Elite Private Security & The Transnational Intersectionality of Privilege

• In Event: WG Organized Crime and Criminal Networks Panel 5: Organized crime: involvement, trajectories and vulnerabilities

Abstract

The harmful effects of diverse and concurrent global insecurities are increasingly felt by those possessing multiple intersecting disadvantages of race, of gender, of socio-economic class, or of other structural frailty. Understandably, this enhanced risk exposure is an important focus for research attention. However, a contrasting contributor to unequal security experiences in this time of polycrisis is to be found in its obverse, the transnational intersectionality of privilege. An important trend that has yet to receive significant academic attention. Whilst vulnerability experienced by the marginalised is increased by intersecting global insecurities, elites have emerged comparatively impregnable to harm and have proved highly insulated from global risks through multiple, intersecting, privileges. In particular, they are increasingly protected by strategically connected consortia of global risk professionals offering portfolios of highly bespoke and ‘always-on’ security, healthcare, insurance and emergency response products and services. Focussing on these niche security actors and the concierge security services they provide, this paper spotlights their strategic harnessing of the contemporary nexus between permanxiety and polycrisis. Engaging with scholarship concerned with elite mobilities, transnational policing and security commodification, this paper addresses how we might conceptualise elite entrepreneurial security responses to increasingly interconnected global risks as well as drawing attention to elite private security’s role in exacerbating already uneven global mobility / security experiences.

Author

• Conor O'Reilly, University of Leeds