Manchester University Press Everyday Security Threats: Perceptions, Experiences, and Consequences

Everyday security threats draws on ideas from international security studies and political psychology to explore citizens' perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain. Using data from twenty focus groups across six British cities and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012, Daniel Stevens and Nick Vaughan-Williams investigate the extent to which a diverse public accepts the government's framing of security threats. They trace the origins of the perceptions of specific threats ranging from terrorism to environmental degradation, asking what it is that makes some people feel more frightened by these issues than others. They also examine the influence of threats on other areas of politics such as the stereotyping of minorities and the prioritising of public spending on border control. Finally, they evaluate the effectiveness of government efforts to change citizens' behaviour as part of the risk management cycle. What they find is that there is a widespread heterogeneity in the perception of security threats, with serious implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. Everyday security threats focuses on the British case, but its unusual combination of quantitative and qualitative methods makes broader theoretical and methodological contributions to scholarship in political science, international relations, political psychology, and security studies.