The governance of crime and insecurity in an anxious age: the trans-European and the local

Across European countries, nation-states appear to be confronting a major crisis under the dual pressures of globalisation and localisation. The march of global capital and finance, together with ever-closer European integration, has encouraged the international flow of business, trade and information. However, alongside this process of delocalisation – in which social systems are stretched across time and space – exists an apparently contradictory process of relocalisation. Here forms of control are increasingly inscribed into the fabric of local territorial and spatial interactions (Robert 2000). In the process, many traditional forms of place-based authority and social control have been torn up. Global flows of capital and culture have significantly affected and recast territorial communities.