In this interview with AOAV’s Executive Director Iain Overton, Oxford anthropologist Professor Ruben Andersson details how, in his new book Age of Security: The Rise of a Global Obsession, he has argued that the world has entered an “age of security” in which governments increasingly respond to political, economic and social uncertainty through surveillance, border controls, military spending and technological systems of control. From the post-Cold War optimism of the 1990s and the expansion of the security state after 9/11 to contemporary rearmament, AI and the growing overlap between civilian technology and military power, Andersson argues that security in and of itself has increasingly become a substitute for politics and diplomacy. He warns of a self-reinforcing system in which perceived threats generate investment in security, which can in turn produce new instability and further demands for spending. He also rejects apocalyptic pessimism, arguing that societies remain capable of challenging permanent emergency politics, rebuilding social security, scrutinising who benefits from militarisation and surveillance, and reviving diplomacy and movements for peace.
Iain Overton, AOAV: First, please you tell us who you are?
Professor Ruben Anderson: Hi, I’m Ruben Andersson. I’m a professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Iain Overton: And tell us a bit about your latest book. What’s it called and what’s it about?
Professor Ruben Andersson: The book is called Age of Security: The Rise of a Global Obsession. It’s about this concern with security that we see all across the world, from the surveillance state of China to a heavily armed Russia, to the Trump administration, and to a European Union that is increasingly framing itself as a security and military project.
The book travels from the borderlands and the fight against migration, where many of these technologies of security have been trialled, into arms fairs and security fairs, where technologies and companies are vying for business, and then into our streets and everyday lives.
All of these spheres are linked. Our everyday concern with safety and security, and our anxiety about the world around us, is very much linked to what’s happening in geopolitics and to the way our governments are selling us a vision of a threatening future.
Iain Overton: Many years ago, I backpacked to Moscow when I was just a teenager and I was one of the first people to go to the McDonald’s there. McDonald’s was presented as this sort of icon of the idea that no two countries with a McDonald’s would ever attack each other. It was the “end of history”, the argument that capitalism would bring an era of extreme peace. What happened?
Professor Ruben Andersson: Well, something clearly went slightly wrong along the way.
I think what we’re seeing now, with this security obsession around the world, this turn towards nationalism, repression and authoritarianism, is a reaction to that earlier world, to the failed promises of the age of globalisation that preceded our age of security.
In the end, Russia went through a meltdown. It saw spiralling inequality, an outflow of capital and the plundering of state assets. Then in came Vladimir Putin with his own security project, in a way setting the tone for that global reaction very early on.
But at the time, there were relatively few observers in the West taking too much notice either of that or, indeed, of China’s rise and its increasingly heavy surveillance of its own population, and its development of extremely repressive and fine-grained methods for controlling citizens.
Now we’re slowly waking up to that. But instead of actually fighting that trend, which started in some of these parts of the world, the West has followed suit. It is now engaged in a surveillance arms race and a security arms race in which civilian and military domains increasingly overlap and where threats are increasingly to be found everywhere.
This security “solution”, if you will, to the problems of globalisation, the inequalities, the tensions and the geopolitical trade-offs, is not really helping. It’s not making matters better.
Rather, we end up with a spiral of more security, more military investment and more surveillance, in a way that ends up hitting citizens in liberal democracies, not just Chinese citizens, civilians in war zones or migrants at the borderlands.
Iain Overton: Would you chart this back, to some degree, to the schism of September 11th? The attack by an amorphous “terror” enabled the security state to justify huge expenditure, invasions and all the rest. That then seeped into, let’s say, the weaponisation of American police forces and the enabling of tech, while in parallel you had the rise of China with its own different approach to surveillance, one that then segues into this wider appetite. Would you say 9/11 was a pivot?
Professor Ruben Andersson: Certainly it was a pivot.
We had the Patriot Act in the United States allowing mass surveillance, including of American residents and citizens. We had the military-industrial complex, to use that old term, ratcheting up a gear.
We had the Department of Homeland Security, this behemoth being created that encompassed border security and migration control, now framed in terms of countering terrorism at the US-Mexico border and so on.
And, as you observe, many of the technologies developed during the war on terror, and even veterans of the war on terror themselves, came back to the borderlands of Arizona, for instance, and imported those technologies and those security systems back into the “homeland”.
So the war on terror was a watershed.
It also inspired, in China, the crackdown on the Uyghur population and the counter-terror campaigns, which really gave a massive boost to China’s surveillance state, also affecting citizens in other parts of China, and then becoming something that could be exported abroad.
