Article

Theoretical Criminology

Reconstructing Leviathan: 15(2) 141­–157

© The Author(s) 2011

Emerging contours of the Reprints and permission:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

security state
DOI: 10.1177/1362480610383451
tcr.sagepub.com

Simon Hallsworth
London Metropolitan University, UK

John Lea
University of Brighton, UK

Abstract
This article develops an account of the current emergence of the security state as
successor to the liberal welfare state. It is argued that the security state heralds a
new type of authoritarianism which, beginning at the periphery and pre-occupied with
the management of the marginalized and socially excluded, is gradually infecting the
core social institutions, the criminal justice system in particular. The article considers
three areas in which the security state is emerging—the transition from welfare to
workfare and risk management; new measures to combat terrorism and organized
crime; and the blurring of warfare and crime control. The article concludes by stressing
the mutually reinforcing effect of these developments.

Keywords
risk, security, state, war, welfare

For a decade or longer theoretical criminologists appeared to have forgotten about the
State. They talked instead about governance: a process occurring on a plurality of levels,
micro and macro, and conducted by a variety of agencies besides the State, including
families, communities, non-state actors and private entities (Johnston and Shearing, 2003;
Singh, 2005). Stan Cohen’s (1985) classic barely mentions the State; David Garland (2001)
emphasizes a nebulous ‘culture of control’; Lucia Zedner (2009) refers to the emergence
of a ‘security society’, while Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing (2003) take the

Corresponding author:
John Lea, University of Brighton, UK
Email: [email protected]
142 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

marginalization of the State to its logical conclusion in their work on ‘nodal security’. The
State, in such accounts, exists only in the distance as the ultimate repository of legitimate
coercion and legal title to property rather than as the central agency of social control.1
These days, however, the State is back, and it is beginning to look rather unpleasant.
The massive surge in coercive state intervention following 9/11 has formed the starting
point for theorization of a new ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005) and more general
documentation of the authoritarian tendencies of the present UK and US governments
(e.g. Raab, 2009). This literature has not necessarily rejected earlier views on the rolling
back of the State. Rather, it reveals how the State may withdraw in some areas while
intensifying its intervention in others. Thus Lea’s (2002) account of the ‘debilitated
authoritarian state’, underlines the simultaneous contraction of welfare alongside an
expansion of the coercive and surveillance aspects of state activity. Others have focused
on the neo-liberal state’s increased appetite for punishment, evident in more severe
sentences and burgeoning prison numbers; tendencies theorized in terms such as ‘new
punitiveness’ or ‘postmodern penality’ (Pratt et al., 2005). Finally criminologists have
developed a more critical stance towards some aspects of the rise to prominence of
non-state actors and organizations—including in the sphere of crime control—and the
extent to which they expand state power (Crawford, 2006; Lea and Stenson, 2007).
In this article we bring ideas from all this literature together to show how develop-
ments in distinct areas of social policy, crime control and national security are facilitating
the emergence of a new state form that we term the ‘security state’. It is important to
distinguish the security state from the classic inter-war authoritarian states of Nazism
and Fascism. These were essentially nationalist projects, inaugurated by a seizure of
power at the political centre, and aimed at the corporatist absorption of civil society into
a single party state through police repression, aggressive war and national-racial ideo­
logy. The post-war welfare state was a democratic answer to such authoritarianism,
encouraging national integration through an archipelago of welfare and disciplinary
institutions in an otherwise open society (Foucault, 1977). Underpinned by a Keynesian
‘mixed economy’, democratic political compromise and a consensus based on common
welfare citizenship the welfare state was sustained by a bipartisan commitment to
economic growth, declining inequalities and increasing social mobility.
While the new security state is coercive, it is in no way a return to inter-war authori-
tarian corporatism. It aims not at the incorporation of all social classes into the State
through nationalist unity but at the management of social fragmentation and the ‘advanced
marginality’ of a growing global surplus population rendered ‘structurally irrelevant’
to capital accumulation (Wacquant, 1996, 1999, 2007; Castells, 1999). It represents,
as Alessandro De Giorgi (2006: 85) has put it, ‘the dawn of a power of control which
supervises whole populations whose collective status justifies their banishment’.
The security state searches for new technologies of power and risk management aimed at
‘external’ threats that, in a globalized world, may originate in the next street or in another con-
tinent. The resulting incremental authoritarianism at the periphery can avail itself of mecha-
nisms of control by banishment and coercion which have long been available in the techniques
of imperial and colonial rule (Duffield, 2007). In turn, these technologies and practices come
to infect the government of the population as a whole. The latter becomes subject to intensi­
fying levels of surveillance and control in a process of ‘securitization’ that becomes the
pre-eminent model for the regulation of post-disciplinary ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze, 1995).
Hallsworth and Lea 143

Figure 1. Dynamics of the security state

In this article we identify three key drivers of securitization—changes in the nature of

the welfare state, shifts in criminal law aimed at dealing with new categories of powerful
offenders and the blurring of the domestic and global territory as sites of control. These,
seemingly disparate processes are, we shall argue, interconnected and mutually reinforc-
ing. They presage new technologies of power, which, notwithstanding their focus on the
periphery and management of surplus populations, are pushing towards a transformation
of the whole system. Not all western societies are pursuing identical paths towards the
security state. We recognize that some, especially Scandinavian, societies have resisted
aspects of the development (see Pratt, 2008). In this article, therefore, we shall focus
upon Britain. See Figure 1.

