Vulnerability: Governing the social through security politics

By Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Barbara Gruber

What does it mean to be ‘vulnerable’? Exploring the rise of ‘vulnerability’ as an organising concept in migration detention, integration, public health, national security and social policy, this volume reveals the blurring of welfare state logics with national security ends. Governments and international agencies use the language of vulnerability to identify needy constituents and communities, but also to frame that need as potentially dangerous. Using international case studies this book shows how vulnerability governance permeates policy sectors – transforming the methods used to govern, problematise and resolve – bringing questions of risk management and security into social policy, but simultaneously brings social policy sectors into counterterrorism delivery. The combination of welfare state and security logics brings interventions deeper into societies, securitising communities and individuals on account of their needs, governing the social through security politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526169365

Book preview

Vulnerability

Vulnerability

Governing the social through security politics

Edited by

Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Barbara Gruber

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors.

An electronic version of the introduction and chapters 5 and 11 of this book are also available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence, thanks to the support of the European Research Council, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the editors, chapter authors and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6937 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Mountain trail in winter with naked trees. Photo by Edurne Tx on Unsplash.

Contents

List of contributors

An introduction to vulnerability: merging social policy with the national security state

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

Part I: From care to risk assessment and national security

1Shifting notions of vulnerability and learning in Swedish prevention policy

Randi Gressgård and Vanja Lozic

2Anti-immigrant politics and vulnerability’s conceptual multiplicity

Andrew C. Fletcher and Ali Fuat Birol

3Governing vulnerability: mental distress, neoliberalism and COVID-19

Jana Fey

4Who is vulnerable, the worker or the state? Psychiatric debates on trauma and welfare in Germany, 1871–1914

Laura Jung

5Counterterrorism and psychiatry: re-bordering vulnerability and securitisation in UK public protection

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

Part II: The reframing of national security around care

Introducing Part II

Barbara Gruber

6Governing vulnerability through case management: from crime to radicalisation prevention in the Netherlands

Barbara Gruber

7Local rationalisations of radicalisation: an analysis of Danish and Swedish municipal policies

Robin Andersson Malmros and Jennie Sivenbring

8The ‘vulnerability’ of Lebanon: reimagining the ‘failing state’ problem through the international PVE agenda

Jan Daniel

9Prevention politics in non-Western contexts: training imams in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu

10‘Ontological’ (in)security under post-colonial conditions: countering violent extremism in Nigeria

Akinyemi Oyawale

11When democracy is deemed vulnerable: preventing far-right extremism by curbing Roma ‘criminality and social pathologies’ in the Czech Republic

Sadi Shanaah

Epilogue: from security to ‘care’, vulnerability to resistance

Hil Aked

Index

Contributors

Hil Aked is Research and Policy Manager at Medact.

Robin Andersson Malmros is Deputy Director of the Segerstedt Institute, University of Gothenburg.

Ali Fuat Birol is a Research Fellow at Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University.

Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu is a PhD Candidate in Politics and International Relations at Dublin City University.

Jan Daniel is a Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and the Institute of Political Studies, Charles University.

Jana Fey is a Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Sussex.

Andrew C. Fletcher is an Instructor in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama.

Randi Gressgård is a Professor at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen.

Barbara Gruber is a Lecturer and PhD Candidate in Security Studies and International Relations at the University of Groningen.

Charlotte Heath-Kelly is Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick.

Laura Jung is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Sussex.

Vanja Lozic is an Associate Professor in Educational Sciences at Malmö University.

Akinyemi Oyawale is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick.

Sadi Shanaah is a Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick.

Jennie Sivenbring is a Lecturer at the Segerstedt Institute, University of Gothenburg.

An introduction to vulnerability: merging social policy with the national security state

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

In the twenty-first century, ‘vulnerability’ has become central to the governance of security, migration, integration, social care and mental health. But what does it mean to govern through vulnerability? Perhaps, we might optimistically think, vulnerability signifies a new-found commitment to precarious lives on the part of policymakers. But if this is so, why do associated policy recommendations appear to transform welfare state provision – moving away from provision to those in need, and towards the remoulding of subjects so that they do not become ‘costly’ or ‘risky’?

