Age Of Security (the Rise Of A Global Obsession)

What would you give up to feel safe?

What would you give up to feel safe?

The security industry has captured our politics and our private lives. From rogue states to Ring doorbells, someone is always keeping a watchful eye – and we’re paying a heavy price. Anthropologist Ruben Andersson shows how Big Security rose to power, generating unprecedented profits while failing to protect us. In this page-turning dispatch from security’s frontlines – across the divides separating political right and left and global rich and poor – he pursues police chiefs in Swedish suburbs, shelters with migrants in Mexico, bunkers down with peacekeepers in Mali and mingles with arms dealers in Paris.

Everywhere, he finds that our shared obsession with security is an act of retreat: high walls, constant surveillance and punitive policies offer the illusion of control while fuelling paranoia and precarity. Every tracking app installed, border fortified, or emergency law passed makes us more fearful and less free. Our age of security is a dystopian response to political failure – but it’s not too late to replace runaway security with a humanist vision where fear no longer controls us.

Privacy, freedom, democratic control – we have already given up so much in the name of safety. But once we see how security has trapped us, we can start to break free.

Ruben Andersson is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on global security. His previous books include Illegality, Inc., winner of a BBC award, No Go World and (with David Keen) Wreckonomics. He has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and El País.

THE NEXT BIG IDEA: Explains how the rise of big security from the 1990s is at the root of our modern permacrisis. The book’s argument only becomes more prescient and pressing with each day of the news cycle.

A FEAT OF NARRATIVE NON-FICTION: Andersson has reported on the ground for over twenty years, from the Sahel to Mexico, and brings this gonzo energy to his writing, with a vivid sense of character and place.

GLOBAL APPEAL: Investigates big security across all seven continents, including Mali, Sweden, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, the USA, China and more, from an author who speaks Swedish, Spanish, English and French.

BRINGING IT HOME: Alongside the big picture politics, the book has relatable sections on our everyday private lives, as we all become willingly complicit in the security machine.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF The Shock Doctrine, Bullshit Jobs or Surveillance Capitalism.

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