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Paper short abstract:

In Denmark, the emic security concept of tryghed has become a politically hot potato. The paper focuses ethnographically on how the state employs tryghed as a register of security to define the citizens who deserve the security of assurance, and those who are deemed worthy of measures of deterrence.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021, 20 new local police stations opened in small Danish provincial towns. The establishment of these police stations occurred in the context of a broader political project of promoting tryghed - an emic concept of security/safety that is set aside from its closest English translations by evoking feelings of warmth, familiarity, proximity, trust, everyday well-being and predictability - not entirely unlike the now famously commercialized Danish notion of hygge. Focusing ethnographically on the establishment of one such police station as a specific form of state performance, the paper argues that rather than fighting crime, a main function of these police stations is to embody a particular state-sanctioned security ideal associated with a (nostalgic) vision of provincial small-scale social order. Conveying an idyllic image of the police as a friendly, jocular, and an integral part of their host communities, the local police stations arguably operate as a negative mirroring of how the state presents itself in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods (so-called ghettos or parallel societies) with large immigrant populations. These areas have been defined by politicians as hubs of utryghed (the negation of tryghed) and have consequently become the targets of fairly draconian law and order policies, e.g. stop-and-frisk zones and ‘double penalty’ laws. Against this backdrop, the paper suggests that the politics of tryghed is intimately linked to political definitions of the citizens who deserve the security of state assurance and, conversely, those that are deemed worthy of hardline measures of deterrence.