This book responds to the rise of vulnerability in the fields of public health, psychology, international security, political administration, post-colonial African and Middle Eastern politics, policing and migration. Across this policy landscape, we show that vulnerability has become central to the reinvention of social governance. When policymakers wish to extend social control further into communities and their municipal structures, the language of vulnerability can help to appropriate the spaces previously administered by the welfare state.

How is the language of vulnerability so powerful and transformative? At its core, ‘vulnerability’ implies a pre-emptive temporality – it is used to denote the potential for something negative to occur. The reorganisation of security and social policies around vulnerability works to centre a preventive, anticipatory temporality. This invents a landscape of intervention before a particular phenomenon manifests. Acting upon the future opens new spaces for policymakers, who can expand their remit by making claims on the society to come and how the present day shows signs of the nascent threats and costs that will later beset us.

Importantly, the language of vulnerability goes beyond that of risk. Large scholarly literatures have shown how the discourse of risk entered security and social politics in the late twentieth century, enabling policymakers and stakeholders to increase surveillance, restrict liberties and to extend their governing mandate by invoking threat and danger (Amoore and De Goede 2008; Beck 1992). The deployment of risk, crucially, exceeds the realm of statistical calculation. Policymakers do not now calculate the statistical likelihood of a threat manifesting and then act proportionately to prevent it; rather, the twenty-first century has seen the proliferation of pre-emptive risk technologies, which drive political action where the likelihood of a threatening outcome cannot be calculated. Here, the present is governed through a security logic of the possible, which must at all costs be prevented – even though its likelihood is unknown or incalculable (Amoore 2013; Aradau and van Munster 2007).

Vulnerability does not deploy the same overtly securitising moves as risk. It does not operate on the register of ‘catastrophe’, nor does it simplistically affirm the need for public protection from future threats. Vulnerability, in the case studies documented in this book, represents the complex intertwining of two distinct logics – that of social provision and that of public protection. Vulnerability brings together the mandate of the welfare state (to provide for those in need) with that of security and policing (to identity and disrupt dangerous plots and persons). By targeting social provision at those who might become disordered, delinquent or deviant, vulnerability-oriented interventions deploy welfare in order to secure the future from additional costs, disruption and potential insecurity. They imagine that signs of need or disadvantage foretell a future of crime, disorderliness or even terrorism.

By weaving together the logics of individual need with potential danger, these pre-emptive interventions echo the original political intent behind the formation of the first welfare states. The welfare states (and public ‘relief’ systems) of Europe and of Roosevelt’s US were all developed to counter domestic political agitation from workers’ organisations, which, in times of hardship, threatened to destabilise public order or even overthrow political elites (Fox Piven and Cloward 1971; Neocleous 2006). The interest of the state in social insurance was originally premised upon undermining support for collective mobilisations that threatened the state and capitalism. The ‘wretched’, it was understood, brought significant potential for organised disorder. The concept of national security, Neocleous argues (2006), emerged from the concept of social security, because it drew more heavily on the original logic of the welfare state than it did the national defence logic that organised the military.

Historically, then, social security and national security systems share a common goal – the preservation of the political and economic system from uprisings, destabilising events and disruptions. So why should it look so strange to a modern audience that vulnerability-oriented policies blur the sectors of social and national security? This is a pertinent question. Alison Howell suggests that, in the fields of international relations and security studies, scholars have adopted an impoverished and ahistorical understanding of security, problematically limited to existential threats to the nation-state (Howell 2014). As such, the field fails to understand, she argues, the origin of both social and national security in the early and mid-twentieth century attempts to govern populations. More broadly, the popular discourses of the welfare state as a provider of care to those in need have proved highly attractive and have eluded its original function of preventing the overthrow of capitalist systems. Beveridge’s delineation of social insurance schemes as protecting individuals from the evils of want, disease, idleness, ignorance and squalor remain noble, but the political elite did not implement welfare schemes until they saw their own interests (economic and political stability) as being served through social provision.

