What does it mean to be 'vulnerable'? Exploring the rise of 'vulnerability' as an organising concept in migration detention, integration, public health, national security and social policy, this volume reveals the blurring of welfare state logics with national security ends. Governments and international agencies use the language of vulnerability to identify needy constituents and communities, but also to frame that need as potentially dangerous. Using international case studies this book shows how vulnerability governance permeates policy sectors - transforming the methods used to govern, problematise and resolve - bringing questions of risk management and security into social policy, but simultaneously brings social policy sectors into counterterrorism delivery. The combination of welfare state and security logics brings interventions deeper into societies, securitising communities and individuals on account of their needs, governing the social through security politics.

An introduction to vulnerability: merging social policy with the national security state - Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Part I: From care to risk assessment and national security
1 Shifting notions of vulnerability and learning in Swedish prevention policy - Randi Gressgård and Vanja Lozic
2 Anti-immigrant politics and vulnerability's conceptual multiplicity - Andrew C. Fletcher and Ali Fuat Birol
3 Governing vulnerability: mental distress, neoliberalism and COVID-19 - Jana Fey
4 Who is vulnerable, the worker or the state? Psychiatric debates on trauma and welfare in Germany, 1871-1914 - Laura Jung
5 Counterterrorism and psychiatry: re-bordering vulnerability and securitisation in UK public protection - Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Part II: The reframing of national security around care
Introducing Part II - Barbara Gruber
6 Governing vulnerability through case management: from crime to radicalization prevention in the Netherlands - Barbara Gruber
7 Local rationalizations of radicalization: an analysis of Danish and Swedish municipal policies - Robin Andersson Malmros and Jennie Sivenbring
8 The 'vulnerability' of Lebanon: reimagining the 'failing state' problem through the international PVE agenda - Jan Daniel
9 Prevention politics in non-western contexts: training imams in post-revolutionary Tunisia - Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu
10 'Ontological' (in)security under postcolonial conditions: countering violent extremism in Nigeria - Akinyemi Oyawale
11 When democracy is deemed vulnerable: preventing far-right extremism by curbing Roma 'criminality and social pathologies' in the Czech Republic - Sadi Shanaah
Epilogue: from security to 'care', vulnerability to resistance - Hil Aked
Index

Editors

Charlotte Heath-Kelly is Professor of Counterterrorism and Public Policy at the University of Warwick
Barbara Gruber is Lecturer in International Relations and Security Studies at the University of Groningen