Abstract
This chapter explores the temporal and disciplinary boundaries of security. Although the language of ‘security’ only became prominent in criminological work in the last twenty years, the concepts of ‘security’, prevention, and sets of practices associated with ‘taming the future’ in the fields of crime, vice and disorder, nevertheless have a long history. However, the nature of that history and its interpretation are contested, and it has only recently begun to be explored in detail. This chapter introduces important features of the histories of policing, crime prevention and protection, and their transformation over the modern period, but in doing so, it also guides the reader through academic debates about the significance of these developments. Particularly important themes are the relationship between the state and private security; security and protection as forms of power or hegemony; the moral and the technical dimensions of security; and the dynamics of ideology, identity and politics, particularly articulated in relation to (neo)liberalism, capitalism and feminism. These themes are related to particular methodological approaches to, or uses of, the history of security: criminological work inspired by Michel Foucault; neo-Marxist critiques of security; and more historicist approaches based around more conventional historical research as a means of engaging in criminological debate, increasingly being termed ‘historical criminology’.
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Dodsworth, F. (2022). Security: History, Genealogy, Ideology. In: Gill, M. (eds) The Handbook of Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91735-7_2
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