Another review of human and social sciences and in particular on security? Did we really need it?
When Massimiliano Mancini talked to me about the Ethica Societas project, I had no doubts, just from the start, that it was an initiative for which it was worth giving one’s contribution. With this short paper I would like to recall the reasons and share some reflections.
The reality that surrounds us and with we have to deal with every day, has a feature that over the last few decades has become increasingly marked: complexity.
A pervading feature of all aspects of working and social life which is surely the consequence of an inevitable progress but enforce also evident distortions and new difficulties to interpreting the context in which we live and work in a careful and ever-changing way.
“Acquiring knowledge” should represent the strategic lever, but it is not a simple operation: there are many “distractors”, perhaps too many sources, individual ability in knowing how to select and understand what is truly useful and reliable is generally still poor.
The security management sector is not immune to the foregoing. The new regulations chase social changes at a speed that is difficult to sustain, much more when in the context comes unexpected emergencies (such as pandemic COVID-19), which in turn have generated dramatic changes, with respect to which have been necessary new regulations and new public safety management procedures.
But even before we found ourselves in this difficult pandemic situation, it had long been understood that to talk about safety it was necessary to field a whole series of apparently distant experiences and skills, but all equally involved in guaranteeing safe cities.
The concept of integrated security wanted to represent a response to the need to frame this issue from different perspectives, which were not only that of control and repression, calling into question social management, urban planning and anything else that could contribute to making communities less insecure. Complexity… as said before!
There are no predetermined solutions, there are no magic formulas or successful strategies to deal with the problems of urban security, everything must be contextualized and studied in reference to a scenario that is unique in its peculiarities.
And this is where the contribution of the dissemination of knowledge and the value that an editorial initiative such as that of Ethica Societas can take.
Making expert opinions on the most current issues available to operators, sharing experiences enhancing their transferability, supporting this process in close collaboration with universities and the world of research, to ensure that our work is not the result of individual choices but, rather, of evidence.
Not with the pretense of always suggesting the best thing, but with the possibility of increasing our awareness.
