ABSTRACT
In this ‘new’ era of threat, crisis and (in) security how do we understand and contextualize this contemporary historical moment? Wherefore the twentieth-century utopian dreams of socialism or liberal democracy? Whither the ‘end of history’, the promise of modernity? Why, half a century from the crisis of fascism are ‘we’ still not ‘safe’, our freedom secured, the world developed and democracy and prosperity still not guaranteed for all? Amid the war on terror, the resulting crisis in civil liberties, the mélange of international security, the ‘threats’ posed by global poverty, the imminent environmental catastrophe, global migration flows, asylum and refugee crisis, there has been a decisive shift in vocabulary in the discourses of development and modernity.
