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Global Crime
ISSN: 1744-0572 (Print) 1744-0580 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fglc20
Decentring security governance
Mark Bevir
To cite this article: Mark Bevir (2016) Decentring security governance, Global Crime, 17:3-4,
227-239, DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2016.1197509
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2016.1197509
Published online: 15 Jul 2016.
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Decentring security governance
Mark Bevir*
Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
A new security governance has spread in domestic and international areas of policing.
Security is increasingly associated with community and capacity building. There is a
consensus that the way to build communities is through networks. Yet, the new
security governance varies widely in ways that reflect the traditions through which
civil servants, street level bureaucrats, voluntary sector actors, and citizens interpret
and resist networked security. Security governance is thus a set of diverse practices
emerging from contests over meanings, including the social scientific theories that
inspired the turn to networks and the local traditions through which policy actors have
encountered, interpreted, and evaluated the policies these theories have inspired.
Keywords: Governance; network; police; security; state-building
Since the 1980s, the word ‘governance’ has become widespread as new theories and
practices have drawn attention away from the central institutions of the state. The focus
has shifted to the activity of governing, and much of the activity of governing now
involves private and voluntary organisations as well as public ones. Indeed, governance is
often defined in contrast to government. Governance is associated with the rise of markets
and networks that include non-governmental and private sector actors.
Governance refers here to a shift in public action and public organisation. It suggests that,
since the 1980s, states and state actors become more reliant on varied private and voluntary
sector actors to devise, manage, and deliver policies and services. The state enters contracts
with other organisations, for example, to manage prisons and to provide security in war-torn
areas. Whereas government had consisted of bureaucratic hierarchies, governance gives
greater scope to markets and networks. Although there are debates about the extent of this
new governance, and the role of the state in it, there is general agreement that the processes of
governing now involve more diverse organisational forms and more diverse actors.
New forms of security governance have spread in the domestic and international
arenas. Security is increasingly associated with community and capacity building, and
there is a consensus that the way to build communities is through networks and joined-up
arrangements. Yet, the new forms of security governance also vary in ways that reflect the
many cultures and traditions through which civil servants, street-level bureaucrats, volun-
tary sector actors, and citizens interpret and resist joined-up security. This special issue
seeks to decentre security governance by not only drawing attention to the rise of
networks but also highlighting the competing meanings and traditions that inform these
networks. It emphasises that security governance is both variegated and contested.
Security governance appears here as a set of diverse practices emerging from contests
over meaning. These meanings include the social scientific theories that have inspired
much recent reform – the neoclassical economics and rational choice theory that helped
*Email: mbevir@berkeley.edu
Global Crime, 2016
Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4, 227–239, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2016.1197509
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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inspire policies that spread contracting out, and also the new institutionalisms and plan-
ning theories that helped inspire attempts to build networks, joining-up, and whole-of-
government arrangements. Equally, however, this special issue examines some of the
other webs of meaning through which policy actors encounter, interpret, and evaluate
these social scientific theories and the policies they have inspired. Elites inherit narratives
through which they filter expert advice. Other policy actors draw on their local traditions
to make sense of elite policy initiatives. All these webs of meaning – social technologies,
elite narratives, and local traditions – influence the ways in which security governance
works. In this introduction, I discuss the rise of security governance and then introduce the
decentred theory that informs the varied studies in this special issue.
