The story of how Big Security took over our politics and private lives.

Security has dominated our politics and private lives, from the return of world wars to the rise of Ring doors. Drawing from the front lines of our paranoid world, anthropologist Ruben Andersson shows how security grew gigantic, why it fails to deliver on its promises and actually makes us significantly less safe, and how we are all complicit in security's harassment in our daily lives – and how we can all resist.

This remarkable work of narrative non-fiction is the culmination of decades of fearless research, as Andersson follows police directors in Swedish suburbs, infiltrates migrants in Mexico, settles with peacekeepers in Mali, and dines with arms traffickers in Paris. Across the world, our shared obsession with security is an act of retreat and a futile one, as we cannot secure our salvation behind high walls. True security lies only in an open, collective society with a strong social safety net and robust freedom of speech, where fear no longer controls us. Once we understand how security has imprisoned us, we can begin to free ourselves.