The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe 9781503607668

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The Gray Zone

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

The Gray Zone

Sovereignty, ­Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Eu­rope

Gregory Feldman

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Ju­nior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Feldman, Gregory, author. Title: The gray zone : sovereignty, ­human smuggling, and undercover police investigation  in Eu­rope / Gregory Feldman. Other titles: Anthropology of policy (Stanford, Calif.) Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: Anthropology of policy |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018027720 | ISBN 9780804799225 (cloth : alk. paper) |  ISBN 9781503607651 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: ­Human smuggling—­European Union countries—­Prevention. |  ­Human trafficking—­European Union countries—­Prevention. | Undercover operations—  ­Moral and ethical aspects—­European Union countries. | Police ethics—­European Union countries. |  Sovereignty—­Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC JV7590 .F454 2018 | DDC 363.25/551094—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018027720 ISBN 978-1-5036-0766-8 (electronic) Typeset by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices in 10.5/15 Brill Cover photo: Refugee tents on a beach in the Mediterranean. IRIN | Ylenia Gostoli Cover design: Rob Ehle

For John Harriss and Alec Dawson Witty and compassionate colleagues who understand what the job is about For Anna Bailey, Julia Edwards, and Anna Labadze ­Women of princi­ple, w ­ omen of action For 119 students of International Studies at Simon Fraser University For signing a petition and saying what they think

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The concept of life is given its due only if every­thing that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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Contents

Preface xi The Argument

xvii

Acknowl­edgments

xix

Introduction: Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones

1

1

The Ambiguity of Truth: The Ephemeral Limits of Security Apparatuses 41

2

Identity and the Investigative Team: Vio­lence, Sovereignty, and Personhood

3 4

The Thinness of Secrecy

107

Sovereign Actions on a Global Stage

137



Conclusion: Alternatives Within: The Appearance of the Second Sovereign Form Despite the First

179

71

References 199 Index 213

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Preface I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. . . . ​It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that p ­ eople want s­ imple t­ hings. ­People are tired of ­simple ­things. They want to be challenged. Umberto Eco (1932–2016)1

“I trusted you with my gun,” David replied with a mixture of disgust and offense. And indeed he did. Earlier that day, I drove north out of the city with him and four of his colleagues—­Brian, Vincent, John, and Frank. They comprise five out of seven members of an undercover investigative team specializing in transnational crime, which usually involves ­human trafficking and smuggling, along with prostitution, burglary, begging, and pickpocketing. Based in a southern, maritime Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) member state, they seek not to arrest street-­level players. Instead, their investigations hone in on t­ hose controlling the local operations, who are invariably tied into wider networks operating in the margins, gaps, and ambiguous spaces of the EU’s security-­migration apparatus. That after­noon, they took me to a shooting range where they could refresh their skills and teach me how to fire a pistol. The range amounted to nothing more than an expanse of hilly terrain with sandy cliffs to catch stray bullets. The team carries Glocks, a well-­ known Austrian handgun and the first ergonomically designed sidearm. David provided me with thorough instructions. First, with the pistol’s bullets removed, he explained its design: the sensitivity of the trigger; the catch to release the magazine; the slide giving access to the barrel; and the sights through which to align the barrel with the target. He then specified the two cardinal rules of h ­ andling a gun and made me repeat them. I reiterated dutifully, “One, keep your index fin­ ger off the trigger u ­ nless you are ready to fire. ­Until then, it should be extended straight forward alongside the barrel. Two, always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction when it is not in use.” 1. Stephen Moss, “Umberto Eco: The G2 Interview,” Guardian (UK), November 27, 2011. https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­books​/­2011​/­nov​/­27​/­umberto​-­eco​-­people​-­tired​-­simple​ -­things. Last accessed May 25, 2016. xi

xii Preface

­ fter he had coached me through a few rounds without bullets, David then A walked me to a spot twenty feet before the target so that I could fire a gun for the first time in my life. I learned that when shooting, one must slightly bend the knees to stabilize the body, like a shock absorber, from the gun’s discharge. The weak hand steadies the strong hand holding the grip, but with strong thumb on top of the weak thumb. Align the front sight notch so that it appears between the rear sight’s two posts and so brings the target into the line of fire. ­Gently press the index fin­ger against the trigger: not too strongly and not too weakly. David stood ­behind my left shoulder. “Relax, Greg. Just breathe.” BANG! Even a relatively quiet pistol startles a first-­time shooter, but one regroups quickly with the coach’s encouragement. “Good. Just relax, breathe, and shoot again, Greg.” BANG! And on I went u ­ ntil the fifteen bullets in the magazine had buried themselves in the sandbank ­behind the target. David continued his instruction. A ­ fter firing the final bullet, first, press the catch to release the magazine from the grip; second, pull the slide back to expose the inside of the barrel, verifying that it is empty; and third, pull the trigger while pointing the gun in a safe direction so that it releases its cocked pressure. David remained unarmed as he instructed me on how to fire his gun. While Brian, Frank, and John milled about, Vincent stood fifteen feet diagonally ­behind my right shoulder, just outside my peripheral vision. His Glock remained in its holster, perched on his b­ elt. He kept his arms folded as he stood on guard, ready to defend David should I have gone off the deep end. Cops back up their colleagues much like one chess piece protects the square of another that has advanced ­toward the opponent’s line. During the car ­ride to and from the shooting range, they had been telling me stories about breaking laws during countless investigations. I had heard many such stories already during the previous two weeks when I first began fieldwork with them: illegal entries, illegal detentions, illegally accessing information, blackmail, extortion, and so on. Two weeks proves a long time in this type of ethnographic fieldwork if mea­sured in a­ ctual contact hours. The team spends most of their time on surveillance operations, which last anywhere from three to twelve hours straight. On balance, ­these operations are excruciatingly boring ­because their suspects, like most ­people, do not ­really move around that much. Most of the operation involves sitting in a car or a café while waiting for suspects to go somewhere to meet someone. So, the hours of downtime are spent talking . . . ​

Preface xiii

and talking . . . ​and talking. The team keeps no secrets from each other, and I had very few left in me by the end of fieldwork. Yet, before then, I was unsure of the amount of skepticism I could show with my questions. That eve­ning at dinner, Brian spoke of a plan, to gain them access to a Chinese-­run brothel, that seemed both elaborate and harebrained to me. ­These brothels are particularly difficult to investigate b­ ecause they only cater to Chinese clients. Such challenges push the team to the limits of their creative powers, and their l­ egal ones. Yet, a­ fter Brian’s idea, I had fi­nally heard one story too many. I yielded to my skeptical impulse, feeling confident that the question I had to ask would neither offend them nor cost me the unusual access they had granted me. In any case, I would have been academically irresponsible to not press them on the ­matter. I asked incredulously, “How do I know ­these stories ­aren’t all bullshit?” To be fair, the stories they tell can hardly be made up. Truth is stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. But enough was enough. Brian and Vincent belted out a hearty laugh at the deadpan delivery of my question. David took it to heart. “Greg, I trusted you with my gun.” Yes, he had, and, unarmed himself, he had taught me how to deliver a fatal gunshot should I ever need to. I could have made him my target. My incredulity offended him: if he trusted me enough to hand over his gun, then why ­couldn’t I trust what he said? Strictly speaking, he had put his life in my hands, and I gave him skepticism in return. I do not expect this vignette to compel the reader to believe that the team never stretched the truth, or that they never dramatized to impress, or make fun of, the naïve ethnographer. I do expect, however, that this ethnography be held to the same standard as any other. It is tempting to think that an accurate under­ standing of p ­ eople’s daily routines is harder to obtain when they work clandestinely for the state. However, ethnographic interlocutors of all backgrounds shield, conceal, and partially reveal themselves and their knowledge. Some have secrets to keep; ­others are more forthcoming. The ethnographer tries to uncover as full an understanding as pos­si­ble. The bar to cross, basically, is ­whether the written repre­sen­ta­tion of one’s interlocutors rings true to anyone generally familiar with the issues at hand. Does the writing convey that the ethnographer knows what s/he is talking about? Ethnographers cannot verify each other’s fieldwork as laboratory scientists verify each other’s experiments through replication in contrived conditions. In this regard, the point I wish to make with

xiv Preface

the opening vignette is that, I believe, the bond I established with the team ­after more than six hundred hours in direct, engaged, face-­to-­face contact with them (not just hanging out in the general vicinity), plus dozens more hours in vari­ous other forms of communication, was sufficiently strong for me to understand what their work is about and how they themselves approach it. I participated in scores of their surveillance runs, ate long lunches with them on a daily basis, socialized with them outside of working hours, visited some of their homes, studied their investigative tactics, interviewed and engaged ­others in adjacent units in the Immigration Ser­vice, and examined a dozen of their open and closed cases. I interviewed them formally and informally, and some of their wives too, and ethnographically studied with them parts of the city and surrounding country where their cases often lead. Another question also comes up, again one that any ethnographer would have to answer: Why did t­ hese ­people want me around in the first place? In my case, this question was usually asked as a prelude to the question of ­whether ­these investigators hid their real dirty work or only showed me a sanitized version of what they do. Yet, while one never knows what one does not know, the question misses a more pressing point: that my continual presence posed a g­ reat risk to them. An awkward foreigner is well capable of screwing up a street operation that requires subtlety and discretion. An outsider can also, accidentally or not, go public with information that could deeply embarrass the team and land them in po­liti­cal or ­legal trou­ble. The associate director to whom they report, one of four in the national Immigration Ser­vice, clarified to me over a two-­hour lunch that “no journalist would ever get this access” for fear of cherry-­ picked stories, unfair biases, and sensationalized headlines. While my presence was their risk, I had no material or po­liti­cal benefit to offer them. They had no professional interest in my research, and t­ here is nothing I could do to advance or protect their ­careers. They had no reason to open their professional world to me only to conceal some other “double secret” component of it from my view. Nevertheless, they had one understandable incentive, familiar to ethnographers, which convinced them to bring me on board a­ fter Brian, upon my request, suggested it to them in spring 2012. (I first met Brian in 2008, during fieldwork for The Migration Apparatus [G. Feldman 2012], and we maintained a correspondence from then on.) It was David again who captured the sentiment. When I asked during my first lunch with them why they had agreed to my proj­ect, he replied, “Greg, ­we’re glad y­ ou’re interested. This is like therapy for us. We have no

