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Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States
Abstract
In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as ‘security assemblages.’ Security assemblages move away from focusing on security formations per se, and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying and studying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As an approach to anthropological inquiry and theory, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We illustrate security assemblages through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter-extremism, in each case arriving at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of distinctions that we propose is intended as an aid to studying empirical situations, particularly of security, and, on another level, as a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice in every circumstance. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary US security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems.
... From the fear of crime to the spectre of terrorism, this branch of anthropology unpacks the narratives, practices, and policies that shape our collective sense of security. By peeling back the layers of everyday life, they uncover the subtle ways in which security measures seep into our interactions, our spaces, and our identities (Sullivan 2009;Samimian-Darsh & Stalcup, 2016). ...
... Through their narratives, they invite us to reconsider our assumptions about security, urging us to embrace a more holistic and culturally sensitive approach to safeguarding our world. Despite their foci, both sub-disciplines are not different from the main subfields and other sub-disciplines in their methods and core concerns (Sullivan 2009;Samimian-Darsh & Stalcup, 2016;Lucas, 2009Lucas, , 2010. ...
... The relevance of anthropology to national security cannot be overemphasised, as it offers unique insights and methodologies that contribute to understanding and addressing complex security challenges. Anthropology, as the study of human societies and cultures, provides valuable perspectives on the social, cultural, and behavioural dimensions of security issues, complementing traditional security approaches focused on military and strategic concerns (Sullivan 2009;Samimian-Darsh & Stalcup, 2016;Lucas, 2010). The question is: how does anthropology informs and enhances efforts to safeguard national security? ...
This paper explores the integration of anthropological perspectives into community engagement strategies to address Nigeria's security challenges. Over the past decades, Nigeria has faced multifaceted security threats stemming from dysfunctional governance, social inequalities, and ethnic and religious tensions. Traditional security approaches have proven insufficient, leading to a shift towards comprehensive, community-centered strategies. Drawing on anthropological insights, this paper examines the role of culture, social dynamics, and local knowledge in shaping security interventions. It highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity, participatory approaches, and conflict resolution mechanisms in fostering collaboration between security agencies and communities. Case studies, situated within the Nigerian context, illustrate the application of anthropological principles in community policing and counter-radicalization efforts. The paper concludes with policy recommendations to enhance community engagement, strengthen security governance, and promote sustainable peace and stability in Nigeria.
... Meanwhile, sociological, psychological, and anthropological research of security [9][10][11][12] show the currently prevailing trend of life securitization that involves the increased significance of external actors ensuring the security in the context of various threats and protection against them [9] (p. 282). ...
... 282). Under these conditions, security is understood and analyzed as a condition connected with the forces and processes of preserving and maintaining order in the society (security), thus being different from the personal perception of security (safety) [11]. ...
... The highest relevance of the "state" category in research publications can confirm the assumption about "securitization" of the safety discourse. In the anthropological research that set forward the idea of securitization [11], security involves maintaining the regulatory order in society via producing various threats and threat protection [9] (p. 282) by government order and control [10] (p. ...
This article is devoted to the statistical analysis of security and safety frequency in the context of categories connected with social institutions and personality features in research works from 2004–2019. Research was based on the following methods: quantitative analysis of safety frequency in the context with coded “categories” related to social institutions and personality features; analysis was conducted with computer-assisted content analysis QDA Miner Lite v. 1.4 and Fisher’s F-test. An analysis of 1157 works showed that the terms “security” and “safety” were quantitatively more frequent when used with concepts related to social institutions than with concepts related to personality features. In our opinion, this qualitative trend shows the prevailing significance of social aspects of security over its personal (psychological) traits for research analysis and practical social aspects. The priority usage of the terms “security” and “safety” can be related to the securitization of society, (i.e., to the increased role and significance of social ways of providing security and protection from threats), primarily with the help of external law-enforcing actors such as the state, police, and army. Securitization counterweights the development of social and psychological mechanisms of security—developing motivation for safe behavior, personal self-regulation, and self-production of security as an internal feeling of protection.
... By combining the governmentality with the neoliberal model, the state frees itself from the various responsibilities of maintaining its subjects, conferring on these subjects themselves the daily obligations of self-maintenance and self regulation 10 . Samimian-Darash & Stalcup 4 adds, as a result, local, private security groups proliferate and replace state security 4 . ...
... The fourth approach in the anthropology and security is security assemblages approach. It means security as an assemblage of forms of governance and power 4,11 . Deriving from Foucault's concepts of governmentality and the security apparatus, and on the methodology and ethical stance they were produced, it urges anthropologist to underscores the diversity of security forms of action: The particular ways that security works in relation to its subjects, individual, or populations. ...
... The hashtag that posted alongside memes aims to categorize social media posts that relevant to the subject. As the memes categorized in a single hashtag, every insinuation toward single candidate can be identified easily 4 . And this potentially leads to conflict between candidate supporters. ...
Since its inception in the 90s, social media become a primary means of communication today, and as the user base of social media expands over time, so does the threat and insecurity for its users. So much so it recognizes as one of the national threats in Indonesia. Using anthropo-logical approach, this article describes the current body of knowledge in the study of security from anthropological perspective first. And then we submit our results about social media usage among Indonesian teenagers especially when they tackle the issues related to the national security. In the end, we intend to show that anthropology as a methodology as well as concepts or theories can offer so much in the study of security.
... Not long afterwards, ethnographic work in security contexts was reflected at the theoretical level. Attempts were made to account for the diversity and hybridity of security actors and actor constellations by applying concepts such as "security assemblages, " "security blurs, " "private security, " and "twilight policing, " all of which directed the analytical gaze toward ambiguous and sometimes contradictory security practices (Diphoorn 2016;Diphoorn and Grassiani 2018;Grassiani and Diphoorn 2017;Higate and Utas 2017;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017). More recently, a revival of well-established anthropological concepts has been observed. ...
Starting from the ambivalence and contradiction of social categories at the margins, this introduction points out the potential of a perspective from and on the margins for a Critical Anthropology of Security. We conceptualize security from the margins as discourses and practices concerned with the social reproduction of marginalized actors, and security concepts and strategies used to negotiate, and establish notions of a “good life.” Security from the margins is characterized by the positionality, temporality, and (in)visibility of marginalized actors and security practices, which, taken seriously, illustrate the diversity of specific threats, practices, and concepts involved in increasingly complex (in)security situations. Marginalized security practices not only aim to minimize negative security risks but generate positive options that secure living conditions at the margins.
... Given the limitations of space, we restrict ourselves to anthropological work in this chapter. Similarly, while some military anthropology overlaps with the anthropology of security (Maguire et al. 2014;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017), in this chapter we focus on the armed forces. ...
The anthropology of militaries in industrial countries is a relatively young discipline, which has seen significant growth since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the “new wars.” The chapter focuses on the anthropological analysis of social and cultural concerns related to (and derived from) the armed forces, war, and the provision for national security. It charts the main clusters of issues anthropologists are engaged with and explains the unique contribution of this discipline through the following themes: militarization, fieldwork, military organization and units, gender, military families, veterans, and medical anthropology. This chapter concludes with a discussion of anthropology’s contribution to military education.
... As military interventionism finds new ground both at home and abroad (see Bélanger & Arroyo, 2016;Weizman, 2007), militarization and militarism securitize and segregate local lives and livelihoods, transforming culture, society and built environment in profound ways. One observes this in military-industrial enclaves like oil company compounds (Appel, 2019), tax-free manufacturing and export zones (Cowen, 2010(Cowen, , 2014Cross, 2014), occupied or contested territories with ever-unattainable human and physical security needs (Braverman, 2009;Bryant & Hatay, 2020;Navaro-Yashin, 2012;Ochs, 2011;Papadakis, 2005;Samimian-Darash & Rotem, 2018;Samimian-Darash & Stalcup, 2017), and during peace-keeping or conflict resolution missions (Coles, 2007;Ellison, 2018;Higate & Henry, 2009;Jeffrey, 2013;Pickering, 2007). In these and other bourgeoning 'securityscapes', the new security architecture demanded by global capitalism and its counterforces, may threaten people's agency to realize their democratic demands, irrespective of their position in the social hierarchy (Hartman et al., 2005;Weldes et al., 1999). ...
