ABSTRACT
Introduction A major way of meeting the goal of security is through the means of surveillance. Security studies and surveillance studies have their own distinctive linguistic and epistemic communities. The former emphasizes the state, while the latter gives additional attention to the behavior of non-state actors such as employers, merchants and private police and of mixed public-private activities such as mega entertainment and sports events. Scholars such as Buzan and Weaver (2003), Burgess (2010) and the political scientists in this volume have broadened the field of security taking it beyond strictly military concerns and raising critical questions, while sociologists give increased attention to the diffusion of practices from business to government and the reverse. Both groups share an interest in studying common individual activities such as travel, consumption, employment and banking as these intersect with the rules and interests of states and international organizations. For several of the authors in this volume and the co-editors from the two fields of a volume on borders (zureik and Salter 2005) the fields fuse.
