Securing the environment: From defense to resilience

This chapter argues that two different senses of financial security have taken a peculiar overlap in the government bond that critically transformed Western statehood. If security and finance converge in a common paradigm of crisis governance, security rationales and practices have also been said to be subject to financialisation. Security in the legal sense of collateral or pledge, or securities as the common term for stocks and bonds in financial discourse, seem to bear no or only distant reference to political understandings of security as protection or freedom from danger. Initially the security of public securities was contested repeatedly, and in turn both tested and transformed contractual relations of mutuality. The peculiar phenomenon of public credit refers to the gradual establishment of sovereign creditworthiness. The chapter considers the different aspects of liquidity, risk-free asset and safe haven status of sovereign debt.