But in the book I actually trace the key shift back to the 1990s, when you had this world of free trade and open borders. That was, of course, never quite the reality, but the narrative was there: that we were now going to emphasise connections, build those McDonald’s outlets and so on, and peace and everlasting prosperity would be upon us.
But the 1990s were also the decade when we started to see the security mentality creeping in, in a way as a complement to those open borders and open markets.
We saw it at the borderlands, with fences against migration in the United States and southern Europe, and a new kind of scramble to define security, which was increasingly to be found in civilian life.
So the 1990s were pivotal in many ways. That decade also set the baseline for the kind of surveillance enabled by the internet and cyberspace that we’re living with today.
I think 9/11 was certainly a pivot. But already by the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, we were entering this period of experimentation with new technologies and repression.
Iain Overton: Obviously, you’ve got writers like Steven Pinker, with The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that things are getting better, that fatality rates are down.
I’ve got some issues with some of his historical data because I don’t think he sufficiently factors in the growth of, let’s say, antibiotics and their impact on survivability in conflict.
But as a general arc, he was arguing that things are getting better. Did he have a point? Do you think he over-read the data? Or are we in a strange space where this is the lull before the real storm, where fatality rates may have dropped but we are creating weapons, systems and architectures of power that could cause absolute catastrophe and mass death? Where do you think he sits in that arc?
Professor Ruben Andersson: I’d be curious to hear what Pinker would say today about that.
The book, of course, is a few years old, and you had others who were framed at the time as neo-optimists. Hans Rosling, for instance, in Sweden, was also saying: actually, life is getting better. What are we complaining about? Why all this dystopia around us?
And to some extent and in some respects, the data backs them up. Lives are getting longer. We are being better educated. Those mass conflicts, including huge death rates from disease and so on, are dropping in important respects.
This is where it’s interesting that, at a time of actually improving life chances in many parts of the world, we have this security obsession and this kind of dystopian vision of threats being everywhere.
So I think authors who emphasise the positive side of the ledger have a real point here. Look, actually, we could quite possibly get on with our lives and spend less time fretting about all these presumably mortal threats against us, and less time and money on security technologies to protect us against those threats.
So I think it’s a real reality check. Are these responses proportionate? Are they necessary? And so on.
But then the problem is that these security technologies, this obsession with military build-up, security and surveillance, are themselves causing numerous harms and dangers.
That’s what we saw in the war on terror and its various offshoots, including in Israel and other parts of the world, where we now have in Gaza a situation of civilian suffering unlike anything seen for a very long time.
In Sudan, of course, and indeed in Ukraine, we see the combination of old-school warfare with new technologies, and the involvement of many international actors.
So conflicts are getting, in some ways, more vicious, certainly in the years after Pinker published his book.
We see an erosion of democracy across the world, a growing number of conflicts, and, crucially, less of a focus on resolving those conflicts through diplomatic means.
Instead, those conflicts, tensions and threats are used as further justification for rearmament and escalation.
So perhaps we are in the calm before the storm. But I do think we need to dial down our dystopian or apocalyptic mindset slightly and actually remind ourselves that, look, in many ways we are better off than before.
Perhaps we could also dial down this threat mindset that is actually feeding the security obsession. And the security obsession itself, I would say, is a big part of the problem we’re having to deal with today.
Iain Overton: It’s an interesting framing because I’ve been accused of being like Chamberlain, of being naive or not understanding what war is about, even though I’ve been to plenty of conflicts.
When I call for restraint or push back, I’ve even been called a traitor for arguing that we should have critical review and that justice should prevail within our armed forces, and so on.
Do you feel there’s a comfort in thinking that imminent threat is just around the corner and that we therefore need unequivocally to build up our arms to combat it?
Do you see yourself operating in quite a minority space as a critical voice on this?
And are you also open to the critique that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that you’re not an ex-military officer, you don’t know the ins and outs of secrecy and all the rest? Do you feel there’s a tendency simply to dismiss your views?
Professor Ruben Andersson: Certainly. It’s very easy to frame those who call for de-escalation and diplomacy as somehow traitors, or as a threat to national security, or perhaps, in a softer sense, simply as naive peacemongers.
I often come back to a quote I had from an African Union official in Addis Ababa who was a military man and who was running African Union military operations in Somalia.
