Multi-centred governance and circuits of power in liberal modes of security

Multi-centred governance is epitomised in current struggles to better ‘secure’ liberal democracies as nation state actors are obliged to act ‘in partnership’ with corporate and non-governmental organisations whilst confronting illicit actors with enhanced digital capacities to circumvent and organisationally outflank both state and corporate powers. Examples of such social technologies, particularly Disruptive Digital Technologies (DDTs), include the use of social media communications for challenging elite constructions of social problems, networked distributed manufacturing technologies for the ‘weaponisation’ of civil society and the use of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAV’s) or ‘drones’ for surveillance and counter-surveillance. The paper draws upon research into transnational organised crime and urban security in Europe to illustrate the circuits of power that constitute liberal modes of security through causal relations of power-dependence, dispositions that fix or re-fix the meaning and membership categories of security and technologies of production and discipline that can facilitate the disruption or reproduction of these causes and dispositions.


Introduction
Contemporary argument about the role of the state in the governance of liberal democracies entails a dispute over trends toward the decentring of power away from the nation state and its diffusion downwards to local and regional authorities, upwards to supranational authorities and outwards to commercial enterprises. 1 Such trends are of obvious concern to the study of security and the capacity of nation states to deliver on their most basic, constitutive, obligation to guarantee universal public safety within their territorial jurisdictions 2 and in conditions of the alleged 'globalisation' of crime and other security threats that are believed to subvert this sovereignty. 3 Here, these arguments are considered in relation to critics of governance theories who have reasserted the significance of sovereign nation-state power and, therefore, a need to recentre the study of the state in the analysis of governmental power. 4 In turn, it is argued that tendencies to de-centre or re-centre the analysis of political power in liberal modes of governing arise out of a preoccupation with a sovereign concept of power as a property that emanates from, or is constituted against, the core executive. This preoccupation is signalled in the architectural language of 'tiers' and 'levels' of governing above, at or beneath the nation state. If, however, a more strategic concept of power is adopted, the core executive appears as but one centre or 'obligatory passage point' in a complex circuitry of relations of power and resistance that produces multiple-centres of governance or passage points through which aspirant governors must pass in order to realise their policy goals. 5 An appreciation of the multiple passage points entails an understanding of the relations of power-dependence 6 that structure and differentiate liberal modes of governance. These relations are characterised by asymmetries, for example between the constitutional-legal powers of nation states, which corporate powers have to negotiate, and the financial powers of corporations on which states depend to deliver on their electoral mandates. 7 There are, however, other breaks in the circuitry of liberal governance including actors within civil society that are capable of disrupting state and corporate power, particularly given the rise of various digital technologies for social media communication, networked distributed manufacture and the enhanced surveillance of populations. 8 This paper advances the novel concept of 'multi-centred governance' as an emergent condition of these circuits of power and resistance. An implication of this for the study of security 9 is that analysis needs to progress beyond accounts of the limits to sovereign state power to explanations of the strategic 'power to' secure in conditions of asymmetrical power-dependence. 10 A corollary of the focus on power-dependence is a concern with the integral relationship between state power and civil society and the proposition that developments in one of these fields, such as the proliferation of serious crime networks, cannot be divorced from developments in the other, such as the degradation of state powers through austerity programmes. How this integral, necessary, relationship is contingently worked out in specific social contexts is a matter for concrete empirical case studies 11 underpinned by the framework for conceptualising governance and security advanced here.
To justify the concept of multi-centred governance (MCG), the article draws upon Clegg's 12 'circuits of power framework' to distinguish this concept both from other theories of governance and from their critics involved in current debates about security in advanced liberal democracies. This is primarily an exercise in conceptual and methodological analysis, not an empirical case study, in which the concept of MCG is distinguished in terms of its commitment to a realist aetiology of political power beyond the state. However the contribution of this concept is illustrated throughout through reference to the author's own empirical work on urban security, transnational organised crime and disruptive digital technologies. To this end the case for a theory of multi-centred governance is made through reference to the analytical shift in debates over liberal modes of security from a preoccupation with sovereignty to a greater interest in strategic concepts of power. Having made this case, section three illustrates the three circuits of causal, dispositional and facilitative power that constitute multiple centres of power. The argument then concludes with some conjectures about prospects for the exercise of power and resistance in liberal modes of security and the further research agenda implied by the acknowledgement of multiple-centres of power.
2. Conceptualising governance and security: from sovereignty to strategy Governance has been located in studies of policing and security in terms of its 'other', the government of 'sovereign powers' and, especially, their failures and limitations. In Anglophone criminology, for example, one of the most cited papers on contemporary strategies of crime control concentrates on the 'Limits to the Sovereign State'. 13 David Garland's essay crystallises concerns about the need to adapt to the normality of crime and the incapacity of states to deliver on their self-legitimating 'punitive display' through various narratives of warfare on crime, drugs and terror etc. There is an affinity with broader work on the limits to hierarchical rule noting the failure of administrations to appreciate the constitution of polities differentiated through related but discrete policy networks. 14 In relation to security, limitations have been identified in evaluations of policy responses to mundane problems of crime and punishment, the idea that 'nothing works' given the high recidivism rate of those offenders successfully prosecuted and imprisoned, placed on probation or fined. Critics of state power in the UK, for example, note the huge attrition rate in which such prosecutions only apply to those responsible for less than 5 per cent of estimated notifiable offences. 15 Limits to sovereign power are also registered in policy discourse about the growing importance of transnational threats to national security such as 'organised crime', mass migration and terrorism often glossed in terms of 'globalization and crime'. 16 2.1. Sovereign power and security: reconstructing leviathan?