The rise of security governance
Security governance refers to the agenda, reforms, and practices associated with the
application of joined-up governance to security policy.1 Joined-up governance refers
more generally to a distinctive policy agenda that seeks to promote efficiency and
effectiveness by fostering networks and partnerships among the public, voluntary, and
private sector organisations involved in any given area of policy. These networks and
partnerships are meant to ensure the relevant organisations communicate with one another,
thereby enabling them to collaborate more effectively and to benefit from the synergies
arising out of such collaboration. These joined-up or whole-of-government approaches
initially appeared in social welfare, community policing, and counterterrorism in states
such as Australia, Britain, and, after 9/11, the U.S.A.2 In international politics, joined-up
security is a post-Cold War phenomenon that shifts the management of security away
from both the state-centric approaches favoured by many realists and the formal institu-
tions favoured by many liberals towards a reliance on more diverse actors and more
flexible ways of working.3
The roots of security governance lie in two developments in the social sciences in the
late twentieth century. First, from the 1980s onwards, some scholars of international
relations began to expand the concept of security. In particular, theories of securitisation
drew attention to non-traditional threats and to the extent to which security depended on
the provision of a range of socio-economic goods. As these theories permeated policy, so
approaches to security began to expand to include the management and delivery of the
relevant socio-economic goods. Second, from the 1970s onwards, scholars of planning
and public management began to champion networks and partnerships as alternatives to
bureaucratic hierarchies and markets. As these theories dramatically grew in influence, so
policymakers turned to ‘joined-up’ or ‘whole-of-government’ arrangements to manage
and deliver the socio-economic goods that were deemed to be prerequisites of security.
The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union posed serious
challenges to analysts and practitionersof international relations. Realist and liberal
theories seemed unable to explain the new security threats that rapidly emerged after
the end of the Cold War, let alone to prescribe adequate policy responses to these threats.
These new threats were perceived to lie at the levels of the state, society, and individual,
rather than in the structure of the international system. The threats included a resurgence
of ethno-nationalist violence in the post-Communist world and the global South,4 a shift
to new forms of conflict that were fought not by disciplined state militaries but by
irregular forces,5 and the consequences of environmental degradation and poor
governance.6 As observers concluded that realist and liberal theories had failed, so they
looked to other accounts of global security. Since the 1960s, some scholars had been
228 M. Bevir
arguing that realists and liberals had too narrow a concept of a security threat.7 Peace
researchers in particular argued that a concentration on military and political threats had
led to a neglect of the ‘structural violence’ of social injustice and of economic inequality.8
In the aftermath of the Cold War, security analysts drew on these elder ideas and
debates to develop new theories of global security that responded to the new threats of the
age.9 Their varied theories shared two key features. First, these theories were less statist
than were realist and liberal theories. They were sceptical of the realist and liberal claim
that building national security entailed greater security for individuals and communities.
They argued, to the contrary, that the state itself was sometimes the principal threat to the
security of citizens. Second, these theories were less focussed on military threats than
were realist and liberal theories. They expanded ‘security studies’ to focus on political,
economic, social, and environmental threats. In practical terms, they suggested that
building security required more than simply improving the capacities of police forces
and militaries.
These new theories helped to inspire new policy agendas, including human security
and state-building. So, although the concept of ‘human security’ became famous mainly
after the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report of 1994, it arose from
earlier work, dating back to the 1960s, by peace researchers and environmentalists. The
concept of ‘human security’ involved a self-conscious act of ‘securitization’, that is, the
act of rendering something not conventionally considered a security issue into a security
issue in order to give it greater political salience.10 Like earlier radical security theorists,
advocates of ‘human security’ argued that properly to address the range of threats facing
many people, especially in the developing world, it was necessary to shift the ‘referent
object’ of security away from the state, and towards individuals and communities. The
UNDP report argued: ‘the world can never be at peace unless people have security in their
daily lives’.11 A year later, at the 1995 World Summit, the UNDP and other actors
sympathetic to the cause pushed for a new global socio-economic order that would
address ‘human security’ by channelling resources hitherto devoted to national security
and economic growth towards sustainable development in the global South.
