Global Policy book review of Security and Migration in the 21st Century by Elspeth Guild

‘We are all Americans’ headed French newspaper Le Monde on 12 September 2001. Although the 2003 Iraq intervention caused a rift between the USA (‘the bad cop’) and parts of Europe (‘the good cop’), it also led to more coherence between both sides – simply because ‘playing policemen’ became an indisputable feature of politics across the Atlantic.

In the USA the focus shifted towards ‘securing the Homeland’, whereas in Europe it moved towards ‘Justice and Home Affairs’. This policy field is very much alive and kicking, and this book explains why: fear within neoliberal democracies of the individual who is not defined as intrinsically belonging to the collectivity; the foreigner in its many ‘disguises’; ‘the Barbarians at the gates of the Roman Empire’.