Securing the European ‘Homeland’: Profit, risk, authority

This thesis explores the emergence of a new European market for homeland security technology in the context of changing conceptions of risk. On the one hand, an important contribution of this study is that it focuses on the politics of the governmentality of risk and the role of industry and lobby groups in the production of contemporary discourses and concepts of (in)security. On the other hand, this analysis illustrates how the development of new security technology in Europe has become subject to internal market considerations and the capacity to cast security as a profitable and politically neutral product. Not a strict privatization of security, the analysis insists on the importance of the marketization of security. The difference lies in the ways in which, in the context of the latter, new security technology becomes entwined with logics of global trade and (potential) market development, empowering those institutions and actors that are directly embedded in global structures, such as finance and trade ministries. The marketization of security implies an increasingly complex form of EU security governance, with the European Commission as a key driving force, even if it lacks the formal capacities to legislate. While the term "homeland security" has been almost entirely absent from European political debates, this analysis has consciously adopted the term to re-politicize EU security integration and the effects that are set in motion by the growth of this new market.