This book examines the politics of crime and the response to it in Potchefstroom, a small settler colonial city in South Africa. It draws on the city's everyday practices and experiences of physical and virtual security to offer local bottom-up insights into private security.

Gideon van Riet is a senior lecturer in political studies at North-West University in South Africa. His research focusses on security as it pertains to disasters and crime. Gideon's first monograph, The institutionalisation of disaster risk reduction: South Africa and neoliberal governmentality, was published by Routledge in 2017.

Introduction: Crime, Security and Politics Part 1: The Reopened Frontier and the Fortified Laager 1. Biopolitics and the Reopened Frontier 2. The Laager as a Collective Security Infrastructure 3. Infamous Spaces and the Constitutive Outside Part 2: The Echo Chamber Effect 4. The Community Policing Forum: The Talk Shop and the Circulator of Ideas 5. Trauma, Debate and the Death Drive: Discursive Entanglements of Crime Reporting in the Potchefstroom Herald 6. Private Security Companies and Securitisation Part 3: Everyday Practices 7. Private Security Operatives: The Typical and the Stereotypical 8. Surveillance in the Suburbs: The Pilot Project in Oewersig 9. The Cachet Park City Improvement District Concluding Analysis: Crime, Radical and Plural Democracy and Strategies of Construction