A few days ago I found myself at the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum in Rome, a meeting organized by NGOs, social movements and civil society organizations to coincide with the general meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

I was around for reasons totally unrelated to my Academic work, and was surprised by the amount of times the word “Security” made it to the panels. They spoke, of course, of food security (ensuring that everyone has enough to eat), but this got me thinking about how the word has managed to pervade our language and our policies in the last few years, and how this abuse of the term may be blurring the lines between different concepts –and making it harder to know exactly what it is we are talking/concerned about.

Margaret Thatcher’s distinction between the enemy without in the Falklands and the enemy within in the ranks of the miners on strike fighting against closures in the 80s, as well as the earlier use of the National Guard in the US against antiwar students at Kent State University in 1970 started to blur the distinction between the police tactics used abroad and at “home”. However, it seemed like the late 80s and 90s were devoted to being able to make a clear difference between Homeland Security and Community Safety.

9/11, apparently, also changed that, and the rhetoric of Globalization, the global terrorist threat, and the home-grown terrorists seem to be taking us back 30 years in terms of security strategies. The implications of this for democracy, human rights and the ability of our communities to build links of trust and shared responsibility are, I think, seriously underestimated.