We live in security-conscious days. Our political language and culture have become saturated by "security" and the related idea that we are living in an increasingly insecure world. This has generated more than its fair share of absurdities. Take the following two stories.

On 4 August, 1999, a flight from Atlanta to Turkey was prevented from taking off by the FBI. A huge security operation then ensued. All 241 passengers were forced to leave the plane and questioned; luggage was unloaded and matched to passengers; the plane was searched by humans and dogs; one man was detained, thought to be "a potential threat to national security". And the reason he was though to be a potential threat? He had paid for his ticket with cash.

The second story is from a few years later in the context of yet more stringent security measures as part of the global "war on terror". It concerns a woman arrested under the UK Prevention of Terrorism Act for walking on a public cycle path in the harbour area of Dundee. The official reason given for the arrest was that "the woman was in a secure area which forbids people walking". As such, she was "seen as a security risk". The authorities conceded that, had she been on a bike, then security would not have been threatened – it was a bike lane, after all.

Such stories are familiar enough, by now. They are indicative of the extent to which the world of security politics has reached absurd proportions: where once upon a time using a lot of cash in one transaction might have just seemed unusual, and walking on a cycle lane nothing other than a bit of a nuisance, these actions are now treated as "security threats". Reading all sorts of issues, problems, or concerns in terms of "security" has become the common way in which politics is performed. A group of farmers aiming to halt what it sees as a perceived decline in UK food production thinks nothing of calling itself Food Security Ltd, for example. Or the potential extinction of tigers sees the Wildlife Conservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Smithsonian National Zoological Park demand that "now more than ever, tigers need homeland security". The paradigm of security has come to shape our imaginations and social being. "Security consciousness" is the new dominant ideology; every day is Security Awareness Day.

It is easy to think that this excessive interest in security is being driven by the state in the war on terror, and in one sense it is. But it actually has a variety of strands and sources which stretch back well beyond September 2001. In a speech at the United Nations (UN) in 1993, for example, then US president Bill Clinton called for "a new understanding of the meaning and nature of national security", a call that was repeated by Russian president Boris Yeltsin at the time. International organizations developed the same line. The 1994 UN Human Development report encouraged "a new concept of human security" much broader than the older and narrower definition focused on military and territorial issues. The report invites us to move "from nuclear security to human security", with the latter incorporating "universal" concerns such as economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security.

Similar arguments have dominated debates within the European Union during the same period. Domestically, Tony Blair and his apparatchiks justified much of their reformist zeal on the grounds that the Labour Party’s core constituency is insecure and must be made to feel secure again. This language appeared in Blair’s speeches and essays prior to winning power and framed Labour policy thereafter. At the Labour Party Conference in September 2005, for example, the large backdrop to the speakers on the main stage stated: "Securing Britain’s Future". This was a continuation of the program for the 2005 election, which Labour leaders had decided would be fought on the terrain of security. From an increase in Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to the defeat of al-Qaeda, from the introduction of ID cards to a growth in the number of surveillance cameras, security was to be the dominant theme of Labour politics.

Academics and intellectuals have in part fed this set of debates around security, and have in part been driven by them. Sociology’s current grand thinkers have come to highlight the issue of insecurity in their accounts of what is variously described as "risk society", "reflexive modernity", and "postmodernity". They have discerned a number of practical and philosophical ways in which security—or a perceived lack of it—may be studied: for Anthony Giddens, existential anxiety is generated by the collapse of ontological security in the late modern age, while Zygmunt Bauman suggests that security is being sacrificed on the altar of ever-expanding individual freedom and liberty. Similarly, Ulrich Beck’s influential thesis about "risk society" depends heavily on the intrinsic connection drawn between risk and security – both the new global market and the planned and bureaucratically ordered society bring about insecurity on a wide scale, from job insecurity to global warming.

But the real thrust of the debate within academia has come from those working in the fields of international relations and political science. In particular, these disciplines have seen countless attempts to expand or broaden the concept of "security" along the lines suggested by the superpowers and international organizations.

Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde’s widely influential Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), for example, attempts to widen the security agenda by claiming security status for issues in the economic, environmental and societal sectors, as well as the more traditional military-political ones. Indeed, the question of how the concept of security can be expanded and the security agenda broadened has been the central debate within international relations and political science in the 1990s, with academics falling over themselves in their eagerness to announce how security might be defined and redefined, re-visioned and remapped, gendered and democratized. Some have asked whether there is perhaps too much security, some have sought its civilization, and not a day goes by without yet another declaration on how to balance it with liberty.

Now, there is no doubt that most of these thinkers consider that something important might be gained politically from rethinking security in these ways. For them, security must be the ground of politics. Yet it might just be that such demands and assumptions are in fact politically debilitating. Debilitating, that is, for any genuinely radical attempts to rethink politics and challenge power in the contemporary world.

Take "human security". It sounds much nicer than "national security", which reminds us too much of the violence embodied in the armed forces or the secrecy surrounding the security services. And it's much more interesting than "social security", which reminds us of the seemingly mundane world of national insurance contributions and benefits. But what does it mean? The United Nations tells us that human security has two aspects: "first, safety from chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression" and, second, "protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life – whether in homes, in jobs or in communities".

It is not hard to get people to agree with the first aspect: that the world would be a better place if people were "secure" from hunger, disease and repression. But to move from there to securing people from hurtful disruptions in daily life is a huge leap. Aren’t hurtful disruptions precisely a part of what constitutes a life? What would a life be without disruptions? What counts as disruption anyway? Leaps such as the one in question turn all social interaction into a question of security – life itself becomes "securitized". And, as we know, when things become securitized the state always steps in – after all, the state exists as the fundamental guardian of security.

But even the first point made by the United Nations is hardly unproblematic. The argument against hunger, for example, can be easily made without recourse to the concept of security. We can agree that unsatisfied hunger is a bad thing without framing it in terms of security. So, even the first dimension of human security securitizes something that does not need securitizing.

I make this point not to suggest that we need and incessant debate around what counts as a security issue. But nor is it to suggest that we take the path laid down by critical security studies (CSS). This school of thought argues that security has to be oriented around the notion of emancipation. Since security is the absence of threats, and emancipation is the freeing of people from human and physical constraints, CSS believes that security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. As Ken Booth, one of the key thinkers in CSS, puts it, "emancipation, not power or order, produces true security...Emancipation, theoretically, is security," he says, adding that this equation can be sustained empirically: "emancipation, empirically, is security." This seems to me to be as about as mistaken as one can possibly be about security. For a start, it is far closer to classical liberalism than it is to critical theory. But worse, in placing security at the heart of the idea of emancipation, it encourages the view that emancipatory politics and critical theory should be organized around the notion of security.

Rather than CSS and yet another vision of security, what is really needed is a critique of security. The starting point of such a critique is to recognize that all this talk about security simply manages to strip politics—real politics—out of human affairs. The more and more security becomes all-encompassing, the more and more everything else gets marginalised in the name of security. In particular, what get marginalised are the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end—as the political end—constitutes a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. Politics as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, and, most importantly, in which people might come to believe that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this.

Worse still, it removes politics while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve security, despite the fact it seems impossible to define what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is in this sense an anti-politics, dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human being.

I suggest that we need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more sectors to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimizes state intervention into yet more and more areas of our lives. To keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding more security—while hoping that this increased security doesn’t damage our liberty—is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics, virtually all of which are now founded on the idea of security.

This would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect of the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the sense that it helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word, not least in liberating us from the fetish of security.

What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognizing that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and insecurities that come with being human; it requires accepting that "securitizing" an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state. Security is often said to be the gift of the state; perhaps we ought to return the gift.