Hollow Sovereignty and the Hollow Crown? Contested Governance and the Olympic Security Edifice

Abstract

In this chapter, Fussey and Coaffee assess the form, impact and lasting ‘legacy’ of security practices associated with hosting the 2012 Olympic Games in London. It examines imbrications of formal security plans, comprising state and private sector actors and agencies, with more indirect and informal securitising processes such as diverse territorially based regulatory regimes and the creation of ‘regenerated’ spaces that are hardened and insulated against the urban milieu in which they are situated. Mega–event security is often characterised as an exceptional exercise in terms of scale, scope and form, and considered variously through macro-theoretical lenses citing the assertion of overarching disciplinary, neoliberal, colonial corporatist and other interest–based aspirations. This chapter argues that whilst such explanations have much to offer, Olympic security practices comprise a multiplicity of ambitions, ordering processes and path dependencies that, as they converge on the Olympic city, do not necessarily cohere and are often in tension with one another. Such processes illuminate the complex and contested governance of Olympic security and also the multiple overt and subtle ways post–Olympics security legacies become embedded in the urban landscape.