Decentring Security: Policing Communities at Home and Abroad

by Mark Bevir (Editor)

Contemporary security governance often relies on markets and networks to link public agencies to non-governmental actors. This book explores the rise, nature, and future of these new forms of security governance across various domestic, transnational, and international settings. The chapters reveal similarities and differences in the way security governance operates in various policy settings. The contributors argue that the similarities generally arise because policy elites, at various levels of governance, have come to believe that security depends on building resilience and communities through various joined-up arrangements, networks, and partnerships. Differences nonetheless persist because civil servants, street level bureaucrats, voluntary sector actors, and citizens all draw on diverse traditions to interpret, and at times resist, the joined-up security being promoted by these policy elites. This book therefore decentres security governance, showing how all kinds of local traditions influence the way it works in different settings. It pays particular attention to the meanings, cultures, and ideologies by which policy actors encounter, interpret, and evaluate security dilemmas. This book was originally published as a special issue in Global Crime .

152 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2017

About the author

Professor Mark Bevir is a member of the Department of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. He was born in London and educated at the University of Exeter, U.K., where he got a BA (1st Class), and the University of Oxford, UK where he was awarded a DPhil. Before moving to Berkeley, he worked at the University of Madras, India, and University of Newcastle, UK. He has held visiting positions in Australia, Finland, France, U.K., and the U.S. Currently he is co-convener of the Interpretive Political Science specialist group of the Political Studies Association and President of the Society for the Philosophy of History.