In this article we engage with the promises and limits of the ‘Security and Development’ discourse. Using Cali as our case study, we show how initiatives associated with this discourse, instead of helping states move beyond insecurity, exclusion and low levels of development by strengthening social relations, official institutions and legal frameworks, end up producing, instead, a particular set of precarious institutional and human arrangements. We characterize this precarity as moving in the realm of ‘pettiness’: a characterization that for us suggests both the marginal kinds of solutions that ultimately form the core of Security and Development, and the flimsiness that has come to mark those institutional and human arrangements resulting from it. The result is a resilient liminality across the board and the continuation of insecurity.