From welfare to risk

The relatively inclusive character of the post-war welfare British state was illustrated by
a crime control policy aimed predominantly at rehabilitation and ‘penal welfare’
(Garland, 1985, 2001). Offenders, at this time, were understood less as a surplus risky
population to be managed than as ‘conditional citizens’ (Vaughan, 2000); weak and
pathological (Weiner, 1994) but capable of being reclaimed and rehabilitated for useful
purposes (Hallsworth, 2000). Crime, as such, remained a depoliticized peripheral issue.
Its management was delegated to a patrician elite who insulated the business of crime
control from overt political manipulation from above and punitive public opinion from
144 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

below (Downes and Morgan, 1997; Ryan, 2005). Meanwhile, the working class
community was thought to enact its own strategies of informal social control of petty
crime and anti-social behaviour to which formal policing made numerous, if often
unstable, adaptations (Brogden et al., 1988; Reiner, 2000). Crime was as a social prob-
lem that the welfare state could engineer away through reducing poverty and inequality
and by promoting a socially included affluent working class. In what remained at core
a disciplinary society, social control was exercised less through overt coercion than
through cohesive communities supplemented by the disciplinary edifice of the school,
the factory, the asylum and the penitentiary system.
Some elements of welfare citizenship continue to be acknowledged and indeed have
arguably been expanded to include various human rights. But now, in a world of slowing
economic growth, insecurity and growing social inequality combined with geographical
segregation (Dorling et al., 2007), welfare citizenship has fractured and the social bonds
that once underpinned social integration have faltered (see Dorling et al., 2008). The
heavily indebted middle classes feel separated from and threatened by the urban poor and
are less interested in sharing universalistic welfare rights with them and more interested
in security and protection from them (Garland, 2001; Lea, 2002). The poor, meanwhile,
increasingly face the consequences of social disintegration: poverty; rising insecurity;
serious violence; and crime. While many communities remain resilient, decades of slow
growth, de-industrialization and ‘permanent recession’ (Hall et al., 2008) have decimated
the old working class, eroded its power as a collective actor and at the same time flooded
the ranks of the global surplus population.
The welfare state traditionally sought to confront social problems through the exten-
sion of social rights and entitlement to welfare. In contrast, the emerging security state
reconstructs problems as risks requiring ever more coercive forms of management. As
the welfare state entered a protracted crisis from the mid-1970s, facing problems of
finance and legitimacy (Habermas, 1976; Offe, 1984), a new state project gradually
emerged. It did not arrive ready formed and it did not coincide with the disappearance of
welfare or welfarism. Its construction was piecemeal and incremental and proceeds on
many fronts today. Cumulatively, however, there is a logic and trajectory to its develop-
ment. If marginality and its symptoms were characterized by the welfare state as social
problems that could be solved by the extension of social rights, entitlement to welfare,
coupled with growing affluence, the emerging security state reconstructs marginality and
its symptoms as risks and dangers that needed to be coercively managed. If the welfare
state aspired to end poverty, the security state works to ‘criminalize poverty via the puni-
tive containment of the poor’ (Wacquant, 2007: 277).

Reconstructing Leviathan
Managing the risks posed by social disintegration entails new forms of state action that
are coalescing into the post-welfare hegemonic project: securitization. As this project
gains momentum we witness three fundamental transformations in the nature of the State:
first, crime control becomes the pre-eminent paradigm for social control; second, social
policy and welfare become progressively criminalized; while, third, the functions of the
State are increasingly distributed through an assemblage of state and non-state actors.
Hallsworth and Lea 145

The ascendancy of crime control

Whereas the business of criminal justice constituted a relative backwater in the welfare
state (Downes and Morgan, 1997), this has changed in the security state; criminal
justice has moved to the policy foreground where it has become progressively politicized
as a blueprint for social policy in general. New Labour’s Crime and Disorder Act 1998
was exemplary in this regard, forging a link between crime and a wider spectrum of
‘anti-social behaviour’, and formalizing local authority responsibilities for crime pre-
vention and ‘community safety’. In so doing, it secured crime control as the hegemonic
perspective across a wide range of social and urban policy (see Atkinson and Helms,
2007; Rodger, 2008).
Crime control now exists at the centre of politics, an essential part of statecraft, and
crucial for demonstrating governing competence (Windlesham, 1998; Ryan, 2003).
As it has assumed a greater political salience, crime control has become, as Simon
(2007) argues, the pre-eminent paradigm through which all problems are interpreted
and solutions sought. Other areas of social policy—in particular social security and
urban policy—follow the lead of criminal justice and adopt its methods or even rely
on its participation, adopting coercion (rather than investment) as a major policy
resource (Rodger, 2008).

The criminalization of social policy

The welfare state, rather than providing inspiration for criminal justice through the
rehabilitation of citizens by useful discipline and reintegration into work and family, is
becoming itself a penal mechanism. Behind this change lies a profound shift in the
relationship between capital and the State. The Keynesian welfare state was based on
the assumption that the State could take steps to secure reasonably full employment
and steer investment into poor areas (Offe, 1984) thereby minimizing the population
dependent on state benefits. Globalization and the increased mobility of capital have
both reduced this possibility. These days, different national states and regions compete
to attract nomadic global capital by providing a labour force and an attractive environ-
ment that might just tempt it to invest (Hall and Winlow, 2003; Hallsworth and
Stephenson, 2008; Imrie et al., 2009).
The poorest communities—usually with high ethnic minority populations—become
subjected to a programme of ‘authoritarian renewal’ (Scraton, 2004) or coercive cohe-
sion aiming to produce by force, as it were, a business-friendly environment. ‘Community
safety’ and pre-emptive criminalization, accompanied by CCTV and intrusive surveil-
lance, are used to drive away the surplus population who are now defined as security
risks and a disincentive to business. Public space is made attractive to business and
consumers while enabling young people to travel to college to acquire appropriate job-
seeking attitudes and ‘capacities’—the latter consisting, of course, mainly in a willing-
ness to work for whatever wages global capital dictates in the context of declining job
opportunities in a society where upward mobility has diminished for the working class
(Blanden and Machin, 2007).
146 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

Social security undergoes a similar transformation as welfare progressively mutates

into a coercive form of workfare. Benefit levels are reduced by being frozen, while enti-
tlements to benefits become linked to job-seeking behaviour aimed at forcing the poor to
work for whatever wages footloose global capital dictates (Crisp, 2008; Brooks, 2009).
Recently (2010) announced massive cuts in public spending will intensify this trend.

