Surveillance is an important governance technique of modern societies and is linked to particular governmental rationalities. This article examines the Swedish policy on camera surveillance, using the analytical framework of governmentality, the art of government, in advanced liberal societies as its theoretical framework. The focus is on three features that characterise current developments in the Swedish policy. These are labelled situational prevention, generalisation of distrust and the significance of the informed citizen. The study shows how prevention, i.e. situational prevention, was successfully introduced as a main rationale for monitoring only after the technology had been in place for some years. Monitoring as a form of general situational prevention, the congruent generalised distrust that affects the public and the Swedish requirement to inform citizens about cameras are viewed as elements of a governmental rationality based on the notion of the autonomous, free and self-responsible subject. Accordingly, the popular idea that camera surveillance is an indicator of an expanding security state must be modified.
This article reports on the results of a study on surveillance and plural policing in the Stockholm public transport system. More specifically, it analyses a SEK 500 million (EUR 55 million) investment called The Security Project, through which the Stockholm public transport authority seeks to address a perceived security deficit among its passengers. At its core, the Security Project was an investment in Sweden's largest CCTV system, and many other surveillance measures. The article describes how surveillance became central to addressing security concerns in the Stockholm public transport system. It applies a diachronic case study methodology and uses a framework that highlights centralisation of governance networks and normative cohesion as means to study plural policing and surveillance. The article addresses current debates on these topics, primarily Coaffee's and Duijnhoven's recent work on urban security. It aims to show how the roles of the police, private security and surveillance practices in general have been altered by the Security Project, and how the project produced contradictory effects through centralisation on the one hand, and a maintained (chaotic) diversity of policing on the other.