The pursuit of security is probably our earliest human instinct – rationalising a willingness as individuals, households, communities and ultimately societies to consent to the concentration of political power in exchange for protection from a world of peril. Security forms the founding contract between citizen and state – constituted for much of the last 250 years primarily as a matter of national defence, legitimising a suite of military, judicial and policing policies deemed necessary to guard against the aggression of other countries and to underwrite the stability of social order at home (Hoppe, 2003; Šulović, 2010).

In the 20th and 21st centuries, ‘security’ peaks twice in public discourse – in the 1950s, in the interstices between the end of the Second World War and the birth of the Cold War; then again, following the early 2000s and the epoch-shaping aftershocks of 9/11 (Kvartalnov, 2021). Over time, however, the defining character and form of this most fundamental value – what security means, what it entails and, crucially, how it is delivered – has broadened and deepened, becoming in the process both more encompassing and benign and more elusive and sinister.

Confronted by a variety of revolutionary movements across 19th-century Europe, the classical outward-facing notion of military security evolved an inward, domestic counterpart focusing on maintaining social stability by containing public dissatisfaction and, in an associated manner, mitigating extreme forms of popular deprivation. In America, Roosevelt's ‘New Deal’ and the 1935 Social Security Act – placing novel emphasis on security in the form of jobs, financial and market participation – pre-dated the National Security Act, National Security Council and the formal establishment of a Central Intelligence Agency.

This tension in our idea of security – between national defence and social welfare – is epitomised in a growing compulsion, led by some highincome administrations, to declare ‘war’ on all manner of ills – criminal and civil, domestic and international. Seeking to build the ‘Great Society’, Lyndon Johnson launched wars simultaneously on both poverty and crime. Sadly, if predictably, programmes aimed at improving opportunity among economically marginalised, largely African American communities overlapped awkwardly with interventions in enhanced law enforcement focusing on criminal delinquency perceived to originate in precisely the same neighbourhoods.