‘Tooling up’ Leviathan

Whereas crime control in the welfare state was principally invested in the public sector
police (see Crawford, 1997; Garland, 2001), this function has also changed as the ‘policing
family’ has widened to form an assemblage that includes an array of non-state actors.
From a system that was principally reactive to criminal events, crime control has mutated
into preventative and pre-emptive structures that infuse social and urban policy (Rodger,
2008). Much of this work is carried out by a proliferation of non-criminal justice agencies
that, through surveillance, architecture and urban design, work to produce ‘safe space’
through a relentless ‘target hardening’ of the urban environment (Hughes, 2007). But the
importance of law enforcement as a vehicle of social control has continued undiminished
even as its constitutive parts have expanded. As it does so it has come up against the
tension, inherent in the criminal justice systems of liberal democratic societies, between,
on the one hand effective and efficient crime reduction or management and, on the other,
due process and respect for the rights of the suspect. To the alarm of civil libertarians the
new security state resolves these issues decisively in the direction of efficient control
both of criminal offenders (see below) and wider sections of the young urban poor. Pain
dispensation is ramped up as the coercive powers of the criminal justice agencies are
extended in both directions: pre-crime and post-punishment.
The emerging security state has expanded the range and use of custodial sentences,
creating new categories of offences and offenders (Reiner, 2007). The consequence is a
punitive turn (Hallsworth, 2000) in which prison populations surge when the tariffs for
a multitude of offences are raised and as more people are drawn into the punitive end of
control net as a consequence of its developing pre-emptive capability (Tonry, 2004;
Pratt et al., 2005). These are embodied in the expansion of a range of penalties which
do not require conviction in the courts (though their breach may do so) and which are
concerned with the management of behaviours perceived as threats to security but
lacking criminal status.
Pre-emptive criminalization (Fitzgibbon, 2004) of sub-criminal anti-social behaviour
or incivilities can now draw on a variety of devices including Anti-Social Behaviour
Orders, and orders or ‘contracts’ relating to Parenting, Acceptable Behaviour, Curfews,
Dispersal from designated public spaces, School Exclusions and Fixed Penalty Notices.
These measures, although imposed by the courts, require less than the criminal standard
of proof, while the agencies involved in activation and implementation include a variety
of local authority officials such as social housing management, head teachers, park
wardens and environmental health officers (Burnett, 2004). Such forms of pre-emptive
criminalization ostensibly target young urban males, though in practice they are also
deployed against groups hitherto considered to be vulnerable such as sex workers,
beggars and street drinkers (Hallsworth and Stephenson, 2008).
Hallsworth and Lea 147

Meanwhile at the stage of criminal prosecution itself, since the beginning of the
1980s, a raft of legislation has re-oriented criminal justice away from due process and the
rights of the suspect. Measures such as the dilution and reversal of the burden of proof,
reduction in the role of jury trial, qualifications to the right to silence, admission of
hearsay evidence in court, as well as numerous changes in police powers recast the
criminal justice system as an effective crime-fighting machine (Belloni and Hodgson,
1999; Kennedy, 2004). Finally, at the post-punishment end of the criminal justice system,
prolonged incapacitation has become increasingly common. Beginning with constraints
on convicted paedophiles the incapacitation strategy has widened considerably. Thus the
Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP) introduced by the Criminal Justice
Act 2003 was initially intended for rapists and paedophiles, yet is now primarily imposed
on ordinary street criminals (Rose, 2007). Those given this sentence cannot be released
until they have demonstrated—via various forms of re-education—that they are no longer
a danger to the public.
In the media outpourings of New Labour, most colourful under the Blair premiership,
such ‘reforms’ to the criminal justice system were explained as a process of ‘rebalancing
of the criminal justice system in favour of the victim’ with the implication that hitherto
the criminal justice system had been tasked exclusively with the defence of the rights of
the suspect (Hattersley, 2005). What was in fact being signalled was the out-moded
nature of due process protections under conditions in which criminal justice agencies
are tasked with security and protection from risk rather than detection, punishment and
rehabilitation of criminal offenders.

Powerful offenders
If the shift away from the welfare state towards the security state was mandated by the
failure of penal welfarism, it has also been legitimated by transformations in the nature
of crime and criminality and the response directed to address them. Powerful offenders
have always possessed disproportionate resources to obstruct criminal justice through
intimidation, corruption and other means. Globalization has brought growing inequali-
ties between rich and poor nations as well as within them. The result is a process of
bifurcation involving an increased weakness of the mass of young offenders reflected
in chaotic criminal urban street life (Hallsworth and Young, 2008; Hallsworth and
Silverstone, 2009). At the same time, we have witnessed a change in the balance of
power between some types of offenders and their victims, the communities in which
they operate and the criminal justice agencies (Lea, 2002). This is both a local and
global phenomenon and can be illustrated by reference to three types of criminality for
which the State has sought new powers to combat.
In poor communities the fragmentation and collapse of community-based mutual
support and social control among the surplus population not only generates anti-social
behaviour but has enhanced the power of even petty offenders to intimidate victims and
witnesses. In the longer term, investment in jobs and education might restore the stability
of poor communities and their mechanisms of informal social control. But the security
state tends to focus on short-term coercive solutions by the criminal justice system. Thus,
a succession of criminal justice ‘reforms’ has sought to reduce the intimidation capacity
148 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

