Samenvatting

Using the concept of chronocentrism, the doctrine that what is current must somehow be superior to what went on before, that ideas, scholars and scholarship inevitably become stale and discredited over time, the author argues the rise and attraction of nodal governance and nodal security fits the definition of chronocentrism. The recent ‘discovery’ of a multitude of (semi-)public agencies and private sector actors performing police functions neglect the fact that many of these agencies and actors have a long standing history (sometimes more than a century) and have been subject of many academic studies. Moreover, these studies are richer in their theoretical foundations because of the explanations they give for different functions, goals, interests, cultures and operational styles of public policing, administrative policing and private policing than much of the current language. In many ways nodal governance and nodal security are new labels for ongoing processes of gradual interweaving of different forms of policing. For this reason the use of these concepts is useful in two ways. First, for policy makers and practitioners. For them the new concepts seem to have a function as a motivational strategy. For instance, what was called increasing cooperation in the justice system (ketensamenwerking) and public-private cooperation in the eighties and nineties are revitalized using new labels. Second, nodal governance and nodal security, in the academic community ‘forces’ us to rethink the very notion of policing. Policing increasingly takes place in hybrid organizations and processes in which boundaries between public administration, public policing, regulatory agencies and private security are blurring.