This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number of received (liberal) suppositions about the relationship between police and government. I then attempt - drawing constructively yet critically on recent theorizations of governance and ‘governmentality’ - to make sense of some contemporary reconfigurations of policing within and beyond the state, and tease out their implications for questions of democratic legitimacy. Finally, I outline the contours of an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-formation and sociologically plausible under the altered conditions of plural, networked policing.

Security has become a defining feature of contemporary public discourse, permeating the so-called 'war on terror', problems of everyday crime and disorder, the reconstruction of 'weak' or 'failed' states and the dramatic renaissance of the private security industry. But what does it mean for individuals to be secure, and what is the relationship between security and the practices of the modern state? In this timely and important book, Ian Loader and Neil Walker outline and defend the view that security remains a valuable public good. They argue that the state is indispensable to the task of fostering and sustaining liveable political communities in the contemporary world and thus pivotal to the project of civilizing security. This is a major contribution by two leading scholars in the field and will be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of one the most significant and pressing issues of our times.

The private security industry is often represented - and typically represents itself - as an expanding business, confident of its place in the world and sure of its ability to meet a rising demand for security. But closer inspection of the ways in which industry players talk about its past, present and future suggests that this self-promotion is accompanied by unease about the industry's condition and legitimacy. In this paper, we analyse the self-understandings of those who sell security - as revealed in interviews conducted with key industry players and in a range of trade materials - in order to highlight and dissect the constitutive elements of this ambivalence. This analysis begins by describing the reputational problems that are currently thought to beset the industry and the underlying fears about its status and worth that these difficulties disclose. We then examine how security players seek to legitimate the industry using various narratives of professionalization. Four such narratives are identified - regulation, education, association and borrowing - each of which seeks to justify private security and enhance the industry's social worth. What is striking about these legitimation claims is that they tend not to justify the selling of security in market terms. In conclusion we ask why this is the case and argue that market justifications are 'closed-off' by a moral ambivalence that attaches to an industry trading in products which cannot guarantee to deliver the condition that its consumers crave.

In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author’s overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community. From this perspective, the author offers a critique of certain prominent forms of what he calls “ambient policing” and aims to cast some new light on the issue of how policing contributes to—or undermines—citizen security in democratic societies.