The Evolution of the Digital Garrison State

The “garrison state” is a political term introduced eight decades ago that continues to shape descriptions in policy debates, empirical research, and popular discourse of possible future societal and economic development. Proposed by American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell in 1941, the concept was intended as a provocative speculation and developmental construct that would clarify how societies might evolve under conditions of persistent insecurity (Lasswell, 1941). Today, the underlying logics of a “digital garrison state,” which prioritizes its resources, technological innovations, and decision-making to security above all else, appear to be increasingly current and operational – and worthy of closer consideration.

The core of Lasswell’s original argument was stark: modern societies could shift from the dominance of “specialists on bargaining” to the supremacy of “specialists on violence,” not through rupture but through a gradual reordering of priorities driven by fear. As a scholar, Lasswell worked across the social sciences and is considered the founder of the field of political psychology. He remains well-known for the breadth of his writing, which included studies of power, a communications model that emphasizes the importance of the channels used, and an early account of wartime propaganda (Lasswell, 1927/2025).

At the center of the societal shift toward a political-military elite was what Lasswell called the socialization of danger. Threat here becomes ambient and shared, and populations come to accept and even to demand the prioritization of security over competing values. As a result, authority centralizes, symbolic management intensifies, and economic life is subtly reorganized around preparedness. Lasswell nevertheless made equally clear that this shift was not inevitable. Rather, it was one possible trajectory among several, to be weighed rather than assumed.

That caution is essential, since contemporary discussions of a digital garrison state often move too quickly from emerging tendencies to systemic claims. The question is not whether elements of Lasswell’s construct are visible today (they are), but whether they cohere into a unified order or instead reflect a more uneven and contested transformation.

Revisiting the Concept: From Militarization to Securitization

Subsequent scholarship has reframed the garrison state less as a binary condition than as a spectrum. What matters is not formal military rule, for example, but the degree to which security considerations dominate decision-making across domains. Israeli political scientist Eyal Rubinson’s “garrison index” captures this variation, demonstrating that states differ significantly in how deeply security logics penetrate domestic and external policy (Rubinson, 2024).

The mechanisms driving this shift are also more complex than Lasswell’s original formulation might suggest. U.S. political scientists Stephen Walker and S. Ivy Lang’s late Cold War study of the “garrison state syndrome” in “the Third World” highlights how threat environments interact with institutional structures in contingent ways. Their research also acknowledges that professional military institutions or a civilian police state, in different contexts, could restrain or amplify the coercive tendencies of policymakers (Walker & Lang, 1988).

What distinguishes our contemporary moment, therefore, is not militarization alone but the expansion of securitization. Economic systems, technological infrastructures, and even everyday behaviors are increasingly framed by politicians and media through the lens of risk and survival. This expansion provides the bridge to the digital domain.

This expansion is visible not only in institutional practice but in language itself. In the United States, for example, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the attacks of September 11, 2001, integrated 22 separate governmental offcies or programs into a single Presidential cabinet-level department with the mission “to safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, n.d.). Doing so signaled the elevation of “security” into a master category through which a wide range of policy domains – immigration, infrastructure, public health, and even education – could be reframed.

Since the end of the Cold War, similar moves have been evident in Europe and elsewhere, where political and media discourse increasingly aggregates disparate risks under a common security rubric, from energy dependence to supply chains and digital platforms (Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1997). The cumulative effect of more and more issues being recoded as matters of security is that they become subject to exceptional treatment, reduced tolerance for trade-offs, and heightened executive discretion. Securitization thus comes to operate not only through budgets and institutions, but through the gradual redefinition of what counts as normal political and economic concerns.

The Digital Turn: Surveillance and the Integration of Civilian Life

The novelty of the present lies in the infrastructure through which securitization operates. Whereas Lasswell anticipated the integration of science and governance, contemporary systems embed surveillance and analysis in the fabric of everyday life. Financial transactions, location data, and communication patterns are continuously captured and rendered into analyzable forms, creating a pervasive informational substrate for both commercial and security purposes.

We should consequently attend to the deep historical roots of this integration. The postwar “warfare state,” as described by sociologist John Bellamy Foster and communications scholar Robert W. McChesney, relied on the close coupling of military demand, industrial production, and scientific research, producing a durable institutional nexus between state and market (Foster & McChesney, 2014). That nexus has since expanded into digital infrastructures that extend far beyond traditional defense domains.

Former Harvard Business School researcher Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism captures clearly a contemporary extension of this logic. Data extraction and behavioral prediction constitute a new regime of accumulation, producing what she calls “Big Other” – a distributed architecture of monitoring and control that reshapes power relations across society (Zuboff, 2015). As the comparative cases and table below illustrate, this infrastructure enables multiple configurations depending on how states, firms, and institutions interact.

Read the full article on Substack