of offenders. Some of these policies have changed legal procedure such as the admission
of hearsay evidence, or concealing the identity of witnesses and raise important issues of
due process. They pose particular challenges to an adversarial trial procedure where
cross-examination in open court is key to the establishment of guilt. Although restricted
to exceptional cases, such measures set important legal precedents. They have been sold
as progress—another case of ‘rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the
victim’—while doing little to redress the relation between an increasingly impoverished
society and its victims. The imperatives of security displace those of social reform
(Zedner, 2009).
The international trafficker exemplifies a second category of powerful offender.
These criminal entrepreneurs exploit the opportunities provided by the expanding
surplus population in the urban ghettos of global cities and impoverished rural areas for
capital accumulation building shadow economies of trafficking in illegal drugs, people,
arms and a variety of other commodities; criminal regeneration in the face of systemic
underdevelopment. Though a Keynesian or welfare-based solution based on investment
in sustainable alternatives remains the rhetoric of international conferences and the
media, the reality is that the interests of global capital inexorably swell the ranks of the
global surplus population. Meanwhile, in the consuming areas, a switch to effective de-
criminalization and a harm reduction approach to drug use is not allowed to interfere
with coercive renewal and the role of drug use in pre-emptive criminalization of youth in
poor areas (see Pantazis, 2008).
The state response, as in other areas, raises the security stakes, trading the due pro-
cess and rights of the accused in return for purported, though dubious, increases in
efficiency. For example, in a classic example of what Ericson (2007) calls ‘counter-law’
or ‘laws against law’ the UK Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, enables the courts to order
seizure of assets irrespective of criminal conviction in the courts. If the accused can be
shown to have a ‘criminal lifestyle’, defined as having committed similar offences over
a preceding period, then, on the civil standard of ‘balance of probabilities’, the court is
entitled to assume their assets are the proceeds of crime unless the accused can demon-
strate otherwise (Lea, 2004).
The new global terrorist represents a third category of powerful offender. Epitomized
by the Al Qaeda network, this figure is, like the trafficker, rooted in the global surplus
population rather than in specific forms of anti-colonial territorial claims as with the
Provisional IRA and similar groups. The organization of the new terrorism resembles
that of the loose global trafficking networks and its ideology is more the expression of
generalized rage, expressed in religious rather than secular political, terms (Burke, 2003;
Mohamedou, 2007). The specific, localized, aims of the Provisional IRA eventually
became the basis for negotiation and political settlement, but it is harder to imagine a
similar scenario involving Al Qaeda that did not involve western withdrawal from
Middle Eastern oil fields, so central to capitalism. Even this would not necessarily
eliminate groups like Al Qaeda, which all too easily, become icons of episodic localized
outbursts of rage—against racism, imperialism marginalization and neo-liberalism—
from the global surplus population.
As many have observed, the events of 9/11 led states to erode civil liberties and due
process for the promise of public security in the face of ‘global terrorism’. In recent UK
Hallsworth and Lea 149

anti-terrorist law, pre-emptive criminalization has emerged in a range of measures

including a vast increase in police stop and search dispensing with ‘reasonable suspi-
cion’, movement and other restrictions imposed on individuals on the basis of suspicion
by the Home Secretary and without right of appeal to the courts (Control Orders under
the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005), vague criminalization of the ‘glorification’ of
terrorism (Terrorism Act 2006), redefinition of criminal conspiracy in terms of vague
notion of ‘links’ with ‘international terrorist groups’ (Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security
Act 2001) and extension of police pre-trial detention for terrorist suspects (see Blick and
Weir, 2005; Blick et al., 2006). Some of these—notably Control Orders—have met
with judicial resistance, others have not. These measures are well known and regularly
criticized by civil libertarians. But there has been a further ingredient to the debate: the
question of whether terrorism be characterized and responded to as a criminality or as a
form of warfare. This leads us to the third major driver in the drift to the security state.

Globalization and de-bordering

The traditional ‘Westphalian’ concept of the sovereign territorial state, that governed
international relations from the late 17th century until the end of the Cold War, is now
in disarray. External threats assimilate to the ‘disease’ model, crossing state borders
with ease. They neither originate in the decisions of other states nor impact directly on
states except through their populations. Such threats, listed in one recent publication
from the British Cabinet Office include ‘international terrorism, weapons of mass
destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics, and trans-national crime’ (Cabinet
Office, 2008: para. 1.3). These factors are not sustained, directly or indirectly, by the
policies and actions of other states. Instead, they are as likely to be consequence of
states falling apart under the impact of rising global poverty and resource conflicts.
Under such circumstances, ‘states have lost the monopoly of war, and free and powerful
self-forming infra-state agents are interjecting themselves across spatial and temporal
boundaries’ (Mohamedou, 2007: 25). Instead, the ‘international environment’ consists
of a mixture of states, ‘failed states’ and networks of non-state actors capable of inflict-
ing economic or physical damage directly on any domestic population.
Global population movements further blur the internal–external distinction, resulting
in the growth of ‘diaspora’ communities and substantial numbers of resident non-
citizens whose cultural and political allegiances may cross national state boundaries.
Many may be illegally present for various reasons (visa overstayers, trafficked migrants,
failed asylum seekers, etc.) yet difficult to distinguish from those of the more settled
and officially resident communities of similar ethnicity in which they reside. This
boundary blurring suggests that the distinction between what is internal and external to
the territorial state is giving way to a ‘flat’ global terrain. States and non-state agencies
select responses—social policy, criminal justice, military intervention—which compete,
merge and form new hybrid legal and political categories. Anti-terrorism and migration
control intertwine, as does criminal and immigration law. The police too, play a role,
holding undocumented foreigners and delivering them to the UK Border Agency for
processing or detention (see Webber, 2006; Bosworth and Guild, 2008).
150 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

