Buchanan: Fear & the Corporatisation of Security

In recent times growing political debate in New Zealand has focused on the issue of public safety and its intersection with private life. New Zealanders are zealous about guarding their private lives and degree of personal freedom in the public sphere. Yet a purported rise in criminality and internationally derived security threats has seen the expansion of public and private security coverage of the social space that is Aotearoa. Why is that so?

Perhaps what is occurring is the “corporatisation” of security. “Corporatisation” encompasses two facets of the better-known subject of “privatization” in the early 21st century security environment.

Privatisation in one sense involves relinquishing all but combat and front-line police functions to private agencies, in a shrinking of the state repressive apparatus in favour of market forces operating in a support function. Profitability in this market sector depends on firms capitalizing on public perceptions of their individual and collective threat environment, and their corresponding levels of personal (in)security.

Privatization in the second sense refers to reduction of private life and privacy in public spaces as the legal scope and technological capabilities of public and private security agencies expand.

Corporatisation of security also involves what Robert Michels referred to as the “iron law of oligarchy:” the main obligation of the organisation is to preserve itself. In early 21st century market democracies this means that public security agencies expand the scope of their authority in order to counter new and old threats, thereby justifying budgetary and personnel increases in core security areas. In parallel private security agencies proliferate as state proxies in a range of security-related fields. All of this growth is fueled by popular perceptions of the common threat environment.

There is a backdrop to all of this, and to explain that we must refer to the state terror experiments of the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s. There is where political scientists and sociologists first noted the expansion of perceptions of threat in pursuit of specific economic, social and political objectives. The phenomenon came to be known as the culture of fear, and its agent was state terror.

A culture of fear makes the social subject manipulable. Expansion of the concept of threat creates an environment of fear and uncertainty that leads to social atomization and infantilization in the measure that individuals lose control of their immediate futures because of the intrusions that the expanded threat environment produces. In environments of physical and material uncertainty the individual as social subject adopts immediate and often survivalist preoccupations. Narrowing of the concept of private self in the pursuit of security disrupts collective identities and horizontal solidarity ties as well as notions of the proper social order. That may serve a purpose.

State terror experiments were carried out to pursue the specific economic and social objectives of the military-civilian coalitions that underpinned the dictatorships conducting them. In its combination state terror in the Southern Cone and elsewhere allowed for the introduction of market-oriented policies in polities otherwise disposed to resist them. The object was to recreate collective and individual identities in order to refashion the social, economic and political identity of the nation. Structural imperatives spawned expansion of threats to a point that cultures of fear developed within subject populations. State terror was used to produce a fundamental rupture with the collective past in order to reforge historical identities of elites and subordinate groups alike.

The turn to market economics in liberal democracies has a somewhat different trajectory. In many liberal democracies, New Zealand among them, market-oriented policies were implemented by velvet fist rather than bludgeon. Even so, the logic of security corporatisation lay within the liberal democratic market projects as well, and all that was needed was a precipitating event that would raise threat perceptions, sow generalized fear, and produce and uncertainties in the public consciousness. That event was 9/11.

9/11 opened a window of opportunity for public and private entities in electoral democracies to hark to increased levels of threat and insecurity in pursuit of bureaucratic and profit-making logics--if not security itself. The threat of Islamicism became the unifying fear in the so-called West, but a wider range of values and behaviour were included along with real criminal activity on the list of undesirable (and therefore threatening) social traits. The overall thrust is to heighten concern about public safety and criminal intrusions on private life, which serves as justification for the expansion of the network of public and private agencies dedicated to countering the manipulated threat perceptions of the general public.

In an increasingly “watched” society, the bottom line is about intelligence gathering. Who, when, where, in what measure and by what means do we need to feel secure? Is the level of threat, locally and nationally, justification for the expansion of both the state’s legal authority on security matters as well as the array of agents purveying threat protection of various stripes? In liberal democracies that is a matter of public debate. In dictatorships it is not.

Intelligence gathering has two dimensions (external and internal) and two broad means of collection—human and technical. Human intelligence collection comes in various guises but is always labour and cost intensive. Technical means involve audio, optical and digital collection mechanisms, often working in concert. Human intelligence tends to be a more proactive form of intelligence collection; technical means tend to be more passive, but also can be focused on specific targets or objectives. Because they are a general as well as a focused means of intelligence collection, technical approaches are cost-effective (since capital outlays are basically start-up costs, with ongoing maintenance, rather than asset training and protection, constituting the bulk of ongoing operations). That makes for a niche market for private security providers. Along with armoured car guards and private security firms, detective and surveillance agencies are just points on the continuum of corporate security provision.