Preface xv

one to talk to but each other and our wives . . . ​and our wives are sick of hearing it!” Genuine interest, however, is not flattery or callow admiration. Good ethnographers are more than passive stenographers of what they are told and what they see. On this point, Clifford Geertz argued that a compelling ethnography “does not rest on its author’s ability to capture primitive facts in faraway places . . . ​but . . . ​to clarify what goes on in such places” (1973: 16). He thought that the ethnographer should not copy raw social discourse, but rather “only that small part of it which our in­for­mants can lead us into understanding” (19–20). To get ­there, ethnographers must ask questions; they must pres­ent dif­ fer­ent perspectives to force their interlocutors to clarify their own. Per Umberto Eco’s point in the epigraph, I suspect that the team, like p ­ eople in general, want to be challenged with tough, but fair, questions b­ ecause the challenge draws more insight out of them. They risked bringing me on board b­ ecause they saw just such a chance. Such chances allow us to speak, clarify, and articulate our own views on the world, and, if we stay open-­minded, then we get to enlarge ­those views through the glorious mess of verbal exchange. We distinguish ourselves through speech, but speaking implies an audience that listens critically. Speech becomes navel-­ gazing without an audience, and, without a critical one, it amounts to nothing more than an echo chamber, mere navel-­gazing in a social setting. A critical audience grants the speaker a worldly real­ity—­a presence in the com­pany of ­others who are dif­fer­ent but willing to fairly examine difference. Through our exchanges in a world of o­ thers—­whom we do not Other—we obtain “being,” that thrill of knowing that the space we share with ­others depends to some extent on our own par­tic­ul­ ar presence, just as our being depends on it. Without this engagement with o­ thers, we are condemned to our private lives, comfortable though they might be, but certainly isolated. Fieldwork with the team, then, consisted of an ongoing debate and discussion prompted by what Heyman (2003) calls “counterpart ideals”—­that is, alternative moral claims in fields of structural power that undercut the position of authority that a given actor occupies. This approach pushed them to both complicate and refine the meaning they ascribe to the sovereign actions they take when imposing themselves on the lives of ­others, to steal the title from a film about the former East Germany’s secret police. To create a situation in which one’s interlocutors do not feel threatened by the exchange, but rather come to thrive on it, the ethnographer must be willing

xvi Preface

to learn what they do and to hear why they choose to do it the way that they do. The ethnographer must not sacrifice his/her ethical judgment, but neither should s/he rush to judgment about theirs. If the interlocutors are confident that the ethnographer’s judgments are reached in mea­sured steps, then they ­will enjoy the differences of opinion that emerge. To be sure, had it just been the flattery of my attention, then the team would have grown bored with me before long. The callow admirer has nothing to offer on his own and ultimately cannot stand eye-­to-­eye with the admired. Had I been unreflectively antagonistic like an over­eager journalist, then they would have grown defensive and dismissive. Had I mirrored them and simply tried to be like them to win their ac­ cep­tance, they would have disparaged me as a pretender. Instead, just as they expect from each other, they expected me to be myself and to ask anything I wished as long as I was willing to listen and watch before I judged. In turn, I had to answer their questions and accept their challenges too. Most of t­hese involved their critiques of North American po­liti­cal correctness, which they perceived to inform my own outlook. It must certainly sound like a cliché to hear that I grew tremendously with this proj­ect. Yet I did. I do not agree with many opinions the team members expressed, and I question the ethics of several actions they took. However, it is no exaggeration to report that their flexibility of mind, allowing them to comprehend the plurality of standpoints tied to a common situation, like a crime, exceeds that of anyone I have known.

The Argument

­ eople desire to constitute sovereign spaces through which they come to life as P par­tic­u­lar persons. However, such spaces, identified ­here as the second sovereign form, appear in the shadows of the nation-­state, identified as the first sovereign form. ­These sovereign forms are qualitatively dif­fer­ent even if not fully disentangled. The first sovereign form depends upon a vertical arrangement that atomizes and abstracts subjects into equal, homogeneous entities. It thus silences the par­tic­u­lar subject by emphasizing a capacity of the mind that operates generically in every­one: the capacity to make abstract, technical judgments through the mind’s faculty of cognition. The second sovereign form depends upon a horizontal arrangement in which p ­ eople appear as dif­fer­ent but equal subjects. It empowers the par­tic­u­lar person as it requires ethical judgments based on a dif­fer­ent capacity of the mind stimulated by the actor’s unique standpoint with re­spect to o­ thers. Through the faculty of thinking, we judge situations by examining o­ thers’ standpoints to decide upon joint actions, which satisfy our consciences. Par­tic­ul­ar subjects mutually constitute each other, and the sovereign space between them, through t­ hose joint actions. Each form differently conditions how sovereign agents ­will conduct themselves in gray zones, for better or worse, where law and custom dissipate and opportunities arise to act without pre­ce­dent. As the first sovereign form is premised upon p ­ eople as atomized, abstract objects, ­those agents are more likely to treat ­Others as ste­reo­typed, voiceless objects. As the second sovereign form is premised upon p ­ eople as mutually constituting subjects, sovereign agents are more likely to treat ­others as full persons, even when acting against their interests. This argument is demonstrated through an ethnography of an undercover police investigative team in a southern, maritime Eu­ro­pean Union member

xvii

xviii

The Argument

state. This team focuses on transnational crime, primarily h ­ uman trafficking and smuggling. They occupy a peculiar place in the larger security apparatus from which they can escape the top-­down vertical imperatives of first sovereign form and, however fleetingly, conduct action in line with the second sovereign form.

Acknowl­edgments

This book would not have been pos­si­ble without the active support and interest of the members of the undercover investigative team themselves. My thanks and gratitude go directly to them. I hope they find the book a thoughtful and thought-­provoking assessment of what they do. I also thank Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council for funding the proj­ect through their Insight Grant program. Much of Chapter 1 draws on material published as G. Feldman (2016), “ ‘With My Head on the Pillow’: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Evil among Undercover Police Investigators,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (2), 491–518, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission. Several students of international studies provided invaluable research assistance throughout the course of the proj­ect. I am grateful to Melissa Gregg, Jenna Dixon, Nick Palaj, Sara Sim, and Ogake Angwenyi for their time and capability. Julia Edwards was especially helpful in proofreading drafts of the chapters, combing through vari­ous lit­er­a­tures, and ferreting out information from obscure sources. Several colleagues offered impor­tant insights that helped me develop, clarify, and refine the book’s empirical and theoretical arguments. They include Samir Gandesha, Elizabeth Cooper, John Harriss, Alec Dawson, Joe Heyman, Naor Ben-­Yehoyada, Michael Herzfeld, Andrew Shryock, Manuela Bojadzijev, and William Walters. I thank Merje Kuus for her help with the logistical responsibilities of conducting fieldwork abroad. The ideas conveyed in this book w ­ ere developed and refined through several invited lectures, workshops, and conference pre­sen­ta­tions. I am grateful to Manuela Bojadzijev for her invitation to pres­ent at the Institute for Eu­ro­pean Ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2015. The same gratitude goes to Samir Gandesha’s invitation to pres­ent at the Institute for Humanities at Simon Fraser University shortly thereafter. I thank Keally McBride for her 2016 invitation to xix

xx

Acknowl­edgments

speak at the University of San Francisco. Rohit Jain’s invitation to deliver the keynote address at the 2016 annual conference of Switzerland’s National Center of Competence in Research—­The Migration-­Mobility Nexus at the University of Neuchâtel came as a ­great honor. I benefitted tremendously from the side conversations during my stay. I am similarly grateful to Thomas Bellinck, theater director and documentarian, for his use of my first book, The Migration Apparatus, in his musical production ­Simple as ABC #2: Keep Calm & Validate, and for his invitation to speak at the 2017 Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. The Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the University of Windsor, Ontario, provided me with a rich forum to pres­ent this research t­ oward the final days of fieldwork. I thank Nick Harney and Tanya Basok, in par­tic­u­lar, for their engagement and interest. I also thank Maria Stoilkova and Esther Romeyn for bringing me to the University of Florida’s Center for Eu­ro­pean Studies’s mini-­ conference “The Provocations of Con­temporary Refugee Migration” in 2017. Thanks to Maria, Esther, and the other participants, this event left me with an overload of issues to consider when working out this book’s argument. I also benefitted from colleagues on panels at conferences of the American Anthropological Association, the Eu­ro­pean Association of Social Anthropologist, and Peace and Conflict Studies in Anthropology. I would like to thank several organizers for their administrative and intellectual input of vari­ous kinds. They include Monika Weissensteiner, Nils Zurawski, Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, Erella Grassiani, Miia Halme-­Tuomisaari, Joshua Clark, Winnie Lem, Pauline Gardiner Barber, Anja Kublitz, Lotte Buch Segal, Jeffrey Martin, Heath Cabot, and Sara Shneiderman. As ever, the editorial team at Stanford University Press have been both professional and personable while keeping the publication pro­cess on track. I extend par­tic­ul­ar thanks to Michelle Lipin­ski. My deep appreciation also goes to Cris Shore and Susan Wright, Anthropology of Policy series editors, and longtime friends and colleagues, who know how to constructively read other ­people’s drafts. I am grateful to Daniel Sentance and Brian Ostrander for their sharp and thoughtful copyediting. Fi­nally, thank you to Rachel Moxham for meandering conversations and the possibilities that come with them.

