Urban (In)Security

The neoliberalization of policing and the policing of neoliberalization are worldwide phenomena. While the first trend effects the organization of policing, the second trend brings about new policing strategies executed by state police, commercial security contractors and by nonprofit police forces. This volume for the first time brings together empirical studies comparing policing strategies from Australia, Britain, France, Germany, India, Lithuania, Sweden and the United States.

"This book illuminates the ways in which the implementation of [neoliberal] policies has also entailed an intensified militarization of urban space as local police forces--which now include both commercial and nonprofit agents--promote new forms of surveillance, social control and repression within local populations."

-Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and is co-editor of Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City.

"Eick and Briken have amassed a rich collection of new and theoretically important work that makes this book an absolute 'must read' for critical scholars of all persuasions."

-Laura Huey is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, The University of Western Ontario, Co-editor of Surveillance & Societyand author of invisible Victims: Homelessness and the Growing Security Gap (UTP 2012).

"The editors have brought together authors from a wide range of contexts and backgrounds who scrutinize state and private policing as a form of wage labor, as a set of practices to govern populations and as a means to secure capitalist accumulation under actually existing neoliberalism. ...a very welcome addition to the literature. Critical scholars in a variety of fields will surely learn much from it."

-Bernd Belina, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Professor of Human Geography, Co-editor of Kriminologisches Journal and author of Raum, berwachung, Kontrolle (Mnster 2006)