More recently, however, a counter-narrative has emerged that criticises the concept of governance for underestimating the resilience and continued centrality of sovereign nation states to the exercise of governmental power. Most notably, in the latest instalment of his analytical history of social power, the political sociologist Michael Mann argues that: The belief that globalization is undermining the nation-state is very widespread . . . All this is greatly exaggerated . . . It is a very Western-centric view, tending to see market capitalism as universal. Yet . . . much of the world lives under politicized versions of capitalism in which one acquires access to economic resources through connections to the state. Moreover, even in the West the state is not so much declining as changing. The global economy still needs regulation by states, and nation-states have acquired a whole range of new functions, from providing welfare to interfering in family and sexual life. 17 Within studies of security this argument finds its counterpart in the work of those seeking to re-emphasise the centrality of the national 'security state'. 18 In their recent account of the shift from welfare state to security state formations, Hallsworth and Lea signal their connection with the Hobbesian tradition of thinking about power in sovereign terms, calling for a 'reconstruction' of Leviathan. 19 Far from acknowledging the limits to sovereign power, this argument draws upon Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'control societies', 20 noting the increased efficiency and economy of state and corporate power in the mundane regulation of civil society, a situation they provocatively characterise as 'soft fascism' and the 'micro-fascism of everyday life': The welfare state relied on and produced patrician experts who took a benign view of the troubled delinquents they were expected to rehabilitate . . . We are now witnessing the arrival of newoften deskilledcadres of security experts. These no longer see, and are no longer expected to see, the individual as a composite being whose biography they need to understand but rather as individuals reduced to clusters of denaturalized risks each of which requires coercive management. 21 In support of this proposition, which they regard as exemplifying the current re-articulation of security in liberal welfare state formations, Hallsworth and Lea cite the redefinition of the poor as 'at risk' groups to be coercively controlled rather than vulnerable groups to whom entitlements need to be better extended. 22 In many respects, the acid test of this shift is the treatment of young people, particularly those from disadvantaged family backgrounds, as risks with 'anti-social' proclivities requiring increasingly forensic surveillance and regulation (behaviour orders, curfews, electronic tagging, incapacitative custody etc.) rather than as citizens with rights whose delinquency is as much a collective failure of state power to adequately extend their entitlements to social inclusion as it is of individual pathologies in need of correction. 23 If penal welfarism has been displaced by risk management, then the security state formation is also characterised by Hallsworth and Lea in terms of its preoccupation with more 'powerful offenders,' in particular those associated with alleged 'transnational organised crime' and inter-continental terrorism. The recourse to pre-emptive interventions (in extremis, those of 'rendition'), the abrogation of due process in criminal justice (including intrusive, mass surveillance of digital communications) and reversals in the burden of criminal proof (as in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, requiring suspects in England and Wales to demonstrate their assets were not gained through criminal enterprise) have all been legitimated in relation to the alleged exceptionality of the threats posed by these new kinds of powerful offender. 24 'Securitization', 25 in which the suspension of due process and normal democratic oversight of security strategies is justified on the grounds of the exceptional character of powerful offending and consequently the existential threat it poses to licit political economies, has also been justified in terms of the functional over-spill of globalization and other exercises in 'de-bordering' controls on the free movement of people, goods, services and capital (as in the European Union's Single Market). Powerful offending and existential threat are constructed in official narratives as a consequence of this freedom of movement, which in turn requires more exceptional executive powers of surveillance and regulation. 26 Finally, it is argued the security state, although more typical of the British context than other European contexts, especially those in the remnants of Scandinavian social democracies, is further consolidated by the global import/export trade in security policies. Such policy transfer, augmented by the proliferation of transnational statutory and commercial networks, privileges tendencies toward the isomorphic reproduction of the security state rather than tendencies toward its resistance and consequent variegation. 27 For all the rich conceptual insight of arguments over the decentralisation or recentralisation of nation-state power, it can be argued that framing security in terms of the limits to, or conversely the efficacy of, sovereign power misdiagnoses the real powers and liabilities of security, particularly those that inhere in the relations of power-dependence. To this end, and against the Hobbesian construction of political power, there are important analytical lessons to be drawn from that strategic concept of power which has been traced back to the first empirical student of political authority 'in action', in the Florentine Court of the Medici, Niccolo Machiavelli, and in the thought of those working in the subsequent Machiavellian framework of power: Gramsci, Foucault, Callon and Latour. 28

Strategic power and security: putting Leviathan in its place
In The Prince Machiavelli offers a rich descriptive ethnography of power conceived in terms of its strategies. Towards these strategies he takes no moral stance: they are neither good nor bad, their only purpose is their effectiveness. They flow from no principle of sovereignty; they serve no principle of sovereignty; they reproduce no principle of sovereignty. . .. Power does not belong to anyone nor to any place; it is not something that princes necessarily have; it is no Leviathan. Power is simply the effectiveness of strategies for achieving for oneself a greater scope for action than for others implicated by one's strategies. Power is not any thing nor is it necessarily inherent in any one; it is a tenuously produced and reproduced effect which is contingent upon the strategic competencies and skills of actors who would be powerful. 29 The central paradox of power: the power of an agency is increased in principle by that agency delegating authority; the delegation of authority can only proceed by rules; rules necessarily entail discretion and discretion potentially empowers delegates. From this arises the tacit and taken-for-granted basis of organizationally negotiated order, and on occasion, its fragility and instability. 30 In his own reflection on Machiavelli's conceptual framework, Latour states the paradox of power more succinctly: the difference between the potential to exercise power and the actual exercise of power is always the actions of others. 