The Gray Zone

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Introduction

Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones To be or not to be. That is the question. We ­will be. Syrian refugee walking with thousands of other refugees from Budapest to the Austrian border, autumn 20151 Have you seen what they do? Go to their offices and see their forms. It changes you. It’s so boring. ­Legal shit and bureaucracy. Vincent

Two Forms of Sovereignty in Contrast States d­ on’t do ­things; p ­ eople do. ­There are no such ­things as states, only actions conducted in their name by par­tic­u­lar ­people. This book follows from that premise to better comprehend sovereign action and how it conditions our being in the world with ­others. The above two epigraphs showcase the very beginnings of two radically dif­fer­ent sovereign forms that frame this book’s analy­sis of action and being ­human. For the refugee quoting Shakespeare, along with thousands more, the only way to be ­after Syria and the Eu­ro­pean Union marginalized them out of po­liti­cal space, for much dif­fer­ent reasons, was to constitute a world for themselves through their own initiative. They acted in concert against the police authorities in Budapest’s Keleti train station by marching directly to the Austrian border. In so ­doing, they entered a gray zone when they stepped outside of Hungarian law to constitute their own sovereign space. The fleeting quality of their actions offers no counterpoint. True, they hardly destabilized the Hungarian state, and their joint action dissipated when they arrived in Austria, where they would be pro­cessed objectively through its asylum application system. Moreover, the Hungarian authorities ultimately provided buses to take them to Austria—it solved their prob­lem and the refugees’ prob­lem. Nevertheless, the point remains that politics and action came down to a single and highly personal question expressed through Shakespeare’s famous line: to be or not to be. That question can only be resolved in f­ avor of the former option through joint action. The par­tic­u­lar person can only be in a world that is constituted with 1. J. Domokos, M. Khalili, R. Sprenger, and N. Payne-­Frank, “We Walk Together: A Syrian ­Family’s Journey to the Heart of Eu­rope,” Guardian (UK) video, 17:03, September 10, 2015, http://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­world​/­video​/­2015​/­sep​/­10​/­we​-­walk​-­together​-­a​-­syrian​ -­familys​-­journey​-­to​-­the​-­heart​-­of​-­europe​-­video (last viewed 14 October 2015). 1

2 Introduction

other par­tic­ul­ar persons. Since their actions tran­spired outside the scope of law—in a “gray zone”—it signified a foundational sovereign act, the birth of a new polity, issuing from their own thinking, judging, and action, that is, from their own partial and worldly positions. It neither descended upon them from an ideology’s transcendent heights nor was imposed on them by revolutionary elites or state bureaucrats. For Vincent, one of the seven investigative team members who operate on the street, the work of the office bureaucrat signifies a living death. He sees that figure personified in the desk investigators seated in the adjacent third floor office with whom his team must collaborate. The desk investigators’ job revolves around paperwork, pro­cess, and procedures all scripted in advance. While the state does not marginalize Vincent in nearly the same way as it does the Syrian refugees, his fear of the desk investigator’s life is that it ­will not allow him to be. The sovereign state reproduces itself, both through and despite the agents operating in its name. It carries on regardless of ­whether any given agent lives or dies. In contrast, the sovereign polity formed by the refugees lasted as long as they could act jointly to keep it alive. The result, however momentary, is the isomorphic appearance of sovereignty, personhood, and action. Vincent’s team contrasts their work against their counter­parts in desk investigation ­because they seek the same experience of being as the Syrian refugees. Sovereign action is not abstract, though it is difficult to imagine a sovereign acting. At best, we can picture an agent of the sovereign, such as a police officer, tax collector, or passport control officer. Yet, if we can pinpoint only the sovereign’s agents, but not the sovereign itself, then we can ask—­just as the team ask themselves—if ­those agents exist in the world as their own par­tic­u­lar persons or as empty conduits for the implementation of sovereign authority. If the former, then the agents conscientiously agree with the sovereign; if the latter, then they lack a conscience insofar as they cannot distinguish their own viewpoint from the policy mea­sures they must implement. If the agents disagree with the sovereign and still carry out the action, then they suffer from a crisis of conscience. In any case, the agents can only appear as themselves when in agreement with the sovereign; such agreement cannot happen in e­ very instance if we acknowledge that each person occupies a subjective standpoint. Yet the sovereign itself cannot be identified, much like the shadowy court that employed two nondescript agents to summon Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial. As in real life, the



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 3

sovereign seems to be an intangible prime mover operating b­ ehind agents’ backs. However, real­ity is far more superficial or, at least, surficial. Rather than steering ­those agents from ­behind, the sovereign only emerges as the effect, not the cause, of what they do in its name. Overall, then, state sovereignty makes a strange demand on its agents: it asks them to deny themselves as a plurality of speaking subjects in order to create the illusion of its existence as a transcendent authority. This book asks if we—­people as a plurality of beings—­are limited to living together in this singular form of sovereignty, which apparently cannot survive without the subordination of the par­tic­u­lar person. This requirement seems inhuman, literally, ­because at the end of the day each of us is nothing other than a par­tic­u­lar person. This fact raises the question of ­whether another form of sovereignty exists, one that is premised upon, not against, plurality, which Hannah Arendt (1998: 7) identified as a basic h ­ uman condition. To address this question, the book draws out two opposing forms of sovereignty to convey the radically dif­fer­ent possibilities they offer for action, ethics, and being in a world of ­either ­Others (per the first sovereign form) or ­others (per the second sovereign form). I refer simply to ­these two sovereign modes throughout the book as, respectively, the first and the second sovereign forms. It should go without saying that the first and the second sovereign forms are not mutually exclusive, even though the first pushes the second into marginal spaces. To draw this analytical distinction is not to superimpose categories onto the ambiguities of daily life. Rather, ­these distinctions allow us to identify significant differences in h ­ uman experience, differences that remain other­wise obscured and entangled in a complicated and messy empirical world. The investigative team’s research significance lies in the fact that while their work is highly conditioned by the usual demands of the traditional sovereign nation-­state (the first sovereign form), they often conduct themselves on the street in a much dif­fer­ent sovereign mode (the second sovereign form). The way they shift between, and act in, the two sovereign forms highlights how each so differently conditions the experience of being ­human. The first form, the modern state, dates back roughly to the seventeenth-­ century rise of the monarchical states of Eu­rope. Short of warfare, it now flexes its muscle most mightily on the intertwined issues of migration and security. It is familiarly expressed at the controlled border crossing point, where travellers appeal to passport control officers for entry onto the state’s sovereign territory.

4 Introduction

The officer swipes the passport through a reader to see if any red flags are attached to the identity indicated in the name page. A few basic questions might be asked to determine if the traveller’s story matches the l­ egal criteria for entry. If not, then the officer sends the individual to a separate room for a second line of questioning. Strikingly, the w ­ hole pro­cess requires precious ­little from the officers despite their making a decision that can profoundly affect the traveller’s journey, if not life. The officers themselves are replaceable, ­because of the generic, abstract quality of the task before them. They assess objects—or persons objectified—­not living subjects. The border-­control system that they are paid to operate minimizes as much of their own thinking assessment as pos­si­ble (Murphy and Maguire 2015: 172). The decisions they make about who crosses and ­under what conditions are based on a flowchart of “if-­then” steps tantamount to high-­school geometric proof. For better or for worse, the officer’s ethical judgment is demoted to the least influential variable in the pro­cess. The officer’s task is simply to track a series of logical steps based on the traveller’s responses. ­Those steps w ­ ill determine ­whether the traveller can enter and on what terms, or how that traveller is to be detained and returned to their home country. In turn, sovereign agents themselves are increasingly surveilled through similarly mathematical procedures now aptly termed “audit culture” (Shore and Wright 2015; Strathern 2000). The second form of sovereignty is arguably much older than the first. It may even be prehistoric in origin. Unlike the first form, which can proceed without the presence of the par­tic­ul­ ar speaking subject, the second form of sovereignty issues directly from the par­tic­u­lar persons composing it. It emerges through a ­human impulse to appear before ­others so that public space materializes out of ­people’s mutual recognition of each other (see Arendt 1978: 26–30). ­Those persons think, judge, deliberate, and jointly act from their par­tic­u­lar standpoints. Hence ­people come to life as po­liti­cal beings through their constitution of the second sovereign form. If ­those persons are replaced, then that sovereign space invariably takes on a dif­fer­ent character, as it would then be recomposed by dif­fer­ent persons. The second form is a function of the fact of h ­ uman plurality, while the first sovereign form is a function of the myth of collective homogeneity. The investigative team shifts between ­these two forms, gravitating to the second with e­ very chance they get b­ ecause in it they compose sovereign space as they see the world rather than how the security apparatus compels them to interpret it. Their desire to operate through the second sovereign form