State building was, like human security, an attempt to improve standards of govern-
ance and so tackle sources of insecurity. State-building involved democratisation, institu-
tional reform, and economic development. All these aspects of state building were thus
‘securitized’: they were no longer just ends in themselves; they became, in addition and
sometimes more importantly, means to improve national and global security. State build-
ing in its various guises was to undermine those autocratic regimes that threatened both
the West and their own citizens. It was to eliminate those socio-economic causes of
dissatisfaction and discontent that had enabled autocrats to come to power in various non-
Western societies.12 In the 1990s, these security considerations inspired the West to
attempt to aid states to make a transition from various forms of authoritarianism to liberal
democracy by encouraging them to adopt – or even imposing on them – certain standards
of institutional design and economic management. In the 2000s, the focus of the West
shifted from transitional states to ‘failed’ or ‘failing states’ such as Afghanistan or the
Solomon Islands. Democratisation and good governance were thus merged into broader
projects of state-building in places where even the rudiments of government had broken
down.13
Human security and state-building are policy agendas that derive in part from the new
theories about international security that came to the fore in the post-Cold War period.
These policy agendas posed practical challenges of implementation. Security governance
spread from the domestic setting to the global one because theorists and practitioners
Global Crime 229
responded to these practical challenges by drawing on the new technologies of govern-
ance associated with networks, joining-up, and whole of government agendas. To under-
stand the rise of these technologies, we need to explore changing fashions in planning
theory and public management.
Planning theory long encouraged a rational approach based on centralised forms of
knowledge and organisation.14 Modern planning developed, together with Keynesian
economics, during the economic crises and the great depression of the inter-War years.
Planning then relied on hierarchic and bureaucratic institutions to collect and study data,
to evaluate courses of action, and to implement decisions. But in the late 1970s, rational
planning was subject to numerous criticisms. Neo-liberals argued that it was impossible
and that it created bureaucracies that were inherently inefficient and unresponsive. Even
mid-level social scientists began increasingly to accept accounts of the incremental nature
of decision-making or the dominance of economic interests in the planning process.15
Progressive social scientists began to suggest that rational planning failed to respond
effectively to the needs of the poor.16
Planning theorists may have turned away from rational planning but they rarely
adopted micro-level theories or championed markets as did neo-liberals. Instead, they
developed new approaches to planning, including transactive planning, social learning
theory, and communicative planning theory.17 These new approaches differed from
rational planning in championing informal structures and wider participation, with
planners having a more facilitative and less directive role. The new approaches
located planning in networks based on partnerships and interactions with the
community.
The shift from rational planning to more informal approaches appeared in the rise of
concepts such as ‘wicked problem’.18 Most definitions suggest problems are wicked if
they exhibit a cluster of features such as being fairly unique, lacking a definitive
formulation, being subject to multiple explanations, lacking a test to decide the value of
any response to it, all responses to it being better or worse rather than true or false, and
each response to it having important consequences such that there is no real chance to
learn by trial and error. Typically these features mean that wicked problems are inter-
related. Any wicked problem has complex links to others. Any response to a wicked
problem has an impact on other wicked problems.
Planning theorists argue that wicked problems explained the failings of hierarchic
bureaucracies. Departmental silos undermine the coordination that is needed to address
interrelated and intransigent problems. The state confronts a growing number of cross-
jurisdictional challenges and a declining ability to respond to them. Wicked problems
require more collaborative and innovative approaches with agencies working across
organisational boundaries both within and outsidethe state. Some planning theorists
thus argue that informal networks and looser planning processes provide a way of dealing
with wicked problems. Partnerships and joined-up governance may enable state agencies
to collaborate with one another and voluntary and private sector organisations. Such
partnerships are especially important to address problems that lie beyond the reach of
single government agencies. They provide a framework in which several organisations
can interact and collaborate in mutually beneficial ways.
The changing nature of planning theory reflects a broader shift in mid-level social
science towards the new institutionalism.19 The new institutionalism is highly amorphous,
consisting minimally of rational choice, historical, and sociological strands.20 The latter
two strands are the ones that interest us. They try to preserve mid-level analysis by
emphasising social embeddedness and the role of structures and norms as determinants of
230 M. Bevir
social life. New institutionalists respond to the challenge of rational choice theory by
distinguishing themselves from old institutionalists.21 They imply that the old institution-
alism was overly formal and legalistic, concentrating on constitutions and the official rules
governing states and other organisations.22 Often they associate this formal legalism with
a privileging of hierarchic bureaucracy as a rational form of organisation embodying a
rational approach to planning. In contrast, they define their own new institutionalism as
open and receptive to informal norms and organisations, including networks and
partnerships.