31 Power inheres not in actors but in their social relations. The value of Clegg's further reworking of this strategic-relational concept of power is in its focus on distinctive circuits that fix and re-fix the rules of membership and meaning that constitute powers of association in these networks and on innovations in the techniques of discipline and production that facilitate the disruption, destabilisation and reformulation of these rules. Before applying concepts from this 'circuits of power' framework to the paradoxes and consequent multi-centred governance of security, it is worth recalling why those working with a strategic concept of power were so concerned to 'unscrew the great Leviathan' 32 or as Foucault vividly remarked, why it remains important for political theory to 'cut off the kings head'. 33 As it will be further elaborated below, if this injunction was important for histories of the present in the 1970s it is even more the case in the emerging contours of digital society with its proliferating technologies of disruption, insecurity and risk. 34 If it is accepted that power is relational not proprietorial, then it is possible to acknowledge the role of state actors in associations of membership and meaning without necessarily granting them a privileged position within these associations. Even if it is acknowledged, apropos Michael Mann, that there are asymmetrical relations between state actors (with certain ideological, economic, political and military resources) and other commercial and civic actors, then state agencies are still not independent of these other actors for the accomplishment of their governing strategies. If, as Mann argues, the 'leading edge' of social power in the early 21st century is the United States, 35 its struggle to project its own national security interests in the Middle Eastern conflicts of the past decade is a salutary reminder of the limits to sovereign projects. Within the metropolitan life of the US itself, urban political analysis has also emphasised the interdependence of state and corporate actors in the 'power to' fix and re-fix regimes of governance as the constitutional-legal powers and electoral mandates of state actors are necessarily traded with corporate actors for the financial, organisational and informational resources that are needed to actually deliver on these mandates. 36 This takes us some distance from the accomplishment of 'fascistic' rule, even of the 'soft', mundane, variety in liberal modes of security. Relations of power-dependence suggest that authoritarian state projects, premised on sovereign command and control, are destined 37 to be organisationally out-flanked by competing centres of power that recognise the need to translate their potential to govern into actually existing strategies of governance. In this sense, the imperative of acting through others is a necessary 'standing condition' of governance. How this standing condition is acknowledged, interpreted and manipulated for strategic advantage by competing security actors is, however, a contingent relationship whose negotiation and practical accomplishment will be contextspecific. Effective translations are those that can better fix/re-fix the interests of others in their problems, enrolling and mobilising these interests into stable governing coalitions through mutually beneficial exchange relationships. 38 This point has been grasped in the policy networks literature 39 and through reference to the 'exogenous' shocks to governing coalitions that can be generated by innovations or crises of production and discipline in the interrelationship between state and corporate actors. 40 However, the more pressing analytical challenge, certainly for understanding the strategic powers of association in problems of security, is to recognise the contribution of actors in civil society to the constitution of circuits of power and resistance. Criminological work has begun to address this through reference to strategies for 'governing from below' adopted by, for example, paramilitaries, serious crime networks and vigilantes. 41 Another frontier is the consideration of 'power and resistance 2.0ʹ or the disruptive implications for security strategies of digital technologies, deployed through the 'interactive' second generation of the World Wide Web. To this end, there is a need for a framework for understanding relations of power and resistance amongst multiple centres of security.

Multi-centred governance: distinguishing centres, networks and circuits of power
The provenance and contribution of the proposed theory of multi-centred governance to arguments about liberal modes of security can be clarified further through reference to recent developments in the ongoing dispute between state-centred and network-distributed concepts of political power. This dispute can be understood in terms of 'second order' theories of power and 'third order' reflections on the methodological assumptions underpinning these theories and how the interaction of second and third order accounts reconstitute governable problems of security in particular ways. 42 At the core of second order disputes about security is a binary argument over whether political power has a (singular) centre, as in the imagery of the Leviathan, or whether it ought to be understood as a social force lacking any centre at all. 43 The contention here is that this binary argument generates a false dilemma for social science. Privileging a particular centre of power, such as the nation state, obscures the grounds for resistance to, and thus variegation in, the exercise of this power within and across, as well as between nation states, as recognised in work on trans-national, sub-national and supra-national 'fields of security'. 44 Conversely, the preoccupation with the dissipation of political power into a plethora of networks constituted by 'nodes' or 'bubbles' of governance, as in the conduct of children by parents in families, of tourists by commercial security on-board aircraft, or of 'denizens' by informal conflict resolution committees in townships, 45 obscures important asymmetries in the capacity of different kinds of governor to project their strategic power. To take the example of the family as an instance of nodal governance, a parent may have certain, more immediate, capacities to conduct the conduct of children in their family but these capacities are shaped, in turn, by the standing conditions of family life as set by state and corporate powers, such as access to accommodation, income support, additional childcare, education and employment opportunities and so forth. 46 In this instance, family nodes are located within a broader assemblage of power relations which set the strategic context for parents' capacity to govern their own children. In turn, however, those state powers interested, in Michael Mann's terms, in increasingly 'interfering' in family life cannot do so forensically and ubiquitously for all families and are therefore dependent on the discretion parents have to immediately conduct the conduct of their children in accordance with state social policy objectives.
As such, the multi-centred theory of governance (MCG) transcends the binary argument over whether political power is either state-centred or lacks any centre at all by focussing on the asymmetrical relations of power-dependence amongst the range of actors that compete to establish themselves as obligatory passage points for constituting and acting upon particular governable problems. These relations can only exist because there are rival centres of power and resistance which aspirant governors, such as parents, teachers, municipal authorities, police forces and core executives are obliged to negotiate. In turn this provokes the question of whether and, if so, why certain centres of power prevail over others in particular places, for particular periods in relation to specific problems. In answer to this, the multi-centred theory of governance conceptualises power as necessarily related to resistance, as producing resistance, and therefore as an ongoing struggle rather than an accomplished state formation.
