Private security in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom: A cross-national comparative analysis of late modern policy trends in a Continental European and Anglo-American context.

In the last few decades, Western countries have witnessed major transformations in the nature of domestic security provision; a development which has witnessed a rapid expansion of the private security industry as one of its most visible and significant trends. Whilst this phenomenon has led to increased theoretical sophistication in criminology, it is widely acknowledged that this has been characterized by an Anglo-American bias. However, in an understandable effort to counter this evolution, a recent wave in criminological scholarship has begun to overemphasize the contrast between Continental-European statist, and Anglo-American neoliberal models, of plural policing. This project claims that in their focus on the differences, the extant scholarship has overlooked analogous political and economic processes that have shaped the political agendas of state and market actors in similar ways in both Continental European and Anglo-American countries. By using a politically-oriented approach, in which the Advocacy Coalition Framework is applied as a conceptual tool to organize the empirical material, this study compares cross-national trends in private security policies in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom since 1980. In this way, it enables important gaps in knowledge, ones which currently hinder criminological understanding of longer-term policy developments in a Continental European and Anglo-American context, to be bridged.