ABSTRACT
Starting with a description of the London Bridge and Borough Market terrorist attack in 2017, and the civilian and armed security responses to the attack, this chapter explores the framing of political power in terms of Hobbes’s Leviathan. This chapter opens a discussion of the culture, institutions, and individuals of the security bureaucracy. We show ethnographic examples from airport security that indicate the ways in which power is limited, and we discuss efforts to deploy technology in airports as a way to mediate the complexity of the tasks at hand. The picture that emerges is not of Leviathan on one side with the people on the other side, or beneath. Rather, complex interactions and ambiguities are found everywhere.