Over the last 3 decades, while ethnography has arguably become a popular and legitimate method to study geopolitics among geographers, anthropologists have increasingly turned towards geopolitics as a popular subject to investigate former and emergent empires as everyday phenom- ena. Yet, their efforts remain rather disjointed. Written by an anthropologist, this review essay aims to put these rather disjointed efforts into a programmatic conversation and think about how one might (re)calibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda. To that end, the essay first takes stock of the existing ethnographic knowledge of geopolitics through a review of selected works by geographers and anthropologists. Then, to help students and scholars of geopolitics from within these cognate disciplines move this engagement forward, the essay concludes by proposing the ‘cultures of geopolitical expertise’ as a productive avenue to recalibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda.
... From a focus on top-down securitization scholars have moved to study, often ethnographically, everyday acts and processes of securitization. Thus, scholars have increasingly begun to critically question concepts of security and securitization generally (Maguire et al., 2014;Grassiani, 2015, 2019;Gluck and Lowe, 2017;Neocleous and Rigakos, 2011), in specific geopolitical settings (El Dardiry and Hermezm, 2020), and in relation to the body (Higate, 2012;Maguire et al., 2014), race (Machold and Charrett, 2021;Ybarra, 2019), neoliberal global economy (Diphoorn and Grassiani, 2016;Grassiani, 2017), and especially border control and irregular migration (Andreas, 2000;Ben Ze'ev and Gazit, 2018;Bigo, 2011;De Genova, 2013;Fassin, 2011;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup, 2017). Moreover, there is a growing acknowledgment regarding the normative and ethical dimensions of securitization (Floyd, 2019;Nyman and Burke, 2016;Taureck, 2006) and its influence on social relations. ...
This introductory chapter to the monograph issue Weaponized Volunteering explicates and situates the theoretical and conceptual problems the collection addresses. It defines the concept of ‘weaponized volunteering’ and analyzes its importance for understanding the relations between contemporary trends of moralization and militarization or securitization. It does so by providing a brief genealogy of the concept of ‘volunteering’ and the rising public interest in it since the 1990s, with the upsurge of neoliberal transformations and a post-political public sphere. The introduction then continues to review changing ideas in the literature concerning civil–military relationships and also concerning the entanglement of what is considered civil and what falls under non-military ‘security’ domains. It then connects both themes to explain the value of the concept of ‘weaponized volunteering’. Finally, the introduction explores how the various articles in this monograph issue contribute to understanding how moralization and militarization, civic volunteerism, and securitization are increasingly entangled, and reinforce each other.
... In the anthropological literature, several scholars focus on how states, institutions, and industries make and deploy different types of security through border patrols, police, military, private security companies, and so forth (Blom Hansen 2006;Diphoorn 2017;Grassiani and Volinz 2016;Maguire and Fussey 2016;Møhl 2020;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017;Sausdal 2019). Here the line between state and non-state actors is often blurred, for instance when private security companies imitate or take on state roles. ...
Security measures take up more and more space in our cities. In parallel, the security industry is growing. To understand these developments, we must take a step back and unfold the rationales and theories that lie behind such security measures and their materiality, specifically in the security industry. This article uses the case of the newly developed counterterrorism industry in Copenhagen to unpack some of the general dynamics that enable growth in the security industry and an increase in security measures. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among security companies, architecture firms, the Municipality of Copenhagen, the national security service, and others, this article shows how theories about counterterrorism develop in an interplay between this diverse group of security actors. The article zooms in on a security company and an architecture firm, and their divergent approaches to counterterrorism measures, and shows how both develop in conflict with local city values and security‐skeptical actors. The two companies work hard to establish and promote theories not only about counterterrorism but also about what is best for the city and its citizens, which help legitimize their work in Copenhagen and shape public opinion on counterterrorism, and, ultimately, the materiality of the city.
... Sociologically, terrorism and counter-terrorism can be approached in terms of the longstanding intellectual traditions of crime and/or deviance and the control thereof (Deflem, 2015;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup, 2017;Shelley, 2014). As such, terrorism is conceptualized as a kind of collective violence and related forms of organized illegal activity that are guided in their motivation by political, religious, or otherwise ideological considerations. ...
This chapter provides an overview of the most important components and mechanisms of counter-terrorism responses, with a focus on relevant work that is planned and enacted by police agencies and its relation to political, military, and legal activities. With special consideration for developments since the terrorist attacks of September 11, it is shown how these various institutional levels act, interact, and co-exist despite their differing underlying logics in pursuing the fight against terrorism. Attention is particularly paid to global trends and cooperation among nations, in line with the international spread of terrorist collective violence.
... D'ailleurs, certaines définitions anthropologiques de la violence (étant instrumentale et expressive, et dont la légitimité sera toujours objet de débats) ne sont pas si éloignées des compréhensions dominantes du terrorisme, dont la spécificité se retrouve du même coup remise en question (Riches 1989). Plus généralement, le terrorisme peut se penser sous les prismes de la conflictualité (Levine 1961) ; de la sécurité et de la gouvernementalité, où il est à penser dans ses liens avec l'antiterrorisme et l'exercice du pouvoir (Goldstein 2010;Samimian-Darash et Stalcup 2016) ; voire à la lumière du tabou (Zulaika et Douglass 1996, 149), où le terrorisme équivaut à la rupture la plus inacceptable de l'interdit dans le discours politique contemporain. ...
Les articles de ce collectif sont basés sur les présentations effectuées
au sein du 2e Colloque Annuel du Département d'Anthropologie de
l'UdeM (CADA) en mars 2019 sur le thème de la transmission.
... Police training sessions parcel out how hate incidents might be sensed and leave behind visceral perceptions that remain outside a distribution that carefully guides reporting these incidents towards existing apparatuses of state and policing. In their recommendations, law-enforcement officers rely on the senses to draw and redraw boundaries of advisable actions (Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017). Playing out scenarios frames such senses as simultaneously already active, like an insect's antennae, and trainable, like the olfactory nerve of a hunting dog. ...
Seattle and its environs are home to more than eighty tech companies, which have added 780,000 new jobs between 2014 and 2019. Along with these jobs comes increased immigration, especially from India and China. Some of Seattle’s Eastside areas now rank among the most diverse in the nation, even while the Pacific Northwest bears a legacy of white supremacist agitation. This essay explores the relationship between the Eastside’s tech industry, migration, and what the Attorney General’s Office of Washington State calls “hate incidents”—verbal attacks and harassment against minorities that do not rise to the level of hate crimes. I show how forms of evidence about hate incidents circulate in Asian immigrant communities. Victims of these hate incidences track evidence of racial bias simultaneously through material evidence, such as dog poop left on front lawns, and through organizing sense impressions to recognize a shouted slur as racially motivated. This sensory evidence falls below what Jacques Rancière calls a particular distribution of the sensible. I call these lost impressions “the sensate,” to capture how the theory of the senses developed by Rancière and others moves too quickly from distribution to dissensus. Instead, the idea of the sensate tracks the ways in which immigrants align, distance themselves from, and register the larger technical and economic scenes in which their lives unfold.
... Goldstein (2010), for example, unpacks the 'security/rights conjuncture' (489) in his ground-breaking article, whereas Maguire et al. (2014) zoom in on different experiences of (in)security. Elsewhere, Samimian-Darash and Stalcup (2016) propose an assemblage approach to security, whereas Maguire and Low (2019), drawing on Gusterson (2004), propagate the idea of the 'securityscape'. The spatial reign also emerges in Low and Maguire's (2019) approach, as well as in Glück and Low's (2017) proposition for a 'sociospatial framework' to understanding security. ...
The anthropology of security is slowly developing into a substantial sub-discipline of anthropology, yet there are only a few works that elaborate on how the research on security is conducted, what ethical issues emerge in this process, and how this differs from research on other topics due to the sensitive, political, and highly controversial nature of security itself. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this scholarly debate by providing a reflexive account of some of our experiences in researching security across various cases and sites. More specifically, we aim to flesh out the ethical dimensions that, we argue, are inherent to any analysis of security. We do so by focusing on two issues, namely, how we do research (including methods and access to the field site) and how we can or are expected to share our research findings (including public engagement and access to data). By drawing from our own experiences, we aim to show that these are complex matters that underline the sensitive nature of security and call for further empirical and theoretical elaboration.
