Foucault's concepts and ideas (surveillance, discipline, governmentality, bio-power and discourse) have gained renewed interest in the post-9/11 environment.

Yet this renewed interest has emphasised the role of the state and state apparatuses in politics in contradiction to Foucault’s project of locating power below the state. This paper re-reads Foucault’s writings on the panopticon in order to intervene into contemporary surveillance studies and in doing so to offer a program for researching everyday security.