discriminatory and xenophobic attitudes and practices of most member states. These stages have been accompanied by a shift from national policies to intergovernmental co-operation to supernationalism concerning the formulation and implementation of immigration and asylum policies in Europe. Yet, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks the counter-terrorism measures are not only failing to address the issue of internal security but also threaten human rights and civil liberties. Though there should have been a more thorough definition of the interlocking concepts of integration and security, the individual articles that make up Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective do manage to show the contentiousness and various discourses accompanying the debates.

While the book edited by Chebel d'Appollonia and Reich is strongly focused on sociological, political and juridical analysis, the volume edited by Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt is historically oriented and almost exclusively contains articles written by historians. The German title's keywords, which translate as State-Power/Violence: States of Emergency and Security Regimes, point to the main interest of the book, albeit with differential weighting, since security is not always the main interest of the articles. While the book's main focus is on the different facets of states of emergency – rejecting the idea that this condition only occurs under constitutional law and demonstrating that it is a situation which more often than not opens the terrain for violence – Lüdtke and Wildt call for a cultural historical approach which sheds light on the manifold ways in which the ‘average person’ appropriated the state(s) of emergency through agency and Eigensinn. Whereas one of the main tasks of state authority (under monarchical sovereignty as well as under constitutional government) is its promise to guarantee security, peace and public order, this is often linked with the recourse to a state of emergency. Yet, and this is one of the important arguments of the editors, security is not just established through institutions but becomes ‘real’ in the practices of everyday life.

This argument in turn structures several of the articles, of which only a few can be mentioned here. In her article on tsarist Russia, Jane Burbank counters the notion that the regime under the tsar differed from other contemporary regimes in continental Europe by governing with secret decrees and exceptional regulations. Burbank shows how people in rural townships appealed to the local police and courts concerning issues of daily security and order. In the nineteenth century, police in Russia (as elsewhere in continental Europe) performed routine surveillance functions. By moving her analysis away from the infamous political violence exercised by society in the form of massive terrorist assaults against the state and vice versa through repressive police actions and anti-state combat, Burbank manages to shed light on the security regime in ordinary social life played out in township courts and by policemen. This reversion of her perspective demonstrates, for example, how local police activities often protected the safety of public spaces. The security regime concerning rural people contradicts the popular notion of the Russian ‘police state’ during that time, and wisely includes the ‘daily-life functions of security systems on which most social life depends’ (pp. 115–16).

Andreas Eckert, in his article on the safeguarding of ‘public order’ in colonial Africa, makes the argument that the definition of ‘order’ rested in the hands of the European colonial powers. Yet the precariousness and weakness of colonial rule manifested itself in wars and excessive violence. The European claim to power itself triggered the violence it had promised to abolish. Nevertheless Eckert reminds us of the role of African cultural brokers in the administration and their possibility to practise a certain degree of influence – despite the constant threat of violence of the colonial state that lingered in an ongoing state of emergency.

Traversing the early modern and modern period, this volume presents a fascinating attempt to move away from a singular view on the state as the main actor and opens up a view on human agents and social practices of ordinary people in dealing with states of emergency and security issues. Other than the volume by Chebel d'Appollonia and Reich, the book manages to move away from mainly structural and state-centred explanations on security and to pay tribute to individual actors in history.

In the eyes of historians, who at the present need to rely heavily on the social sciences when dealing with issues of security, the presented volumes are, albeit to a different degree, of interest in many respects. One important aspect is the interconnectedness of security issues. The two handbooks are especially helpful in realising how different securities can interlock; how environmental security can intersect with questions of migration or that military security cannot be detached from human security and so on. Research on security thus needs to connect its various facets. This may be important for historical accounts in avoiding a simple one-directional view on security.

Also, the shift from a state-centred perspective to a bottom-up perspective that considers individual subjectivities that frame understandings of security may well be promising for cultural historians interested in the ways that our worlds are endowed with meaning and in the range of human experiences as well as security effects on human beings. If the study of security is still largely a missing chapter, these volumes help gather ideas of how security can be framed and conceptualised – despite the still desperate need to historicise the issue. In this sense we should not forget that security is an essentially contested concept and always means different things to different people over time and space.