Intriguingly, and over time, the first welfare states became concerned with the ‘morality’ of workers and their families. These concerns were not oriented towards preventing strikes and mobilisations, but rather demonstrate the objectives of the welfare state adapting towards increasing economic productivity (as is wonderfully demonstrated in Chapter 4 by Laura Jung). The introduction of public health measures (neo-hygienism) in the early twentieth century functioned to ensure the readiness (and sobriety) of workers to work, and thereby to sustain the capitalist system. The expansion of the welfare state then turned to policing proper conduct through welfare workers, known as social work, to ensure the fitness of the population (Rose 1985: 152–155; see also Rose 1996).

So, the logics of welfare and state security/policing have always been intertwined. Furthermore, the politics of public administration look significantly less progressive than we might otherwise assume when populations and individuals are targeted for reform to serve the needs of the state and the economy.

But, as the inheritor of this complex security politics, what does the contemporary discourse of vulnerability do? Is it unique in any way? Vulnerability merges the functions, operations and goals of contemporary public sector governance. Whereas security, policing and welfare have been significantly siloed in modern public administration, vulnerability brings them back together – deploying targeted welfare responses not just to meet individual need but to reduce future disorder and deviance by doing so. While vulnerability governance can be understood as replicating many functions of the original welfare state, it is novel in one regard: it deploys pre-emptive interventions at the individual level.¹

Governing ‘through vulnerability’ fully embraces the pre-emptive logic of contemporary risk governance. The signs of need, made apparent in an individual’s presentation or conduct, are read as indicating their ‘pre-delinquency’, the danger they might present in the future if their life course is not rectified, and their securitised potential is not addressed (Heath-Kelly and Shanaah 2022). Here, the operations of population governance are not targeted at the level of population, like the operations of twentieth-century biopolitics. Instead of using statistics to direct the governance of national, regional or local populations, the remit of vulnerability governance is that of the individual. An individual’s need, or disadvantage, can be read through the vulnerability paradigm as future risk and danger (Brown 2016).

Vulnerability governance is a particularly localised phenomena; as a result, its discourse often legitimises profoundly invasive interventions on individual lives – once they are framed as potentially disruptive or dangerous to the future. Operating through the enormous and complex systems of public administration and welfare of the contemporary era, we often find vulnerability governance accompanying local social provision, local integration programmes, and in healthcare premises, schools and workplaces. By accompanying the mechanisms of welfare and provision, vulnerability governance has brought the operations of security into the local arena. This is not the traditional security landscape of international politics or terrorist conspiracy. Rather, vulnerability governance frames proximity to everyday lives as ‘earlier’ in the ‘prevention chain’. A prime example of this is found in the discourse of the Radicalisation Awareness Network of the European Union (EU). Its many working groups are united by the common commitment to a spatio-temporal localism of threat detection and prevention (Melhuish and Heath-Kelly 2022). The closer to individual lives that radicalisation prevention can be embedded (within social and public services), the earlier it is assumed that threat can be detected and intervened upon by welfare officers. ‘Closer’ means ‘earlier’, in the operations of vulnerability governance.

Finally, vulnerability governance foregrounds the concept of resilience, although not as governance from a distance (Joseph 2018), but rather an individualised, corrective and dynamic intervention, designed to re-establish the resilience of those deemed vulnerable (Amery 2019; Aranda et al. 2012). The individual is to be identified by local public sector professionals as potentially disruptive or costly; their conduct and behaviours are then to be modified through soft power interventions, sustaining their own personal resilience – but also that of the state and the economy.

This ‘locality’ of vulnerability governance brings risk assessment (for future dependency, disorder and delinquency) into the remit of social care professionals and educators, but it also, surprisingly perhaps, brings social provision into the work of security and policing personnel, who identify and resolve counterterrorism concerns through the work of multi-agency radicalisation panels. Our book is organised around this multidirectional movement of care and policing, such that vulnerability brings security and risk into care sectors, while it simultaneously brings care professionals and logics into counterterrorism.

