Book Review: Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390501400309 |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Author | Alistair Henry |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REFERENCES
Ewing, Keith (1998) ‘The State and Industrial Relations: “Collective Laissez-Faire”
Revisited’ (1998) HSIR 1.
Freedland, Mark and Paul Davies (1993) Labour Legislation and Public Policy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rubin, G. R. (1987) War, Law, and Labour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
HUGH COLLINS
London School of Economics, UK
LES JOHNSTON AND CLIFFORD SHEARING, Governing Security: Explorations in
Policing and Justice. London: Routledge, 2002, 192 pp. £71.48 (hbk).
At its heart, Governing Security is a book that seeks to provoke both scholars and
policymakers with an interest in security and its equitable distribution throughout
society. It is a book that is well grounded in the politics and jurisprudence of past and
contemporary debates about punishment, policing and crime control; both in terms
of the technologies and practices involved and the institutions and mentalities that
sustain and animate them. But it is also a book with a specific practical project. Where
risk-based, actuarial and proactive models of security provision have tended to
become associated with the corporate sector, or those affluent pockets of citizens who
can afford to pay extra for security-enhancing technologies and services (and who
increasingly, it is argued, resent paying twice for the privilege through collective
taxation), this book seeks to reclaim them as a means through which it also poten-
tially possible to empower and reinvigorate poor and socially excluded communities
through supporting them to develop meaningful ways of enhancing their feelings of
security and justice. The authors use the Zwelethemba ‘local capacity policing’ project
in South Africa to illustrate this point in the final chapter of the book, and describe
how block-grants allocated to the community have been used to develop local
security and dispute resolution strategies which do not rely on punitive principles but
which nonetheless have proved successful in promoting a sustainable sense of both
security and justice in the community.
It will come as little surprise to those familiar with the earlier work of the authors
that the importance of distinguishing between the ‘police’ (the new public police) and
‘policing’ (the wider governmental project of maintaining the wealth and security of
a population) looms large throughout the analysis. The distinction is much more than
a heuristic device, however, and plays a central role in the development and articu-
lation of the defining part of the book’s argument: the discussion of nodal govern-
ance. In short, the authors have long argued that the tendency of scholars to focus
their attention on the state police has blinded them to the continued existence of
private and civic forms of policing (the state police never enjoyed the ‘monopoly’ over
the governance of security that it may once have claimed) and their increasing import-
ance (in terms of the resources they employ and the roles in which they are engaged)
since the latter years of the twentieth century. Their explicit decision to use the
language of governance rather than the language of policing is intended to sensitize
readers to the ‘diversity of sites of governance’ which play a role in maintaining the
security of local communities. Naturally the state police (may) play a role but there
are numerous other ‘nodes’ of local governance ranging from private security services
in mass private property on the one hand, to the local information networks (includ-
ing occasional access to the informal economy and related knowledge networks in
440 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 14(3)
06 055692 Reviews (bc-s) 12/7/05 3:25 pm Page 440
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