Between Public and Private: The Co-production of Infrastructural Security

ABSTRACT

The paper proposes to use the concept of co-production to account for the mutual co-production of private as well as public security actors and critical infrastructure. Through an exploration in the field of urban security provision, we aim to contribute to critical security studies by turning to the entanglements of public and private security actors in the process of securitising infrastructure. As the construction and provision of infrastructural security depends neither solely on public nor private actors but on their interaction, we propose the concept of co-production to account for these dynamics. Based on a focused ethnography, the paper mobilises material collected during a security conference in Israel, in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments. This paper has also greatly benefitted from Andreas Langenohl’s most helpful comments and Johannes Gunesch’s valuable feedback and careful reading. Amina Nolte’s research was carried out within the collaborative research centre ‘Dynamics of Security’ /Transregio 138 at the Justus Liebig University Giessen and Philipps University Marburg. Carola Westermeier’s work was carried out in the framework of the research project ‘FOLLOW: Following the Money from Transaction to Trial’,

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See https://elnetwork.eu/country/israel/safe-smart-city-conference/

2 This only applies to Jewish and Druze citizens of Israel. Arab-Palestinians, who make up around 20% of the citizens of Israel, are not conscripted to the Army.

3 Interview, Safe and Smart City Conference, November 19th, 2018.

4 See https://www.safeandsmartcity.org/, last accessed December 9th, 2019.

5 Interview number 3 with Tomer Avishai, Safe and Smart City Conference, November 19th.

6 Interview, Safe and Smart City Conference, November 19th.

7 Interview, Safe and Smart City Conference, November 19th.

Additional information

Funding

Carola Westermeier's work was carried out in the framework of the research project ‘FOLLOW: Following the Money from Transaction to Trial’, funded by the European Research Council, Grant No. ERC-2015-CoG 682317.