Vulnerability literatures

What have others said on the question of vulnerability? What can we add to their discussions by paying attention to the co-constitution of social policy and security? As Kate Brown (2016) demonstrates in her remarkable study of vulnerability-oriented policies, definitions of the concept outside its use in political policies are remarkably varied. Some philosophers understand vulnerability, in and of itself, to represent the fundamental equality of human beings through their propensity to be wounded, arguing that vulnerability theory should replace the legal and political models of the subject (as formally equal in rights and autonomy). Martha Fineman (2019) and others argue that proper attention to vulnerability would characterise a state that is properly responsive to questions of social justice and disadvantage. Judith Butler offers a complementary reading of vulnerability. She suggests that attentiveness to the universal vulnerability of lives to harm and death forms the groundwork of global ethical obligations (Butler 2012; 2020), while also recognising that vulnerability is produced by deeply engrained economic and social systems (Butler 2020).

For other scholars, vulnerability does not offer a progressive political vision, but rather is immersed in stigmatisation (Wishart 2003) and reflects the dominance of therapeutic culture and psychologisation in modern societies (Furedi 2004). The most detailed account of vulnerability and its place in social care policy and practice comes from Kate Brown, who argues that attention to vulnerability opens up difficult questions about deservingness, human agency, care and social control (Brown 2016: 1–2). The ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’ has resonated through drug prevention (Wincup 2019), in relation to disability (Clough 2017) and education (Ecclestone and Rawdin 2016). Vulnerability, according to Brown (2016: 1–2), operates as a categorisation employed by authorities and professionals to designate an individual as requiring of correction, assistance and even control. By categorising someone as vulnerable, an extended range of interventions can be performed upon them – both protective and controlling in nature.

A paradigmatic example of this disciplinary regime can be found in the Care Act 2014 (UK Parliament 2014), applicable to healthcare and social care provision in England and Wales. The Care Act formalised the responsibilities of care professionals for vulnerable people, establishing that having care needs (such as disability, addiction or mental illness) can sometimes – but not always – render a person unable to protect themselves from abuse. If a risk of abuse exists (such as financial abuse, sexual abuse or physical abuse), then care professionals are tasked with making a safeguarding referral for vulnerable people, because they might not be able to adequately protect themselves. Local authority agencies can then be required to step in to provide alternative housing or support.

Safeguarding those vulnerable to abuse, who cannot protect themselves, is of course a noble and worthy aim. But the attribution of vulnerability to an individual does, in safeguarding processes, renegotiate their agency as a person, a political subject and as a decision-maker. Through safeguarding, local practitioners are empowered to exercise a significant level of control of choices made by that individual – steering them towards more socially conventional living arrangements, as well as protecting them from harm. With vulnerability comes a mediation of choice and freedom through social control.

No one would object to the rescue of an abused elderly person from accommodation where they are victimised. Nor would any right-thinking person object to the rescue of a domestic violence survivor from cohabitation with their abuser. But not all safeguarding processes, or attributions of vulnerability, are so clear cut. The logic of vulnerability has expanded beyond urgent protective measures that resolve situations of victimisation. As national economies and social service provision reorients around preventing future need (rather than responding to need in the present), vulnerability has become a language for the reorganisation of social provision around risk and potential disorder, rather than need. In this scenario, vulnerability is the matrix through which social welfare is provided on a preventative basis – through interventions in the lives of those deemed likely to engage in criminal careers or antisocial behaviour.

