A rapid staccato pop of pistol fire echoed down the long dimly lit corridor. I was at the Senayan shooting range in central Jakarta to meet with senior players in Jakarta's booming private security industry. ‘We come here regularly to hone our skills, socialise and to meet and train clients’, shouted Pak Brata. Hailing from a military family, he is director of Agung Rahardja Manunggal Yahya, or PT ARMY, a security company specialising in VIP bodyguard services and security for ‘national vital objects’, or objek vital nasional, typically extractive industry facilities. A career security professional, he has done specialist training in Israel and the United States and accompanied clients to Somalia and Iraq. As a senior figure in the nationalist paramilitary organisation Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth), Brata is also responsible for coordinating its ‘core commandos’ (komando inti, KOTI), who undergo focused physical and ideological training and are tasked with protecting the organisation's leadership. As we attempted to talk over the din, a group of Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) executives clumsily shot at paper targets under the instruction of another security company director. ‘He's just finished providing briefings to BNI and Shangrila Hotel Group on 2024’, says Brata. ‘An election year means lots of business for us. Companies want contingency plans, like how to get staff to the airport if there's unrest, potential hotspots and risks to company assets.’ Noticing my interest in the executives’ bespoke gold-plated pistols being diligently cleaned by pistol range staff, he added ‘more and more corporate clients are carrying guns nowadays. The more they have, the less safe they feel’.

What does it mean to be secure in twenty-first century Jakarta? While for the city's bank executives it may mean access to a firearm and specialist bodyguard services, for others it can be a matter of securing a place to live free from risk of eviction. Security perceptions and needs depend upon who and where you are in the city. Rather than consisting of fixed properties, security is politically constructed and contested, conceptually and in practice; notions of security and risk are also central to how cities are planned, built, governed, inhabited and imagined (Zeiderman 2016).