Neoliberal security provision: Between state practices and individual experience

Abstract

The article develops a new understanding of neoliberal security provision on the basis of available accounts of three different “states”; the penal state, the regulatory state, and the activating welfare state. I argue that these forms of state intervention provide individuals with security in the sense that anxiety is temporarily alleviated, while stabilizing the conflictual dynamic of global power structures. Marketization and organizational control account for the specifically neoliberal character. Such an understanding matters because it directs attention to the dynamic between state practices and individual experience, and the multitude of mechanisms, which not only promise but also provide security, however temporary and partial.

Trafficking Chains

“…These varieties of modernity are shaped by capital (Brenner et al 2010), post-colonial (Bhambra 2007;Boatcă 2015;Go 2016) and current colonial (Al-Dayel et al 2022; Lewis and Blitz 2023) relations, and by gender regimes (Shire and Walby 2020; Shire 2023 While the location of the boundary between social democratic and neoliberal forms has been a key site of debate (Giddens 1998), there is increasing interest in authoritarianism in the context of de-democratization (Verloo 2018;Lombardo et al 2021;V-Dem 2022). Within these debates, there is a cluster of work that focuses on political economy (Esping-Andersen 1990;Brenner et al 1999;Hall and Soskice 2001;Bruff 2014) and another relatively separate cluster focused on the regulation of violence (Garland 2000;Lacey 2009;Wacquant 2009;Bernstein 2010;Hörnqvist 2020;McGlynn 2022;Ballesteros Pena et al 2023).…”

The submerged prison state: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability

“…Prisons are part and parcel of this transformation. New institutions and new modes of governance have been constructed out of the old (Cruikshank, 1999; Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001; Harcourt, 2011; Hörnqvist, 2020; Soss, 2002; Wacquant, 2009).…”

“… 7. There is a field-crossing literature on the “regulatory state” that intersects the works I sketch here. For a helpful review, see Hörnqvist (2020). Braithwaite, to take one prominent author, offers the following description: “States can be thought of as providing, distributing, and regulating.…”