To save the future costs of prosecuting, incarcerating and rehabilitating these offenders, many welfare states have been reorganised around the prospect of prevention. Prevention, it is argued, is cheaper to fund than retroactive response. The Scottish Christie Commission report is paradigmatic in this regard. Responding to the prospect of decreasing funding from the Westminster government, Scottish authorities commissioned a report on the future of welfare in the country, led by Dr Campbell Christie. The Christie Commission (2011) framed rising demand for welfare services as a long-standing failure of the government to address the causes of disadvantage and vulnerability. To resolve the ‘failure demand’ (of people seeking support for their needs and their disadvantages), Christie recommended that welfare spending be immediately reprioritised on preventing negative outcomes – not responding to them, as had been the previous commitment to welfare provision.

Recharacterising the provision of welfare according to needs as failure demand (spending that could have been avoided by earlier targeted interventions (Christie Commission 2011: 7)) demonstrates the ascendence of prevention as a modality and logic for governing the social. It reframes social expenditure as an unwanted occurrence for government, highlighting the neoliberal context for welfare reform and the turn to preventive interventions. It also centralises an assumption that people and groups can be identified as heading towards potential costliness, in advance, and steered away from unwanted behaviours. These are the logics of social control and risk that accompany the reorganisation of the welfare state around vulnerability.

But this raises the thorny question of the relationship between neoliberalism and vulnerability governance. Many authors have proposed a relationship between neoliberal economic and social transformations and the reorganisation of welfare states around the prevention of claims, the reduction of expenditure and the pre-emptive reform of at-risk individuals. As Stephen Webb writes:

The neoliberal program, politically hostile to Keynesian economics, makes its entry on the welfare stage by initiating and extending a market rationality of individualism, competition and efficiency which have a decisive impact on social work […] Neoliberal welfare society concerns itself with an emerging division between active citizens, capable of managing their own risk, and targeted marginal ‘underclass’ populations, who are high-risk and dependent on expert safety-net intervention to conduct their lives. (Webb 2006: 49–50)

Certainly, the operations of the welfare state in the current historical moment centralise anticipatory intervention on those lives deemed ‘troubled’ in order to reduce future cost through law enforcement and corrective rehabilitation. In a particularly striking example of this, Joe Turner delineates how the UK government’s troubled families programme was established in 2012 to transform the lives of Britain’s most troubled families – understood as those imposing the most costs on the welfare state through antisocial behaviour, crime and entrenched unemployment (Turner 2017). The scheme provided families with a family intervention worker, who would induce appropriate forms of responsible citizenship and domesticity in the home. In the event of non-cooperation, sanctions would be imposed upon the family by the state.

Like the Scottish Christie Commission’s identification of needs that exist in the present as a failure to prevent them in the past, the Troubled Families programme is an initiative borne of the desire to cut costs – by intervening before they arise, on the basis of risk flags. The governance of population occurs here through the targeted application of welfare support (the family intervention worker) to an individual family, as contrasted with the population-wide safety net of social insurance. The vulnerability of those target families is framed almost entirely through the risk (and cost) they pose to the future welfare and criminal justice system.

But to what extent is this neoliberal? The reorganisation of welfare states around prevention is disciplinary, distasteful and coercive, for sure. But the extent to which we can call this a ‘neoliberal’ variant is questionable. This supposedly ‘neoliberal’ welfare still rests on the provision of (some kind of) social assistance. While social assistance is reduced, compare this to the complete abandonment of disadvantaged populations to their fate, or to incarceration resulting from poverty survival strategies, in sociologies of neoliberal penality in the US (Wacquant 2009). Indeed, the criminologists behind the major academic studies of neoliberal welfare retreat and punitive crime policy, David Garland, Bernard Harcourt and Loïc Wacquant, all argue that neoliberalism sees the (American) state withdraw funding for social policy and welfare – and then extend militarised policing and mass incarceration into its place. They each argue that the neoliberal state abandons welfare but simultaneously doubles down on its criminal justice mission, using repression and incarceration to ‘resolve’ the social issues left by this deliberate retreat from social assistance (Garland 2002; Harcourt 2011; Wacquant 2009). Unsurprisingly, each of the authors writes about the experience of the US and not Europe.