At this point it might be objected that the MCG simply reiterates the decentred concept of power found in other network-distributed theories of governance, particularly those inspired by Foucault's study of governmentality 47 and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'assemblage'. 48 There is certainly an affinity with these theories and a shared intellectual provenance in the Machiavellian framework of strategic power but the MCG is distinguished from these theories of governance by the analytical priority it accords to the circuits of power and resistance that produce and disrupt the rival centres or obligatory passage points of power. Rather than abstracting particular 'nodes' or 'bubbles' of governance from the network of asymmetrical relations of power-dependence in which they are entangled, the MCG is concerned with the interrelationship between rival centres of power, the dispositions that integrate actors in these centres, however temporarily, the standing conditions which privilege certain centres of power over others and the technologies of production and discipline that can alter these conditions and promote particular governing dispositions whilst destabilising others. In this way, the focus upon circuits of power informs causal explanations, not just descriptions, of governing assemblages, how they are formed and why they are reproduced, challenged and replaced. This latter point is especially important for justifying the comparative methodological aim of the MCG which addresses the recent interest in explaining the success and failure of rival governing projects pursued within the same nation state contexts. 49 A corollary of this aim is that governance needs to be understood in 'global perspective' for both societal and social scientific reasons. It is argued that real-world conditions of the increased transnational mobility of illicit, as well as licit, capital, labour, goods and services emphasise localities, particularly powerful city-regions, rather than nations as the primary focus of social and political change. 50 Knowledge about, and opportunities for emulating, governing arrangements beyond the nation state have also been driven by the revolution in digital communications technologies, particularly the internet, equipping both social actors and social scientists with instantaneous access to a greater volume and variety of comparative data. In this context the capacity for transnational policy transfer, emulation, plagiarism and adaptation is intensified, further undermining the idea that local practices of governing can be understood as autonomous, abstracted from the global-local relations in which they are enmeshed.
In these terms the methodology underpinning the MCG can be distinguished from rival 'third order' accounts of researching governance and security, in particular the binary opposition of 'formal' and 'historicist' methodologies. The inclination behind the formal approach is to generalise about processes of governance, by seeking uniform qualities and substantiating universally applicable explanations, as in the examples of 'securitization' and 'the security state'. 51 By contrast, advocates of historicism argue that to adequately understand and explain processes of governing, it is necessary to see them as meaningful activities dependent on particular social and historical contexts: To discuss and explain this meaningful activity is to ascribe desires and beliefs to the relevant actors . . . Social scientists have to do the empirical work of finding out what beliefs and desires people actually hold in any given case. They have to rely less on formal models than on contextual and historical explanations . . . Social scientists should adopt a noticeably more interpretive approach in which practices appear as patterns of contingent activity explained by reference to the meanings within them and the historical contexts of these meanings. 52 The distinctiveness of the methodology underpinning the MCG is in its treatment of the context-dependency of security problems. If formal approaches under-contextualise accounts of security, precluding the opportunity to question variegation within the same context, then some historicist approaches provide over-contextualised accounts, inhibiting an understanding of whether there are processes of governing that can be transferred across contexts because they are context-independent. 53 Instances of 'strong' historicism can be found in studies of governmentality and 'histories of the present' that prefer thick description or 'diagnoses' of specific governing arrangements to attempts to causally explain them through comparative analyses of different contexts of governing. 54 This strong historicism argues that the very use of abstract concepts, like 'securitization', produces misrepresentations of the contexts in question because they superimpose the categories and concepts of theorists onto those of their research subjects in ways that mistranslate and misrecognise the meanings which these subjects attribute to their own activities. It is argued that causal explanations developed in a particular historical moment cannot keep pace with processes of political change, they are highly perishable and cannot but mistranslate problems of security in other moments. Hence the fundamental criticism that formal models in social science fail to recognise their own historicity. 55 For these reasons the goals of critical social science, to arbitrate between rival truth-claims and provide a more emancipatory understanding of the problems and governing arrangements in question, must be rejected in favour of diagnostic descriptions of government. In response, critics of this strong historicism argue it prevents commentators from posing questions about why governing programmes prevail or fail, 56 how they can be reformed and what lessons can be drawn about this from comparative analysis. 57 Advocates argue the rejection of critique and explanation, 'the burdens of sociological realism', 58 liberates historicist accounts to be forward-looking in inventing alternative governing arrangements and thinking, 'how not to be governed thus'. 59 As a consequence of these methodological orientations, and despite their profound differences, both formal and historicist approaches inhibit explanations of the contextdependency of governing arrangements. Historicist accounts assert the context-dependency and patterns of contingent activity in governing arrangements rather than establishing these through comparisons of what, if any, arrangements transfer across contexts. This is particularly problematic given the plausible argument that processes of globalisation are likely to intensify policy transfer across different governing contexts, as political actors emulate established 'best practice' a process referred to as 'mimetic institutional isomorphism'. 60 Whether governing arrangements for security are becoming more isomorphic is a moot question for empirical investigation but methodologically this implies the definition of a comparative framework using common concepts to differentiate processes of convergence and divergence. 61 Formal approaches may distinguish between, for example, 'securitization' in general and particular instances of securitization 62 but even so, this formal theory draws attention away from any other governing arrangements for security that may be discovered through context-sensitive research, such as multiple case studies that contrast rival theories. 63 By contrast, the methodology underpinning the multi-centred theory of governance problematizes the context-dependence of governing arrangements by distinguishing necessary relations of governing, which by definitional fiat will be found across different contexts and which frame comparative analyses, from contingent relations that are context-specific. This, it will be argued in the third section of this article, is especially important for understanding the interplay of globallocal relations and how these complicate the isolation of national or local contexts of security. As such, context is understood as a relational concept whose meaning can only be grasped in relation to that which is context-independent.
