ABSTRACT
Utilising Foucauldian ideas of monitoring circulating risk and requirements for new forms of security governance, this chapter unpacks and connects both territorially focused and city-wide security to contemporary counterterrorism interventions. First, the chapter analyses the evolution of ‘fortress’ security at specific overseas political missions since 1998, where sophisticated and robust security has been advanced, often mirroring historical castle and citadel architecture. Detailed examples of the construction of new U.S. Embassies in Iraq and the United Kingdom are used to exemplify these evolving counterterrorism ‘blueprint’ designs. The second part of the chapter illuminates the monitoring and filtering of circulating risk through means of digital surveillance. Here increasing sophisticated biometric security cameras and other ‘smart’ security techniques and surveillance cordons are shown to have increasingly facilitated the automatic production of urban space and enabled the infiltration of surveillance devices into buildings and infrastructure, in ways, it is claimed, help track or even deter terrorists. The chapter concludes by reflecting upon the adoption and progression of new-style security assemblages that are increasingly driven by a set of priorities, from not just state security agencies and law enforcement, but from private corporations unimpeded by the social implications of their impact.
