(In)security-at-a-distance: rescaling justice, risk and warfare in a transnational age

Abstract

The article examines the progressive de-bounding of social risks and the blurring boundaries between internal and external notions of security. Contemporary forms of cross-border connectivity bring to our attention the renewed importance of analysing distance (physical, social and other) in criminology. Globalising processes significantly expand the scale and scope of social interaction, including violent conflict and crime control and security strategies, by offering social agents a possibility of acting from the point of ‘strategic globality’. The article outlines an emerging landscape of ‘security at a distance’, where previously local and national phenomena are transformed by new forms of transnational connectivity, risk and movement. It suggests that, through the emerging forms of globalism, criminal justice is plugging into trans-border circuits of circulation of people, forms of knowledge and social and political action, where, ultimately, crime control can become an export and war can be, metaphorically, seen as an import.