In turn, this requires a method of articulation that is distinct from both the formal modelling of governing arrangements and the historicist description of particular governing arrangements. This method can be found in the epistemology of critical realism which conceptualises any social problem as being 'concrete', a 'unity of diverse aspects', which can only be understood through a process of abstraction, isolating in-thought what these diverse aspects might be, as a precursor to investigating how these aspects come together in particular, 'real-concrete', instances. 64 The multi-centred theory of governance uses this epistemology to isolate, in thought, the necessary relations of governing security, without which arrangements for governing security could not exist, as a precursor to concrete studies of how these necessary relations occur within and are shaped by contingentlyrelated conditions. In these terms the context-dependency of governing security can be grasped through an understanding of how necessary and contingent relations are configured in particular places and moments.
Reasserting causal explanation in this way also enables the normative aspects of critical social science to be addressed. In contrast to the 'non-committed analytic' of detailed configurations of rule found in historicist approaches, 65 this methodology reasserts the objectives of explaining the causes, reproduction and failure of governing arrangements as a premise for reflecting not just on 'how not to be governed thus' but on 'why we ought to be governed better' and 'how this could be so'. 66 In the remainder of the article it is suggested, in keeping with a strategic concept of power, that the circuits of power framework 67 provides a useful source of abstractions about the multi-centred governance of security: the standing conditions and dispositions of governing arrangements for security and the technologies that can reproduce or disrupt these arrangements. The implications of this approach for studies of security are illustrated through reference to 'urban security' and transnational organised crime. These problems of security exemplify the public policy impulse to problematise security in ways that constitute the powers and responsibilities of sovereign authorities, particularly nation states and regional 'city-states'. 68 Once they are rearticulated in the terms of circuits of causal, dispositional and facilitative power, however, it becomes possible to challenge the assumptions behind this policy discourse and recognise the integral relationships amongst multiple centres for governing security. In this way, the multi-centred theory reconstitutes the problems of governing security as problems of circuits of power rather than accomplished state formations or context-specific networks.
In constitutional-legal terms it is understandable that problems are articulated in the terms of the sovereign centres constituted in law as responsible nation states or local governments. This should not be confused, however, with the sociological experience of these problems in civil society and their accomplishment through the interplay of global and local relations captured in the, admittedly inelegant, concept of 'glocalisation'. 69 As will be illustrated further below, an uncritical adoption of the public policy discourse on 'urban security' leads to a concern with the experience of cities and urban populations as if they were abstracted from the circuits of inter-city relations produced through the greater movement of capital, labour, goods and services across national borders.
Conversely, viewing urban security as an emergent product of circuits of causal, dispositional and facilitative power clarifies the integral relationship between cities and an emergent 'world urban system' of inter-city relations. 70 In these terms, the interdependence of 'transnational organised crime' and 'urban security' makes sense when the analytical focus is shifted from discrete governable places to governable circuits. For example, the trafficking of heroin from the Middle East, via the Balkans into Amsterdam, as the principal wholesale drugs market destination in Europe, and back out to London but then onto the principal provincial wholesale centres for narcotics in Britain: the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. 71 As such, the threat posed by heroin markets to security within large British cities cannot be understood once divorced from the chain of trafficking networks that facilitate the movement of this product from its origins in the Middle East. Following the illicit product and the 'crime script' 72 through which it is produced, distributed and consumed soon leads to the collapse of neat distinctions between the domestic, transnational and international places of security. 73

Circuits of power: causal, dispositional and facilitative security
Clegg draws upon the sociology of organisations to argue that 'agency' is not reducible to individual actors but can also refer to organisations which are, in turn, the emergent product of social relations. From this axiom, he dismantles possessive individualistic theories of power, from the Leviathan through to concepts of power in terms of the decisions or non-decisions taken in legislative arenas 74 and to contemporary theories of rational choice. The focus on sovereignty is displaced by a concern with the social relations of translation that can constitute governing strategies. Shifting the analytical focus from properties to relations implies an allied movement away from architectural concepts of the 'levels', 'tiers' and 'spheres' at which governance is organised to a concern with the circuits through which any governing project must flow if it is to be reproduced and sustained. In this regard the nation-state or the urban regime matter not because they are discrete tiers of governance but because they signify certain standing conditions for the actual exercise of power. Understanding these social relations and their reproduced or disrupted conditions of existence requires the disambiguation of three analytically distinct but practically interrelated circuits of power: the causal, dispositional and facilitative.

Causal powers: the standing conditions of security
Episodic instances of the power of (individual or organisational) agents are the most apparent circuit of power and resistance, epitomised in formulations of 'A' getting 'B' to do something 'B' resists doing. Even here, however, such causal power is generated by various 'standing conditions' in the relationship between 'A' and 'B' which are less obvious. They can include the constitutional-legal powers an actor may possess, and their access to unequally distributed financial, organisational, informational and political resources which can be used to leverage and negotiate favourable outcomes.
