National Security Risks? Uncertainty, Austerity and Other Logics of Risk in the UK government’s National Security Strategy

Risk scholars within Security studies have argued that the concept of security has gone through a fundamental transformation away from a threat-based conceptualisation of defence, urgency and exceptionality to one of preparedness, precautions and prevention of future risks, some of which are calculable, others of which are not. This article explores whether and how the concept of security is changing due to this ‘rise of risk’, through a hermeneutically grounded conceptual and discourse analysis of the United Kingdom government’s national security strategy (NSS) from 1998 to 2011. We ask how risk-security language is employed in the NSS; what factors motivate such discursive shifts; and what, if any, consequences of these shifts can be discerned in UK national security practices. Our aim is twofold: to better understand shifts in the security understandings and policies of UK authorities; and to contribute to the conceptual debate on the significance of the rise of risk as a component of the concept of security

An alternative strategic defence and security review: reconstituting a shrinking force

This paper critically examines the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. It is argued that despite budgetary constraints the government could build forces far more capable of power projection than envisaged under current plans. Defence is a true necessity but it does not have to be unaffordable provided risky procurement decisions are avoided

Towards a global ‘child friendly’ juvenile justice?

The impact of globalisation on juvenile justice is increasingly conceptualised with reference to neo-liberal governance and the intensification of ‘new punitiveness’. Whatever the merits of such analyses, they have the effect of marginalising, if not completely overlooking, the extent to which international human rights instruments might serve to neutralise and/or mediate punitive currents. Indeed, it might be argued that the commitment – repeatedly expressed in official discourse – to both protect and promote the human rights of children in conflict with the law has itself come to comprise a discursive and tangible dimension of global child governance. Key signifiers of this phenomenon – at the global level – include a corpus of interrelated human rights conventions, standards, treaties and rules, formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, whilst at the European level authoritative rights-informed guidelines on ‘child friendly justice’, ratified by the Council of Europe, are similarly representative. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the degree to which individual nation states receive and respond to their human rights and ‘child friendly justice’ obligations. Whilst recognising the mediating capacities of formal human rights instruments, we aim to critically interrogate the relations between globalised rhetoric and localised reality; between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other