Book Review: Law, Insecurity and Risk Control: Neo-Liberal Governance and the Populist Revolt
| Author | Harry Annison |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639211038700 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
JOHN PRATT, Law, Insecurity and Risk Control: Neo-Liberal Governance and the Populist Revolt.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, ISBN 978-3-030-48871-0, £79.99 (hbk), £54.99 (pbk).
Law, Insecurity and Risk Control is the latest in a number of books authored by John Pratt
that apply a social theoretical perspective to the consideration of broad societal dynamics,
and their relationship with penal policy. Law, Insecurity and Risk Control examines and
explains the relationship between neo-liberal governance and what Pratt calls the ‘popu-
list revolt’. It discusses –and indeed places central in its analytical discussion –the
‘security sanction’(described in more detail below) and its role, as Pratt sees it, in
seeking to shore up the increasingly shaky foundations of the neo-liberal order.
Pratt argues that since the 1980s, criminal law has seen dramatic changes, taking on a
risk-prevention role. At the same time, risk has become increasingly central to criminal
justice practice and policy more broadly. He argues that what we have seen is not the
inexorable growth of state power per se, but a shift towards criminal law measures
intended to offer ‘a form of limited protection by the state from risks that individuals
cannot insure themselves against and which would otherwise cause irreparable harm’
(p. 7).
Pratt draws together material from five jurisdictions –the UK, the US, Australia, New
Zealand and Canada –‘to show how the phenomenon of the security sanction emerged
out of the consequences of neo-liberal restructuring as a possibility to control new anx-
ieties and insecurities this simultaneously generated’(p. 12). But Pratt’s account goes
further: both in terms of arguing that there have been additional important developments
in recent years that require us to re-orient our analytical narrative, and (relatedly) in terms
of arguing that the populist revolt in particular has fundamentally changed the nature, and
possible future prospects, of liberal democratic nation states.
The book develops the theoretical argument via a historical narrative structure; the
chapters leading the reader from the post-World War Two era (‘Never Again’) to the
present (‘The End’). Chapter 2 argues that the post-WWII period was one of a rejection
of inequality and a desire to ensure sufficient welfare protection for all. An era of con-
formity, and also cast as one where preventive measures against ‘the dangerous’(espe-
cially sex offenders) that had been advocated up to the 1930s fell away in the wake of
the horrors of the World War.
Chapter 3 discusses the emergence of the neo-liberal political agenda from the 1970s,
focusing in particular on the ways in which risk was ‘set free’during this era. Chapter 4
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(3) 501–512
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211038700
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