Introduction: Policing and Security Frontiers

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the idea of the ‘next frontier’ in criminology and in studies of policing and security. The book's understanding of the frontier theme has threefold, overlapping meanings. First, frontier means the edge and realms beyond conventional policing and security thinking and practice. Second, frontier refers to how these forms of policing and security are taken up by scholars in ways beyond or across clear-cut disciplinary boundaries. Third, the frontier has a specific meaning in colonial countries such as Canada and Australia, where state formation involved violence and assimilation targeting Indigenous people. Criminology should be pushed to the edge of its current understandings to theorise and examine the shifting landscapes of policing and security practice. When criminology arrives at the edge and adopts the notion of frontier, it reveals previously hidden or less elaborated insights about policing and security provision.