... In this sense, we have witnessed the birth of new logics, such as preparedness. This refers to a rationality of anticipatory action towards potential globalised risk (Collier 2008;Lakoff 2008;Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017). It conceptualises and formalises any future risk, either national or manmade, related to the security of people, the economy or national and international policy. ...
This article analyses drones as an upcoming device in the field of epidemiology. It is based on a research project which aims to track the variations in the forms of vigilance experienced by epidemiology in recent decades. After surveying approaches such as bioepidemiology and tele-epidemiology, we propose that the use of drones in this discipline entails the onset of a new era for surveillance and control, which may transform the very articulation of our societies; this is because surveillance is no longer conducted to monitor, much less to punish, rather it now aspires to create and manage the global circulation flows that determine our behaviours in real time.
... In a culture of fear and in risk society, the infiltration has already occurred, in that risk and fear occupy internal spaces, thereby blurring the boundaries between society and the threat to it. They are analogous to terrorists in the new age of the war on terrorism, living within the society that they aim to threaten (Samimian-Darash & Stalcup, 2017). This does not, however, dramatically change the objective of pandemic governance: to control or disable exterior threats, including those that have already made their way inside. ...
In April 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared influenza A H1N1 a public-health emergency of international concern. This event was especially significant for marking the first pandemic outbreak to fall under 2005’s new International Health Regulations, an ambitious binding agreement to regulate international health. Since then, other communicable diseases have provoked similar international responses, with Ebola and Zika among the latest examples. Each of them has occasioned scrutiny of the ability of national and international health organisations – the WHO among them – to handle health threats and emergencies situated at global level. Among the issues recurrently rearing their head amid controversy are uniformity in enforcement of international regulations across contexts, promotion of specific lines of research, rapid development of new drugs, the management of local and international health-care workers’ activities, and engagement with local populations. One of the main ways in which health organisations respond to the uncertainty generally associated with pandemic threats is through biopreparedness policies – policies that articulate response and resource management mechanisms before a pandemic event is declared or even before its characteristics are known. The thesis examines the discourses and practices of institutional and scientific actors, for greater understanding of how knowledge is constructed and later carried into implementation in such conditions of uncertainty.
The focus is placed on processes of boundary-making, categorisation, and identification. The analysis of how health and scientific institutions identify, categorise, and describe the various human and nonhuman actors involved in pandemic events employs theoretical tools from science and technology studies, Foucauldian approaches, and understandings of the more-than-human in the social sciences. These shed light on the boundaries, categories, and identities at play during pandemic processes as shared among the many humans, animals, and molecular forms of life involved in pandemic events. The approach of assemblage ethnography is engaged with as an aid to navigating digital and material networks of public health from an empirical perspective. Public documents, interviews with public-health professionals, and field visits linked with diverse international organisations are used in combination with items of scientific news and articles from various journals to illuminate how pandemic threats and emergencies unfold.
The empirical work suggests that knowledge-making in institutional and scientific settings always involves notions of threat and protection. In the material analysed, there is a tendency to identify and categorise a given actor as threatening, vulnerable (in need of protection), or expert (able to protect). This argument is unfolded in tandem with discussion of three, interconnected areas of focus in pandemic preparedness and response wherein boundaries are made: 1) the establishment of governmental stand-by networks, 2) knowledge-making and knowledge distribution practices, and 3) the conceptualisation and governance of threatening life.
Each of these areas connects with one of the three main lines of analytically grounded argument. Firstly, institutional boundaries are challenged in efforts to construct more prepared governmental networks that are able to protect societies from pandemic threats and emergencies. As these networks emerge mostly in a context of uncertain and virtual threats, they impose a need for threats’ identification and characterisation. Secondly, practices of making and distributing knowledge are productive in that they determine the boundaries between expert, vulnerable, and threatening assemblages, creating differentiated communities by regulating who can produce knowledge and who may access it. The third main area of discussion involves how, from a governmental perspective, certain life forms (both human and nonhuman) come to be identified as hybrid threats because of its sociotechnical interactions. Such hybridity is a key element for the design of pandemic governance and response measures. Accordingly, the way in which actors are categorised in terms of threat, vulnerability, and expertise is defined with regard to their engagement with elements such as space, technology, nationality, and gender.
The thesis concludes with discussion of three ways in which boundary-making, categorisation, and identification processes interact with pandemic preparedness and response: 1) by shedding light on the establishment of more-than-human modes of pandemic governance; 2) by drawing attention to the need for portable, permeable, and flexible boundaries between threat and protection; and 3) by considering how boundary-making reinforces intersectional inequalities in international health. These conclusions point to a need to incorporate, from both an academic and a policy perspective, alternative pandemic narratives that pay heed to the intersectional, changing, and situated definitions of threat and protection.
... Indeed, climate migration constitutes the latest object of the so-called development-security nexus-the post-Cold War collapse of distinctions between security, development, and humani-tarian measures. 6 Ethnographically engaging these assemblages that meld climate, security, and development proves critical in a political environment in which security offers a primary lens through which policy makers evaluate responses to and planning for climate change (Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2016). ...
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. My exploration of these projects is situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh, a space increasingly imagined as a ground zero of climate change. The projects discussed frame the borderlands as a site that reflects forward onto a multiplicity of (other) dystopian spaces to come. Their often puzzling architecture reveals a grim imagining of the future: one in which atomized resilient families remain rooted in place, facing climate chaos alone, assisted by development technology. In this way, these projects seek to mitigate against global anxiety about climate displacement by emplacing people—preventing them from migrating across borders increasingly imagined as the front lines of climate security. Yet at the same time, these projects speak a visual language that suggests they are as much about representing success at managing climate crisis to an audience elsewhere as they are to successfully stemming climate migration in a particular place. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the specific visions of time and space embedded in securitized framings of the future. In doing so, however, it also points toward counterimaginations and possibilities for life in the midst of ecological change. I thus conclude by contrasting climate heterodystopias with other projects that Bangladeshi peasants living in the borderlands are carrying out: projects that offer different ways of imagining the environment and life in the borderlands of Bangladesh.
(Resumen en español abajo) This thesis examines the recent expansion of wind energy projects into Mapuche lands in the province of Malleco in the South of Chile. It shows that when wind energy arrives on these lands, it reinforces existing property relations and the land tenure of large landowners and forestry companies, and increases the criminalization of competing land claims by Mapuche groups. It argues that this is possible because of the legal work that multinational energy companies undertake to legalize their operations. Methodologically, the thesis is based on twelve months of multifaceted ethnographic fieldwork in Chile, between the capital Santiago de Chile and Collipulli, a community in the heart of Wallmapu, the Mapuche ancestral territory. It follows two specific wind farm projects, the San Andrés Wind Farm and the Malleco Wind Farm, at different stages of development. The author used a strategy of investigative ethnography, combining research in notaries' archives with interviews and participant observation. Conceptually, this thesis considers how law facilitates the circulation of capital, combining Marxist work on the circulation of capital with an institutionalist attention to capital as legally coded through private legal instruments. It shows that for the process of profit maximization and investment to take place, corporations encode exchange relations for extended periods into the future, effectively locking in property relations and giving them priority over competing, democratizing concerns. Chapter one argues that property in Malleco is conditioned by histories of colonial and dictatorial dispossession that are cemented with the arrival of wind energy. Chapters two through four detail the process of legal coding of rights for green capital. Chapter two interrogates the politics of legal personhood through which corporations and financiers legalize their operations. This chapter argues that to understand what an energy project is from a legal perspective, it is useful to think of it as a bundle of property rights that are made transferable to distant actors through law. In chapter three, by following the coding of new land rights for the arrival of wind energy, which are contingent on the maintenance of the land tenancy of large landowners. In chapter four, by asking how power purchase agreements enable the circulation of electricity as a commodity. Taken together, these three chapters show that in order for energy companies to raise capital to build wind farms, they engage in a legal coding of the future that cements social relations over land and electrical infrastructure for decades into the future. 228 Chapters five and six both question the enforcement of contracts and the relationship between the political and the economic. Chapter five describes the public and private security arrangements that were put in place to secure the construction site of the Malleco wind farm. It shows that legal certainty for investors translated into a mobilization of the state's capacity for security, i.e. the suspension of its own rules. Chapter six asks how corporations mobilize legality to manage responsibility for the externalities of their operations. It does so by asking how two different deaths on the roads outside the wind farm are constructed as events. It argues that the legal nature of the corporation makes it possible for the corporation to manage its externalities. Taken together, this thesis draws attention to the tensions between the goals of the inherently future- oriented politics of energy transitions and the futures that are legally sanctioned by corporations and investors in the private contracts of energy companies. It argues that the latter forecloses democratic politics by cementing property relations far into the future.
