Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception

Security as Politics argues that ‘security’ was once institutionalized as an anti-political ‘exception’ in liberal democracies - a ‘black box’ of secret intelligence and military decision making at the dark heart of the state – but has now permeated ‘normal’ professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic ‘anti-politics’. To make this claim, the book investigates security from the perspective of professional political practice, historically, sociologically, and theoretically. Using archival research and interviews with politicians, it investigates the history of parliamentary exclusion from security policy making and the reasons behind that exclusion (such as executive secrecy, but also parliamentary deference). It then demonstrates that political activity on security has increased to such an extent that it requires a rethink of the assumed pathological relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘security’.