Getting Through Security

Getting Through Security’s systematic examination of a particular security regime (airports) and ramified exploration of a particular realm of expertise (counterterrorism) prepares the way for a strikingly insightful examination of issues at the heart of the contemporary security state. Highly distinctive in style, structure, sources, and originality of thought, this book reads and should be read across disciplines—anthropology, cultural studies, law, political science, and sociology. Perhaps as significantly, Getting Through Security is the product of a highly successful collaboration, arising from conversation, thinking and writing together, in ways that frankly I, or any anthropologist, would envy. In a sense, achieved collaborations are as important for anthropology today as the topics that they might address.

—George Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin and coauthor of Collaborations Now

In Getting Through Security Mark Maguire and David Westbrook have crafted a masterful account of the people and ideas that animate security culture. The book is a tour de force, but of an unusual sort: written not merely as a review of the relevant scholarship, but as a generous invitation to the reader to reflect on the modern state, the media, bureaucracy, and expertise in relation to fundamental ideas about the resilience and vulnerabilities of the contemporary social order.

Drawing on scores of examples of successful and failed attacks, the authors challenge basic assumptions underwriting the politics and practices of security. They also provide glimpses of the multinational group of actors, of current and former police, military, terrorism and counter terrorism experts as well as consultants, managers, and bureaucrats who populate what Maguire and Westbrook term the "secret college:" the formal and informal networks in which the strategic and tactical of issues of security are relentlessly scrutinized and appraised. Getting Through Security thus opens familiar and unfamiliar terrains to expansive forms of anthropological inquiry and ethnographic reflection.

—Douglas Holmes, author of Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks and Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism

This intriguing book takes the reader into the dispersed worlds of security, exploring by way of ethnographic glimpses and reflexive exercise, what ’security’ in the broader sense, as a ’horizon for certain kinds of thought and institutional action’, is. Ultimately, the book is about the uncanniness of not knowing, of being out of control, in a state of fear, yet attempting to come to grips with uncertainty and risk. In the end, it is not just about security and the officials who deal with security as a profession, but about modes of navigating with only fragments of maps at hand. A gripping and extraordinary read!

—Christina Garsten, Principal, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Principal Investigator, Global Foresight, Stockholm University

This short book does much more than pull back the curtains that shroud airport security. Getting Through Security humanizes the security officials who, through long hours of boredom punctuated by sudden minutes of terror, become practicing ethnographers to keep the skies safe. It’s a fascinating read for any air traveler interested in pondering the dilemmas faced by the security bureaucracy.

—Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, and former Legal Adviser, Senate Foreign Relations Committee