The interplay between criminal justice and warfare is the most important characteristic
of the security state. The result is what Susanne Krasmann calls (following Jakobs, 2004)
an ‘enemy penology’. This ‘belligerent policy of the interior … transgresses and reverses
the conventional borders and thus functions ... as a motor for the transformation of the
democratic constitutional state’ (Krasmann, 2007: 304).
On the one hand, there is a seemingly progressive aspect of attempts to merge crimi-
nal justice and warfare in the form of ‘liberal interventionism’. This doctrine formulated,
during the wars of the break-up of Yugoslavia, recast external military intervention as a
variety of ‘cosmopolitan policing’ (Kaldor, 1999). Elsewhere it can be identified in the
creation of various tribunals culminating in the International Criminal Court established
to try participants, including heads of state, for murder, and crimes against humanity
(Glasius, 2005).
As critics have noted, however, those chosen, for intervention or indictment, have
generally been those who have fallen foul of the interests of the USA and its allies.
Most, like Slobodan Milosevic, former Serbian head of state, Radovan Karadicz, for-
mer Bosnian Serb leader or Omar Bashir, Sudanese head of state, participants in the
chaotic ‘new wars’ (Kaldor, 1999; Munkler, 2005) have overseen collapsing states
where various factions—including non-state informal militias and criminal gangs—
attempt to carve out territories by ethnic cleansing and genocide. While their trials are
to be welcomed, the range of others who are not selected for criminal prosecution is also
instructive.
The decision of whether to deal with a problem as war or crime, or as some hybrid of
the two, is necessarily a political one. Terrorism presents a phenomenon that is amenable
to both. It is simultaneously external and internal, warfare against the State and criminal
murder of innocent civilians. It is, moreover, of indeterminate duration. These qualities
make it easy for states like Britain and the USA to retain an overall criminal justice
orientation towards terrorism, seeking to arrest and prosecute those who conspire to
commit acts of terror while at the same time introducing ‘wartime’ restrictions involving
pre-emptive criminalization based on suspicious activity or even speech. There is no
inevitability as to the latter—all terrorist prosecutions in the UK to date have arisen as a
result of normal police and security service surveillance and interdiction. There have
been no armed confrontations in the cities.
State activities legitimized by ‘wartime’ conditions include massive intrusive
surveillance—of everything from financial transactions, interpersonal communica-
tions, presence in significant locations, personal identity details. They have created a
whole new population of suspect communities—potential enemy aliens (Pantazis and
Pemberton, 2009). Predictably such classifications have been accorded to those com-
munities of similar ethnic or religious background to the supposed terrorists and in
particular on elements of the global surplus population who reside among them. The
fact that many may be non-citizens, illegal immigrants or asylum seekers enables the
constraints on ‘aliens’ (citizens of other states) usually exercised at the frontier—intern-
ment, refusal or restrictions on, entry, to seep into the general mechanisms of control
and security. The real border is no longer simply that of the nation state but of the
secured enclaves and neighbourhoods within it. The border is everywhere (De Giorgi,
2006, 2009) and has become a general resource for internal population control.
Hallsworth and Lea 151

Finally the blurring of warfare and criminality infects policing. The key issue is not
the militarization of police training and technology per se, though that has also been
notable over this period. Police action, however aggressive and militarized, aims to
arrest, gather evidence and apprehend suspects for prosecution in the courts. In warfare,
the aim is to ‘take out’, ‘inflict unacceptable casualties’ or otherwise neutralize the ene-
my’s threat. To this end, contemporary policing seeks to anticipate enemy actions and
has adopted pre-emptive responses that previously would have been unthinkable other
than at times of major civil disturbance and the suspension of normal legality.
It is important to recall that warfare and traditional policing approaches involve
quite different notions of risk. For policing the risk is that the target may be innocent.
There is also of course the risk, in an armed confrontation, that the target will open fire.
In military situations this is the only danger, as soldiers’ primary task is not to establish
the identity of the enemy. In the case of terrorism, the figure of the suicide bomber armed
with a weapon of mass destruction has been used to legitimize a shift of the risk criteria
in the military direction of pre-emptive force. The result, for British policing, could be
the gradual emergence in mainland UK of ‘shoot to kill’ policies. Such factors may well
have been a factor in the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 (Kennison
and Loumansky, 2007).

Reinforcement and diffusion

These, then, are what we identify as the three main drivers of the drift to the security state,
the permanent state of exception (Agamben, 2005). They all deal with different aspects of
the shift from integration to management of surplus population via urban security and pre-
emptive criminalization, security against terrorists and organized crime via inroads into
due process and through incorporation of wartime security principles into the domestic
sphere. They are located at the periphery of society. That is to say, they target marginal
groups, elements of the global surplus population—terrorists, traffickers, but also the
young poor and unemployed—not the employed middle classes. But they have a tendency
to move towards the centre. There are two processes at work that we can identify.
The first is one of mutual reinforcement. Policy transfer occurs when innovations in
one area are presented as ‘common sense’ against the background of the others. Thus
the punitive welfare reforms, rather than appearing as a frontal assault on welfare citi-
zenship, and the virtual criminalization of weak poor individuals, appear as sensible
innovations dealing with a marginalized, risky population against whom ‘citizens’ need
security and protection. Wider categories of offenders come to be seen as threats to
public security rather than as individuals gone astray. Precisely because the interna-
tional drugs trade penetrates into the community, the lowest level street dealer can be
assimilated to the level of the international trafficker while, as regards punishment, the
‘consensus obtained in the fight against serious crime allows for the justification of
the blind and generalised harshening of punishment’ (Rodriguez, 2003: 188). Hence the
current tendency to see elaborately organized street gangs (Pitts, 2008) where evidence
suggests they are more disorganized and fluid structures (Hallsworth and Young, 2008;
Hallsworth and Silverstone, 2009). In turn, due process gives way to gang tracking,
massive surveillance and pre-emptive criminalization.
152 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