Resumen
Esta tesis examina la reciente expansión de proyectos de energía eólica en tierras mapuches de la provincia de Malleco, en el sur de Chile. Muestra que cuando la energía eólica llega a estas tierras, refuerza las relaciones de propiedad existentes y la tenencia de la tierra de los grandes terratenientes y las empresas forestales, y aumenta la criminalización de las reivindicaciones territoriales en competencia por parte de los grupos mapuches. Sostiene que esto es posible gracias al trabajo jurídico que realizan las multinacionales de la energía para legalizar sus operaciones. Metodológicamente, la tesis se basa en doce meses de trabajo de campo etnográfico multifacético en Chile, entre la capital Santiago de Chile y Collipulli, una comunidad en el corazón del Wallmapu, el territorio ancestral mapuche. Sigue dos proyectos concretos de parques eólicos, el Parque Eólico San Andrés y el Parque Eólico Malleco, en diferentes fases de desarrollo. La autora utilizó una estrategia de etnografía investigativa, combinando la investigación en archivos notariales con entrevistas y observación participante. Desde el punto de vista conceptual, esta tesis examina cómo el derecho facilita la circulación del capital, combinando el trabajo marxista sobre la circulación del capital con una atención institucionalista al capital codificado legalmente a través de instrumentos jurídicos privados. Demuestra que para que el proceso de maximización de beneficios e inversión tenga lugar, las corporaciones codifican las relaciones de intercambio durante largos periodos de tiempo en el futuro, bloqueando de forma efectiva las relaciones de propiedad y dándoles prioridad sobre otros intereses competidores y democratizadores. El capítulo uno argumenta que la propiedad en Malleco está condicionada por historias de desposesión colonial y dictatorial que se cimentan con la llegada de la energía eólica. Los capítulos segundo a cuarto detallan el proceso de codificación legal de los derechos del capital verde. El capítulo dos cuestiona la política de la personalidad jurídica a través de la cual las empresas y los financieros legalizan sus operaciones. En este capítulo se argumenta que, para entender lo que es un proyecto energético desde una perspectiva jurídica, es útil considerarlo como un conjunto de derechos de propiedad que se hacen transferibles a actores distantes a través de la ley. En el capítulo tres, siguiendo la codificación de los nuevos derechos sobre la tierra para la llegada de la energía eólica, que están supeditados al mantenimiento de la tenencia de la tierra de los grandes terratenientes. En el capítulo cuarto, preguntándose cómo los contratos de compraventa de energía permiten la circulación de la electricidad como mercancía. En conjunto, estos tres capítulos muestran que, para que las empresas energéticas consigan capital para construir parques eólicos, participan en una codificación legal del futuro que consolida las relaciones sociales sobre la tierra y la infraestructura eléctrica durante décadas. Los capítulos cinco y seis cuestionan el cumplimiento de los contratos y la relación entre lo político y lo económico. El capítulo cinco describe los dispositivos de seguridad pública y privada que se pusieron en marcha para proteger las obras de construcción del parque eólico de Malleco. Muestra que la certeza jurídica para los inversionistas se tradujo en una movilización de la capacidad de seguridad del Estado, es decir, en la suspensión de sus propias normas. El capítulo seis se pregunta cómo las empresas movilizan la legalidad para gestionar la responsabilidad por las externalidades de sus operaciones. Para ello, se pregunta cómo se construyen como acontecimientos dos muertes diferentes en las carreteras fuera del parque eólico. Argumenta que la naturaleza legal de la empresa hace posible que ésta gestione sus externalidades. En conjunto, esta tesis llama la atención sobre las tensiones entre los objetivos de la política inherentemente orientada al futuro de las transiciones energéticas y los futuros sancionados legalmente por las corporaciones y los inversores en los contratos privados de las empresas energéticas. Sostiene que estos últimos excluyen la política democrática al cimentar las relaciones de propiedad en un futuro lejano.
In the twenty‐first century, blackouts have settled into a familiar sequence of events in the fully electrified world. After jolting publics into a sudden awareness of energy assemblages, they gradually disappear from public memory. This article is an exercise in dwelling on blackouts that have already begun to recede from public memory so as to better conceptualize ‘energy security’ as an object of anthropological critique. Examining expert reports and retrospective verbal accounts, I focus on the 2021 blackout of Texas and the 2015 nationwide blackout of Turkey. Drawing on my long‐term ethnographic work with the US electric grid, I punctuate these failures with an uneventful day at a high‐security operation building in New England. I show that the desire for security suffuses electricity assemblages, from secure buildings of operation, to governments securing passage for the electric current, to publics demanding uninterrupted electricity access. I argue that in grid experts’ imagination, energy futures hinge on securing high‐risk nodes while continually expanding grids so that potential failures might be better absorbed. This imagination, however, produces a false sense of security when contemporary threats to transmission are too wide‐ranging to isolate and will only be amplified by larger grids.
Global energy companies have regularly depended on state and private security for sustaining their operations, often with deadly consequences for union leaders, environmental defenders, and local communities. This article examines how these security arrangements are mutating amid the rapid expansion of renewable energy in Latin America. It uncovers how wind energy companies in Colombia rely on Indigenous knowledge, social networks, and legal norms to safeguard themselves in La Guajira, a border region reputed by outsiders as haunted by criminality and (il)legal practices. Through long‐term ethnographic research of corporate spaces, I argue that Wayúu lifeways are mobilized by green energy capital to craft a hybrid security apparatus that, though failure‐prone, is crucial for Colombia's low‐carbon future. This case reveals how corporate and Indigenous configurations of protection and risk prevention work in tandem across sites that are being demarcated for the energy transition and climate change mitigation in Latin America.
In the past decade, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, has witnessed an exponential growth in private security. In this article, we contribute to understandings of how security shapes urban life by focusing on what we call hospitality security , which takes place in elite spaces of residence and leisure such as high‐end neighborhoods, gated communities, and shopping malls. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that hospitality security is a specific urban formation that combines protection with care for spaces and clients. As such, it is not just another paid protection service, but is viewed as a necessary force for creating a desirable quality of life and fostering an ease of urban circulation that is seen as absent from public spaces due to high crime and ongoing eruptions of police violence. Hospitality security thus attempts to produce urban stability and predictability by maintaining harmony in residential and commercial environments and ensuring foreseeable social interactions while requiring security guards to uphold an unequal, racialized status quo.
Security has come to embody a self-evident and much sought-after kind of good, and has come to colonise imaginaries, debates, policies, and large swathes of what social life means in various corners of the world. Echoing postcolonial calls for decentring that which is taken for granted, my essay seeks to provincialise security in three distinct ways. Drawing on my research on the securitisation of the Roma in Italy, first, I trace the transformation of the term sicurezza from safety to security in a recent-historical perspective, showing how the notion morphed from bodily integrity to a much more blurred – though taken for granted – concept. Second, using a non-representational approach grounded in new materialism, I show that what hides beneath the ubiquitous talk of sicurezza surrounding the Roma nowadays are dimensions of materiality and sensoriality that construct insecurity in a relational and ever-shifting manner. Third, I privilege the perspective of the Roma in a decolonising move that questions their securitisation and the overall framing of Roma-related concerns as a security problem. Finally, I show the productivity of the topology framework in provincialising both security, and the western-centric theory production around it.
