Crime‐Control in the Post‐Wall Era: The Menace of Security

Abstract

Over the past ten to fifteen years, an increasing number of social issues have become linked, and then subordinated, to security policy. This policy area has witnessed a paradigm shift, with the emergence of a new security mentality. The crumbling of the walls built up during the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet empire, meant the disappearance of the East versus West polarity. And as this world order, based on a balance of terror, passed into history, the nature of the global threat situation was transformed. The antagonisms of the Cold War had hardly had time to cease creating fear before new threat images emerged onto the scene. Unlike the Cold War situation, where world peace was threatened by a frenetic arms race between two highly concrete superpowers, the perceived threats of the 1990s became increasingly vague. The military menace was superseded by what was said to be a much more diffuse criminal threat. For what is it that lies concealed behind such concepts as ‘cross‐border crime’, ‘organized crime’, ‘terrorism’ and the like? Previously, security policy analysts had been able to localize the source of a given threat with precision. Their benchmark was now gone, however. Once the established geographical demarcations between Us and Them ceased to apply, it was found that the enemy might instead be in our midst.

Notes

One might however think that this was in fact the case, given the inordinate amount that has been written on different aspects of risk since the mid‐1990s (Power 2004:12).

The work on this article has been conducted within the context of the project ‘The internationalization of crime policy’, financed by the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (Krisberedskapsmyndigheten). The author would like to thank David Shannon for his translation of the text.

Over 800 persons lost their lives when the passenger ship Estonia sunk during a storm in the Baltic Sea in 1994.

See Bigo 1994 for a discussion concerning the increasing confusing since the early 1990s of the boundaries between military–police, and internal–external security.

Graham et al. (2004) have made an interesting analysis of four such declarations of war made by political leaders.

See for example, SOU 1993:89; SOU 1995:19; Government Bill (Proposition 1996/97:11); SOU 2001:41 and Ds 2001:14.

The Anti‐Terrorism, Crime and Security Act was introduced subsequent to 9/11 and inter alia gives the Home Secretary the right to make decisions without reference to the legal system. If a suspect is deemed to constitute a threat to national security, he or she may be held in prison for an indeterminate period without charge or a court hearing.

IKFN is an abbreviation for ‘The intervention of the Swedish Armed Forces in the context of invasions of Swedish territory in times of peace and neutrality, etc.’

See Nordström 2003 for an interesting study of the way the news were staged by experts and the media during the war in Iraq.