Security governance in Europe: a return to system

The security governance literature has developed in four waves: the first is dedicated to matters of definition; the second to conceptual debate; the third to matters of application in the European setting and the fourth to how well the concept works in extra-European regions and at the global level. For all this effort, security governance as a concept remains problematic: it still has some way to go before it obtains clear definitional precision, conceptual clarity and a secure standing as concept in Security Studies. We address some of the theoretical and methodological difficulties common to the literature and argue that security governance has become overly preoccupied with agency and has thereby neglected structure. It has, in other words, obtained an actor-centered focus and so tended to conflate security governance as an analytical category with the specific actions of security actors. It has thus moved forward little in its ability to determine how and why security actors behave in the aggregate and whether that behavior reflects wider systemic properties. We thus ask in a third section whether it is worth returning to systemic thinking on security governance especially in the European context where the concept has had its most sophisticated application.