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 5

is frequently expressed through their criticism of their colleagues in desk investigation and passport control, whose work they see as quintessentially bureaucratic: boring, repetitive, and soul destroying. Hardt and Negri argue that traditional state sovereignty, along with standard forms of vertical bureaucracy, no longer maintains a stranglehold on populations and territories. Instead, “Empire” operates through globally networked institutions, agencies, and practices that are horizontally arranged and integrated through a singular logic of social reproduction (2000: xi–­xii). This book readily accepts that point, particularly demonstrating it in Chapter 4, where the team’s investigations are set in a global rather than a national or even EU context (see also Albahari 2015: 18–19; G. Feldman 2012). However, the effect of the first sovereign form still obtains in the global field of Empire ­because technocratic logics still replace the particularity of an actor’s ethical judgment. Even though formal bureaucratic hierarchies disperse into globally networked organizations, agencies, and institutions, the actor is still subordinated to the logics of security, social reproduction, and capital accumulation as in the traditional nation-­ state form. Horizontality only fully accomplishes a shift to the second sovereign form when the particularity of the actors’ judgments on unpre­ce­dented situations replaces the dominance of abstract logic as the ultimate mode of governance. I first obtained permission to conduct this fieldwork, and publish research from it, from the team members themselves, then from their immediate superior officer, and fi­nally from the national director of their Immigration Ser­vice, a component part of their Ministry of the Interior. Permission came with a trade-­ off: geo­graph­i­cal anonymity. I cannot disclose the southern, maritime EU member state in which they work, ­because much of the activity I observed was ­either illegal or not compellingly ­legal. The team cannot take the risk of exposure, although nothing that I report is unusual, as anyone familiar with law enforcement w ­ ill know. Police units are often reticent to permit ethnographers into their midst. Fassin (2013: 14–21; see also Karpiak 2010: 8) details a litany of challenges confronting his fieldwork in Paris. Prior to recent research on police, anthropologists had been studying covert organ­izations such as nuclear weapons laboratories (Gusterson 1996, 2004; Masco 2006), military bases (Lutz 2002; Lutz and Enloe 2009; Vine 2009, 2015), counterinsurgency warfare units (Gonzalez 2009), and militarized culture more broadly (Gonzalez 2010; Masco 2014; Price 2011). ­These, too, presented predictable challenges for ethnographic research,

6 Introduction

challenges for which ­these anthropologists compensated in a variety of ways (see Gusterson 1997; Gonzalez 2012; in non-­security contexts see G. Feldman 2011; Nader 1972; Ortner 2010). Yet, for my proj­ect, permission came smoothly and quickly, with no substantial barriers to access, an experience similar to Marx in his earlier study of police in the United States (1988: xxii). Se­nior officers trusted the team’s judgment, and I stressed to the relevant authorities that I was not conducting investigative journalism. The national director of the Immigration Ser­vice gave his written approval. My field notes w ­ ere handwritten (illegible to anyone but me), then transcribed into e-­files stored on two local computers, which ­were not networked into any system, and a flash drive. My field notes do not identify the p ­ eople described or quoted or give an indication of the fieldwork location. I give every­one in this ethnography En­glish pseudonyms to prevent hinting at the country through linguistic similarities. I refer to this southern maritime EU member state itself as the “country,” to its citizens as “nationals,” and to the cosmopolitan city in which the team lives and works as the “city.” This access requires that I generalize many of this country’s and city’s ­particularities for the sake of maintaining anonymity. Yet the team’s actions, discussions, and daily routines are documented in rich detail, rendering the ethnographic context as the way in which they act in the gray zone with the sovereign authority bestowed upon them. Context and action meld into one. This approach—­enforced by the conditions of fieldwork—­prevents their historical and geographic circumstances from speaking for the team, as it w ­ ere. Distinguishing context from actor risks rendering the actor a passive and dependent variable on the context. Agency would be denied. The key question, then, becomes how the team uses the context as they sense it, rather than how an a priori context preconditions the team. Despite their differences, countries such as Italy, France, and Spain, for example, are squarely premised upon the Eu­ro­pean nation-­state form, which is made an ethnographic real­ity in the actions that sovereign agents themselves take in the state’s name. In pursuing the question of what conditions enable the second sovereign form, this book also asks several derivative questions specific to the investigative team: How do the team shift back and forth between the first and second sovereign forms? What makes ­those shifts pos­si­ ble? And why do ­those shifts obtain such significance for them?



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 7

Contributions to the Current Critique of Sovereignty Sovereignty, personhood, and action are phenomena that mutually compose each other. The difference between the two sovereign forms lies in ­whether and how the person can act in the com­pany of o­ thers. For example, per the first sovereign form, Louis XIV could not have said it better when he proclaimed (or is regarded to have proclaimed), “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state). Louis’s person became isomorphic with the territorial space of his kingdom as he took action to reconstitute it so substantially that he could don the mantle of Sun King. All life depends upon the sun. That sovereign space rendered his person a worldly real­ity; without that space, ­there would be no Louis. However, Louis’s fusion with French po­liti­cal space left no room for the plurality of voices in the kingdom. His sovereign presence denied it as one’s public appearance required deference to Louis’s (sove)reign. The nation-­state’s replacement of the monarchical state—­ inspired by the French Revolution—­still retains that silencing effect. While the absolute monarch is a par­tic­u­lar person whose sovereign authority marginalizes the par­tic­u­lar ­people in the kingdom, the nation is a homogenizing abstraction, one that marginalizes the citizenry b­ ecause no par­tic­u­lar citizen embodies the nation. This conceptual ­matter does not deny the well-­established point that such sovereign authority never fully takes hold (Appadurai 1996; Bonilla 2017; Davis 2010; Goldstein 2010; Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 297; Jaffe 2015; Rutherford 2012). Clearly, the state has never fully effected what its own etymology claims: a static sovereign land u ­ nder absolute control. Rather, the modern state has always been a work in pro­gress, as the pivotal early modern po­liti­cal phi­los­o­phers, like Bodin and Hobbes, well recognized (see Jennings 2011: 29). The point is that the modern sovereign’s drive for absolutism remains the proj­ect with which we all must contend, so its contours must be exposed for the sake of conceptualizing and identifying genuine alternatives. The second sovereign form keeps alive the equation of sovereignty, personhood, and action, though with the significant difference that it empowers, rather than silences, the plurality of persons that compose it. In other words, the second sovereign form amounts to a space negotiated among equal but dif­fer­ent ­people ever ready to reor­ga­nize the terms of their coexistence when they confront unpre­ce­dented quandaries for which law, norm, or custom offer l­ittle guidance. Their particularity necessarily materializes through their mutual recognition of each other in the course of their speech and action. Without that

8 Introduction

space, none would have a world in which to appear; through that space, they necessarily constitute a polity as joint sovereigns as long as their action continues. Holding the first and second sovereign forms in comparison pres­ents an opportunity to expand and deepen the current critique of sovereignty in anthropology and the critical social science more broadly (Bonilla 2017; Jennings 2011; Kauanui 2017). In keeping with the current critique, ­there is no question that the Eu­ro­pean state form has worked vio­lence and degradation on p ­ eoples worldwide through colonialism and imperialism (Anghie 2007; Bonilla 2017; Scott 1999). We should add that the state form has also imparted such vio­lence on Eu­ro­pe­ans themselves throughout the centuries of its tortured and tortuous history. Moreover, our efforts to understand the po­liti­cal life of the colonized are impaired by the unreflective use of state sovereignty as a Western category of po­liti­cal understanding (Asad 2013; Trouillot 2003). Such habits of thought similarly preclude our understanding of alternative po­liti­cal movements in the global North, movements that seek not only justice on a given issue but also altogether new modes of organ­izing po­liti­cal life. Thus, the modern state, while functioning as a vehicle to concentrate global power in Eu­rope, has also taken its toll on Eu­ro­pe­ans themselves as a plurality over the last five hundred years of its development. This point does not equalize the suffering endured in the colonies with that of Eu­ro­pe­ans. I attempt no absurdly quantitative comparison. I make this point ­because in order to retain the explanatory power of the concept of sovereignty, we cannot reduce it to the par­tic­ul­ar result of Eu­rope’s centuries-­long strug­gles with sovereign action, i.e. the modern state. Rather, per the genealogical method of historical inquiry, we must ask what animated that strug­gle, which could have led to a range of other, now forgotten, possibilities. Similarly, to argue for a nonsovereign politics is a non sequitur. We need to retain that concept ­because sovereignty is the mode through which the h ­ uman po­liti­cal capacity is ­either expressed or denied. As biological life is unimaginable with air and food; po­liti­cal life is unimaginable without sovereignty. The dominant view of sovereign power, a view which also limits the current critique, reduces sovereignty to the prerogative of extralegal vio­lence, and so to absolute domination over the body politic. However, as much as sovereign power finds expression in this prerogative, familiarly known as the state of exception (Agamben 1998; Schmitt 1985), it does not capture the full essence of what compels us to sovereign action: the ­human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings. More concretely, sovereign action materializes the strug­gle to (re)constitute



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 9

po­liti­cal space as it exists between ­people and break from the old order. (Thus, while vio­lence may transpire in a state of exception, the character of that vio­ lence ­will differ significantly relative to the first and second sovereign forms, as discussed in Chapter 2.) In juridical parlance, the capacity to constitute po­ liti­cal space anew is known as constitutive power, in contrast to constituted power, which subsequently governs that space according to a l­egal frame (see Jennings 2011: 29). ­Whether sovereignty materializes through the first or the second form, replete with radically dif­fer­ent implications for vio­lence and personhood, is the subsequent question. Hannah Arendt understood better than most that the challenge is to establish “a constituted po­liti­cal order that does not destroy the constitutive power that created it” lest that order destroy people’s capacity to reconstitute po­liti­cal worlds as new circumstances require (40). Hence Jennings (52) stresses the urgency of Arendt’s work in this regard. Sharing that sentiment, Arendt’s oeuvre ­will inform the analy­sis that follows. However, one point must be cleared up. Arendt herself appears to argue that the options are, in fact, between sovereignty and nonsovereignty, rather than between two alternative sovereign forms, when the question of how to obtain a genuinely plural po­liti­cal space is asked. With re­spect to the American Revolution, which she regarded quite favorably, Arendt (2006c: 144) writes that “the ­great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of h ­ uman affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” Yet Elshtain (2008: 152–57) correctly notes that Arendt was critiquing a sovereign form as it would appear in centralized Eu­ro­pean nation-­ states. To boot, American jurists, contra Arendt, have made continuous reference to sovereignty through the country’s history, even if they thought of it as a foreign concept in the early de­cades. Stepping back, we see that Arendt’s full oeuvre seeks a central place for joint action in our understanding of the po­liti­cal and of being. It does not dwell on eliminating the sovereignty concept per se (though see 1998: 234–236). For Arendt, po­liti­cal action is the only venue through which being is pos­si­ble, ­because it creates public space where we mutually recognize each other as par­tic­ul­ ar beings in a shared polity. In this regard, being fully h ­ uman and po­liti­cal action are inseparable. What distinguishes politics for Arendt is not the right of vio­lence and domination, but rather the power to constitute—­and reconstitute—­that po­ liti­cal space anew. To put it in near hyperbole, a plurality of p ­ eople acting in