So, the unveiling of new, targeted and disciplinary social assistance programmes that try to reform ‘troubled’ families or intervene in at-risk lives before they become costly to the economy are not immediately apparent as neoliberal. Rather, they are often coercive, paternalist and pre-emptive welfare interventions. Unbridled neoliberalism undertakes to remove social assistance and to criminalise the communities left in precarity. The idea of a neoliberal welfare society (Webb 2006: 50), then, could be viewed as a contradiction in terms – but, of course, we must recognise that European welfare states employ the welfare/neoliberalism matrix to differing degrees. So why has the idea of a profound shift from a welfare state to a neoliberal welfare state been so popular? The academic investment in a neoliberal welfare society results from viewing preceding social insurance systems of the mid-twentieth century as uncoercive and undisciplinary, meeting needs for the sake of meeting those needs. The denigration of contemporary (neoliberal) welfare systems for their targeted, risk-based, cost-cutting objectives is partially reliant upon a utopian understanding of social insurance in the early and mid-twentieth century. But the contrast is not as marked as we might think.

Earlier in the chapter we explored how the original purpose of social insurance was to protect the state against the prospect of strikes and disorder. It was a state security technology, designed to weaken support for trade unions and mass mobilisation. Then, the ‘moralising’ efforts of twentieth-century social workers (to ensure sobriety and responsible citizenship among the population) and public hygiene initiatives described by Rose (1985) are further indications that social policy functions to protect the state economy, even while it meets individual needs. Foucault’s historical studies on the growth of disciplinary and bio-political governance should also convince us that public and social policy serve the interests of the state, through the governing of population. As such, the contrast between neoliberal welfare society and the good old days of social welfarism is exaggerated. Particular administrations might occasionally adjust the balance between cost-cutting and generosity, but there has been no paradigm shift in the nature of the welfare state. It has always constituted borders between those deemed worthy of economic support and those deemed unworthy, generating a significant disciplinary effect on the conduct of the population.

So where does this leave vulnerability? If there has been no paradigm shift between ‘progressive’ and ‘neoliberal’ welfare state models, and the provision of social security has always been tied to the preservation of national security and the conservation of economic and political elites, then vulnerability governance is the latest form taken by the social/national security nexus. It overtly reflects the original relationship between social security and national security, deploying social assistance to prevent potential costs (both economic and in terms of crime and disorder) down the line. But rather than acting upon entire populations, as social insurance did, vulnerability governance targets those individuals deemed at risk of becoming risky (Heath-Kelly 2013). It is an increasingly localised performance, often performed by multi-agency partnerships upon individuals within a municipality (Gressgård and Lozic 2020). ‘Closer’ is read as ‘earlier’, in the prevention of future disorder (Melhuish and Heath-Kelly 2022).

Importantly, the governance of radicalisation vulnerability is a particularly novel development, where – for the first time – practitioners outline the particular socio-economic and cognitive vulnerabilities that can lead individuals to accept extreme ideologies (see the chapters 6 and 7). Here, individual pathways have been envisaged for the path towards insecurity and rebellion. Contrastingly, twentieth-century welfare states could not conceive of the ‘pathways’ that lead individuals to revolt against the state; rather they simply provided concessions to slightly improve the conditions of workers, hoping to prevent the fomentation of political mobilisation.

Vulnerability is the palatable language through which risk (to the state, the public or the economy) is identified, assessed and corrected in individuals – securitising marginalised populations on account of their potential futures. By appropriating social welfarist language and mechanisms of care, interventions can reach further and deeper into society – promising to remedy the vulnerability of certain groups (and thus their future conduct and its effects). This circumvents the costly demands of regulating deviancy through law, as in pre-emptive justice (Zedner 2021), although the target group significantly overlaps. As Kate Brown argues, vulnerability is the shadow concept of risk (Brown 2016: 2). It is a complementary discourse that allows moralising or policing interventions to penetrate deeper into communities and to ‘correct’ those lives deemed antisocial, risky or undesirable.

