The Future of Security
My second Reith Lecture, recorded in Berlin, hits Radio 4 at 9 today
Many thanks to all those of you who tuned into my first Reith Lecture on the Future of Security last week. And if you haven’t heard it yet, it will be available for time immemorial on BBC Sounds. The Reith Lectures are forever. Look on my works ye mighty… etc etc.
Or if you would prefer not to hear the sound of my voice you can read the lecture here.
My second lecture hits today (if you are reading this as soon as I send it out) at 9AM on Radio 4 and 11PM on Sunday, also on R4. Should you wish to further ruin your weekend you can also listen just after 7PM on BBC World Service. Or again on BBC Sounds or <media voice> wherever you get your podcasts.
I gave the lecture in the Hertie School in the centre of Berlin. The school was founded twenty years ago and is named after Hermann Tietz, one of the founders of the Jewish-owned Hertie department stores. The Tietz family were dispossessed in the early 1930s and their stores were ‘aryanized’. Postwar a foundation was created in the name of the family, which ultimately supports the policy school today.
I mention all of this because I gave the talk on November 9th - Schicksalstag - or day of destiny - a date encumbered with meaning in Germany. November 9th was of course Kristallnacht, the most famous night of anti-semitic looting, theft, murder and destruction in Nazi Germany, at least before the war. It feels apt to have given a talk on security - on the morbid dance of anarchy and tyranny - in a school founded in honour of one of the main Jewish businesses in Berlin in the 1930s.
November 9th is also remembered as the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A day when liberty conquered tyranny. And that is a core theme of the talk. Of the challenges that we in liberal democracies face as we combat tyranny at home and abroad. And of the responsibilities we have to treat our fellow humans with respect and kindness - not to get swept up in the mummifying blanket of a security state. As contemporary events in British immigration policy show, those challenges are very real. But dwarfed of course by the perils of insecurity in Ukraine, the Levant, and beyond.
I hope you enjoy the lecture and the wonderful questions from Jeremy Cliffe, John Kaempfner, and Musa Okwonga, among others.
If you are interested in more of my work on security, there’s a whole chapter on it in Why Politics Fails. I also wrote an academic book with Johannes Lindavll on the concept of Inward Conquest - states figuring out how to conquer the minds, bodies, and behaviour of their own citizens. That book has, inter alia, chapters on the origins of the modern police, prisons, and asylums.
And in other media updates, you can watch me on Politics Joe with the great Oli Dugmore here. This was a really fun conversation that covered both my lectures and the book. Peter Stanford wrote a very nice interview with me for the Telegraph about the lectures that you can also read here. I now am realising I really missed a trick by not telling him I was born in Stanford University Hospital. Ah well…
Anyways, enjoy the lecture and see you soon.