Today many institutionalists accept neo-liberal arguments about the inflexible and
unresponsive nature of rational planning and bureaucratic hierarchies. However, instead of
promoting marketisation and managerialism, they favour joining-up and networks.23 These
new institutionalists think that networks are characteristically flexible and responsive struc-
tures that allow for the structured and yet informal environments in which social actors
operate. They argue that competitiveness and efficiency derive not only from markets and
competition but also from stable relationships that are characterised by mutual trust, social
participation, and voluntary associations. These new institutionalists thereby suggest that in
many circumstances networks offer a superior mode of coordination to both hierarchies and
markets. In their view, networks combine an enabling and facilitative leadership with
increased flexibility, creativity, inclusiveness, and commitment.
Planning theorists, institutionalists, and mid-level social scientists have turned to net-
works. Many of them suggest that networks can combine the best features of markets,
including flexibility and efficiency, with the desirable features of hierarchies, including
stability and the ability to concentrate on long-term issues. In their opinion, networks can
overcome the problems associated with managerialism and outsourcing: networks offer the
benefits of long-term stable relationships and genuine cooperation in contrast to a short-term
focus on immediate profits. Some institutionalists argue here that the private sector is marred
by an endemic short-termism: competition and the need to make an immediate profit lead
companies to neglect long-term investment and stability. This argument suggests that there
are some advantages to the public sector being comparatively sheltered from competition.
State agencies can concentrate on building collaborative relationships that will provide the
long-term advantages associated with stability, trust, and collaboration.
The turn to networks has inspired a new belief in the virtues of joining-up and public–
private partnerships. Joined-up governance requires horizontal and vertical coordination
between organisations involved in public policy. Although the boundary between policy-
making and policy implementation is blurred, joined-up approaches look different in each
case. Joined-up policymaking tries to bring together the varied agencies involved in
addressing a particular problem, such as juvenile crime or counterterrorism. Joined-up
policy implementation tries to simplify the delivery of services to citizens by improving
coordination among different agencies – an example being the way agencies are brought
together in one-stop shops at which the unemployed can access benefits, training, and
information about jobs. In both cases, joined-up governance draws on the idea that
networks can effectively coordinate the actions of a range of actors and organisations.
So, security governance spread from domestic policing and counterterrorism to
defence and development as policymakers extended joined-up and network approaches
to ever more areas.24 Policymakers often extended these approaches in response to what
they perceived to be new non-state-based security challenges such as transnational crime,
terrorism, and illegal migration. As these threats appeared across policy sectors and across
national borders, so they seemed to require transnational and joined-up responses. As a
result, from the 1990s onwards, states and international organisations increasingly sought
Global Crime 231
to tackle security issues by engaging other actors, including NGOs, environmental
organisations, think tanks and private firms.
Decentring security networks
As the papers in this special issue explore the nature of security governance in practice, so
they try to decentre it. A decentred theory of governance highlights the diverse and
contingent meanings that inform the actions of the individuals involved in all kinds of
practices of rule.25 Decentred theory encourages social scientists to examine the ways in
which patterns of rule, including institutions and policies, are created, sustained, and
modified by individuals. It encourages social scientists to recognise that the actions of
these individuals are not fixed by institutional rules or a social logic of modernisation. On
the contrary, actions arise from the beliefs that individuals adopt against the background
of traditions and in response to dilemmas.
This decentred theory of governance entails a shift from institutions to meanings in
action and so a shift from social logics to narratives. Many accounts of security govern-
ance reduce the diversity of state formations to something like a social logic of moder-
nisation, institutional norms, or a set of classifications or correlations across networks.
