ABSTRACT
The last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have witnessed four developments, all of which have significantly affected the provision of policing and security. First, there has been a growing diversity of policing provision. At the domestic level – and increasingly at the international level too – the newly emerging ‘policing family’ is being made up of a multiplicity of partners, including both ‘public’ (state-sponsored) policing agencies and a host of ‘private’ and civil society bodies which, collectively, pose major challenges for effective and coherent regimes of governance and public accountability. Second, policing and security, both at the domestic and international level, have been subject to significant degrees of ‘marketization’ or ‘commodification’. By and large, this has been built upon programmes of neoliberal reform that have come to dominate contemporary governance. A third factor, globalization, is closely connected to these processes. Globalization is a complex phenomenon. On the one hand, it tends to homogenize and integrate national and local differences. On the other hand, just as global forces impact on the local, so local actions will impact, reciprocally, on the global. This paradox is captured in what has become a mantra for transnational corporations, in general, and for transnational commercial security (TCS) in particular: ‘Think globally, act locally’.1
