Between Public and Private: The Co-production of Infrastructural Security

Abstract

The paper proposes to use the concept of co-production to account for the mutual co-production of private as well as public security actors and critical infrastructure. Through an exploration in the field of urban security provision, we aim to contribute to critical security studies by turning to the entanglements of public and private security actors in the process of securitising infrastructure. As the construction and provision of infrastructural security depends neither solely on public nor private actors but on their interaction, we propose the concept of co-production to account for these dynamics. Based on a focused ethnography, the paper mobilises material collected during a security conference in Israel, in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.