From care to risk, and from risk to care – multidirectional applications of vulnerability

Vulnerability governance presents an overlap between welfare and care systems with policing and national security structures. While this overlap is not in itself novel, the language of vulnerability – and the distinctively targeted methods of state intervention (targeted at individuals) – are new. Crucially, the language and methods of vulnerability governance have produced multidirectional exchanges between care and policing sectors. It is not just that policing and security techniques of assessing risk and the potential for disorder have entered social care; rather, technologies of care have also passed into some national security work. Particularly in the governance of radicalisation, police agencies now lean heavily on techniques drawn from psychology and social work to understand (and attempt to reverse) the individual’s transition to terrorist violence.

Our book tackles the transformation of the welfare state and the security state in modern politics, such that care and repression can no longer be firmly distinguished. To do this, we use Part I to study the move from care to anticipatory risk assessment in social policy sectors; whereas Part II explores the importation of vulnerability and care logics into national security work (attempting to produce a realm of early intervention before threat develops).

In Part I we collect together chapters that look at social policy sectors where caring work has begun to incorporate threat/security framings and objectives (and the economic context for this transformation of welfare and social provision towards risk). These chapters focus attention on the development of ‘vulnerability governance’ across policy sectors (and its relationship to risk governance). Each explores how traditional understandings of vulnerability (as necessitating care and need) are overturned in favour of assessing future risk from designated groups, and the political economic context that facilitated the integration of policing for future risk.

Part I begins with the intervention of Randi Gressgård and Vanja Lozic. In Chapter 1 they explore migrant integration programmes in urban Swedish areas, which target Arabic-speaking mothers as vulnerable. Carefully unpacking the effects of the integration of resilience discourse into Swedish welfare programming, the chapter shows how the women have first been identified as vulnerable (in the sense that they are culturally and linguistically disenfranchised from Swedish communities), before this vulnerability is rapidly reconjured to mean the potential for disorder, and even terrorism, in these neighbourhoods. Through interviews with police and agency stakeholders in the multi-agency Kraftsamling programme, Gressgård and Lozic show how engagement, community collaboration and knowledge exchange have become security practices that, in the minds of practitioners, reduce vulnerability and thus reduce the threat of disorder.

The marking of vulnerable populations by policymakers as the locus for potential threats becomes even more extreme in Chapter 2, by Andrew Fletcher and Ali Fuat Birol. They explore the migrant detention centres at the southern border of the US, which (under multiple administrations) have detained the most vulnerable newcomers to the country, who are simultaneously designated as potential threats to the nation. Using the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Fletcher and Fuat Birol explore the inversion of vulnerability in migrant detention centres – such that unaccompanied children are detained in traumatic conditions, on the basis that they pose a threat to the US. Rather than responding to frightened children with a recognition of the shared vulnerability that could unite people in solidarity, the authors demonstrate the purposeful dehumanising of detained migrants in the centres. This functions, they argue, to reconstitute the performance of American national identity, against the spectre of threatening, anonymised outsiders.

In Chapter 3 Jana Fey then turns our attention to mental health awareness campaigns and their discursive transformation during the COVID-19 crisis. As public health measures, mental health awareness campaigns have historically attempted to make responsible those living with depression and anxiety to become ‘resilient’ to their distress – a significant motif of neoliberal approaches to health, which advocate self-care. Indeed, the UK’s public health discourse on mental distress tends to associate the need for corrective measures with the economic cost of sick days for conditions such as anxiety and depression. Fey then explores the transformation of mental distress discourse during the pandemic, where mental health vulnerabilities became the signature motif of anti-lockdown campaigning. In the midst of the pandemic, groups deployed their vulnerabilities to mental distress as a political argument against restrictions. Physical vulnerability to a virus was pitched against mental health impacts of lockdowns – reimagining the pandemic society through the competing vulnerabilities of different groups.

Laura Jung continues the focus on public health in Chapter 4, moving our attention to the tensions between trauma diagnoses and social insurance in the world’s first welfare state under Bismarck. In