The cultural construction of safety and security: imaginaries, discourses and philosophies that shaped modern Europe

Cover -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Gemma Blok and Jan Oosterholt -- Section 1 Philosophical Conceptualisations of Safety -- 1 Security, Certainty, Trust -- Historical and Contemporary Aspects of the Concept of Safety -- Eddo Evink -- 2 Tolerance: A Safety Policy in Pierre Bayle's Thought -- Ana Alicia Carmona Aliaga -- 3 The Shackles of Freedom -- The Modern Philosophical Notion of Public Safety -- Tom Giesbers -- Section 2 Security Cultures in History -- 4 The Invention of Collective Security after 1815 -- Beatrice de Graaf -- 5 Criminal, Cosmopolitan, Commodified -- How Rotterdam's Interwar Amusement Street, the Schiedamsedijk, Became a Safe Mirror Image of Itself -- Vincent Baptist -- 6 Tourists, Dealers or Addicts -- Security Practices in Response to Open Drug Scenes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zurich, 1960-2000 -- Gemma Blok, Peter-Paul Bänzinger and Lisanne Walma -- Section 3 Narratives and Imaginaries of Safety -- 7 The 'Golden Age' Revisited -- Images and Notions of Safety in Insecure Times -- Nils Büttner -- 8 Safety as Nostalgia -- Infrastructural Breakdown in Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity (1938) -- Frederik Van Dam -- 9 Brace for Impact -- Spatial Responses to Terror in Belfast and Oslo -- Roos van Strien -- Section 4 Narratives and Imaginaries of Unsafety -- 10 Safe at Home? -- The Domestic Space in Early Modern Visual Culture -- Sigrid Ruby -- 11 The Transfer of Nineteenth-Century Representations of Unsafety -- A Dutch Adaptation of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris -- Jan Oosterholt -- 12 Feeling Lost in a Modernising World -- A Critique on Martha Nussbaum's Emotion Theory through an Analysis of Feelings of Unsafety in Magda Szabó's Iza's Ballad -- Femke Kok -- List of Illustrations.

This volume analyses cultural perceptions of safety and security that have shaped modern European societies. The articles present a wide range of topics, from feelings of unsafety generated by early modern fake news to safety issues related to twentieth-century drug use in public space. The volume demonstrates how 'safety' is not just a social or biological condition to pursue but also a historical and cultural construct. In philosophical terms, safety can be interpreted in different ways, referring to security, certainty or trust. What does feeling safe and thinking about a safe society mean to various groups of people over time? The articles in this volume are bound by their joint effort to take a constructionist approach to emotional expressions, artistic representations, literary narratives and political discourses of (un)safety and their impact on modern European society.