A second aspect of mutual reinforcement can be found in the incorporation of military

thinking in dealing with the disparate examples of terrorism, national security, undocu-
mented immigrants, suspect communities and the social groups in which they are
embedded. Drug addicts, the homeless, the permanently unemployed, those engaged in
anti-social behaviour join terrorists, clandestine immigrants and international organized
criminals to constitute ‘an entire “enemy population”, rather than individual offenders,
against whom security initiatives are targeted’ (Zedner, 2000: 211). National databases of
DNA and other personal information—held irrespective of criminal conviction—to
which a variety of agencies, from local authorities to central government, have access—
passes without question among politicians and Home Secretaries. In 2009 the policing of
the G20 demonstrations in London demonstrated that protest has become viewed as a
potential threat to security; those who insist on taking to the streets have to be ‘kettled’
(contained in a small space) and photographed to identify future security threats.
The second process is that of diffusion. Legislation targeting seemingly specific activ-
ities such as terrorism is couched in vague forms amenable to a widening use. Thus the
UK Terrorism Act 2000 defines terrorism so as to include either violence against persons
or ‘serious damage to property’, which can be aimed not only at intimidating the public
but alternatively to ‘influence the Government’ with the aim of ‘advancing a political,
religious, or ideological cause’ (see, inter alia, Blick and Weir, 2005; Blick et al., 2006).
This flexible definition has enabled it to be used against public demonstrations or indi-
viduals having nothing to do with terrorism in any meaningful sense of the term. So, too,
a widening spectrum of agencies make use of legislation intended originally for surveil-
lance of terrorist or serious organized crime. Thus the UK Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act 2000 extended the powers of ‘public bodies’ regarding interception of com-
munications. While the Government justified this Act as an essential tool for police and
security services to combat terrorism and organized crime, it is now deployed by local
authorities for investigation of benefit fraud, licensing and environmental health issues.
If the paradigm of security initially evolved to regulate and control what was defined
as criminal, over time and within the emerging security state, it threatens to provide a
general blueprint for regulating any social relations regarded as problematic. Under New
Labour for example, legislative moves were made to make insulting religion a criminal
offence, CCTVs were introduced into classrooms (in addition to public space more gen-
erally) while minor infractions such as the failure to recycle waste correctly could result
in a criminal prosecution. The result has been a securitization process in which not only
bureaucrats but ordinary members of the public think in terms of security and public
protection without simultaneously thinking of rights and liberties. Indeed, the new pru-
dential mind-set of the ‘active citizen’ takes responsibility not only for self and family as
regards economic welfare but also an increasing range of security issues (Rose, 2000;
Clarke, 2005, 2008).
Criminologists have observed these factors before. What we suggest, however, is that
what appears as a backgrounding of the State is in fact the creation of a ‘state in the mind’
in which the State is allowed seemingly infinite new powers. A securitization of the life
world manifested in a set of attitudes welcomes and accepts the actions of the State as a
necessary exchange between liberty and security even though the terms of trade are
unknown as is whether any diminution in liberty furnishes any real increase in security
(Zedner, 2005).
Hallsworth and Lea 153

In this process, policies that would have been wholly unthinkable within the welfare
state have become acceptable and celebrated. The criteria for defining what is successful
have changed. For instance, until recently, in the UK, it would have been unthinkable to
imagine that police officers would search young people as they entered their school
gates. In the emerging security state, however, such actions have been implemented and
with considerable public support.

End game: towards ‘soft fascism’?

Each state regime engenders mentalities and personality structures shaped in its image.
The welfare state relied on and produced patrician experts who took a benign view of the
troubled delinquents they were expected to rehabilitate (Froggett, 2002). We are now
witnessing the arrival of new—often deskilled—cadres of security experts. These no
longer see, and are no longer expected to see, the individual as a composite being whose
biography they need to understand but rather as individuals reduced to clusters of denatu-
ralized risks each of which requires coercive management (Franko Aas, 2005; Fitzgibbon,
2007, 2008). The mantra of the emerging security state becomes: ‘If you are innocent
then you have nothing to fear.’ How stable such a system will be under conditions of
growing economic and personal insecurity that magnify the inherent tendency of an
emphasis on security to enhance feelings of insecurity remains to be seen.
As what is left of the welfare state withers or becomes progressively criminalized, the
discourses and mentalities that it had encouraged are displaced and evicted by those of
security. These push down into the interstices of social life; social relations are shaped
and interpolated in their image in a process analogous to that described by Habermas
(1984) as the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’, J.G. Ballard’s (2006) dystopia of ‘soft fas-
cism’ or the micro fascisms of everyday life (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). By contrast
with classic fascism there is no nationalist exuberance imposed by state controlled media
and education but rather a shrill moralism. There is no (direct) total war but rather the
never ending ‘wars’ on crime, terrorism, illegal immigrants and anti-social behaviour.
There is no formal abolition of civil rights, just their hollowing out.
In short, there is a need for a new politics of law and order. The old problematic of
how to perfect and refine the liberal democratic, civilized approach to law and order has
now ended. The new politics of our era must focus instead upon how we extricate our-
selves from the security state we are in.

Note
1. Even though, for some, the Troubles in Northern Ireland from where policing ‘innovations’
had a habit of finding their way to mainland UK was always a salutary reminder of the State’s
role in social control (Hillyard, 1987, 1993).

