This chapter addresses the question of ‘what security is’. It begins by exploring the history of security as a concept and practice emerging out of the long nineteenth century. The chapter shows security's inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism. It then suggests that security can be seen as an achievable threshold/goal whose progress can be measured, or as an ongoing process that is never complete. Either way, security is a form of political mobilization that acts upon our worlds through the prism of threats and risks, creating conditions of possibility and impossibility. The chapter concludes that the ubiquity of security demands that we ask how it defines our relations with others and with ourselves in shaping socio-political orders. To ask ‘what is security?’ is ultimately to answer the question, ‘what does security do?’.