He told me, in a message really directed towards Western leaders, that what the international community has to learn is that you don’t negotiate with your friend, you negotiate with your enemy.
The enemy, however much you dislike it, is part of the solution.
He was referring there to al-Shabaab, of course, which was very much at the heart of the vicious conflict in Somalia over many years.
So even on the military side, and I often found this in Mali as well, in the country’s long-running conflict, it was frequently military voices, those actually involved in the conflict themselves, who had the strongest sense of the need for other methods of ending war, for de-escalation and for bringing back a modicum of peace.
They also had the closest, most acute sense of their own limitations.
I’m not talking about everybody here. I’m talking about particular voices and particular veterans of these conflicts. But they have a sense that we cannot resolve this through military means alone. We do need diplomacy. We do need other ways of ending these wars and their devastating impact on civilians.
Often, I found that it was those sitting in political offices, or indeed in Western capitals, who were most strident about the possibilities and importance of military escalation.
And I think we see that mismatch today in Europe and other parts of the world, where rearmament is becoming an end in itself.
We rarely ask: what is the strategy behind this?
Strategy is missing in action. Diplomacy is missing in action. And without a sense of strategy, whether we’re talking about Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan or elsewhere, you’re going to have very little likelihood of success, however much you build up your arms.
And that’s before we consider what scholars call the security dilemma. Because when you start rearming, the other side will see that as a threat, and then escalation continues.
So I think what we’re seeing here, and I argue this in the book as well, is a security rationale increasingly coming to substitute for politics, for the hard work of actually thrashing out differences and providing a different vision or strategy.
That applies domestically, in asking where we are going as societies and what will improve people’s lives, and internationally, in terms of diplomacy and actually recognising that the other side has interests of its own.
Without that, you will never resolve these problems. You can end up in a quagmire, as I think history proves.
Iain Overton: I was trying to understand, for instance, the defence policy of Reform UK, a fast-growing political party in the UK. I was struck by how light and threadbare it seemed.
And yet its fundamental framing feels almost like a sort of millenarian apocalypticism: the need for strong leadership, the need for authoritarianism, enemies at the gates in the form of migration, and Armageddon down the road in whatever form that might take.
They haven’t quite leaned into anti-Russian rhetoric for a whole variety of reasons. But certainly there’s the idea that authoritarianism is the saviour in these parlous times.
Are we seeing two issues arising together? You’ve got the vested self-interest of the military-industrial complex, which wants to sell weapons and make profits, and then you have authoritarian groups rising alongside that for whom nationalism and strong defence become a byword for showing how powerful they could be if they got a seat at the table.
Professor Ruben Andersson: There’s certainly a symbiosis in many countries between authoritarian and industrial interests.
But I think we’re facing something more complex here, partly because, as you said, parties such as Reform in the UK, or indeed the Trump administration, Vox in Spain, the old Front National and others, tend to be more focused on population-centric threats, in military parlance.
That is specifically migration and cross-border flows. That is what is seen as an existential threat to the nation.
That’s why, according to this logic, we need to invest heavily in border security, in our defence, and in authoritarian or repressive collaborations with partner states.
So the focus is often slightly different, though certainly it branches into the more traditional military side in some contexts.
But it’s interesting to see how, in the United States, the MAGA movement is not necessarily excited about war with Iran, for instance, or how parts of the far right in Europe are rather sceptical about endless war in Ukraine. So the lines cut across one another in interesting ways.
But I think one key issue that we don’t talk about enough is how centrist, if you want to call them that, mainstream parties in Europe – and certainly the Democrats in the United States – social democratic parties and centre-right parties, have become heavily invested in a war mentality and a war footing.
They’re essentially going along with what the Trump administration is arguing for in terms of a massive rise in spending on defence and security as a proportion of GDP.
And they have their own reasons for pushing this kind of agenda, also on migration, by the way, not just on national defence.
Only the other day, in the Swedish national elections, what looks like the incoming Social Democratic prime minister said that we have to invest in military innovation, that it’s going to be a driver of growth for Sweden, and that Sweden should create a partnership with Ukraine over drone warfare as part of that.
This is very different rhetoric from that of the Social Democrats 40 years ago.
And we see something similar, of course, in Labour in the UK and in other parts of Europe.
So I think these linkages are not simply about rising authoritarian populist politics and the self-interest of the military-industrial complex.
You have many other actors feeding into this in different ways.
Security has become a kind of mainstream common sense: that we all have to invest in it, no matter what.
