The first edition of this book was published in late 2011. As the reader can imagine, much has changed since then in the homeland security enterprise. Over the last six years or so, the world has seen the rise and fall of the so‐called Islamic State; a massive influx of migrants to Europe causing crises in the Schengen Area and European Union (EU) (and playing a role in precipitating the British decision to leave the EU); an epic natural disaster in Japan; an Ebola outbreak that moved significantly beyond the confines of previous outbreaks; group and individual terrorist attacks using bombs, firearms, knives, and motor vehicles; Russian and Chinese hacking and cyberespionage; major natural disasters in the United States; and a range of other homeland security challenges. These challenges and the natural evolution of laws and policies have necessitated the writing of a second edition to reflect many of these changes. This edition also delves into cybersecurity policy issues, an area that has been growing exponentially but was not touched on in the first edition.

I have also endeavored to make this book more useful as a guide, not only to students but also to those involved in the policymaking process, by including more sidebars in the chapters with cases, policy language, and other vignettes of information that may help generate policy ideas. Overall, while the book has been updated and I have brought in new content to make the book slightly more comprehensive, the previous chapter structure and format has been maintained.

This book is designed primarily as a textbook for students of the emerging academic and practitioner discipline of homeland security. While no universally accepted definition of homeland security exists at present (or is likely to ever exist), the introductory chapter of this book will posit a working definition around which the book’s chapters are organized. This book is not designed to be an introductory text for students of homeland security as there are a number of these. Instead, this book is designed to serve as a text and resource for a subfield within the discipline of homeland security, that of “Comparative Homeland Security.” This subfield is chiefly concerned with analyzing and understanding the homeland security policies followed outside the United States (homeland security is a quintessentially American concept, as will be explained in the Introduction to this book). Comparative Homeland Security accordingly mirrors the various subject areas within the broader field of homeland security, and hence this book will touch upon most (or all, depending on one’s definition of homeland security) of these issue‐areas.

This book has several flaws, and there is little point in trying to conceal them now as the reader will discover them soon enough. The first, and chief, flaw is a lack of comprehensiveness. This book does not even begin to scratch the surface of the subfield of Comparative Homeland Security. As will be noted in the Introduction to this book, the field of homeland security is extremely broad and covers issues as diverse as counterterrorism, law enforcement, emergency management and response, public health, strategic communications, and a host of other public policy issues. Adequate treatment of this topic solely within the American context would require, at a minimum, a shelf‐load of books, and doing so in the context of the handful of foreign countries addressed in this book would require several shelf‐loads of books. Accordingly, it is not the author’s intent to be comprehensive because comprehensiveness requires far more space than is available here. Moreover, aside from space issues, comprehensiveness is not really possible at this stage in the development of this subfield because only a small percentage of the information needed to address this issue in a truly thorough manner is publically accessible.

Researchers who focus on homeland security strategies and policies in the domestic American context often do not have access to the materials that they need because these are either classified or otherwise held close and not made publically available or, in some cases, are unwritten and can only be accessed through identifying the appropriate persons and obtaining their acquiescence to be interviewed. Nevertheless, a surprising amount of material is available in the public sphere as many organizations and agencies produce reports, analyses, strategy papers, and other types of documentation, and there is also a growing body of academic studies in the field. Consequently, while researchers of domestic homeland security policy will often come up empty when looking for documentation on which to base their research, they also enjoy an extensive and expanding pool of materials with which to work.

The researcher interested in exploring the homeland security policies of other nations, however, is in a position of comparative disadvantage. This is because not all countries of interest tend to follow the American approach of, by and large, making strategy and policy publically available as a way of ensuring governmental accountability to the public. Granted, materials produced by governmental agencies for public consumption are sanitized and always designed to portray the agency in question in as favorable a light as possible (many have photos of smiling agency personnel and members of the public embellishing the document). Nevertheless, much can still be learned from them if one “reads between the lines” and triangulates this information with data from other sources. In addition, academic studies and documents produced by various assessment entities (public and private) often provide a more critical take on policies. The culture of public accountability is quite strong in the United States and is shared by some countries of interest in this text including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and, in some cases, Germany, and consequently these countries offer greater access to information about policy. In other cases, such as Israel, France, and Italy, there is little of the culture of public accountability, and consequently far fewer materials are available to the public because there is less of a sense that the public has the “need to know.”

In addition to the absence of materials with respect to many countries, there is also a linguistic barrier to the comprehensive study of homeland security policies overseas. An all‐inclusive study of the publically available materials in the handful of countries dealt with in this book would require the researcher to be fluent not only in English but also in Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. Perhaps a few lucky (and brilliant!) individuals with this linguistic repertoire can be found somewhere, but the author is definitely not among them (having true command of only a paltry two of these), and thus some documentation could not be analyzed. Consequently, this is somewhat similar to the story of the man who is found attentively searching for his car keys underneath a streetlight in the middle of the night. When asked where he dropped the keys, he points to his car, shrouded in the darkness, down the street. When subsequently asked why he is searching for his car keys near the streetlight when he dropped them near his car, he replies: “because this is where the light is.”

A second flaw in this book has to do with the absence of a strong methodology for comparing policies and strategies across countries. Most works that deal with comparative analysis in fields and subfields such as comparative politics, comparative public health, comparative policing, etc., do not integrate the data and analyze it but rather lay out different policies (followed by different nations or jurisdictions within a nation) side by side – though this methodology does help increase understanding of how and why things are done in different contexts (such as countries) through comparing and contrasting. As this is an introductory text designed to introduce the reader to the subfield of Comparative Homeland Security, the goal here is not to produce a theoretical tome that will solve the problem of the absence of a good comparativist methodology that truly integrates data and analysis. Nevertheless, by breaking the book down by issue‐areas within homeland security and then looking at the approaches of different countries in those contexts, the author has attempted to at least take one step in the direction of some sort of integrative approach to comparing across countries. A true comparative study will have to await the development of a strong methodological tool.

A final flaw (and one would hope that this is, indeed, the final flaw) in this book is that some of the data provided to the reader may be inaccurate. This is chiefly for two reasons: Firstly, Comparative Homeland Security is a very dynamic field with homeland security laws, policies, and strategies overseas constantly evolving, and while the author has attempted to provide as much up‐to‐date information as possible, changes are constantly occurring and no book in this area can be 100% current. Secondly, policy and strategy, as expressed in documents and briefings, is not necessarily what really happens. In order to understand what really happens, a researcher has to have worked in the various areas within homeland security in a senior capacity (in order to have a good overall view of policy and strategy) in all of the countries touched upon in this book, and he/she needs to simultaneously continue working for all of these agencies in all of these countries to make sure that the knowledge that they have is indeed still relevant. Perhaps this is possible if, as some quantum mechanics physicists suggest, there are infinite parallel universes, but that is of no help.

There you have it, dear reader: A book with partial and, in some cases, dated information and the absence of a powerful methodological tool. Nevertheless, this book will provide you with a strong grounding and basic understanding of the emerging subdiscipline of Comparative Homeland Security. Since comprehensiveness is not an option, the focus here is on providing vignettes of information that are interesting and useful, and consequently each chapter touches on a different mix of countries and different sets of issues. Hopefully, this book will stimulate your interest in this field and encourage you to look outside your national borders (this book is written primarily for an American audience but will hopefully be of use to others as well) for answers to homeland security problems. The more policymakers and practitioners in different countries can learn from each other’s strategies and approaches, the greater will be the shared pool of knowledge, and this knowledge will ultimately make people safer. That is reason enough to study Comparative Homeland Security.