The New Citizenship of the Risk and Surveillance Society - From a Citizenship of Hope to a Citizenship of Fear?

This paper considers the tensions between personal liberty and the use of closed circuit television in the surveillance of citizens. The growing acceptance and seeming inevitability of increased risk and uncertainty in social life helps to underwrite surveillance measures such as CCTV alongside the monitoring of credit card transactions, email traffic, electronic messaging and so on. Important in this is the transformation of the category of citizen from notions of civil, political and social citizenship with their emphasis on a fullness of rights and participation, to the brittle citizenship of the responsible, ‘new’ citizen of the risk society