And we rarely scrutinise it, or scrutinise how that call serves many different actors and their political and commercial ends.
Iain Overton: I’m always interested in what you might call the economics of scrutiny.
I’m drawn back to that line from King Lear: “Nothing will come of nothing.” I know it’s not quite the same context, but I do think that, as an organisation arguing for less spending on defence rather than more, when we produce our papers there is no immediate sale of those papers that creates profit that can then be pushed back into more research.
We are reliant on Quaker organisations and others to give us support, and there are very few of those on the ground.
Meanwhile, these large defence corporations are receiving multi-million-pound or billion-pound contracts and can push that money back into lobbying, marketing and hiring veterans who then reinforce that entire status quo.
Is there a terrible snowball economic logic here, where restraint simply isn’t funded in a late-capitalist system when it comes to defence?
Professor Ruben Andersson: Yes. I think it is partly built into those systems and industries, with the revolving doors and the sense that money begets money.
But it’s also inherent, to sound a bit academic, in the security logic itself.
Once you start seeing threats everywhere, there will always be a reason to expand investment in order to counter those threats.
And once your methods for countering those threats are a border wall, more rearmament, escalating conflict or mass surveillance, you’re going to feed further threats. That’s what we tend to see.
A colleague, David Keen, and I call this cycle “wreckonomics”, where you’re feeding off the wreckage that your own policies are helping to create.
We saw that with a massive rise in fatalities from terror attacks worldwide during the heyday of George W. Bush’s and later Barack Obama’s global war on terror.
We’ve seen it with migration controls. Smuggling networks have grown stronger and more predatory, and migration crises have kept perpetuating themselves.
And we see it in war zones, where we are not necessarily seeing conflict brought to an end through further military investment. Instead, we see conflicts becoming more vicious and prolonged.
And that then, perversely, becomes a justification for even more investment.
So I think it is partly about an industry feeding itself.
And partly it is about security itself being self-perpetuating, because the more threats your systems allow you to see, the more you will have to invest in fighting those threats.
And oftentimes the threats will simply continue growing as a result.
Iain Overton: It’s interesting when you talk about the growth of surveillance and how that also has an impact on levels of accountability and, arguably, on our capacity even to make arguments for restraint.
For instance, I’ve been banned from going to Nicaragua, and they picked me up through a Chinese surveillance system looking at the roster on the aircraft. I’m not allowed to work as a journalist in Rwanda. I can’t go to Russia. I can’t go to Iran. I can’t go to a number of countries, partly because of these surveillance apparatuses being developed in the West and then sold to despotic nations around the world as well.
So surveillance itself becomes a form of restraint.
How do you see the media’s role in this space more generally? Is it facilitating this rise of fear, or is it acting to some degree as a brake? And are the people who might write critically about these systems increasingly unable to get access in order to conduct that critical review?
Professor Ruben Andersson: I think the balance of power, if you will, is shifting between traditional media, social media, and what I call in the book “Big Security” systems.
Big Security involves technology companies, state security agencies and other key actors in this space who are helping to technologise warfare and integrate civilian surveillance capabilities with military capabilities, automation and AI.
We’re seeing increasing crossover.
There are some extremely powerful corporations, including household names, working together with state security capabilities.
That creates a formidable force that journalists are struggling to keep up with.
I know the work you do is crucial in actually showing journalists how some of this can be investigated, but it’s a very hard job, as you know better than anybody.
And, of course, the cards are stacked against that kind of work, partly because you are now the one being watched rather than effectively being able to act as the watchdog of these very powerful systems.
Iain Overton: And some of those systems that are being turned into part of the military-technological-industrial complex are also increasingly becoming gatekeepers of information.
We might be using those AI systems to understand the world. They might, in turn, be pushing back to us the need for more defence through some kind of biased feedback loop. The snake is eating itself, to some degree.
Professor Ruben Andersson: Oh yes. We all rely on these technologies. It’s very hard to do without them.
You can try to be a Luddite or a puritan, but it’s not going to be very easy.
So we are all, in a way, stuck with this.
And when we see reports, such as those in the United States, of generative AI tools now being used in that symbiosis between the military and civilian domains, we see how the little queries we put in online, including as journalists or researchers, feed into some of the military systems we are trying to investigate.
Iain Overton: And potentially feed back the justification for those systems.
Professor Ruben Andersson: They may well feed back the justification.