To revisit imagery of the 'security state' formation in Britain, instances of such causal power include the proliferation of legislative action on volume crime and 'anti-social behaviour', the organisation of serious crimes and terrorism. However, what is of interest in this circuit are the standing conditions which could, possibly, result in 'A' (e.g. constabularies) getting 'B' (e.g. prolific and priority offenders) to desist, much less the accomplishment of some soft fascistic regulation of everyday life. It is precisely because the standing conditions of causal relations between crime and control are so disputed that the plausibility of an accomplished security state is questionable. In Britain this causal relationship has been rendered problematic during the era of upward trends in officially registered and self-reported volume crimes (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s) which were in an inverse relationship to the increasing legislative powers, financial resources, organisational capacities and informational resources provided to both public and commercial policing. 75 This causal relationship has become even more problematic to grasp during the current era of an apparent 'crime drop', which has been registered in police records and household victim surveys since the mid-1990s despite dramatic reductions in expenditure on constabularies and other crime-relevant public authorities, particularly local governments, since the advent of the Coalition Government's (2010 -2015) 'austerity' programme. 76 In both of these eras the overriding standing condition of the crimecontrol relationship appears to be one of disconnection. 77 More nuanced interpretation and analysis of these national trends suggests they mask the grossly unequal, 'Lorenz curve', distribution of victimisation for volume personal and property crimes, in which the top decile of high crime neighbourhoods is estimated to account for the overwhelming proportion of theft, burglary and violence against the person, both publicly and in the home. 78 Even so, this suggests that far from 'fixing' a soft fascistic security state, the standing condition of volume crime and control would appear to be one of the abandonment, rather than forensic regulation, of those vulnerable populations amongst whom victimisation is being concentrated, particularly in high crime urban neighbourhoods. 79 This is especially pertinent given the greater policy and analytical interest in the variegated crimecontrol relationships that are captured in concepts of 'community safety' or 'urban security' regimes. These regimes coalesce around policy agendas advancing admixtures of criminal justice, restorative justice, social justice and risk management. 80 As noted above, however, a strategic-relational concept of power shifts the analytical focus from governable places to governable circuits through which transnational problems like the narcotics trade are constituted and contested. In so doing, the multi-centred theory further elaborates the standing conditions of crimecontrol relationships challenging the presupposition that they can be sensibly understood within administrative categories of national or subnational state sovereignty.
A standing condition of disconnection between crime and control is also evident in studies of controlling the 'powerful offenders' that Hallsworth and Lea identify as evidence of an accomplished security state. Much of the empirical research on the organisation of serious crime suggests control strategies premised on the surveillance, prosecution or even 'disruption' of 'organised crime groups' and their 'core nominals' are routinely outflanked by more fluid criminal networks, such as 'slinger gangs' brought together for specific 'project crimes' by 'criminal contact brokers' acting as illicit recruitment consultants for particular jobs. 81 A more convincing depiction of the standing conditions for the organised crimecontrol relationship is therefore of an asymmetrical relationship between state and commercial authorities and 'protieform criminalities'. 82 The latter have the resources and counter-surveillant intelligence to adapt new social technologies to organisationally outflank state security, especially given their transnational and cross-jurisdictional mobility, the epitome of which being the failed 'war on drugs'. 83

Dispositional powers: the rules of security practice
Apropos the strategic-relational concept of power, however, standing conditions only confer the potential to exercise power, its actual exercise implies the actions of others and, therefore, the disposition of these others to conform or resist. Dispositions can, in turn, be understood in terms of the rules of practice which 'fix' or 're-fix' the meaning and membership of governing arrangements amongst a coalition of actors. Actors have to 'buy-in' to the membership categorization devices (MCD's) 84 used to constitute or 'problematise' governance in ways that continue to interest, enrol and mobilise a coalition whilst disinteresting actors in the causes of other coalitions: a strategic relationship described by Callon as the 'four moments of translation'. 85 When fixed, these rules of practice will oblige would-be governors to adhere to, or adapt, an established problematisation or else to discredit and replace it but, in each case, to necessarily engage with it as an 'obligatory passage point' in the actual exercise of power.
Central to the standing conditions of disconnection between the causes of crime and control is the disposition of many state actors, particularly those with a self-referential interest in police and criminal justice solutions to social and economic problems. Garland's concept of 'punitive display' 86 goes someway to capturing this as does Loader and Sparks' more recent account of the 'heated' qualities of public criminology. 87 This disposition fixes the meaning and membership of public debates about security to understandable empathy with victims, particularly of egregious 'signal' crimes 88 such as terrorist incidents, the abuse of minors and of other vulnerable groups particularly the elderly, and unmitigated castigation of 'signal' offenders, such as sex offenders, violent young males especially from ethnic minorities and other 'outsider' groups. These rules of practice foreground categorisation devices of enforcement, punishment, retribution and warfare notwithstanding the cumulative evidence of their counterproductive, criminogenic, and even 'deadly', tendencies. 89 An interesting development in the rules of practice in Britain, however, is the administrative appeal to logical and 'evidence-based' policymaking. Garland 90 identifies this as an adaptive strategy that operates, sotto voce, behind the punitive display of public criminology, accepting the normality of crime but identifying pragmatic, situational, opportunities for its reduction. 91 Eclipsed by these punitivepopulist and rational-bureaucratic dispositions are the discredited social democratic rules of practice, the disposition that dare not speak its name: that social inequalities characterise much offending and victimisation implying a re-translation of criminal justice and risk management strategies back into matters of social justice and allied social and economic policy responses.
