We try in this paper to tackle what David Held (2004: 166) calls ‘one of the principal political questions of our time’- namely, that of ‘how global public goods’ - in the present case policing and security - ‘can best be provided’. We want, in particular, to specify the ways in which the idea of the public interest may be conceptually reworked and institutionally relocated within today’s pluralized transnational security configuration.