This chapter explores how the clash between security and health concerns has manifested through two case studies in the UK and considers the impact of security policies on the mental health of asylum seekers and refugees. The first case study is among asylum seekers in detention, while the second focuses on the asylum process and struggles for housing, employment, and access to healthcare experienced by forced migrants in their everyday lives. Using the UK as a pertinent example, this chapter highlights the mechanisms by which mental health problems among forced migrants are created and exacerbated by policies intended to prioritise security concerns, both worsening the mental health status for these persons and further impeding access to necessary mental health services. Ironically, this prioritisation of security issues seems to have provided neither health benefits nor benefits to security. The system is thus in need of major reform, using an intersectoral approach enshrined in the right to health.
Security-whether public or private-is a key tool for managing populations and integral for creating urban spaces. This paper examines how mall security practices in São Paulo work to create safe and clean worlds for customers, distinguishing it from an cityscape that is seen as violent, dangerous, and populated with criminals. Drawing on five months of ethnographic research and interviews with the security team of the “Rivertown” shopping center in São Paulo and various private security employees, we show how the mall is secured by means of a set of practices based on “hospitality security,” paying special attention to the key role that security guard behavior plays in this process.
Since 2015, Burkina Faso has faced a rapid deterioration of national security, giving rise to new Security Force Assistance (SFA) programmes. This article investigates a ‘peacebuilding’ SFA project that assists in integrating state security forces, civil society, self-defence groups called Koglweogo, and the general population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, which revealed social friction caused by the co-optation of the Koglweogo, the article examines the broad range of security practices and moralities within these ‘security assemblages’. Furthermore, by comparing how the different project participants try to make security work, the article challenges state-centred assumptions about vigilantism in Africa.
In 2013 activists in a Rio de Janeiro favela—an epicenter of the city's notorious police violence—called on the Brazilian state to fulfill their “right to public security.” They were anticipating a new policing program, known as “pacification,” in which the state would expand its efforts to “clean up” poor, racially stigmatized neighborhoods dominated by drug‐trafficking groups. The activists’ claim was at once a cry and a demand: a cry against discriminatory policing, state terror, and an unjustly divided city, and a demand for equality, peace, and the state provision of safety in their streets. This case shows that a critical anthropology of security can maintain a tension between security‐as‐violence and security‐as‐rights. In doing so, scholars can broaden the understanding of state security beyond repression and attend to how it instantiates various modes of sovereign power. [ security , policing , rights , activism , pacification , UPP , traffickers , favela , Brazil ]
This article provides an anthropological analysis of counterterrorism in Indonesia. In doing so, it draws on several complementary ideas which have shaped anthropological scholarship on security, addressing ‘states of exception’, ‘securitization’, ‘governmentality’, and ‘human security’. The article develops its analysis through the first ethnographic study of Indonesia’s national counterterrorism agency. Data comes from special access to the agency’s facilities and events as well as interviews with agency personnel and ex-terrorists. The article also argues that post-9/11 security agencies frequently embrace a distinctive ‘Muslim security strategy’ built upon several contestable assumptions. Hence, it is assumed that Islam poses extraordinary threats to physical safety, human rights, and national identity. These threats justify suspending ordinary laws, making enormous investments in security measures, and extending such measures across the globe. It is also assumed that measures to prevent threats should focus on combating radical Islamic ideas, especially in educational institutions and on the Internet.
This chapter explores how the clash between security and health concerns has manifested through two case studies in the UK and considers the impact of security policies on the mental health of asylum seekers and refugees. The first case study is among asylum seekers in detention, while the second focuses on the asylum process and struggles for housing, employment, and access to healthcare experienced by forced migrants in their everyday lives. Using the UK as a pertinent example, this chapter highlights the mechanisms by which mental health problems among forced migrants are created and exacerbated by policies intended to prioritise security concerns, both worsening the mental health status for these persons and further impeding access to necessary mental health services. Ironically, this prioritisation of security issues seems to have provided neither health benefits nor benefits to security. The system is thus in need of major reform, using an intersectoral approach enshrined in the right to health.
This article analyses the work of prevention within a specific social field: the families of prisoners. From this place of experience, it examines how prevention takes shape as a technology of government that guides practices, thoughts and ways of being. Within this relational movement, this article theorizes the concept of “subject of prevention” in order to explain how a framework of subjectivation emerges as an agent of moral discipline, which is conceived through a neoliberal grammar of state programs, translated into ordinary language by NGO workers and driven by the imperative to prevent
Studies on militarization and borders in South Asia often focus on zones of spectacular conflict, such as Kashmir, or partition violence in Punjab. This article examines the production of everyday policing in a zone of high surveillance that is not a conventional military “hot spot” in the region. The question of who or what constitutes the police force is as important as the question of what it does. The categories of police or law enforcer and those who are policed are malleable and contingent. Networks of secrecy, transparency, and trust are produced through a series of dialogic relationships between police, borderland residents, and other actors not conventionally taken to be a part of the security apparatus—for example, tourists, development agencies, and anthropologists. The article suggests that encounters between those on either side of the law are not only coercive, but shot through with shades of hospitality, reciprocity, and desire. It thus attempts to refigure wartime and peacetime as periods of continuum rather than opposition and repositions those who are inside and outside formal categories of law enforcement to suggest that the manner in which the border is policed may reflect the ways in which borderland populations are engaged quite actively with the question of security.
In this article, we examine statements by state officials and individuals from the military and the medical establishment regarding the provision of medical aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian Civil War. We argue discussions of this project have been characterized by three different discourses, each dominant at different times, which we classify as military, medical, and political-security. We propose “unintended securitization” to describe how the project moved from the military into the medical-civilian and then into the political sphere, and came to be seen as advancing the security interests of the Israeli state. We argue the relationship between humanitarianism and securitization seen here challenges the view that humanitarian apparatuses are often subordinated to military rationales by showing how securitization here emerged from the demilitarization of what was initially a military project.
This paper discusses the securitization of the discourse and policies framing the realities of young refugees in Africa. Drawing on an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School Securitization Theory, I argue that current tendencies to examine young refugees’ experiences of political violence and displacement through a security lens may actually increase, rather than mitigate the risk of radicalization. Findings discussed are the result of UNICEF-sponsored ethnographic fieldwork among displaced communities from Burundi and the Central African Republic.
The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. We define “extreme fieldwork” as a research design likely to yield the kinds of data that Price identifies as “Dual Use Anthropology.” The bulk of our essay is devoted to providing warrants for the claim that there are strong incentives to brand oneself as an “extreme” fieldworker – which may be the post-9/11 equivalent of chasing what Trouillot called the “savage slot.” We argue that for some topics in certain research settings, uncomfortably, the more care and effort one invests in ethnographic best practices, the more likely it is that the researcher will engage in behaviors that could be confused with spycraft.
Written by leading authorities from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America, this groundbreaking volume offers the first truly global and critical perspective on human security in the post 9/11 world. The collection offers unique interpretations on mainstream discourses on human security. © Giorgio Shani, Makoto Sato and Mustapha Kamal Pasha 2007. Individual chapters, their respective authors 2007. Foreword, A.G. McGrew 2007. All rights reserved.
Diverse, sometimes even contradictory concepts and practices of resilience have proliferated into a wide range of security policies. In introducing this special issue, we problematize and critically discuss how these forms of resilience change environments, create subjects, link temporalities, and redefine relations of security and insecurity. We show the increased attention - scholarly as well as political - given to resilience in recent times and provide a review of the state of critical security studies literature on resilience. We argue that to advance this discussion, resilience needs to be conceptualized and investigated in plural terms. We use temporalities and subjectivities as key analytical aspects to investigate the plural instantiations of resilience in actual political practice. These two issues - subjectivity and temporality - form the overall context for the special issue and are core themes for all the articles collected here.
Several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. In government inquiries and in the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. But for many police officers in the United States, they were moments of professional revelation, and also personally fraught. Officers replayed the incidents of contact, which lay bare the uncertainty of every encounter. In the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative subsequently launched, routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for discerning, identifying and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and related scholarship, this chapter discusses three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. “Prevention” arises from the roots of risk, where uncertainty is a function of lack of knowledge, while “preemption” deals with potential uncertainty by creating possibilities. In “anticipation,” suspicious behaviors are taken as the precursors of a threat that is still in virtual form; officers and intelligence analysts cultivate the capacity of discernment in order to detect suspicion, and capture these forerunners as they actualize. In so doing, they are constituted as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty.