The dispositional power of criminal justice and risk management is further evidenced by the eclipse of any social democratic translation of serious crime and terrorism, particularly through the categorisation device of 'transnational organised crime'. In this security field, the externalising devices that categorise and often interrelate Jihadism, drugs trafficking, people trafficking and illegal immigration continue to define national and European-wide 'threat assessments'. 92 In categorising security threats as 'external' impositions on otherwise unproblematic political-economies, these assessments obviate any responsibility that western political authorities and populations have for exporting security problems that come back to haunt them, whether as a consequence of foreign policy decisions or the demand-side stimulus to markets in drugs and vice from consumers of illicit goods and services. 93 Counterpoised to Garland's historiography of contemporary crime control strategies, however, are studies of the use of the categorisation device, 'urban security' and its Anglophile equivalent, 'community safety', to re-fix the meaning and membership of governable practices around the crimecontrol relationship. 94 The European Forum for Urban Security is a transnational policy network of over 400 municipal authorities committed to the Aubervilliers and Saint Denis Manifesto on, Security, Democracy and Cities, which explicitly states its social democratic disposition, arguing that, 'Europe is experiencing imbalances and disparities, in particular an outburst of unemployment, which has plunged European citizens into a state of anxiety, weakening the social fabric and trust in the future . . . In each of its localities, the crisis threatens social cohesion and solidarity, making selfishness and individualism emerge'. 95 It is also clear from research into the meaning in-use of this categorisation device that 'urban security' is being used to re-fix the crimecontrol relationship around more anticipatory practices of governance including the adoption of digital technologies in efforts to predict and pre-empt security threats as well as to broaden the governmental concern beyond crime to a wider repertoire of harms. 96 In Lucia Zedner's memorable phrase, security is used to forge a governmentality that is 'pre-crime and post-criminology'. 97

Facilitative powers: transforming security practices
It is acknowledged that, by definitional fiat, 'rules of practice' generate an inherent conservatism in the continuity of governing problems and arrangements. This is compounded by the risk-aversion to gambling on radical changes, the outcomes of which are uncertain and potentially damaging to proponents. By contrast, it is less of a gamble to copy successful actors and so 'institutional isomorphism' is a predominant governmental disposition as is the fear of being discredited for revising one's commitments or, in the argot of contemporary British politics, 'U-turning'. Yet, however rare, major policy change does occur. Understanding how rules of practice can be reproduced, disrupted or transformed by innovations in technologies of production and discipline is the purpose of Clegg's third 'facilitative' circuit of power. Herein, innovation can be characterised as an incremental consequence of fixed rules of practice or as an adaptation to 'exogenous environmental contingencies', such as technological breakthroughs, political and economic crises, military conflagrations, unplanned mass migration and the related exhaustion of political-economic models. Exogenous shocks can facilitate disruption in rules of practice by disempowering and discrediting dominant dispositions and they may facilitate the transformation of these rules by empowering extant but marginalised dispositions or the innovation of new dispositions. 98 Another scenario is that external shocks disempower all extant dispositions without generating any new rules of practice resulting in extended periods of governance failure and drift.
In this regard the two most obvious exogenous environmental contingencies fuelling the import and export of insecurity in Europe are the ailing war on terror in the Middle East and the pursuit of austere public expenditure rounds degrading governing capacity at home and amongst fellow member states of the European Union. 99 These, however, foreground state actors as facilitators of major changes to the rules of practice and their dispositional powers and liabilities whereas a consequence of the very degradation of governing capacity that has accompanied 'austerity' programmes in European countries is the increasing significance of civil society as a focus of governance and security.
Admittedly, state and civil society are always in an integral relationship, 100 one cannot understand developments in one field without a grasp of developments in the other, but the shifting and asymmetrical qualities of this relationship need to be grasped to appreciate innovations in, and the consequences of, technologies of discipline and production. In a context in which major state agencies in Britain, including constabularies and municipal authorities, have had their budgets reduced by over a third and, in some service areas, by over two thirds, it seems perverse to privilege a statist research programme on security over one prioritising security within civil societies characterised increasingly by the withdrawal of state intervention. How might this withdrawal disrupt and transform relations of discipline and production within civil society? Might it provoke the kind of self-governing order envisaged by advocates of the 'big society', one of a spontaneous proliferation of supportive, voluntary, associations? What might be the criminogenic consequences of such private government? To paraphrase a key concept from Poulantzas, is the 'authoritarian state formation' liable to be superseded by variants of 'authoritarian gangsterism' in conditions of weak or negligible state intervention?
The facilitative power arising out of technologies of discipline and production in austere conditions of governance is exemplified by the breakthroughs associated with 'disruptive digital technologies' (DDTs). 101 These have the potential to further empower or disempower dominant dispositions including the resurgence of non-governmental actors in civil society relative to state and corporate actors. It is in this latter sense that DDTs are of particular interest to arguments over the re-centring, decentring or circuitous qualities of security, for they may consolidate or disempower predominant criminal justice and risk management dispositions, they may facilitate a resurgent social justice, they may facilitate a new disposition, akin to the revanchist populism of various nationalist movements in Western Europe, and so forth. 102 Hitherto much of the debate around DDTs has been couched in terms of their consequences for commerce: The parade of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs is relentless and is unfolding on many fronts. Almost any advance is billed as a breakthrough, and the list of 'next big things' grows ever longer. Yet some technologies do in fact have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, rearrange value pools, and lead to entirely new products and services. Business leaders can't wait until evolving technologies are having these effects to determine which developments are truly big things. They need to understand how the competitive advantages on which they have based strategy might erode or be enhanced a decade from now by emerging technologieshow technologies might bring them new customers or force them to defend their existing bases or inspire them to invent new strategies. 103 To further specify the identification of disruptive technologies, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) defines four criteria: • The technology is rapidly advancing or experiencing breakthroughs • The potential scope of impact is broad • Significant economic value could be affected • Economic impact is potentially disruptive 104 As a consequence, 12 disruptive technologies are identified including the mobile internet, the automation of knowledge work, 3-D printing through processes of additive manufacture and the development of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs), such as drones. 105 With some reworking of the MGI criteria, it is possible to think about the disruptive consequences of these social technologies for security. As indicated in Table 1, DDTs are of interest to debates over multi-centred security because they may enhance the panoptic surveillant powers of state and corporate actors, 106 but they also facilitate the synoptic power of the many to monitor and challenge the few and, in some instances, with potentially lethal effects, as in the networked distributed manufacture of firearms and ammunition. 107 Of further interest is the capacity of DDTs to facilitate a form of 'polyoptic' power in which the many watch the many and in which many are empowered to circumvent the obligatory passage points of pre-digital society, such as print and broadcast news editors or licensed firearms suppliers.