10 Introduction

concert are capable of creating something out of nothing—­a public space that has not existed before and that reflects their own strug­gles, desires, judgments, and actions. This phenomenon characterizes any revolutionary movement that liberates itself from an old order but not necessarily in constituting a new one in its place. The perennial prob­lem that Arendt wished to solve—­and argued that the American Revolution nearly solved—is how to institutionalize the revolutionary spirit ­after the republic is founded. This trick requires us not to reduce government to the mere governance of bodies, lest the sovereign state become the agent of degradation, but rather to locate the power of reconstitution in participatory demo­cratic government itself. In short, if po­liti­cal action is the basic requirement for being ­human, qua par­tic­ul­ ar speaking subjects, then sovereignty must reside in the plurality of subjects composing the polity. Sovereignty is firstly about the original act of constituting po­liti­cal space; it is only secondly, and not necessarily, about the absolute domination of other ­people. That it has shown itself to be about the latter is, strictly speaking, an accident of history. To expand the current critique of sovereignty, we must extend the genealogy of sovereignty back before the early modern period and recognize what Arendt and Elshtain saw in it. We see that an emphasis on the power of natality and the promise it offers precedes the emphasis on absolutism, which is followed by fatalism and the loss of all purpose. Sovereignty begins its ­career not as a territorial concept but as a moral one that recognizes God as the creator of all t­ hings (Elshtain 2008: 2). Augustine reasons through the Trinity that God’s absolute power of creation offers the possibility for ­people to rise up (but never fully reach) God’s level of wisdom and goodness, symbolized through ac­cep­tance of the Trinity’s second figure, Jesus Christ. Augustine maintained, though theologians ­after Thomas Aquinas would dispute, that each of the Trinity’s three parts—­Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—­were equals, which gives p ­ eople the hope of fully realizing their true being. As God loves his creation, so he ­wills not to dominate it but rather to offer it a proximate experience of godliness through the figure of Christ (8–9). From ­here, he reasoned that no force could exude sovereign power over the bodies of the earthly realm (9). Hence, Augustine’s point in City of God that “[God] did not wish the rational being, made in his own image, to have dominion over any but irrational creatures, not man over man, but man over the beasts” (Augustine 2003: 874). This statement lets us infer that man’s dominion over man, the social configuration of modern state sovereignty, results in the bestialization of all men (Foucault cited in Agamben 1998: 3). The quin­



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 11

tes­sen­tial capacity of h ­ umans, the only creatures rendered in God’s image, is the capacity to inaugurate new beginnings and so change the direction of time. That capacity is sovereign b­ ecause it reflects God’s unbound power to create worlds out of nothing just as God created the earth and all living beings out of nothing. Thus, if ­humans are created in God’s image, then ­humans are creators. The birth of each person into the world signifies the birth of one who is a beginner, that is, one who can begin ­things anew, and not merely a novice to be trained. Arendt thus reads Augustine as offering us a princi­ple of freedom in this regard (Arendt 1998: 177; see also 2006a: 165–66; 1978: 216–17; Elshtain 2008: 4). Hence God’s sovereign power finds its highest expression in the power of creation not arbitrary destruction. This sovereign capacity meant not that h ­ umans ­were equal to God but that they could construct worldly cities consistent with God’s grace and love. In reverse, God could not impose arbitrary w ­ ill—­a Divine version of the modern state of exception—­because p ­ eople cannot follow an inconsistent God; they can only fear his unpredictable wrath. Parallel to the juridical interplay between constitutive and constituted power, God is unbound with absolute power, opening all possibilities of action except ­those that would have him contradicting himself, but is also bound with ordained power, which renders God reliable, regulated, and integral to the worldly po­liti­cal life (Elshtain 2008: 21). From the writings of Augustine in late antiquity to, and including, ­those of Thomas Aquinas in the late medieval era, this interplay among God, pope, king, emperor, and ­people never endorsed a singular sovereign with the absolute power of domination. Instead, the relationship between God and ­people amounts to dialogue in which the power to create is absolute for God and, to a lesser extent, for ­people, but so are the responsibilities to love and be just. Rather than originating in a transcendent realm, sovereign authority thus flows from two sources, God and people; any king who strove to rise to the level of God above the ­people would lose legitimacy from both (15). The premodern concept of sovereignty could not accommodate kings, like Louis XIV, seeking to unite both l­egal and sacred power in their persons as it would have granted them absolute dominion, transcendence in effect. The connotation of absolutism in sovereign m ­ atters initially appears in thirteenth-­century France, when monarchies strug­gled to centralize their rule against the pope’s plenitudo po­ testati. This tenet granted the pope the power to make and unmake kings; it became a formal creed with Pope Boniface VIII’s bull of 1302, Unam Sanctum (23–24). In response, the monarchs of Christendom aimed for full sovereign powers in

12 Introduction

their respective territorial kingdoms, powers that paralleled, but did not depend on, God’s sovereign power in the Divine realm. They sought freedom from the Divine Law that upheld papal authority. While sovereignty as absolute power over territory and its inhabitants entered the debate in late medieval Eu­rope, it did not dominate that debate ­until absolute monarchies became a fixture in the po­liti­cal landscape by the seventeenth ­century. This extended genealogy shows that sovereignty, rather than being the power of absolute domination, begins its c­ areer as the absolute power of creation. As Arendt insisted that po­liti­cal action was central to our own being in the world, then so must we recognize sovereignty as equally central as it signifies that which most centrally defines us: our ability to inaugurate new beginnings. This comparison of sovereignty on e­ ither side of early modern Eu­rope is critical for imagining an alternative politics, a politics that is f­ ree from the tyranny of the state form. It does not ­matter that we have reached an understanding of this difference through a Euro-­Christian historical trajectory. Stripped of its historical particularities, we find the common prob­lem of ­people striving to establish a constituted po­liti­cal order without destroying the constitutive power that enabled it in the first place (see G. Feldman 2015; Graeber 2009: 214–217). Put differently, the prob­ lem becomes how to define basic tenets of po­liti­cal life that take on the aura of sacredness, but not to the extent that they cannot be agreeably redefined when new dilemmas call for it. This prob­lem emerges most fully when an old order collapses, or is at least suspended in a state of exception, and a new beginning has yet to take place (Arendt 2006c: 197). Multiple directions are pos­si­ble in the gray zone that composes this gap in time. The crucial question becomes which sovereign form ­will materialize when a new order is constituted. The answer depends upon the prevailing view of equality during the interim.

The Differences Between Equality, Mind, and ­Others in the Two Sovereign Forms During a slow after­noon at headquarters, the team discussed conduct in the gray zone. The conversation moved quickly to two related issues: thinking for themselves and the endorsement of each as in­de­pen­dent judges on the other’s conduct. As we had just been talking about bribery, David explained that “if Brian or John saw me take a bribe, then they would lose trust in me. They ­wouldn’t tell on me, but they would lose their trust in me. That is a huge consequence of messing t­ hings up in the gray zone.” How does one know what is the right ­thing



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 13

to do in the gray zone? Brian answered, “Sometimes it is hard to know. You know when you are in the black ­because you are formatted in the white. You know there is black and white. You have to find out for yourself that t­ here is gray.” John added that “conscience defines the gray zone . . . ​when I am past the law,” but he also agreed with Max, who explained that “my colleagues must approve any decision I make about g­ oing into the gray zone.” As officers of the law, this conversation contains within it the interconnected issues of personhood, relations with ­others, and sovereignty. To illuminate how ­these issues unfold in lived experience, we must distinguish between two understandings of the word equality. The characteristically modern princi­ple of equality waivered early in its ­career between two definitions. Equality in the first sovereign form, which now dominates our understanding of the term, refers to the sameness of all citizens. Since all citizens are the same qua nationals, then all must be treated (nominally) the same. One citizen must neither be distinguished from another nor distinguish him/herself from the ­others for the sake of guaranteeing the same basic conditions for every­one’s life chances. Leaders must closely resemble the led, lest they be regarded as inauthentic, illegitimate, or elitist. Hence a politician should dress folksy like a neighbor, not regal like a king. The demand for an equality of sameness also conditions how we bring our minds to bear upon the technocratic work of maintaining and stabilizing mass society. If we are all the same, then we ­will be compelled to deploy our abstract reason—­the work of the mind’s faculty of cognition—to manage par­tic­u­lar prob­lems rather than our own par­tic­u­lar judgment (G. Feldman 2015: 55–61). Such reason sustains the equality of sameness ­because all ­people reason the same way, or can be trained to do so, as long as they accept the premise from which reason’s logical steps begin. If we accept a number system based on ten, then we ­will all conclude, once the logic is demonstrated, that 2 + 2 = 4. From that point, one person can perform the calculation as well as another. Hence, all are equal. To stay with our original example, the passport control officers’ if-­then decisions are technical judgments based on the logical steps in a flowchart. Once the professional training is complete, one agent can conduct the work as well as another, and so all are replaceable. Recent leaps in border-­control technology accentuate the point: algorithmic passport scanners replace the officers, much like automated checkout in grocery stores has replaced cashiers. The replacement of the ­human with the machine clarifies what was already apparent in the officer’s routine responsibility: that the sovereign “state” requires ­those