I think, for now, generative AI systems are fairly good at humouring their users. It’s also part of the selling point that you often get back what you want to hear, which is another kind of problem and, of course, is based on surveillance in its own right.
But I do think there are openings here. There are glitches.
And I know you’ve written about them and identified how journalists can go about pursuing them.
But it is harder and harder to do this kind of work, particularly when surveillance becomes so omnipresent.
We don’t have to go to China to see the dangers of that.
I think many academics and many journalists across the world are feeling that repressive hand of security.
Iain Overton: Let’s end, hopefully, on a note of relative optimism.
Do you conclude in the book with pathways forward that can perhaps temper our quite innate desire to imagine the end of the world, this idea that millenarianism is somehow the natural arc of the human lifespan?
What are the pullbacks?
Professor Ruben Andersson: I do end the book by saying that the apocalypse, which we all seem to indulge in, is a bad idea. Let’s jettison it.
I don’t think it helps us to paint the future in shades of doomsday red.
I think we do this across the political spectrum, whether it is the risk of deep authoritarianism, global war, global warming or, indeed, the idea of a migration “invasion” on the far right.
Some of these warnings are more plausible and pressing than others. But none of them are really helping us come to terms with, and actually debate, what the real challenges are right now and what can be done about them.
So, first of all, we need to de-escalate and actually have a proper political conversation. We need to get back to an ideological battle; that’s also something I argue in the book.
Security stands in the way of politics in that sense. It stands in the way of compromise, debate, a free exchange of ideas and the forging of different visions for the future. Once we claim the other represents an existential threat, we short-circuit debate.
Instead, we’re stuck. We’re kind of stalled at the border fence. We don’t quite know where to go, while the threats are apparently massing on the other side.
So we need to de-escalate.
But we also need to find a way back, I think, to a more genuine form of stability, or indeed social security, if you want to call it that.
I think the rise of the repressive, authoritarian right, and the recourse to security technologies, security solutions and rearmament, in many ways stand in for the failures of liberal democratic states and governments actually to uphold the social security nets and safety nets that people have rightly come to expect.
People see their life chances eroding. The future looks more and more uncertain. Just the basic security of having a home, perhaps owning a home, becomes more and more remote.
So this may sound like a very traditional left or centre-left agenda, and in many ways it is. But that’s one part of the puzzle, at least, that has increasingly gone missing in action as well.
Other parts of the political spectrum will have their own solutions.
Liberals will perhaps want to come back to free trade and revive their enthusiasm for liberty, which is being lost in these illiberal times.
We will all have our different solutions to offer. But I think security is a kind of blockage on articulating and debating those solutions: this obsession with defending ourselves against massive threats.
Iain Overton: I wonder whether people will eventually look at the multimillion-pound pay packets some defence executives take home and ask how justifiable that is when, at the same time, cuts to social welfare are being justified in order to pay for defence expenditure.
I sometimes think we may get to a point where questions of fairness start to bite, and people say: well, Armageddon hasn’t happened.
We’ve been promised for 25 years now that the end of the world is around the corner, whether it comes from jihadism, Russia, China or whatever else it might be. But these invasions haven’t occurred.
Maybe people will therefore begin to see through some of this and start asking more critical questions.
I’m optimistic in the way that I think you seem to suggest you are at the end of the book.
There is this idea of the apocalypse deferred. The apocalypse isn’t now. The apocalypse is always just ahead. But the moment you defer it again and again and again, it weakens the notion of apocalypse.
Professor Ruben Andersson: Yes. And I think I’m also optimistic here, actually.
We’re seeing, in some corners, attempts to return to politics and move away from this constant emergency footing on which we’ve been living, perhaps since the war on terror, if not before.
And we are seeing increasing scepticism about whether any of this is actually making us safer and rendering our lives more stable.
You see a backlash in the United States right now against mass surveillance, against the tech barons, against data centres and so on.
People are starting to join the dots.
So who really benefits from this?
That is the question we have to keep asking ourselves.
It’s not necessarily the ordinary person on the street. It is big tech oligarchs and “Big Security” as a whole, you could say.
So we’re seeing a pushback, and I think we’re going to see more of it as time goes on.
What is perhaps missing, from my perspective, is a peace movement of the kind that we saw in earlier decades.
We’ve lost sight of that somehow.
And I think there’s great scope here to revive it across borders, in the interest of getting away from this constant apocalyptic mindset in which we seem to be stuck.
Iain Overton: Thank you very much.
Professor Ruben Andersson: Thank you.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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