ABSTRACT
This volume is a contribution to our understanding of the dynamics associated with seeing in all sorts of everyday social situations and cultural phenomena a potential threat to security. The range of such phenomena and activities is wide and diverse. Drug use and street crime, expressions of religious, cultural, or political identity, migration across state territories or state borders, collective public gatherings from sports games to state-sponsored public events-even being in public buildings such as courthouses, schools, hospitals, airports, or city halls-have all become intimately intertwined with the fear that they may be associated with intentions to undermine what is seen as security in everyday living. Popular expressions such as “we need more security here,” “security will be very tight during the event,” “there is a lot of security around that area,” or “there is a lot more security here now than there used to be in the past” attest to this development. Such expressions connote public interpretations of the dynamics associated with what I call security meta-framing (Bajc 2010), an ordering principle of social life that holds security as its central value. Public understanding of security meta-framing captures a number of elements associated with these dynamics, among them an apparatus of institutions and their operatives, surveillance practices and technologies, and a particular kind of social order and perception of safety.