14 Introduction

authorized to act in its name to sacrifice their particularity for the sake of universal reason. Their capacity to think and to ethically judge from their par­tic­u­lar standpoint gives way to the logic of sovereign order. Hence the security apparatus’s efficiency demands an equality that renders every­one identical and ­replaceable as long as they have been properly trained. (This situation parallels the reduction of the laborer to a replaceable extension of the machine, as Marx spotlighted at the beginning of industrialization. For this reason, interviews with state officers so often begin with them first asking, “Do you want to know what I think or what I have to tell you?”) To be sure, the passport control officer determines how any given person or situation falls ­under one category or another within that template and decides how vigorously to apply the rules and to whom. This wiggle room grants the officer some mea­sure of agency. However, it hardly signifies a challenge to traditional state sovereignty—­they are still prescribed the criteria for deciding how to classify any given traveller. The ethical premise of the ­whole operation remains untouched ­because the universality of technical judgments replaces the particularity of ethical judgments. The price of the system’s efficiency is the dumbing down of its officers to the point of rendering them dispensable. Work becomes a bore interrupted occasionally by the thrill of a security breach. Equality in the second sovereign form appears as the equal empowerment of dif­fer­ent p ­ eople rather than as the protection of ostensibly homogeneous ­people. ­Those differences are initially manifested through the faculty of thinking, not the faculty of cognition. Rather than the tracking of logical steps, thinking amounts to the inner two-­in-­one dialogue with the self about how to live in the world. We seek agreement with ourselves for the sake of settling our consciences, John’s guide for action in the gray zone. Thinking is unavoidably subjective and stimulated by our receptiveness to the world. No two ­people can think alike—­that is, no two p ­ eople can ethically assess situations exactly the same way, ­because no two p ­ eople occupy the same standpoint in the world (Arendt 1971, 1978, 1992; G. Feldman 2015: 55–61). Thinking persons constitute sovereign space by making ethical judgments about how to act upon unpre­ce­dented situations, situations that they cannot address by appealing to existing standards (in the shape of laws, moral codes, flowcharts, or rote bureaucratic procedure). Through persuasion and consensus among a diversity of judgments, thinking subjects jointly act to (re)constitute space so that living in it does not generate a crisis of conscience. Sovereign power manifests in the joint action itself.



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 15

The second sovereign form guarantees each participant’s presence in the com­ pany of one’s peers, all as constituent members of the polity. We are more likely to regard o­ thers as different but equal ­because our own particularity likewise gains a worldly presence through their recognition of ourselves. This phenomenon of mutual recognition decreases the likelihood of us degrading others, b­ ecause o­ thers would then confirm us to be the very person we wish to avoid: one who degrades others. Our worldly appearance would then create a contradiction in the two-­in-­ one thought dialogue, leaving us at odds with ourselves and suffering a crisis of conscience. Without mutual recognition, all actors become alienated for lack of ­others with whom to constitute shared space in which they establish themselves as po­liti­cal subjects. The argument is not simply that we adopt a more open-­ minded attitude ­toward other ­people, be they neighbors, colleagues, or strangers. Rather, we are less likely to degrade o­ thers ­because our appearance before them is how we necessarily constitute ourselves as beings in the world. Although the second sovereign form allows the par­tic­u­lar person to be, as it w ­ ere, it is not a liberal form of sovereignty, ­because it does not assume the a priori existence of the individual subject. Again, subjects can only obtain a worldly existence through mutual recognition. Without such recognition, one cannot exist in the world, if by “world” we mean a shared, if contested, space of meaning. The public that emerges in that shared space, then, yields not a h ­ omogeneous “­people” or “nation” but rather the appearances of par­tic­u­lar persons whose speech and action conjured them into existence. The second sovereign form is a direct effect of a plurality of ­people being together as po­liti­cal equals. Hence the el­derly Syrian refugee insists not that the liberal “I ­will be” but rather that the phenomenal “we w ­ ill be.” The difference between the first and the second sovereign forms spotlights the conditions through which we can appear in the world through the particularity of our own phenomenal being. To understand the difference between ­being ­human in the first and second sovereign forms respectively, it helps to revisit Aristotle’s distinction between the ­human qua animal and the ­human qua po­liti­cal actor. The former (zöe) need only reproduce its generic, biological existence through a field of social relations with other identical specimens of the human-­animal. Biological reproduction works in tandem with social reproduction among a collective of identical, indistinct, and equal subjects. The latter (bios) requires a venue in which it can distinguish itself through speech and action with o­ thers. The former assumes that all persons are essentially the same, while the latter assumes that all persons are qualitatively dif­fer­ent.

16 Introduction

The dif­fer­ent implications that each realm holds for po­liti­cal life could not be more decisive. This clarification allows us to better conceptualize two terms that are central to understanding action and central to much current anthropological lit­er­a­ture as well (Chapter 2). First, ethical refers to actions a person takes to reach inner agreement—­through the faculty of thinking—­about how to live in the world with ­others. Put differently, ethics begin with the two-­in-­one thought dialogue, which divides the erstwhile unitary subject into two separate voices that the subject tries to align in order to s­ ettle the conscience. Ethics in this regard does not mean living according to social norms and expectations with which one might justifiably agree. Rather, inspired by thought and judgment, ethics materialize in the world through original, extraordinary actions to intervene in ongoing pro­cesses of which the actor cannot tolerate being a constituent part. As Cabot shows, one’s ethics can blend with the technical judgments that asylum adjudicators make, as one example, while t­ hose actors might reflect on wider social narratives, par­tic­u­lar encounters, and dif­fer­ent forms of knowledge to reach a decision. Hence the application of law cannot be reduced to law itself (2014: 2–3, 7–8; see also Coutin 2000; Maguire 2015; Maguire and Fussey 2016). Yet ethics alone do not inherently challenge the basis of sovereign power, even if they empower us to manipulate law, bureaucracies, and apparatuses. Ethics inspire in­ dividual actions, which, unlike joint action, cannot result in the (re)constitution of sovereign space, ­because space only emerges between multiple persons. Second, po­liti­cal refers to joint actions among dif­fer­ent but equal ­people to constitute a shared space in line with their ethical judgments and allows them to reconstitute that space when deemed necessary. Po­liti­cal h ­ ere refers neither to Machiavellian strategies for securing one’s hold on power nor to Marxist notions of reproducing structures of in­equality that privilege one group over another. To hold leverage over ­others does not grant one freedom of being (see G. Feldman 2015: 13–14). On the contrary, it can further isolate us from the world, just as the tyrant is the strongest and the loneliest player in the game. In short, this book ­will regard politics not as the advancement of self-­interest but rather as the strug­gle to establish our sovereign presence in a world we necessarily constitute with o­ thers. The po­liti­cal enhances and institutionalizes the ethical for as long as p ­ eople decide that it applies to the status quo. Ethical actions occur in synchronous moments. Po­liti­cal action moves beyond the synchronous moment by establishing direct bonds between subjects that last through time through shared memory (i.e., lasting beyond the participation of ­those sub-



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 17

jects and getting inherited by ­others through a new tradition). The polity, then, outlasts the participation of any given member and so assumes a quasi-­immortal status (Arendt 1998: 17–20). Therefore, ethics and politics are ­things of action through which actors become subjects who constitute worlds. We undertake sovereign action to effect the world (and not simply affect it) b­ ecause we strive for being—­a ­human existence only obtainable in the com­pany of equal but dif­fer­ ent ­people. Any examination of how polities are constituted invokes “mi­grants” ­because the term invariably refers to “­others” through and against whom we constitute ourselves (Cabot 2014: 8). However, our relations with ­others need not proceed on the basis of abstract, categorical types (in a word, ste­reo­types), in which case the other becomes the Other, or the par­tic­u­lar person crossing a border mysteriously becomes a categorical “mi­grant,” “alien,” “temporary laborer,” and so forth. In the ethnography that follows, I do not dwell on the extent to which the investigative team’s actions indicate the ethical or the po­liti­cal as the difference is one of degree not kind. The question that needs attention is how the second sovereign form materializes at all in a world so thoroughly dominated by the first.

