ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is underpinned by a way of thinking about security that has a vexed history, encompassing genealogical relations with techniques of warfare that emerged in the early twentieth century. It provides a cutting-edge analysis of how CIP is enacting a shift in the security practices of Western states, leading from a concern with securing territorial borders to a concern with promoting a 'society-wide state of security' by working on the inside, 'with the grain of society', as Soby Kristensen expresses it. The book demonstrates why the rationalities informing CIP cannot be understood in simplistic terms of a desire for the protection of human beings from the risk of violent death at the hands of terrorists, but express a more technocratic will to defend infrastructures even at the cost and to the detriment of distinctly human capacities.
