Introduction

The recent scholarly interest in terrorism and anti-terrorism as a social problem exemplifies how politics and political interests shape research. The most penetrating and lucid work is the Report of the 9/11 Commission (2004). Clearly, control of, and response to, terrorism is a question of relevance to police studies, to the governance of security, and speaks to the fragmentation and multiplicity of forms of social control. Simultaneously, the power of the state has grown (Cohen 1985; Garland 2001; Johnston and Shearing 2003). Contemporaneous studies of social control agents and agencies provide data that can connect organizational theories, the negative risks associated with terrorism, and observable police actions in respect to putative terrorism and/or anti-terrorism. The emerging role of private and public police and anti-terrorism preparations are particularly revealing of the changing shape of control because terrorist policing and anti-terrorist policing, with some exceptions, have previously been eschewed by Anglo-American police (Liang 1993; Manning 2003: 41–2). Implicit in these developments is the question of to what degree these preparations threaten democratic freedoms and civil liberties.

This chapter, drawing on ethnographic-evidence studies of organizational responses to terrorism, has three themes. The first theme is that contingencies imagined as negative risks are not shared within and across policing (regulatory) organizations. The second concerns the problems associated with assembling temporary organizational networks to defend an event, place, or group at risk.