This blog spot was first posted on Open Democracy website, on June 3, 2014

Security practices and their relationship to mobility and freedom are changing. Security seems to expand globally and to reach for the future. Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as an authority who has best described the new (not so brave) world with its “unknown unknowns”. Part of the discourse of security studies participates in rendering critical approaches mainstream by reproducing, with variations, this common belief. We want to discuss this ‘essentiality’ of security everywhere and its relation to the future. We argue that this discourse of Global Preventive Security like a GPS in search of a triangulation for tracking down the agents is de facto an illusion. Security is ‘sans importance’, ‘sans qualité’. It is a practical regime of justification permitting some to be sacrificed, while normalising others, as long as security is isolated and not related to freedom, popular sovereignty, access to justice, rule of law, or equality. When security is related to them, then we can see that all these activities and rhetoric are no more than a thin layer of ice. It may look so pervasive and homogeneous, but in fact has no consistency in societies that produce cracks, turmoil, magmatic liquidity. This calls therefore for an investigation into the implications of the idea that a change in securitization practices is happening, is necessary, and will lead towards the benevolent control of all forms of flows.  How can we begin to interpret this series of diverse practices that claim to constitute an all-encompassing security: one that is global, limitless, primary, and preventive, whereas in the past it claimed only to be national, bounded territorially, liberal, and punitive?

By Pr. Didier Bigo

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