Conceptualizing the Gray Zone of the First Sovereign Form Like state sovereignty, the gray zone is an effect of ­human relations, not a preexisting netherworld into which ­people arrive from elsewhere. The gray zone is a point in space-­time ­free of the constraints and contours of moral code and law, which is where sovereign power expresses itself in the original act of (re)constitution. Sovereignty and the gray zone are inextricably linked as the latter is a precondition of the former, and the former can only reveal itself fully in the latter. State sovereignty, despite its mythical reputation, never materializes in a totalizing objective presence, for the ­simple reason that persons, who by definition are subjective beings, are the agents who materialize it. “Subjective” means nothing more than occupying par­tic­u­lar standpoints. Even the sum total of those standpoints reaches not a transcendent, universal order but only a historically contingent, global order ever vulnerable to contestation and transformation. By analogy, Vincent demonstrated the illusion of transcendent state sovereignty through the meta­phor of an inkjet printer, which prints, for example, a black square, composed of countless microscopic dots, on a white sheet of paper. Held from a distance, that black square appears to fully enclose a bounded area within an undefined expanse of limitless, uncultivated white space. The

18 Introduction

boundary between emptiness and order—­between inside and outside—­appears cleanly at the juncture of perfectly white space and perfectly black space. ­Under a microscope, however, the picture looks much dif­fer­ent: the ink does not totally cover that apparently bounded area; instead, the innumerable black dots only resemble total incorporation, but they neither fully blot out the white space nor establish an impermeable border against it. The white space infiltrates the black space by design and conditions how it appears on the page. Thus, like the black space, state sovereignty as an objective real­ity is an optical illusion. But this point does not deny its real­ity. Rather, it calls out sovereignty as a subjective real­ ity, meaning it appears out of the practices of situated persons authorized to act in the name of the state. No objective real­ity can truly emerge from subjective beings, other­wise known as ­human beings. As Herzfeld (2008: 87) puts it, “The state is . . . ​emergent in practice; while it does ‘exist’, our knowledge of it comes from our practical engagements with its vari­ous realizations in bureaucracy, law, and surveillance.” Recent academic lit­er­a­ture overwhelmingly understands the gray zone, along with the associated concept of sovereignty, through Agamben’s (1998) “state of exception” and his term homo sacer. This perspective addresses the sovereign’s prerogative to suspend the law, which then grants it impunity to deal directly with the security threat. As the sovereign establishes the constitution, it can suspend the laws that emerge from it, b­ ecause the sovereign is logically prior to the constitution. We can detect echoes of Foucault (2007: 261–67), who flags the irony that the coup d’état (the suspension of ­legal order to suppress a threat to the sovereign) is the prerogative of the raison d’état (the responsibility of the state to provide ­legal order). Hence the coup d’état is the expression of the raison d’état in full force. When targeting the threatening subject, the sovereign removes the l­ egal protection that this subject has hitherto enjoyed, thus rendering it homo sacer. (This term means “sacred [hu]man,” but it signifies an entity that is simply outside of mundane order rather than part of the Divine realm.) Hence homo sacer becomes a subject who can be killed with no consequence for the killer. Agamben’s most radical and insightful point, however, is that sovereign order is premised upon homo sacer ’s ambiguous position relative to the sovereign: this figure is both the foundation of state sovereignty (as the embodiment of the mass “­people” in whose name sovereign state exists) and also that which the state may exclude if the sovereign calls for a state of exception. The generic “­people” underpin state sovereignty, but any par­tic­u­lar person can be dis-



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 19

missed at no risk to the sovereign. In brief, the sovereign gets it both ways with re­spect to homo sacer. The upshot is that the first sovereign form begets the figure of homo sacer ­because sovereignty is premised upon an abstraction (i.e., it is premised upon the “­people,” who by definition cannot speak; only ­actual persons can speak). Hence the p ­ eople, or a subcategory of them, cannot defend themselves from being dismissed, b­ ecause they themselves are not sovereign, but rather sovereignty is simply issued in their categorical name. Agamben argues that the state of exception becomes permanent when the concentration camp fully materializes. Short of that moment, full-­scale sovereign authority is dispersed about the social configuration that embodies the state (or status quo). This dispersion does not qualitatively eliminate the state of exception but rather dilutes its dehumanizing effects, ­because law and custom more reliably protect the individual subject. This contradiction—­state sovereignty premised upon an abstract entity that the sovereign can si­mul­ta­neously exclude—­does not appear in the second sovereign form, ­because par­tic­u­lar persons themselves instantiate their sovereignty through their joint action. No action; no sovereignty. Cecilia, the only ­woman on the investigative team, readily grasped the irony “that the state d­ oesn’t care about me even when I arrest a criminal. The law cares, but not the state. If the state cared about us, then we would not be taking pay cuts for the last three years.” Among other interlocutors in Agamben’s analy­sis is Carl Schmitt, whose unfortunate association with Nazism makes it difficult ­today to appreciate what motivated his inquiry into the state of exception. Pinpointing what led Schmitt into a dead end spotlights what we need to know to better understand the second sovereign form. Oddly, Schmitt’s analy­sis seeks to recapture an under­ standing of sovereignty as the empowerment of ­people to inaugurate new beginnings rather than domination per se. It ultimately falls on his mistaken identification of plurality as a descriptor of states rather than ­actual persons. As Schwab notes (1985: xlii), Schmitt lamented the rise of technocracy and its elimination of the personal from po­liti­cal space. The modern state, Schmitt writes, “seems to have become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant. Po­liti­cal ideas are generally recognized only when groups can be identified that have a plausible economic interest in turning them to their advantage” (65; see also 27–28). He adds that “what we can still call the state t­ oday must inversely be defined and understood from the po­liti­cal” (cited in Strong 2005: xv, italics added). The state’s hyperformality(i.e., its unwavering commitment to the rule

20 Introduction

of law and administrative governance) rendered it antithetical to any meaningful definition of the word “po­liti­cal” and rendered ­people unprepared to act or cope with unforeseen events due to rigid bureaucracies and strict l­egal frameworks (xvii–­xviii). Attempting to recover the h ­ uman ele­ment in politics, Schmitt designated the exception as the space where the person must act to deal with the throng of unpredictable historical events. Normal order cannot address what emerges from beyond its scope, bound as it is by the prejudices of the par­tic­u­lar historical moment in which it was established. Thus the state of exception gives the person, qua sovereign agent, the opportunity to act f­ ree of normal constraint in times of crisis to establish a new order. In line with his desire to restore the personal into our conception of the po­ liti­cal, Schmitt’s (1985: 5) famous definition that the “sovereign is he who decides the exception” refers not to a godlike ­human but rather to a configuration of actors who, in deciding that exception, likewise define the norm. Schmitt understands sovereignty, therefore, to be “infinitely pliable,” given the countless possibilities of social configurations and of events identified as threats, and not some mere “expression of a [transcendent] real­ity” (17). Equipped with that underived power, the sovereign both defines situations of threat to the order (usually as extreme peril) and also undertakes action to reestablish order anew (6). Thus, even outside the l­egal framework, the state remains, while the law recedes (12). With sovereign action, Schmitt seeks a world premised upon human need, h ­ uman particularity, and a h ­ uman desire to show one’s self in the world. For Schmitt, then, sovereign action returns (or should return) the personal to the po­liti­cal. Drawing on Hobbes, Schmitt understood this action through the model of God’s creation, which God achieved outside any preexisting order. Symbolized in the “miracle,” direct interventions ­were precisely how God was understood to act in the world prior to Enlightenment-­era Deism, a­ fter which God was thought to have removed himself from the world a­ fter he set the clockwork cosmos in motion. (The meta­phor for po­liti­cal life is clear: the pre-­Enlightenment God symbolizes the capacity to act without pre­ce­dent, while the Enlightenment God symbolizes the totality of logical necessity, which even moots God’s existence.) Accordingly, Schmitt asserts that sovereign power is the power “to make something from that which is not something and thus is not subject to laid-­down laws” (Strong 2005: xxvii). Enlightenment rationalism precluded any such opportunity for direct intervention, given its obsession with



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 21

planning, order, calculated initiatives, and belief that the totality of being could be known in the pres­ent and anticipated for the f­uture. For Schmitt, then, the miracle of action is ­human life fulfilled in the po­liti­cal realm (1985: 36–37). That Schmitt was attracted to Nazism makes a certain benighted sense, insofar as totalitarian movements adopt a hostile stance t­oward the staid, bureaucratic state. In contrast, ­those movements strive to remain in constant motion—a simulation of local action—by pursuing ever more extreme mea­sures to try to materialize their utopian dream on earth (Arendt 1968: 391). If all action within the realm of state sovereignty is impersonal and technocratic, then Schmitt seemed to think that any action taken outside of it must be the longed-­ for definitive h ­ uman experience. The tragedy of his analy­sis lies in his failure to realize that a politics of the personal, if it manifests as a cult of personality, is not sovereign action issuing from the strug­gles of par­tic­u­lar persons. Rather, it is a movement that destroys politics by destroying the basic h ­ uman condition of plurality as every­one must resemble the leader. Hence Schmitt’s (2007: 26) definition of the po­liti­cal (as the motives and actions premised upon the distinction between friend and ­enemy) generates precisely the opposite effect for ­human beings than it intended. For Schmitt, the state ultimately asserts and acts upon that distinction (29–30). However, the categories of friend and e­ nemy are collectivized abstractions, meaning that the “­enemy in the po­liti­cal sense need not be hated personally” (29). It remains unclear in Schmitt’s work how the actor is drawn both to po­liti­cal being—­meaning to act on the basis of the friend-­enemy distinction—­and also si­mul­ta­neously to feel indifferent to the “other” against whom one is acting. To act with indifference would be to ape the agenda of the impersonal technocratic state, and thus to deny one’s own capacity to think, as the means by which we resolve the two-­in-­one thought dialogue, and to judge how one engages ­others as par­tic­ul­ar persons. Schmitt’s conclusion asks us to act in contradiction to the motivation of his ­whole analy­sis: restoring the personal to the po­liti­cal. Therefore, the po­liti­cal for Schmitt is exemplified in the willingness to give one’s life for the collective—­the abstract identity—as the ultimate ­human act (Strong 1996: xvii). Schmitt’s view of po­liti­cal action lands in the same place as the technocratic form of governance that he so carefully picks apart: the indifferent subject who can be induced to act not for any par­tic­u­lar ethical judgment but for expediency in stabilizing the status quo for the collectivized group. Put differently, a politics of the personal, seeking escape from the confines of law and technocracy, yields not politics based on par­tic­u­lar persons but only

22 Introduction

a person abstracted into a deity embodying a cultural type, with which all other members see as an essential expression of themselves. Schmitt’s (2007) stark distinction between “friend” and “­enemy” reduces the po­liti­cal realm to actions taken in the name of an essentialized cultural ethos, which would define all persons of the said cultural group. Hence he makes clear that the po­liti­cal world cannot be a universe, but rather a “pluriverse” composed of the only entity capable of ­doing politics, namely a collection of distinct states each speaking for a distinctly dif­fer­ent abstract nation (53). He falls victim to what Stolcke (1995) aptly called “cultural fundamentalism”—­that is, the modern belief that essentialized groups by nature lack any moral commensurability. Hence no law can govern their interrelations, and vio­lence between them is inevitable if they occupy the same geographic space. Schmitt rejects plurality (understood as the empirical fact that no two ­people occupy the standpoint, ­whether they are members of the same group or not). This rejection necessarily results in government action being deduced from a singular premise about the good of the homogeneous, collectivized “­people.” This path silences par­tic­u­lar subjects by abstracting them into a common generic one: the nation, the race, the class, or all of humanity. Thus Schmitt still arrives, tragically, at an endorsement of a state openly hostile to plurality ­because the sovereign form he sought regards the personal as a derivative of an abstract type.