Their proponents tame a chaotic picture of multiple actors creating a contingent pattern of
rule through their diverse understandings and conflicting actions. In contrast, decentred
theory suggests that security governance arises from the bottom up as conflicting beliefs,
competing traditions, and varied dilemmas results in diverse practices. It replaces aggre-
gate concepts that refer to objectified social laws with narratives that explain actions by
relating them to the beliefs and desires that produce them.
A decentred theory of security governance contrasts sharply with comprehensive
accounts that seek to unpack the essential properties and necessary logics of networks
and governance. Neither the intrinsic rationality of markets nor the path dependency of
institutions decides patterns of security governance. Rather, security governance is
explained as diverse and contingent constructions of several actors inspired by competing
webs of belief rooted in various traditions. Decentred theory explains shifting patterns of
governance by focusing on the actors’ own interpretations of their actions and practices. It
explores the diverse ways in which situated agents change the boundaries of state and civil
society as their beliefs change leading them constantly to remake practices.
Social scientists cannot properly explain cases of security governance by reference to a
formal theory of its allegedly key features. Social scientists can define security governance
only by reference to particularcases. Further, the absence of a comprehensive theory of
security governance implies there need be no feature common to all the cases to which social
scientists would apply the term. It is often futile to search for the essential features of an
abstract category that stands for a cluster of human practices. Worse still, the search for
allegedly common features of security governance can lead social scientists to dismiss the
particular cases that are essential to understanding its variety. When social scientists offer a
general account of security governance, it should be expressed as a set of family resemblances.
So, decentred theory depicts security governance as the variegated product of contests
over reform agendas that have sought to spread markets and especially networks. Security
governance is conceived not as a particular state formation but as the various policies and
outcomes emerging from meaningful actions that coalesce into contingent, shifting, and
contestable practices. For convenience, we might divide the meanings embedded in
security governance into social technologies, elite narratives, and local traditions.
232 M. Bevir
I have already suggested that social science inspired the reform agendas that promoted
securitisation, markets, privatisation, networks, and joining-up. However, this general
pattern hides wide variation across particular cases. Narrower, even different, traditions
of social science have influenced public policy in ways that vary across time, space, and
sector. Security governance encompasses many clashing social technologies.26
Technology refers here to the social scientific beliefs and associated policies that govern
conduct. It captures the ways in which governmental and other actors draw on social
sciences to construct policies. Security sectors have been transformed, of course, by
market and managerial technologies such as those of performance measurement and
targets.27 Security governance has also been transformed, as I have been emphasising,
by technologies surrounding networks and joining-up.
Many of the papers in this special issue offer case studies of the astonishing rise and
spread of these latter technologies. Adam Edwards describes in his paper how the idea of
multi-centred governance has come to dominate discussions of security in liberal democ-
racies, notably within Europe. Edwards highlights the extent to which networks and
partnerships have been touted as the solution to dilemmas raised by developments such
as the rise of new forms of social media. Transnational and global crime has been
transformed by the rise of disruptive digital technologies and networked distributed
manufacturing technologies. Both states and corporations have struggled to respond to
these developments. States in particular have responded to developments in global crime
by trying to build new security partnerships with private and voluntary sector actors.
David Chandler’s contribution to this special issue explores the way in which similar
networked technologies have impacted international politics. Chandler traces a shift in
international security. States used to try to intervene directly to deal with the sources of
security problems. Now they increasingly focus on building partnerships to manage and
regulate the effects of security problems. In Chandlers’ view, international security used to
be a primarily top-down activity driven by western ideas and interests, and led by those
western states that sat atop of a kind of global hierarchy. Today, in contrast, even western
states act more indirectly, operating alongside and through more local actors. Global risks
are thus governed through more decentralised networks involving local management,
local resources, and self-policing.