To take but three DDTs, it is possible to use the automation of knowledge work, the development of 3D printing and advances in autonomous vehicle technology to illustrate how facilitative power can transform security practices. A particularly striking example of this kind of power is the utilisation and subversion of automated knowledge work in contemporary urban political protests such as the use of social media against President Erdogan's Islamist regime in the Gezi Park protests by the secular and feminist movement in Turkey. 108 Mindful of attempts by the Turkish intelligence and security services to monitor and target activists in this movement through algorithms used to survey social media communications about anti-Erdogan protests, participants 'dodged' this surveillance through 'sub-tweeting' (in which surrogate terms are used to identify and criticise Erdogan's regime), 'screen capture' (in which it is the photograph of the social media communication that is broadcast rather than the actual words, again escaping detection by an algorithm that would simply sense the presence of a photographic image) and 'hatelinking' (in which social media users simply provide a link to other critical communications without explicitly expressing a particular opinion themselves). 109 A more lethal or more emancipatory facilitative power, depending on one's stance on gun control, is the 3D printing of firearms and ammunition. Libertarians, such as the American firm 'Defense Distributed' promote their printable plastic gun, 'The Liberator', as a means of individual emancipation from overweening state power. Its critics note its lethal potential for individual users, given major problems of quality assurance and the instability of the product itself. 110 The broader significance and prospective development of such technology, however, is its potential to further weaponise civil society and circumvent the kind of stricter gun control laws in jurisdictions which, some argue, are responsible for dramatic variations in the pattern of lethal firearms-related violence within and across nation states. 111 A further illustration of the facilitative powers and liabilities of DDTs is provided by Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs) more colloquially known as 'drones'. Whilst principally renowned for their military applications, as in the surveillance and bombing missions undertaken by Western powers in Afghanistan, drones are becoming an increasingly prominent technology for urban security as in the Dutch Hague Security Delta (HSD) consortium's promotion of UAVs for surveillance and crime prevention. 112 This consortium of 'businesses, governments and knowledge institutions' also undertakes research and development into policing the use of drone technology by criminal enterprises and other non-state actors. One of its Small Business Innovation Research projects, 'Innovative Security Solutions Against Drones' has the aim of: finding ways to take over control, intercept or redirect, and detect the location of the person in control of such systems. Drones can for example be used to disrupt the public order and to smuggle forbidden goods. Any approaches that could lead to detection, identification, and the controlled removal of unmanned systems [are] of interest as well. 113 In this regard drones exemplify the 'arms race' between perpetrators and preventers that has long been recognised as a central dynamic in the organisation of serious crimes. 114 In this race, state and corporate technologies are appropriated by criminal enterprises and other non-state organisations, including those employing political violence, in order to anticipate and outflank state and corporate powers. In turn, this provokes further rounds of innovationappropriationregulation as state and corporate powers produce technological solutions to social problems of discipline whilst simultaneously attempting to regulate the liabilities of these technologies for further undermining state and corporate power.

Prospects for power and resistance in liberal modes of security
In terms of the circuits of power framework, the arms race provoked by the onset of DDTs can be understood as facilitating a 'risk management' disposition which refixes the meaning of urban security as a problem of pragmatic technological 'solutions' rather than as a problem of social justice. 115 Through this disposition, an attempt is made to restrict the standing conditions of the governance of security to the pragmatic agenda of 'securocrats', or consortia of state, commercial and knowledge institutions (i.e. universities, consultants and think tanks) interested in technological solutions. This agenda mobilises constitutional-legal, organisational, financial, informational and political resources for interventions that explicitly bracket-off and discredit social and economic policy in order to privilege situational, pragmatic, security agendas. 116 As noted, however, the risk management disposition can also be subverted by its own technologies of production and discipline, once they are appropriated by other actors in civil society, as in the synoptic powers of social media communication, the weaponisation of civil society through printable firearms and the counter-surveillant use of drones. In turn, DDTs can also be used to re-fix the meaning and membership of security around the social justice agenda of policy networks such as the European Forum for Urban Security and of social movements capable of using this technology to challenge 'securocratic' constructions of social problems.
In these terms the multi-centred theory provokes the study of strategic and relational rather than sovereign and proprietorial powers and liabilities. The inter-dependence of power and resistance within these relations implies a focus on contestation both of the meaning and membership of security strategies, although in periods of stability the rules of this contestation get fixed on dispositions that are highly resistant to change. Accounts of public criminology have noted the resilience of criminal justice agendas which, despite critical appeals to 'evidence-based' policy change and learning, remain central to the policing of communities at home and abroad, albeit augmented by developments in risk management. There are, however, reasons to suspect this disposition is being significantly disrupted in the current era of exogenous shocks to security networks occasioned by austere limitations to the investment in enforcement and the enhanced capacity of illicit actor networks to outflank the panoptic powers of state surveillance.
The proposition is that the standing conditions for governing security, along with the rules of practice for security, are being destabilised by the facilitative powers of DDTs. Whether criminal justice and risk management dispositions are able to fix security agendas in the context of a more intensive technological arms race, whether these agendas get re-fixed around restorative and/or social justice agendas for security or whether the prevailing circumstance is one of no predominant disposition in conditions of governance failure and drift requires comparative research into the standing conditions for governing security in different liberal democratic polities.
An empirical starting-point for this comparison is the claim that city-regions, rather than nation states, are becoming the new obligatory passage points for fixing security regimes in a 'world urban system' in which the porous borders of nation states enable some regional, if not 'global', cities to project their political, economic and cultural power at the cost of localities rendered increasingly peripheral by this system. 117 The challenge of maintaining a politics of solidarity and redistribution encountered by national social democracies, let alone city-regions, enmeshed in these global relations would suggest the rules of security practice in liberal polities are likely to swing even further away from social justice towards risk management in an era of transnational, inter-city, competition. However, research into the relatively successful adaptations of the Nordic model in balancing market openness with social inclusion 118 identifies an important variegation in the response of liberal democratic polities to the standing conditions of global politicaleconomy whose security implications are now the subject of comparative research in Europe. 119