Archive / Magazine / Politics / Counter Terrorism / Article | 27/07/2007

"Creating networks” – the new effectiveness myth for "internal security”

Terrorism is posing new challenges for national security policies. Time-honoured measures are being reassessed and new methods are being discovered. Peter Stegmaier und Thomas Feltes ask how "national security" can be guaranteed in the future.

Whether it is terrorism in London or Madrid, suitcase bombs in German railway stations and trains, the World Cup or 9/11 itself, all available symbolic causes are grasped in order that the field of security can be reorganised and these changes legitimised.

Officers of the Metropolitan Police Department's special unit in a mock drill in Tokio
Photo:AP

A change of perspective is currently taking place in criminal and home policy, accompanied by a reorganisation of those institutions responsible for the establishment and protection of "internal security”. The control myth of nation-state centered modernity has been shattered. The individual state is reaching ever more quickly the limits of its ability to govern and regulate. Previously it was technical risks and dangers, now it is terrorist ones which pose a challenge to the capacity of states to act.

Globally organised crime is putting the globally organised economy and individual states to the test with respect to the effectiveness of their supra-national cooperation. "Internal security” as something purely internal and purely a matter for the state is becoming unthinkable. Increasingly, security is produced primarily in areas where influential bodies demand it, in other words where it can be paid for, and therefore less and less for common good. This is true wherever private security agencies are employed and the state tries to save money. States are forced to cooperate with private companies.[1] Crime prevention is moving away from reactions to acts and actors and is increasingly directed towards low-risk attempts to regulate daily life. The penal law is used increasingly as an instrument for combating general social insecurity and the "subjective feeling of security” is becoming an ever stronger force for the legitimacy of law and order campaigns.

In this scenario, the institutions of social control are acquiring new tasks and new problems. They have to use conventional methods to deal with problems under changed conditions, and for this reason they have to change the instruments they use. Conversely, newly introduced methods are often of only limited use in tackling areas of weakness. Methods first have to be developed (or transferred from other areas), tried out and improved. New areas of knowledge and action are opening up, especially through the joining together of previously separate arrangements, through the use of new kinds of investigative data, and through new forms of organisation and communication. With this comes the promise that, through the creation of networks between security actors, efficiency and effectiveness can be increased and that social processes can in principle continue to be directed in spite of dramatic changes. Can this policy of "connected internal security” succeed, or is a lot of fuss being made about something which cannot bring salvation either?

We need to ask, first, how the various security agencies make arrangements among themselves and with the changing political and social context in which they operate? Second, what can security actually be in an age of uncertainty? Third, can the paradoxical promise be kept of ensuring security and order in conditions of growing insecurity and when there possibilities for framing people's actions are becoming ever more limited, in particular by means of a security policy approach?

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More from the press review on the subject » International Relations, » Security Policy / Crises / War, » EU Policy, » Europe, » Global