Image 1: “Oklahoma State Highway Re-imagined.” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using Wikimedia image by Ks0stm (CC BY-SA 3 2013). Introduction This article is divided in three major parts. First a scenario, second its context, and third, an analysis. The text draws on ethnographic research on security practices in the United States among police and parts of the intelligence community from 2006 through to the beginning of 2014. Real names are used when the material is drawn from archival sources, while individuals who were interviewed during fieldwork are referred to by their position rank or title. For matters of fact not otherwise referenced, see the sources compiled on “The Complete 911 Timeline” at History Commons. First, a scenario. Oklahoma, 2001 It is 1 April 2001, in far western Oklahoma, warm beneath the late afternoon sun. Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins is about 80 kilometres from the border of Texas, watching trucks and cars speed along Interstate 40. The speed limit is around 110 kilometres per hour, and just then, his radar clocks a blue Toyota Corolla going 135 kph. The driver is not wearing a seatbelt. Trooper Parkins swung in behind the vehicle, and after a while signalled that the car should pull over. The driver was dark-haired and short; in Parkins’s memory, he spoke English without any problem. He asked the man to come sit in the patrol car while he did a series of routine checks—to see if the vehicle was stolen, if there were warrants out for his arrest, if his license was valid. Parkins said, “I visited with him a little bit but I just barely remember even having him in my car. You stop so many people that if […] you don't arrest them or anything […] you don't remember too much after a couple months” (Clay and Ellis). Nawaf Al Hazmi had a valid California driver’s license, with an address in San Diego, and the car’s registration had been legally transferred to him by his former roommate. Parkins’s inquiries to the National Crime Information Center returned no warnings, nor did anything seem odd in their interaction. So the officer wrote Al Hazmi two tickets totalling $138, one for speeding and one for failure to use a seat belt, and told him to be on his way. Al Hazmi, for his part, was crossing the country to a new apartment in a Virginia suburb of Washington, DC, and upon arrival he mailed the payment for his tickets to the county court clerk in Oklahoma. Over the next five months, he lived several places on the East Coast: going to the gym, making routine purchases, and taking a few trips that included Las Vegas and Florida. He had a couple more encounters with local law enforcement and these too were unremarkable. On 1 May 2001 he was mugged, and promptly notified the police, who documented the incident with his name and local address (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 139). At the end of June, having moved to New Jersey, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge, and officers again recorded his real name and details of the incident. In July, Khalid Al Mihdhar, the previous owner of the car, returned from abroad, and joined Al Hazmi in New Jersey. The two were boyhood friends, and they went together to a library several times to look up travel information, and then, with Al Hazmi’s younger brother Selem, to book their final flight. On 11 September, the three boarded American Airlines flight 77 as part of the Al Qaeda team that flew the mid-sized jet into the west façade of the Pentagon. They died along with the piloting hijacker, all the passengers, and 125 people on the ground. Theirs was one of four airplanes hijacked that day, one of which was crashed by passengers, the others into significant sites of American power, by men who had been living for varying lengths of time all but unnoticed in the United States. No one thought that Trooper Parkins, or the other officers with whom the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths, should have acted differently. The Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety himself commented that the trooper “did the right thing” at that April traffic stop. And yet, interviewed by a local newspaper in January of 2002, Parkins mused to the reporter “it's difficult sometimes to think back and go: 'What if you had known something else?'" (Clay and Ellis). Missed Opportunities Image 2: “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”. In fact, several of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Mohamed Atta, usually pointed to as the ringleader, was given a citation in Florida that spring of 2001 for driving without a license. When he missed his court date, a bench warrant was issued (Wall Street Journal). Perhaps the warrant was not flagged properly, however, since nothing happened when he was pulled over again, for speeding. In the government inquiries that followed attack, and in the press, these brushes with the law were “missed opportunities” to thwart the 9/11 plot (Kean and Hamilton, Report 353). Among a certain set of career law enforcement personnel, particularly those active in management and police associations, these missed opportunities were fraught with a sense of personal failure. Yet, in short order, they were to become a source of professional revelation. The scenarios—Trooper Parkins and Al Hazmi, other encounters in other states, the general fact that there had been chance meetings between police officers and the hijackers—were re-imagined in the aftermath of 9/11. Those moments were returned to and reversed, so that multiple potentialities could be seen, beyond or in addition to what had taken place. The deputy director of an intelligence fusion centre told me in an interview, “it is always a local cop who saw something” and he replayed how the incidents of contact had unfolded with the men. These scenarios offered a way to recapture the past. In the uncertainty of every encounter, whether a traffic stop or questioning someone taking photos of a landmark (and potential terrorist target), was also potential. Through a process of re-imagining, police encounters with the public became part of the government’s “national intelligence” strategy. Previously a division had been marked between foreign and domestic intelligence. While the phrase “national intelligence” had long been used, notably in National Intelligence Estimates, after 9/11 it became more significant. The overall director of the US intelligence community became the Director National Intelligence, for instance, and the cohesive term marked the way that increasingly diverse institutional components, types of data and forms of action were evolving to address the collection of data and intelligence production (McConnell). In a series of working groups mobilised by members of major police professional organisations, and funded by the US Department of Justice, career officers and representatives from federal agencies produced detailed recommendations and plans for involving police in the new Information Sharing Environment. Among the plans drawn up during this period was what would eventually come to be the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, built principally around the idea of encounters such as the one between Parkins and Al Hazmi. Map 1: Map of pilot sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment in 2010 (courtesy of the author; no longer available online). Map 2: Map of participating sites in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, as of 2014. In an interview, a fusion centre director who participated in this planning as well as its implementation, told me that his thought had been, “if we train state and local cops to understand pre-terrorism indicators, if we train them to be more curious, and to question more what they see,” this could feed into “a system where they could actually get that information to somebody where it matters.” In devising the reporting initiative, the working groups counter-actualised the scenarios of those encounters, and the kinds of larger plots to which they were understood to belong, in order to extract a set of concepts: categories of suspicious “activities” or “patterns of behaviour” corresponding to the phases of a terrorism event in the process of becoming (Deleuze, Negotiations). This conceptualisation of terrorism was standardised, so that it could be taught, and applied, in discerning and documenting the incidents comprising an event’s phases. In police officer training, the various suspicious behaviours were called “terrorism precursor activities” and were divided between criminal and non-criminal. “Functional Standards,” developed by the Los Angeles Police Department and then tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), served to code the observed behaviours for sharing (via compatible communication protocols) up the federal hierarchy and also horizontally between states and regions. In the popular parlance of videos made for the public by local police departments and DHS, which would come to populate the internet within a few years, these categories were “signs of terrorism,” more specifically: surveillance, eliciting information, testing security, and so on. Image 3: “The Seven Signs of Terrorism (sometimes eight).” CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. If the problem of 9/11 had been that the men who would become hijackers had gone unnoticed, the basic idea of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was to create a mechanism through which the eyes and ears of everyone could contribute to their detection. In this vein, “If You See Something, Say Something™” was a campaign that originated with the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was then licensed for use to DHS. The tips and leads such campaigns generated, together with the reports from officers on suspicious incidents that might have to do with terrorism, were coordinated in the Information Sharing Environment. Drawing on reports thus generated, the Federal Government would, in theory, communicate timely information on security threats to law enforcement so that they would be better able to discern the incidents to be reported. The cycle aimed to catch events in emergence, in a distinctively anticipatory strategy of counterterrorism (Stalcup). Re-imagination A curious fact emerges from this history, and it is key to understanding how this initiative developed. That is, there was nothing suspicious in the encounters. The soon-to-be terrorists’ licenses were up-to-date, the cars were legal, they were not nervous. Even Mohamed Atta’s warrant would have resulted in nothing more than a fine. It is not self-evident, given these facts, how a governmental technology came to be designed from these scenarios. How––if nothing seemed of immediate concern, if there had been nothing suspicious to discern––did an intelligence strategy come to be assembled around such encounters? Evidently, strident demands were