In her paper, Rita Abrahmsen shows, more specifically, how Security Sector Reform
(SSR) has developed as a global policy agenda. SSR promotes networked policy models
through models of ‘good governance’ and attempts to fix international examples and
standards of ‘best practice’. Network technologies have thus become key technologies in
global attempts to transform security sectors and especially to build security governance
in poor and fragile states. Development policy, Abrahmsen argues, is in thrall to social
science technologies that promote partnerships between state and non-state actors as key
to effective security governance.
Even if network technologies now dominate many security governance agendas, they
nonetheless coexist withmarket-based technologies and alsowith older command and control,
and other strategies associated with hierarchic bureaucracy and state sovereignty. So, for
example, David Betz argues persuasively in his paper that walls and other fortifications remain
prominent technologies of security governance. He even suggests that walls are playing a
greater role today than they have since the early modern era. Today’s walls serve not only as
military fortifications but, at least as importantly, as ways of securing the state against both
transnational criminal networks and unwanted migration. Within states too, walls are used to
separate societal factions within cities and to protect infrastructure from terrorist attacks.
Global Crime 233
It is important to recognise, finally here, that social science is more or less continuously
generating new technologies that policymakers are all too ready to grab as they search
desperately for any plausible lever of control. So, for example, even while performance
measurements remain popular, other market-based technologies have arisen, such as nudge
technologies rooted in behavioural economics.28 Behavioural economics explores the ways
people systematically depart from rational, utility-maximising actions because of the heur-
istics they use and the biases to which they are prone.29 Nudge technologies seek to correct
such heuristics and biases so as to move people towards actions the government prefers. The
U.K. government’s acronym ‘MINDSPACE’ is based on seven such nudges. ‘N’ is for
‘Norms’ and refers to the idea that people are influenced by what others do. Scotland’s
Violence Reduction Unit uses these concepts of norms as a nudge technology, drawing on
the earlier work of the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV). It punishes every
member of a gang should one member misbehave. So, if a gang member commits a murder,
then the entire gang is aggressively pursued for drug offences, the possession of weapons,
violation of parole, and so on.
Decentred theory suggests that social scientists should pay attention not only to social
technologies but also the narratives by which elites construct their worldviews. Moreover,
the central elite need not be a uniform group, all the members of which see their interests
in the same way, share a common culture, or speak a shared discourse. Rather, a decentred
approach suggests that social scientists should ask whether different sections of the elite
draw on different traditions to construct different narratives about the world, their place
within it, and their interests and values.
So, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks rightly emphasise in their contribution to this
special issue that crime control is not about ideologies as well as tactical and technocratic
evaluations. One point here is that crime control is not a science: even the kind of social
technologies I have been discussing are not neutral technocratic solutions but rather, as the
other papers in this special issue make clear, the contestable historical constructs of
particular styles of social science. Another point is, however, that within security policy,
these technologies are generally interpreted, transformed, and even overturned by other
ideological meanings. Despite the talk of ours being a post-ideological world, crime, like
much else, is understood and debated in part through political categories.
Perhaps much of the world will find itself discussing and constructing security policies
in terms reflecting key differencesbetween conservatives, liberals, and socialists. Equally,
however, other ideological concepts can also enable or foreclose the adoption of specific
security technologies and policies. Nationalist sentiments might provide fertile ground for
some of the uses of walls discussed by Beitz. Humanitarian and cosmopolitan visions might
provide better soil for networked partnerships and decentralised policies as described by
Chandler. Ideological debates around tradition and modernity, or theism and secularism,
might similarly effect which technologies are adopted in what ways in which contexts.