References
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Atkinson, R. and G. Helms (eds) (2007) Securing an Urban Renaissance: Crime, Community and
British Urban Policy. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Ballard, J.G. (2006) Kingdom Come. London: Fourth Estate.
154 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

Belloni, F. and J. Hodgson (1999) Criminal Injustice: An Evaluation of the Criminal Justice
Process in Britain. London: Macmillan.
Blanden, J. and S. Machin (2007) Recent Changes in Intergenerational Mobility in Britain, Report
for the Sutton Trust. London: The Sutton Trust.
Blick A. and S. Weir (2005) The Rules of the Game: The Government’s Counter Terrorism Laws
and Strategy. York: Joseph Rowntree Trust.
Blick, A., T. Choudhury and S. Weir (2006) The Rules of the Game: Terrorism, Community and
Human Rights. York: Joseph Rowntree Trust.
Bosworth, M. and M. Guild (2008) ‘Governing through Migration Control’, British Journal of
Criminology 48(6): 703–19.
Brogden, M., T. Jefferson and S. Walklate (1988) Introducing Police Work. London: Unwin.
Brooks, L. (2009) ‘In the Workfare State, Poverty Is Always an Individual Failing’, Guardian, 11 June.
Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/jun/11/welfare-reform-bill-workfare?
INTCMP=SRCH (consulted 14 April 2010).
Burke, J. (2003) Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. London: I.B. Tauris.
Burnett, J. (2004) ‘Community, Cohesion and the State’, Race and Class 45(3): 1–18.
Cabinet Office (2008) The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an
Interdependent World. Cmnd 7291. London: HMSO.
Castells, M. (1999) ‘Flows, Networks and Identities’, in M. Castells, R. Flecha, P. Friere, H. Giroux,
D. Macedo and P. Willis (eds) Critical Education in the New Information Age, pp. 37–64.
Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.
Clarke, J. (2005) ‘New Labour’s Citizens: Activated, Empowered, Responsibilized, Abandoned?’,
Critical Social Policy 25(4): 447–63.
Clarke, J. (2008) ‘Still Policing the Crisis?’, Crime Media Culture 4(1): 123–9.
Cohen, Stanley (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge: Polity.
Crawford, A. (1997) The Local Governance of Crime. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Crawford, A. (2006) ‘Networked Governance and the Post-Regulatory State? Steering, Rowing
and Achoring the Provision of Policing and Security’, Theoretical Criminology 10(4): 449–79.
Crisp, R. (2008) ‘Motivation, Morals and Justice: Discourses of Worklessness in the Welfare
Reform Green Paper’, People, Place & Policy Online 2(3): 172–85.
De Giorgi, A. (2006) Re-Thinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-
Fordism and Penal Politics. Aldershot: Ashgate.
De Giorgi, A. (2009) ‘Re-Bordering, Detention and Actuarialism: Immigration as Ontological
Crime across Europe and the United States’, paper presented at the American Society of
Criminology annual meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4–7 November.
Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London:
Athlone Press.
Dorling, D., J. Rigby and B. Wheeler (2007) Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968 to 2005.
Bristol: Policy Press.
Dorling, D., D. Vickers, B. Thomas, J. Pritchard and D. Ballas (2008) Changing UK: The Way We
Live Now. Sheffield: Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) Group, Department of Geography,
University of Sheffield.
Downes, D. and R. Morgan (1997) ‘Dumping the “Hostages to Fortune”? The Politics of Law
and Order in Post-War Britain’, in M. Maguirer, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology, pp. 183–232. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duffield, M. (2007) Development, Security, and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples.
Cambridge: Polity.
Ericson, R.V. (2007) Crime in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hallsworth and Lea 155

Fitzgibbon, D.W. (2004) Pre- Emptive Criminalisation: Risk Control and Alternative Futures.
London: NAPO.
Fitzgibbon, D.W. (2007) ‘Risk Analysis and the New Practitioner: Myth or Reality?’, Punishment
and Society 9(1): 87–97.
Fitzgibbon, D.W. (2008) ‘Deconstructing Probation: Risk and Developments in Practice’, British
Journal for Social Work Practice 22(1): 85–101.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane.
Franko Aas, K. (2005) Sentencing in the Age of Information: From Faust to Macintosh. London:
Glasshouse Press.
Froggett, L. (2002) Love, Hate and Welfare: Psychosocial Approaches to Policy and Practice.
Bristol: The Policy Press.
Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies. Aldershot: Gower.
Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glasius, M. (2005) The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement.
London: Routledge.
Habermas, J. (1976) Legitimation Crisis. London: Heinemann.
Habermas, J. (1984) Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1: Reason and the Rationalization of
Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hall, S. and S. Winlow (2003) ‘Rehabilitating Leviathan: Reflections on the State, Economic
Regulation and Violence Reduction’, Theoretical Criminology 7(2): 139–62.
Hall, S., S. Winlow and C. Ancram (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton:
Willan.
Hallsworth, S. (2000) ‘Rethinking the Punitive Turn: Economies of Excess and the Criminology
of the Other’, Punishment and Society 2(2): 145–60.
Hallsworth, S. and D. Silverstone (2009) ‘“That’s Life Innit”: A British Perspective on Guns,
Crime and Social Order’, Criminology and Criminal Justice 9(3): 359–77.
Hallsworth, S. and S. Stephenson (2008) ‘A Tale of Two Utopias’, Criminal Justice Matters
74(1): 24–5.
Hallsworth, S. and T. Young (2008) ‘Gang Talk and Gang Talkers: A Critique’, Crime Media
Culture 4(2): 175–95.
Hattersley, R. (2005) ‘The Danger in Blair’s Balderdash’, Guardian, 5 September. http://www.guard-
ian.co.uk/politics/2005/sep/05/ukcrime.prisonsandprobation?INTCMP=SRCH (consulted 14
April 2010).
Hillyard, P. (1987) ‘The Normalization of Special Powers: From Northern Ireland to Britain’, in
P. Scraton (ed.) Law, Order and the Authoritarian State, pp. 279–312. Milton Keynes: Open
University Press.
Hillyard, P. (1993) Suspect Community: People’s Experiences of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts
in Britain. London: Pluto Press.
Hughes, G. (2007) The Politics of Crime and Community. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Imrie, R., L. Lees and M. Raco (2009) ‘London’s Regeneration’, in R. Imrie, L. Lees and M. Raco
(eds) Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City,
pp. 3–23. London: Routledge.
Jakobs, G. (2004) ‘Bürgerstrafrecht und Feindstrafrecht’, Höchstrichterliche Recht-sprechung
Strafrecht (HRRS) 5(3): 88–94.
Johnston, L. and C. Shearing (2003) Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice.
London: Routledge.
Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity.
Kennedy, H. (2004) Just Law. London: Chatto & Windus.
156 Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

