Multi-centred governance and circuits of power in liberal modes of security

Multi-centred governance is epitomised in current struggles to better ‘secure’ liberal democracies as nation state actors are obliged to act ‘in partnership’ with corporate and non-governmental organisations whilst confronting illicit actors with enhanced digital capacities to circumvent and organisationally outflank both state and corporate powers. Examples of such social technologies, particularly Disruptive Digital Technologies (DDTs), include the use of social media communications for challenging elite constructions of social problems, networked distributed manufacturing technologies for the ‘weaponisation’ of civil society and the use of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAV’s) or ‘drones’ for surveillance and counter-surveillance. The paper draws upon research into transnational organised crime and urban security in Europe to illustrate the circuits of power that constitute liberal modes of security through causal relations of power-dependence, dispositions that fix or re-fix the meaning and membership categories of security and technologies of production and discipline that can facilitate the disruption or reproduction of these causes and dispositions.