This new book shows how from the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, academically and politically.

It focuses on the theme of protection. It moves away from the dominant question of whom or what is threatening to the crucial questions of who is to be protected, and in the case of conflicting claims, who has the capacity to define whose needs prevail.
It also poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions raised in relation to the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world. The authors identify and explore issues that challenge or raise a number of questions about the traditional notion that states are to protect their citizens through retaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.

Jef Huysmans is Lecturer in Government and Politics at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Andrew Dobson is Professor and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and Government at The Open University. Raia Prokhovnik is Senior Lecturer in Government and Politics, also at The Open University.

1. Agency and The Politics of Protection: Implications for Security Studies 2. Privatizing the Politics of Protection: Military Companies and the Definition of Security Concerns 3. Privatisation, Globalisation, and the Politics of Protection in South Africa 4. Taking Rights, Mediating Wrongs: Disagreements over the Political Agency of Non-Status Refugees 5. Resisting Sovereign Power: Camps In-between Exception and Dissent 6. Protection: security, territory and population 7. "Civilizing" the Balkans, Protecting Europe: the International Politics of Reconstruction in Bosnia and Kosovo 8. The Judicialisation of Armed Conflict: transforming the 21st Century 9. The Limits of Agency in Times of Emergency 10. Sovereignty, International Security and the Regulation of Armed Conflict: the Possibilities of Political Agency 11. Do we need (to protect) nature? 12. On the Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection