After a decade of popular uprisings and civil wars, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region experiences a deep governance crisis. The transformation, weakening or even the collapse of state institutions has changed the security framework, with direct implications for the safety and security of civilian populations across the region. Security Sector Governance and Reform (SSG/R) has to cope with hybridity and institutional fatigue. This report explores the MENA region's governance crises, providing case studies on Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, and Yemen. How can we effectively bring about meaningful SSG/R in hybrid security orders? In which way is "institutionalised insecurity" challenging traditional patterns of governance in vulnerable settings?

Explores the tensions that arise when institutions address contemporary security threats.

Security studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, the book provides an approach that allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analysis of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation. This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Third World Thematics.

For more than a decade, broad and vaguely defined new offences have been enacted in many areas of the criminal law, such as terrorism, money-laundering, fraud, sex offences and anti-social behavior. These have expanded police powers and prosecutorial discretion with little regard for the rule of law. Most theorists have explained the gap between legislative policy and the liberal principles of criminal law theory as the result of 'penal populism': politicians have sacrificed sound normative principles in an opportunistic appeal to an angry and fearful electorate. The Insecurity State, by contrast, argues that this so-called 'populism' in the criminal law can claim some normative principles of its own. It identifies these principles through an analysis of the iconic anti-social behaviour order (ASBO), the flagship of recent British criminal justice policy. Demonstrating that the controversial orders impose a liability on those who fail to reassure others about their future security, he traces the justification of this liability through the conditional character of citizenship in New Labour policy to an underlying concept of 'vulnerable autonomy' that the ASBO serves to protect. The book argues that the vulnerability of individual autonomy is an idea deeply embedded in the political theories that have most influenced British and American political life in recent decades. He shows that the ASBO is the archetype of a wide range of other recently enacted criminal offences in the UK and USA that are justified by the same normative structure. Finally it investigates the paradoxical implications of institutionalising the vulnerability of citizens in the terms of the substantive criminal law. In so doing, the book identifies a weakening of political authority at the heart of contemporary security laws.

At a time when families break up and employment is often short-term, society is increasingly forced to operate against a background of insecurity. Insecure Times looks at how this sense of risk and instability has affected the major institutions of social life. With examples and research taken from a range of European and North American societies today, this innovative text on contemporary society discusses such major issues as: * the causes of social and economic insecurity * insecurity and modern capitalism * the role of the state * insecurity and housing * contemporary family life.

This book explores the emergent and internationally widespread phenomenon of precariousness, specifically in relation to the home. It maps the complex reality of the insecure home by examining the many ways in which precariousness is manifested in legal and social change across a number of otherwise very different jurisdictions. By applying innovative work done by socio-legal scholars in other fields such as labour law and welfare law to the home, Law and the Precarious Home offers a broader theoretical understanding of contemporary 'precarisation' of law and society. It will enable reflections upon differential experience of home dependent upon class, race and gender from a range of local, national and cross-national perspectives. Finally it will explore the pluralisation of ideas of home in subjective experience, social reality and legal form. The answers offered in this book reflect the expertise and standing of the assembled authors who are international leaders in their field, with decades of first-hand practical and intellectual engagement with the area.

There is evidence that economic fraud has, in recent years, become routine activity in the economies of both high- and low-income countries. Many business sectors in today's global economy are rife with economic crime. Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud shows how neoliberal policies, reforms, ideas, social relations and practices have engendered a type of sociocultural change across the globe which is facilitating widespread fraud. This book investigates the moral worlds of fraud in different social and geographical settings, and shows how contemporary fraud is not the outcome of just a few ‘bad apples’. Authors from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology and political science, social policy and economics, employ case studies from the Global North and Global South to explore how particular values, morals and standards of behaviour rendered dominant by neoliberalism are encouraging the proliferation of fraud. This book will be indispensable for those who are interested in political economy, development studies, economics, anthropology, sociology and criminology.