Wow! eBook
Age of Security: The Rise of a Global Obsession
Author(s): Ruben Andersson (Author)
- Publisher: William Collins
- Publication Date: 13 Aug. 2026
- Language: English
- Print length: 352 pages
- ISBN-10: 0008716374
- ISBN-13: 9780008716370
Book Description
‘This is not normal. It can be resisted. Find out how’ ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN
‘Breaking out of the container of containment, and restoring politics to its rightful place in human life, is perhaps our most urgent task’ KENAN MALIK, THE OBSERVER
________________________________
What would you give up to feel safe?
The security industry has captured our politics and our private lives. From rogue states to smart doorbells, someone is always keeping a watchful eye – and we’re paying a heavy price. Anthropologist Ruben Andersson shows how Big Security rose to power, generating unprecedented profits while failing to protect us. In this page-turning dispatch from security’s frontlines – across the divides separating political right and left and global rich and poor – he pursues police chiefs in Swedish suburbs, shelters with migrants in Mexico, bunkers down with peacekeepers in Mali and mingles with arms dealers in Paris.
Everywhere, he finds that our shared obsession with security is an act of retreat: high walls, constant surveillance and punitive policies offer the illusion of control while fuelling paranoia and precarity. Every tracking app installed, border fortified, or emergency law passed makes us more fearful and less free. Our age of security is a dystopian response to political failure – but it’s not too late to replace runaway security with a humanist vision where fear no longer controls us.
Privacy, freedom, democratic control – we have already given up so much in the name of safety. But once we see how security has trapped us, we can start to break free.
‘Brilliantly thought-provoking’ MARK GALEOTTI
‘Propulsive and urgent … a panoramic exploration of our world’ MARTHA SPURRIER
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘We are safer now than ever, in the main. So why do we feel so insecure? A brilliantly thought-provoking study not just of our shrinking tolerance for risk, but also how cynical politicians and a massive global industry encourage us to trap ourselves in cages of our own making’
Mark Galeotti, author of Homo Criminalis
‘Do we actually want to live in this state of heightened supervision? Does it matter? And who cares? Those are the questions tackled in this book about the global shift towards a security culture and the possible cost of that shift’
The Spectator
‘We live in an age in which we seek less to solve problems than to contain them … Breaking out of the container of containment, and restoring politics to its rightful place in human life, is perhaps our most urgent task’
The Observer
‘Andersson draws impressively on many examples from across the world to argue persuasively that we have moved into the era of ‘Big Security’, where the name of the game is protection of the status quo, invariably at the expense of the marginalised’
openDemocracy
‘A sober and passionate examination into how we’ve allowed the security narrative to infect every aspect of our lives. This is not normal. It can be resisted. Find out how’
Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory
‘A courageous and beautifully written book that takes us to the heart of the brave new world of surveillance capitalism. Forces us to acknowledge the high price of the quest for a ‘risk-free’ world: it confronts the transformation of human values in the digital era, and shows how deeply we are all involved in this crisis’
Professor Toby Green, author of A Fistful of Shells
‘Propulsive and urgent, Age of Security is a panoramic exploration of our world with a vital demand that we change it for the better’
Martha Spurrier
‘Manages to combine engaging writing with scholarly rigour to tell a novel story about our age of security’
Professor Faisal Devji
About the Author
Ruben Andersson is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and the holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship on global security. His previous books include Illegality, Inc., winner of a BBC award, No Go World and (with David Keen) Wreckonomics. He has written for the Guardian, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, and El País.
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