Security Governance and the Politics of State Transformation: Moving From Description to Explanation

A rapidly growing, self-identified scholarly subfield on “Security Governance” has recently emerged. Its signal contribution has been to explicate the expansion of security governance beyond traditional defense multilateralism to include diverse actors, networked transnationally across multiple scales. However, this literature is predominantly descriptive and evaluative. Lacking an explanatory theory, it struggles to explain security governance outcomes convincingly. This article advances this body of literature by presenting an explanatory theoretical framework, which sees security governance as being produced through struggles over the appropriate scale of governance and the transformation of state apparatuses, shaped by specific state-society and political economy contexts. This framework is used to explain outcomes in the governance of money laundering and terrorist financing in the Asia-Pacific region and in Africa. Contrary to the expectations of Security Governance scholars that states in these regions generally fail to engage in security governance, the case studies illustrate that significant governance innovation has in fact occurred. This innovation is not the result of supranational multilateralization, but of the transformation and partial internationalization of domestic institutions– to an extent determined by local socio-political struggles over governance rescaling. Our framework thus accounts for real world outcomes; explains, rather than merely describes, the functional efficacy of security governance regimes; and enables normative assessment by identifying the winners and losers that emerge out of governance innovation.