6 - Security, politics and global assemblages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Globalization, it is frequently noted, has eroded traditional understandings of state sovereignty. In the words of David Held and Anthony McGrew, it has ‘unbundled’ the relationship between sovereignty, territory and political power and made the ‘proper locus of politics and the articulation of the public interest … a puzzling matter’. Today, this is also the case in the field of security. While frequently seen as the last secure bastion of sovereignty in a rapidly globalizing world, the state’s much-vaunted monopoly of legitimate force is increasingly enmeshed in networks and relations that cannot be contained within the boundaries of the national state. Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource production facilities, security provision and governance take place within assemblages that are deterritorialized in terms of actors, technologies, norms and discourses and are embedded in a complex transnational architecture that defies the conventional distinctions of public–private and global–local. Security, in other words, is increasingly beyond the state.
As part of transformations in global governance and shifting social forces, private security has become integral to contemporary power and politics. The key issue is no longer the familiar one of whether or not the state is losing power and sovereignty in a zero-sum game with non-state actors. As we have shown, the new geographies of power cannot be reduced to a simple question of more or less state power or weakened domestic government, in the manner of so much early scholarship on globalization and security privatization. Instead, they demand an investigation of the production of new modalities of power through which the very categories of public–private and global–local are reconstituted and reconfigured.
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- Security Beyond the StatePrivate Security in International Politics, pp. 217 - 237Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010