When social scientists neglect agency, they can give the impression that politics and
policies arise only from the strategies and interactions of central and local elites. However,
other actors can resist, transform, and thwart the agendas of elites. There are good reasons,
therefore, to be sceptical that joined-up approaches have been implemented to the extent
the rhetoric suggests.30 A decentred approach draws attention here to the diverse traditions
that inspire street-level bureaucrats and citizens. Policies are sites of struggles not just
between strategic elites, but between all kinds of actors with different views and ideals
reached against the background of different traditions. Subordinate actors can resist the
intentions and policies of elites by consuming them in ways that draw on their local
traditions and their local reasoning.31
234 M. Bevir
In their contributions to this special issue, Anne Holohan and Louise Westmarland
provide detailed ethnographic case studies of local traditions and their impact on security
governance. Senior officers can circumvent state policies at even at the executive board
level, and front line officers standardly fall back on their occupational culture in ways that
prevent policies operating as intended. Westmarland focuses in particular on the local
traditions through which British police officers remade and transformed reforms aimed at
promoting consumerism and codes of behaviour. The ease with which policy documents
called for police to be customer orientated served to gloss over difficult questions about
the relationship of citizens as consumers and as a collective public, and about the police as
a business and as a public service. Similarly, codes of police ethics may be easy to write
but it is hard to govern the soul of police officers many of whom have a strong allegiance
to an alternative code rooted in loyalty to one’s fellows.
Holohan uses ethnographic methods to get inside a case of international security
governance – the U.N. peacebuilding mission in Kosovo. She studies the interactions of
international organisations and local peoples in two Serbian enclaves. The international
organisations were promoting networked and liberal conceptions of good governance.
Although they sought to cooperate with local groups, their ability to do so depended on
the extent to which these local groups bought into the legitimacy of the U.N. mission.
Here, Holohan looks at one case where the local organisations cooperated with interna-
tional actors and one case where there was far more suspicion and distrusts.
Conclusion
Decentred theory replaces formal explanations and comprehensive accounts with studies
of the diverse meanings found in social technologies, elite narratives, and local traditions.
What does this decentred theory teach us about security governance? The following
papers in this special issue suggest three main answers.
First, a decentred account of security governance is not based primarily on policy
networks. It is based more fundamentally on the idea that social science has inspired two
waves of reform – first markets and contracting out, then networks and joining-up – and
these reforms produced complex patterns of policing at home and abroad. This account of
security governance is less an abstract model of an emerging pattern of rule than an
historical story about the diverse patterns of rule emerging from the impact of expertise on
security policies and practices. Because decentred theory presents the new politics as a
product of social science, it can allow for the varied consequences of security reforms
irrespective of whether they include the fragmenting state and multiplying networks.
Second, when decentred theory invokes a fragmented state or differentiated polity,
therefore, it is not appealing to a functional logic of increasing specialisation. Decentred
theory points instead to a post-foundational critique of reified concepts of the state for
their neglect of the varied contingent meanings and actions that make up the state. The
argument is, in other words, less that bureaucracy has declined and networks grown than
that the state is and always has been stateless. States have no essence, structural quality, or
power to determine the actions of which they consist.
Decentred theory rejects the notion of the state as a material object and governance as
an emergent structure. It is a ‘stateless’ theory in the sense that it rejects the idea of the
state as a pre-existing causal structure that can be understood as having an autonomous
existence and causal effects over and apart from people’s beliefs and actions. The state is
just an aggregate description for a vast array of meaningful actions that coalesce into
contingent, shifting, and contested practices. For decentred theory, therefore, the core
Global Crime 235
executive is not defined in functional terms by its core tasks within a system. The core
executive is a descriptive concept that captures the fluid and varying actors involved in
central decision-making. Core executives are characterised less by their institutions and
functions than by their court politics. Court politics refers to the beliefs, practices, and
traditions of the networks of actors with the formal authority of political and adminis-
trative leadership whose statecraft is a matter of ruling.
Third, when decentred theory addresses changes in the state, it does not engage with
the rather odd debate about whether the number of networks has grown and the number of
hierarchies declined. It is primarily interested instead in how the spread of new ideas
about markets and networks changed security governance. On one level, decentred theory
here engages with issues of governmentality, notably the discourses and policies of
political elite. On another level, however, decentred theory encourages studies of the
myriad ways in which local actors have interpreted these discourses and policies. It
explores how they have responded, anticipated, reproduced, or resisted the designs of
the elites, and forged their own practices of security governance. Social scientists can
better explore the diversity of present-day practices of security governance by observing
ministers, civil servants, street-level bureaucrats, and citizens in action.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Bevir, ‘Joined-up Security’.