To be sure, electronic surveillance mechanisms in public places can allow for the identification of criminals after the fact, and in some cases (assuming constant real-time monitoring) prevent crimes from happening or interrupt them in progress. They also may serve as a deterrent to the criminally minded. But the question remains as to whether concerns with public safety should be addressed by putting the entire population under scrutiny regardless of their propensity for crime. The same is true for concerns about foreign derived threats. Do all people of a certain ethnic or religious persuasion come under suspicion because of the distant actions of a few? Where is the presumption of innocence that is a cornerstone of democratic jurisprudence? In a country that values privacy and which has no recent history of foreign or domestic terrorism (other than hoaxes and minor assaults on property), arguments about the existence of such threats, be they criminal or political in nature, needs to be challenged.

With regards to contracting direct repression and combat skills for political reasons, mercenaries have been around for ages and now often come from the elite forces of major military powers. Private intelligence and repressive agents (snitches, moles, strong arm heavies, bounty hunters and debt collectors) are also a historical fixture of the human social landscape. The difference now is the technological sophistication and levels of professionalization, scope of operations and corporate logics of private security agencies. The logic of profit is what pushes the standard.

Expansion of state security authority and public and private security agencies across the spectrum of threat has its roots in the market-driven project. Security agencies need something to defend against or countervail. That requires permanent threats. In many countries the threats are real, often palpable. In many others, especially after 9/11, threats are more contrived than real. That is because the pursuit of profit requires private and public security agencies to continually re-invent the threat environment to create new market opportunities and client relationships for themselves. The ripple effects of this syndrome increase in the measure that the state successfully divests itself of all but core repressive functions while increasing its legal authority over security matters. Since the definition of threat is malleable so are public perceptions of it.

The issue ultimately boils down to an issue of consent? What is the security threshold beyond which people will not consent to the corporatisation of security and diminishing of the private sphere? That threshold is a function of the threat environment in which it obtains. In Israel or Iraq, the threshold of popular consent to expanded security operations is quite low due to the environments of insecurity in which the populations live. In the United Kingdom the threshold of popular consent on security matters is not as low, but nevertheless is constructed upon the historical experience of the IRA bombing campaigns as well as recent terrorist attacks by Islamic militants. In New Zealand, the threshold of consent to security intrusions on private life has historically been very high. After all, this is a country where up until a few years ago driver’s licenses did not contain photographs, and in which no national identity card is In order to convince the public that a narrowing of the private space is needed in order to ensure public security, popular notions of threat needed to be expanded. That is what occurred after 9/11, even though it is arguable whether international security threats to the commonweal are realistic, or whether the levels of domestic crime have reached such proportions that the entire population needs to be placed under 24/7 electronic scrutiny.

In dictatorships lack of consent to intrusions on private life and the securitisation of the public sphere is an issue settled by force. In post-9/11 democracies consent is bought by the ideological re-conceptualisation of collective and personal threat environments so as to materially benefit private security providers operating under loosened state jurisdiction in which the interests of the policy elite, rather than the universal rule of law, is what determines the nature of the threat in question.

If human reality is socially as well as physically constructed, so then are perceptions of threat. These in turn depend on notions of individual and collective rationality, which themselves have a socially constructed component. The issue reduces to whether, under present and anticipated future conditions, threats justifying the expansion of security provision are imaginary or real. In dictatorships the previously unimaginable became real in the form of state terror. In the climates of fear that followed market projects were imposed. In liberal democracies market logics came before the expansion of threat horizons and proliferation of private security. After 9/11, the effect of the global climate of fear had repercussions in liberal democracies, one of which is the inexorable corporatisation of public security to the detriment of private life. That leads back to where this essay began—societies dominated by fear, via government manipulation of threats, all in pursuit of private profit in the public domain.

Paul G. Buchanan writes about issues of comparative and international politics. This essay is the basis for a talk given at the “Who is Watching Who” public meeting, Christchurch, October 11, 2007.

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