ABSTRACT
This chapter refers term the governance of security in preference to the term policing and attempts to shape the flow of events in ways that are intended to promote security. The success of the police in realizing the intention of their architects is evident in the extent to which, over the course of some two centuries, they have come to epitomize security governance. Even though much has happened over the course of the last half-century to erode this 'ownership' of policing by the police, policing continues to be closely coupled with 'the' police. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, plural policing was seen as a feature of the past that was being, and that should be, overcome. Pluralism is indeed anchored but it has multiple state, supra-state and non-state anchors. The rule-at-a-distance story about how the governance of security has been developing is both simple and elegant.
