There comes a moment when reflection on security ceases to be a technical matter and inevitably returns to being a political one in the highest sense of the term. It is the moment when we realize that fear has taken the helm of public discourse, transforming itself from a legitimate emotion into the cornerstone of collective choices, from a signal to be understood into a tool to be used. This is not a neutral shift. Rather, it is a distortion that has progressively simplified the complexity of reality to the point of making it unrecognizable, offering easy answers to difficult questions and reducing security to an almost exclusively criminal dimension.
Within this simplification lies one of the deepest misunderstandings of the period we are living through: the idea that harsher penalties, the multiplication of criminal offenses, and the muscular visibility of public intervention can represent the predominant, if not exclusive, response to the demand for security. It is a reassuring illusion, because it offers immediacy, conveys determination, and generates consensus. But it is, precisely, an illusion. It addresses effects rather than causes, chases phenomena instead of governing them, and ultimately keeps pushing the point of equilibrium further ahead without ever reaching it.
The almost compulsive reliance on the penal lever is, in reality, the sign of a deeper difficulty: the inability to read security as a systemic issue. Security is never merely public order, nor simply the prevention or repression of crime. It is, above all, the quality of social relationships, the resilience of local communities, equitable access to opportunities, and the ability of institutions to be perceived as credible and fair. When these dimensions weaken, the penal response inevitably becomes overloaded with expectations it cannot sustain.
Within this framework, an increasingly instrumental use of statistics also fits. Numbers, which should serve as an antidote to fear, often become an integral part of its construction. Selected, emphasized, and sometimes bent to narrative needs, they end up confirming pre-established theses rather than illuminating reality. Thus, opposing representations of the same phenomenon alternate: permanent emergency when in opposition, reassuring normality when in government. In both cases, the result is the same: a gradual loss of trust in data, in the institutions that produce them, and ultimately in the very possibility of understanding what is happening.
The issue of immigration is perhaps the ground on which this dynamic appears most clearly. A structural, global, intrinsically complex phenomenon is systematically reduced to a matter of public order. Narratives are built around the contrast between “those who defend” and “those who let things happen,” scapegoats are identified, and definitive solutions are promised that reality, punctually, disproves. In this way, a problem that would require governance, vision, and integrated policies is transformed into an identity device, useful for generating consensus but incapable of producing lasting results.
It is here that the lever of fear reveals all its ambiguity. Because, if on the one hand it allows for immediate dividends, on the other it slowly erodes the democratic fabric. Fear, when it becomes the dominant political language, tends to place security and freedom in opposition, as if one could grow only at the expense of the other. This is a misleading and dangerous representation. There is no security without freedom, just as there is no freedom without security. The two dimensions are not alternatives, but complementary.
Recognizing this means accepting that another response is possible. A more complex response, certainly, less immediate on a communicative level, but infinitely more solid. A response that does not renounce enforcement and counteraction, but places them within a broader framework, made up of prevention, inclusion, the ability to read contexts, and to intervene before problems turn into emergencies.
This perspective implies a paradigm shift. It means moving from imposed security to shared security, from a vertical logic to a relational one. It means recognizing that security is built together: institutions, communities, territories, intermediary bodies. It is a process of co-creation of value, in which each actor is called upon to play their part, not by delegation but by responsibility.
Dialogue, in this sense, is not an accessory element, but an essential condition. It is not a matter of indulging in forms of naïveté or renouncing firmness when necessary. Rather, it is about building spaces for discussion in which fears can be understood, processed, and brought back to a manageable dimension. Only in this way is it possible to rebuild that relationship of trust between citizens and institutions that represents the true invisible infrastructure of security.
Ultimately, security is not a rock, something static and defined once and for all. It is a relationship. And like all relationships, it lives on balance, listening, and reciprocity. When this relationship cracks, no penal rule, however severe, is capable of restoring it.
Recovering this awareness means restoring security to its nature as a common good. It means removing it from ideological contest, propagandistic simplification, and the temptation to use it as a lever for consensus. Above all, it means reaffirming a principle that should be obvious, but which the age of fear has obscured: security is the condition of freedom, not its limit. It is what allows rights to be exercised, people to move, and communities to live without fear.
Defending oneself, therefore, is necessary. But defending oneself without losing oneself is the real challenge. A challenge that cannot be won through shortcuts, but through patience, expertise, and a vision capable of holding together order and justice, rules and inclusion, firmness and humanity. Only in this way can security return to what it must be: not a device of fear, but a promise of freedom.
Franco Gabrielli has recently published, with Carlo Bonini, Contro la paura. Manifesto per una sicurezza democratica (Feltrinelli, in Italian).