2. Bevir, Democratic Governance, 27–49; Crawford and Lister, ‘Patchwork Shape’, 413–30;
Fosher, Under Construction; Johnston, ‘From Pluralisation’, 185–204; and Palmer and
Whelan, ‘Counter-Terrorism’, 449–65.
3. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Beyond the State; Hall and Biersteker, Emergence of
Private Authority; Hollis, ‘The Necessity of Protection’, 32–29; Slaughter and Hale,
‘Transgovernmental Networks’; and Streets, ‘Global Governance’.
4. Von Hippel, ‘Resurgence of Nationalism’, 185–200.
5. Kaldor, New and Old Wars.
6. Duffield, Global Governance and New Wars.
7. Buzan and Hansen, Evolution of International Security, 101–155.
8. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace’, 167–91.
9. Smith, ‘Increasing Insecurity’, 72–101.
10. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies’, 511–31.
11. UNDP, Human Development Report, 1.
12. Chandler, International Statebuilding; Duffield, Global Governance and New Wars; Holohan
Networks of Democracy; and Klingebiel, New Interfaces.
13. Patrick and Brown, Greater than theSum; and Wesley, ‘State of the Art’, 369–85.
14. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow.
15. Lindblom, ‘Science of Muddling Through’, 79–88; and Molotoch, ‘City as Growth Machine’,
309–32.
16. Grabow and Heskin, ‘Foundations for Radical Concept’, 106–14.
17. Forester, Planning in the Face; and Friedman, Retracking America; Healey, Collaborative
Planning.
18. Rittel and Webber, ‘Dilemmas in General Theory’, 155–69; Conklin, Dialogue Mapping; and
Paquet, Governance through Social Learning.
19. Healey, ‘Institutionalist Analysis’, 111–21.
20. Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science’, 936–57.
21. Hall and Taylor, ‘Political Science’; Peters, Institutional Theory; and for discussion Adcock,
Bevir, and Stimson, ‘Historicising the New Institutionalism’.
236 M. Bevir
22. March and Olsen, ‘New Institutionalism’, 734–49.
23. Granovetter, ‘Business Gorups’; and Powell, Koput, and Smith-Doerr, ‘Interorganizational
Collaboration’, 116–45.
24. Webber et al., ‘Governance of European Security’, 4.
25. Bevir, A Theory of Governance.
26. Bevir and Rhodes, Governance Stories, 145–62; Holmberg, ‘Scandinavian Police Reform’,
447–60; Loveday, ‘Police Management’; and Stenson and Edwards, ‘Crime Control’, 203–17.
27. Loveday, ‘Policing Performance’.
28. Dolan et al., Mindspace; and John et al., Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think.
29. Kahneman, Thinking Fast.
30. Crawford, ‘Networked Governance’, 449–79; and Doig and Levi, ‘Inter-Ageny Work’,
199–215.
31. Lipsky, Street Level Bureaucracy; Marks and Sklansky, Police Reform; and Maynard-Moody
and Musheno, Cops, Teachers, Counsellors.
Notes on contributor
Mark Bevir is a professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.
He is the author or co-author of The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999), Interpreting British
Governance (2003), New Labour: A Critique (2005), Governance Stories (2006), Key Concepts of
Governance (2009), and The State as Cultural Practice (2010), Democratic Governance (2010),
The Making of British Socialism (2011), Governance: A Very Short Introduction (2012), and A
Theory of Governance (2013).
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	Abstract
	The rise of security governance
	Decentring security networks
	Conclusion
	Disclosure statement
	Notes
	Notes on contributor
	Bibliography