made after the events of 9/11 to know, “what went wrong?” Policies were crafted and implemented according to the answers given: it was too easy to obtain identification, or to enter and stay in the country, or to buy airplane tickets and fly. But the trooper’s question, the reader will recall, was somewhat different. He had said, “It’s difficult sometimes to think back and go: ‘What if you had known something else?’” To ask “what if you had known something else?” is also to ask what else might have been. Janet Roitman shows that identifying a crisis tends to implicate precisely the question of what went wrong. Crisis, and its critique, take up history as a series of right and wrong turns, bad choices made between existing dichotomies (90): liberty-security, security-privacy, ordinary-suspicious. It is to say, what were the possibilities and how could we have selected the correct one? Such questions seek to retrospectively uncover latencies—systemic or structural, human error or a moral lapse (71)—but they ask of those latencies what false understanding of the enemy, of threat, of priorities, allowed a terrible thing to happen. “What if…?” instead turns to the virtuality hidden in history, through which missed opportunities can be re-imagined. Image 4: “The Cholmondeley Sisters and Their Swaddled Babies.” Anonymous, c. 1600-1610 (British School, 17th century); Deleuze and Parnet (150). CC BY-SA 4.0 2015 by author, using materials in the public domain. Gilles Deleuze, speaking with Claire Parnet, says, “memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object” (150). Re-imagined scenarios take up the potential of memory, so that as the trooper’s traffic stop was revisited, it also became a way of imagining what else might have been. As Immanuel Kant, among others, points out, “the productive power of imagination is […] not exactly creative, for it is not capable of producing a sense representation that was never given to our faculty of sense; one can always furnish evidence of the material of its ideas” (61). The “memory” of these encounters provided the material for re-imagining them, and thereby re-virtualising history. This was different than other governmental responses, such as examining past events in order to assess the probable risk of their repetition, or drawing on past events to imagine future scenarios, for use in exercises that identify vulnerabilities and remedy deficiencies (Anderson). Re-imagining scenarios of police-hijacker encounters through the question of “what if?” evoked what Erin Manning calls “a certain array of recognizable elastic points” (39), through which options for other movements were invented. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative’s architects instrumentalised such moments as they designed new governmental entities and programs to anticipate terrorism. For each element of the encounter, an aspect of the initiative was developed: training, functional standards, a way to (hypothetically) get real-time information about threats. Suspicion was identified as a key affect, one which, if cultivated, could offer a way to effectively deal not with binary right or wrong possibilities, but with the potential which lies nestled in uncertainty. The “signs of terrorism” (that is, categories of “terrorism precursor activities”) served to maximise receptivity to encounters. Indeed, it can apparently create an oversensitivity, manifested, for example, in police surveillance of innocent people exercising their right to assemble (Madigan), or the confiscation of photographers’s equipment (Simon). “What went wrong?” and “what if?” were different interrogations of the same pre-9/11 incidents. The questions are of course intimately related. Moments where something went wrong are when one is likely to ask, what else might have been known? Moreover, what else might have been? The answers to each question informed and shaped the other, as re-imagined scenarios became the means of extracting categories of suspicious activities and patterns of behaviour that comprise the phases of an event in becoming. Conclusion The 9/11 Commission, after two years of investigation into the causes of the disastrous day, reported that “the most important failure was one of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton, Summary). The iconic images of 9/11––such as airplanes being flown into symbols of American power––already existed, in guises ranging from fictive thrillers to the infamous FBI field memo sent to headquarters on Arab men learning to fly, but not land. In 1974 there had already been an actual (failed) attempt to steal a plane and kill the president by crashing it into the White House (Kean and Hamilton, Report Ch11 n21). The threats had been imagined, as Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen put it, but not how to govern them, and because the ways to address those threats had been not imagined, they were discounted as matters for intervention (29). O’Malley and Bougen argue that one effect of 9/11, and the general rise of incalculable insecurities, was to make it necessary for the “merely imaginable” to become governable. Images of threats from the mundane to the extreme had to be conjured, and then imagination applied again, to devise ways to render them amenable to calculation, minimisation or elimination. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, the Government must bureaucratise imagination. There is a sense in which this led to more of the same. Re-imagining the early encounters reinforced expectations for officers to do what they already do, that is, to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviours. Yet, the images of threat brought forth, in their mixing of memory and an elastic “almost,” generated their own momentum and distinctive demands. Existing capacities, such as suspicion, were re-shaped and elaborated into specific forms of security governance. The question of “what if?” and the scenarios of police-hijacker encounter were particularly potent equipment for this re-imagining of history and its re-virtualisation. References Anderson, Ben. “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies.” Progress in Human Geography 34.6 (2010): 777-98. Clay, Nolan, and Randy Ellis. “Terrorist Ticketed Last Year on I-40.” NewsOK, 20 Jan. 2002. 25 Nov. 2014 ‹http://newsok.com/article/2779124›. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia UP 2007 [1977]. Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Hijackers Timeline (Redacted) Part 01 of 02.” Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates. 2003. 18 Apr. 2014 ‹https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11%20Commission%20Report/9-11-chronology-part-01-of-02›. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Exec.htm›. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee Hamilton. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. McConnell, Mike. “Overhauling Intelligence.” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2007. Madigan, Nick. “Spying Uncovered.” Baltimore Sun 18 Jul. 2008. 25 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-te.md.spy18jul18-story.html›. Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2009. O’Malley, P., and P. Bougen. “Imaginable Insecurities: Imagination, Routinisation and the Government of Uncertainty post 9/11.” Imaginary Penalities. Ed. Pat Carlen. Cullompton, UK: Willan, 2008.Roitman, Janet. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. Simon, Stephanie. “Suspicious Encounters: Ordinary Preemption and the Securitization of Photography.” Security Dialogue 43.2 (2012): 157-73. Stalcup, Meg. “Policing Uncertainty: On Suspicious Activity Reporting.” Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases. Eds. Limor Saminian-Darash and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. 69-87. Wall Street Journal. “A Careful Sequence of Mundane Dealings Sows a Day of Bloody Terror for Hijackers.” 16 Oct. 2001.
List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Anthropology with an Accent PART ONE: The Talk of Crime 1. Talking of Crime and Ordering the World Crime as a Disorganizing Experience and an Organizing Symbol Violence and Signification From Progress to Economic Crisis, from Authoritarianism to Democracy 2. Crisis, Criminals, and the Spread of Evil Limits to Modernization Going Down Socially and Despising the Poor The Experiences of Violence Dilemmas of Classification and Discrimination Evil and Authority PART TWO: Violent Crime and the Failure of the Rule of Law 3. The Increase in Violent Crime Tailoring the Statistics Crime Trends, 1973-1996 Looking for Explanations 4. The Police: A Long History of Abuses A Critique of the Incomplete Modernity Model Organization of the Police Forces A Tradition of Transgressions 5. Police Violence under Democracy Escalating Police Violence Promoting a "Tough" Police The Massacre at the Casa de Detencao The Police from the Citizens' Point of View Security as a Private Matter The Cycle of Violence PART THREE: Urban Segregation, Fortified Enclaves, and Public Space 6. Sao Paulo: Three Patterns of Spatial Segregation The Concentrated City of Early Industrialization Center-Periphery: The Dispersed City Proximity and Walls in the 198s and 199s 7. Fortified Enclaves: Building Up Walls and Creating a New Private Order Private Worlds for the Elite From Corticos to Luxury Enclaves A Total Way of Life: Advertising Residential Enclaves for the Rich Keeping Order inside the Walls Resisting the Enclaves An Aesthetic of Security 8. The Implosion of Modern Public Life The Modern Ideal of Public Space and City Life Garden City and Modernism: The Lineage of the Fortified Enclave Street Life: Incivility and Aggression Experiencing the Public The Neo-international Style: Sao Paulo and Los Angeles Contradictory Public Space PART FOUR: Violence, Civil Rights, and the Body 9. Violence, the Unbounded Body, and the Disregard for Rights in Brazilian Democracy Human Rights as "Privileges for Bandits" Debating Capital Punishment Punishment as Private and Painful Vengeance Body and Rights Appendix Notes References Index
Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety and bioterrorism, which are targeted by similar policies and solutions. The cases, nevertheless, differ. In the United States, biosecurity is contextualized in the dynamics between science and society, and apprehension about research with dangerous pathogens focuses on the social risks and benefits of such research. In Israel, biosecurity is contextualized in the dynamics between science and the state and hinges on whether and how far the state should restrict scientific freedom. In view of this difference, the authors advocate the development of a nuanced concept of biosecurity capable of describing and explaining local permutations. They suggest reconceptualizing biosecurity as a boundary object that mediates between competing domains and that takes variable form in efforts to resolve the problem of securing life.
