Danger, innovation, responsibility: Imagining future security (original) (raw)

Security thinking in Europe today represents the convergence of four distinct threads of Western thought. The first thread is the emergence of a new security landscape featuring a new constellation of actual threats and threat perceptions accompanied by a new logic danger. The second thread follows the development of liberalism and the liberal paradigm in Western societies, a set of ideas at the core of the European project. The third thread flows from the evolution of the technology and the predominance technological approaches to addressing social problems. Finally, the fourth thread follows the transformation and intensification of a discourse of values as a guiding force of European security policy. These threads converge in a nexus where notions of danger, innovation and responsibility are recast in the legitimation of new forms of policing, social control, and political accountability where the technologically possible sets the standard for what is politically necessary ethical acceptable. This paper will document and analyse this evolution, critique is supporting assumptions and suggest the shape of an alternative discourse of the security, and the elements of a counter discourse that will help guide us toward it.