Kennison, P. and A. Loumansky (2007) ‘Shoot to Kill: Understanding Police Use of Force in
Combatting Suicide Terrorism’, Crime, Law and Social Change 47(3): 151–68.
Krasmann, S. (2007) ‘The Enemy on the Border: Critique of a Programme in Favour of a Preventive
State’, Punishment and Society 9(3): 301–18.
Lea, J. (2002) Crime and Modernity. London: SAGE.
Lea, J. (2004) ‘Hitting Criminals Where It Hurts: Organised Crime and the Erosion of Due
Process’, Cambrian Law Review 35: 81–96.
Lea, J. and K. Stenson (2007) ‘Security, Sovereignty, and Non-State Governance “from Below”’,
Canadian Journal of Law and Society 22(2): 9–27.
Mohamedou, M.-M. (2007) Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War. London: Pluto.
Munkler, H. (2005) New Wars. Cambridge: Polity.
Offe, C. (1984) Contradictions of the Welfare State. Ed. J. Keane. London: Hutchinson.
Pantazis, C. (2008) ‘The Problem with Criminalisation’, Criminal Justice Matters 74(1): 10–12.
Pantazis, C. and S. Pemberton (2009) ‘From the “Old” to the “New” Suspect Community:
Examining the Impact of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation’, British Journal of
Criminology 49(5): 646–66.
Pitts, J. (2008) Reluctant Gangsters: The Changing Shape of Youth Crime. Cullompton: Willan.
Pratt, J. (2008) ‘Scandinavian Exceptionalism in an Era of Penal Excess: Part II: Does Scandinavian
Exceptionalism Have a Future?’, British Journal of Criminology 48(3): 275–92.
Pratt, J., D. Brown, M. Brown, S. Hallsworth and W. Morrison (2005) The New Punitiveness:
Trends, Theories, Perspectives. Cullompton: Willan.
Raab, D. (2009) The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights. London: Fourth Estate
(HarperCollins).
Reiner, R. (2000) The Politics of the Police (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reiner, R. (2007) Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control. Cambridge:
Polity.
Rodger, J.R. (2008) Criminalising Social Policy: Anti-Social Behaviour and Welfare in a
De-Civilised Society. Cullompton: Willan.
Rodriguez, A. (2003) ‘Criminal Policy: New Challenges, Old Ways’, Cahiers de Defense Sociale
182–212. Available at http://www.defensesociale.org/revista2003/12.pdf (consulted 16 March
2010).
Rose, D. (2007) ‘Locked Up to Make Us Feel Better’, New Statesman, 19 March. Available at
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2007/03/risk-prison-sex-act-life (consulted 14 April
2010).
Rose, N. (2000) ‘Government and Control’, British Journal of Criminology 40(3): 321–39.
Ryan, M. (2003) Penal Policy and Political Culture in England and Wales. Winchester: Waterside
Press.
Ryan, M. (2005) ‘Engaging with Punitive Attitudes towards Crime and Punishment: Some
Strategic Lessons from England and Wales’, in J. Pratt, D. Brown, M. Brown, S. Hallsworth
and W. Morrison (eds) The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives, pp. 139–49.
Cullompton: Willan.
Scraton, P. (2004) ‘Streets of Terror: Marginalization, Criminalization & Authoritarian Renewal’,
Social Justice 31(1&2): 130–58.
Simon, J. (2007) Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American
Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press.
Singh, A. (2005) ‘Private Security and Crime Control’, Theoretical Criminology 9(2): 153–74.
Tonry, M. (2004) Punishment and Politics: Evidence and Emulation in the Making of English
Crime Control Policy. Cullompton: Willan.
Vaughan, B. (2000) ‘Punishment and Conditional Citizenship’, Punishment and Society 2(1): 23–39.
Hallsworth and Lea 157

Wacquant, L. (1996) ‘The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications’,
Acta Sociologica 39(2): 121–39.
Wacquant, L. (1999) ‘Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium’, Urban Studies 36(10):
1639–47.
Wacquant, L. (2007) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality.
Cambridge: Polity.
Webber, F. (2006) Border Wars and Asylum Crimes. London: Statewatch.
Weiner, M. (1994) Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Windlesham, L. (1998) Responses to Crime: Politics, Punishment and Populism. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Zedner, L. (2000) ‘The Pursuit of Security’, in T. Hope and C. Sparks (eds) Crime, Risk and
Insecurity: Law and Order in Everyday Life and Political Discourse, pp. 200–14. London:
Routledge.
Zedner, L. (2005) ‘Securing Liberty in the Face of Terror: Reflections from Criminal Justice’,
Journal of Law and Society 32(4): 507–33.
Zedner, L. (2009) Security. New York: Routledge.

Simon Hallsworth is professor of social research in the Department of Applied Social Science at
London Metropolitan University where he is also Director of the Centre for Social Evaluation
Research. He is author of Street Crime (Willan, 2005) and was co-editor of the New Punitiveness:
Trends, Theories, Perspectives (Willan, 2005). He has written on penal change and development
and is engaged in research conducted into violent street worlds and street organizations.

John Lea is Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Brighton UK. He is author (with
Jock Young) of What Is to Be Done about Law and Order? (1984) and has published on issues
concerning crime and criminal justice in postmodern society and racism in criminal justice
agencies. His most recent book is Crime and Modernity (SAGE, 2002).