To what extent are citizens of the United States affected by and entangled in the issue of national security? In more ways than one could ever imagine is Joseph Masco’s answer to this question in his new book, which examines the creation and promotion of a national security state in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. He uses a comparative lens to examine the War on Terror of the contemporary moment in relation to the Cold War. Instead of a list of similarities and differences, Masco’s robust and historically rigorous comparison yields a deep understanding of the evolution of U.S. hegemony in the long postwar era and into the twenty-first century. He not only traces the origins of the counterterrorist security apparatus to the nuclear revolution of the Cold War era, but also elucidates the character of the counterterrorist state as a repetition with variation from the countercommunist state. And in Masco’s study, the variations are just as significant as the repetitions, as he persistently and persuasively draws readers’ attention to the remarkable expansion of state influence in pushing the idea of preemptive war on its citizens and the changed temporality of war in the perennial military readiness of the War on Terror.
While each chapter reveals fascinating information and analyses on various dimensions of national security—some more obvious, like the public campaigns on the nuclear threat or the state codification and guarding of sensitive information (in this case, “sensitive but unclassified” information) in chapters one and three, and some less obvious like climate change in chapter two—the most instructive element of the book is its consistent illustration of what Masco calls “national security affect” (9) and its various forms. His attention to how national security in the second half of the twentieth century turns on the state’s ability to educate its citizen-subjects on the appropriate feelings of terror, shock, and pain and to mobilize such feelings in accordance with the state objectives of security illuminates the cultural work of affect in a democratic society that is given to, as Masco calls it, governance through terror (21). His formalist awareness results in coherent and perceptive discussions about a wide range of rhetorics of national security, including what he calls “biosecurity noir,” his term for the scripts of official efforts to predict and preempt biosecurity threats. In its emphasis on affect, Masco’s discussion of feelings as “a new national project” (17) in the post–1945 national security state calls to mind Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If the latter can be read as the affective interpellation of the bourgeois subject, Masco’s discussion of national security affect queries “the techniques of emotional management” (26) for a new kind of militarized liberal democratic subject in the continuum of the national security state from the Cold War to the War on Terror. His project is, as he claims, “ultimately a consideration of American self-fashioning through terror” (42) in this period.
In the field of Cold War studies, Masco’s book can be read alongside works that compare contemporary U.S. military interventions in the Middle East to Cold War-era interventions in Asia, such as Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young’s edited volume, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, or studies on the culture of contemporary U.S. militarism, such as Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism. These works prompt readers to reexamine the very definition of “post-Cold War” and to view the Cold War era and the post-Cold War era not as discrete historical periods, but as intermeshed systems that continuously call for a critical scrutiny of U.S. military hegemony. Additionally, Masco’s study connects the discourse of policies with the experiences of the people these policies influence. Micro-effects of macro-level decisions can be seen throughout Masco’s study. As the anthropologist Heonik Kwon outlines in The Other Cold War, Cold War Studies is increasingly tuning into the everyday experiences of people who have been affected by the balance of terror. From this perspective, Masco’s study seems to be a good example of what the effects...
The chapter by Gros is intended to familiarize the reader with the idea that security has functioned in four different ways in the West, from the “spiritual” security of Hellenism to the “imperial” security in the medieval social imaginary, from the early modern “state” security to our current “biopolitical” or “human” form of security. Foucault, according to Gros, thinks a new form of security that works through networks of communication flows and where security is brought by the generalized function of policing the circulation of communication, commodities, and persons which are in turn essential to capitalist relations of exchange and production.
In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining cutting-edge practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. Taking up topics that include bioethics, anger and competition among molecular biologists, the lessons of the Drosophila genome, the nature of ethnographic observation in radically new settings, and the moral landscape shared by scientists and anthropologists, Rabinow shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates. By turning abstract philosophical problems into real-world explorations and offering original insights, Marking Time is a landmark contribution to the continuing re-invention of anthropology and the human sciences.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In Israel, gates, fences, and walls encircle public spaces while guards scrutinize, inspect, and interrogate. With a population constantly aware of the possibility of suicide bombings, Israel is defined by its culture of security. Security and Suspicion is a closely drawn ethnographic study of the way Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. Observing security concerns through an anthropological lens, Juliana Ochs investigates the relationship between perceptions of danger and the political strategies of the state. Ochs argues that everyday security practices create exceptional states of civilian alertness that perpetuate-rather than mitigate-national fear and ongoing violence. In Israeli cities, customers entering gated urban cafes open their handbags for armed security guards and parents circumnavigate feared neighborhoods to deliver their children safely to school. Suspicious objects appear to be everywhere, as Israelis internalize the state's vigilance for signs of potential suicide bombers. Fear and suspicion not only permeate political rhetoric, writes Ochs, but also condition how people see, the way they move, and the way they relate to Palestinians. Ochs reveals that in Israel everyday practices of security-in the home, on commutes to work, or in cafés and restaurants-are as much a part of conflict as soldiers and military checkpoints. Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, Security and Suspicion charts a new approach to issues of security while contributing to our understanding of the subtle dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book offers a way to understand why security propagates the very fears and suspicions it is supposed to reduce. Copyright
Suffering and Sentiment examines the cultural and personal experiences of chronic and acute pain sufferers in a richly described account of everyday beliefs, values, and practices on the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. C. Jason Throop provides a vivid sense of Yapese life as he explores the local systems of knowledge, morality, and practice that pertain to experiencing and expressing pain. In so doing, Throop investigates the ways in which sensory experiences like pain can be given meaningful coherence in the context of an individual's culturally constituted existence. In addition to examining the extent to which local understandings of pain's characteristics are personalized by individual sufferers, the book sheds important new light on how pain is implicated in the fashioning of particular Yapese understandings of ethical subjectivity and right action.
The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape-northern New Mexico's Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispano addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its heroin problem as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. Lyrically evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call for a new ethics of care.
In this second of his two-part article, the author analyzes the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long-term human survival.
In this two-part article, explored are the many funded programmes by which security agencies and private companies mine ‘big data’ and attempt to measure the sociocultural and psychological states of whole populations. How is failure or success measured? What kinds of new institutions/practices might these give rise to? Part 1 ‘The Pentagon's quest for a “social radar”’, published in this issue, comes to terms with today's many sociocultural modelling and forecasting efforts, looks in detail at one company in particular, and ends up reviewing the role of anthropologists in their development and critique. Part 2 ‘“Big data”, algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency’, to be published in a future issue, will analyze the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long-term human survival.
Introduction 1 Big Stories and the Stories Behind the Stories 2 Critical Code-Switching and the State of Unexception 3 "Today They Rob You and They Kill You" 4 Adventure Time in San Salvador 5 Democratic Disenchantment 6 Unknowing the Other Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
This article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discourses of resilience. This article charts the emergence and proliferation of security-driven resilience logics, deployed at different spatial scales, which exist in tension with each other. We exemplify such tensions in practice through a detailed case study from Birmingham, UK: ‘Project Champion’ an attempt to install over 200 high-resolution surveillance cameras, often invisibly, around neighbourhoods with a predominantly Muslim population. Here, practices of security-driven resilience came into conflict with other policy priorities focused upon community-centred social cohesion, posing a series of questions about social control, surveillance and the ability of national agencies to construct community resilience in local areas amidst state attempts to label the same spaces as ‘dangerous’. It is argued that security-driven logics of resilience generate conflicts in how resilience is operationalized, and produce and reproduce new hierarchical arrangements which, in turn, may work to subvert some of the founding aspirations and principles of resilience logic itself.
This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists examine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post-Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity.
Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.
Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian interventions, but more attention to the cultural aspects of how emergencies operate and to the positive and negative effects they might have on political and social life is needed.