Verticality, Atomization, and Ambiguities in the First Sovereign Form’s Gray Zone As David once reflected, “According to my Christian education, t­ here is no gray zone; ­there is a red line that separates ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ According to my personal and professional ethics, ­there is a ‘gray zone’ that’s between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ According to my personal experience, sometimes t­ here’s nothing but a ‘gray zone,’ and you just hope you got it right.” The sequence of David’s remarks shows a progression from youthful moral upbringing (where all choices are perfectly clear), to compromises that police work asks of its officers, to an ambiguous world that a formal moral code cannot adequately address. “Morally ambiguous” need not mean “bad” only, but rather the possibility of moving in a “good” or “bad” direction. To that extent, David’s remarks convey that we ­will live in a world of new possibilities ­because of gray zones. However, we need to determine what makes ­things so often go terribly wrong in them without lapsing into simplistic arguments about ­human nature or cultural determinism. Primo Levi



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 23

offers insights into that m ­ atter based on his experience in a concentration camp, a term that conveys the intensification of the banal, basic conditions of the first sovereign form (Bauman 2001). Levi gives pointed attention to the camp’s vertical bureaucratic arrangements, its subsequent atomization, and the moral ambiguity that pervades its entire social fabric. Indeed, he premises his insights on a critique of our banal need for clarity in moral issues. As he writes, “Anyone who reads (or writes) this history of the Lager reveals the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to emulate Christ’s gesture on Judgment Day: ­here the righ­teous, over ­there the reprobates” (1988: 37). Himself an inmate of Auschwitz for twelve months, Levi explains that “the network of ­human relations inside the Lager was not s­ imple: it could not be reduced to two blocs of victims and persecutors” (37). Instead, the Lager appears as a space of bureaucratic rule that contains an erstwhile war of all against all. The search for allies proved a futile exercise in front of “a thousand sealed off monads, and between them a desperate covert and continuous strug­gle” (38). The primary purpose of the concentration camp system was “shattering the adversaries’ capacity to resist: for the camp management the new arrival was by definition an adversary” (38). Other inmates envied the newcomer b­ ecause “he still seemed to have on him the smell of home” (39). Out of this hyperindividualization, where competition replaces recognition, ­those with institutional authority seek to disperse the blame for the atrocities ­under way by making the victim complicit, thereby eradicating the border between “right” and “wrong” in a move of self-­protection. The best method is to “cover them in blood, compromise them as much as pos­si­ble, thus establishing a bond of complicity so that they can no longer turn back” (Levi 1988: 43). Servants and masters thus blend into an amoral and highly complex internal structure that complicates one’s ability to judge. (Levi does judge, however, with careful discernment, but his criteria do not concern us h ­ ere.) Atomized and complicit, the temptation for inmates to seek a “secure” position in the camp’s egregious bureaucracy ­rose to a fever pitch. It was the Lager’s creation of the Special Squad (SS) that marked the quin­tes­sen­tial merger between victim and perpetrator, as implied in the unit’s abbreviation mimicking the Nazi paramilitary SS, or Schutzstaffel. This SS referred to the groups of prisoners who maintained order and discipline among the new arrivals and managed the persons fated for the gas chambers. Their duties included pulling gold teeth from the corpses,

24 Introduction

cutting ­women’s hair, and sorting out clothing and luggage. They would transport bodies to the crematoria and attend to the extraction and elimination of the ashes. In Auschwitz, they numbered from seven hundred to a thousand persons (50). The existence of the SS allowed the message to be sent from the perpetrators to the victims that “we, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours” (53–54; see also Balibar 2009a: 17). The result is an odd equality of footing between the two ostensible antagonists, sardonically summarized in a camp football match where both sides competed as equal, but empty, abstract souls (Levi 1988: 55; see also Balibar 2009a: 18; 2009b). The testimony of one SS member relayed the following: “Certainly, I would have killed myself or got myself killed; but I wanted to survive, to avenge myself and bear witness. You ­mustn’t think we are monsters; we are the same as you, only much more unhappy” (Levi 1988: 53). The camp reproduced, with much greater intensity, the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian society in which it was enmeshed (Levi 1988: 47). Put differently, the camp, and gray zones more generally, do not invent hierarchies, equipped with their bigotry, that destroy ­people. Rather, gray zones remove any checks on such destructive impulses, which normal social order enables in the first place. As to the question of who works within that structure, Levi sees a variety of reasons that ­people joined (or w ­ ere recruited for) the Kapos, the petty camp bureaucrats responsible for lower-­level order. First, the ranks ­were filled with the common criminals and po­liti­cal prisoners, ­until Jews themselves sought positions in the hopes of avoiding their prescribed destinies (47). A few ­were sadists, attracted to bureaucratic privilege and the authority to inflict pain and suffering. The frustrated sought power as well, which Levi also sees as emblematic of larger totalitarian society. Yet the common denominator of the Ka­ pos was their willingness “to pay homage to hierarchic authority, thus attaining an other­wise unattainable social elevation” (48). Nothing in his descriptions of the tempted, however, differs from what normally draws ­people to positions of institutional authority. The point in reviewing Levi’s analy­sis is to argue not that any gray zone is identical to the Lager but rather that key features of legitimate sovereign power are accentuated in its gray zone. Two features concern us h ­ ere. First, the moral breakdown he describes does not occur outside of an (im)moral order. The



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 25

gray zone signifies not a full break from the “normal” order from which it emerges but rather an intensification of normal order’s organ­izing princi­ples: in this case, vertical, bureaucratic authority, hyper-­atomization, and blatant racism. The difference between the normal order and the gray zone is a m ­ atter of degree, not of kind. The ease with which normal order slides into a gray zone explains why none of the team members ever spoke of entering it as a ­simple crossing of a clear boundary. Rather, it resembled a walk through fog or a slow descent into a murkier realm. Usually, it begins with generously interpreting a law that does not clearly fit the situation at hand: if you need a judge’s warrant to search a ­hotel room, then do you need a warrant to search a suitcase that a guest left in storage in the lobby? Returning to Vincent’s meta­phor of the inkjet printer, we see that the gray zone is the default mode of social interaction ­because the black square of law and order, composed of a loose configuration of dots, cannot fully blot out the white space under­neath and beyond it. Social interaction binds the two, forming gray out of the black and white spaces. Second, that moral breakdown generated a society of vacuous souls who concluded that their lives had become miserable for their complicity in unspeakable crimes. Though tempting to emphasize the cooperation of other­wise innocent victims, the perpetrators experience this vacuity as well. No one wins, even though some lose much more than o­ thers. Arendt (1968: 459) explained it with frankness and precision: “The manipulators of this system [the Nazi death camps] believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all ­others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous ­because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never ­were born.” Thus the first sovereign form and its associated gray zone tap into a grim capacity for extreme, systemic vio­lence. Yet this result cannot be the consequence of some mythical ­human nature or historical determinism. Rather, the horrors of this gray zone are functions of a historically par­tic­u­lar sovereign formation underpinning social order. Insofar as the first sovereign form is premised upon vertical relations and categorized, objectified h ­ uman subjects, most likely ­those subjects w ­ ill be treated as just that when the protection of law is removed. In sum, the gray zone accentuates tendencies already pres­ent in normal order ­because both order and the gray zone derive their enabling conditions from the same sovereign form. The point holds for both the first and the second sovereign forms, though with markedly dif­fer­ent results.

26 Introduction

The Ordinary Gray Zone and the First Sovereign Form Much academic research rightly focuses on less sensational examples of gray zones of the first sovereign form, which are made pos­si­ble by the same conditions enabling the concentration camp. As a basic l­ egal ­matter, the Canadian Criminal Code (CCC), for example, highlights the inseparability of the law and the gray zone, even in a liberal democracy: (2) Princi­ple—­It is in the public interest to ensure that public officers may effectively carry out their law enforcement duties in accordance with the rule of law and, to that end, to expressly recognize in law a justification for public officers and other persons acting at their direction to commits acts or omissions that would other­wise constitute offences. (CCC, art. 25.1 [2] cited in Brodeur 2010: 6)

In short, per Schmitt’s and Agamben’s point, a fundamental contradiction appears in the legal-­cum-­security apparatus, specifically that the law must grant its sovereign agents the right to break it in order to uphold it in the “public interest.” This contradiction yields enormous leverage to its agents over any individual who falls within the scope of their security concerns. We live at the mercy of their ethical judgments or lack thereof. For example, Caton and Zacka (2010: 206) point to Abu Ghraib, the US-­run prison in Iraq, to argue that prisoner abuse, occurring outside l­ egal and formal policy procedure, requires “an orga­nizational type grounded in the systematic institutionalization of arbitrariness in the form of individual practical judgment and initiative taking.” They reason that t­ hese abuses became pos­si­ble b­ ecause Abu Ghraib functioned as a mixture of a Foucauldian disciplinary regime and a security apparatus. On the one hand, Abu Ghraib was an enclosed space of total surveillance with full knowledge of the interred subjects and complete regimentation of daily routine. In this case, all decisions should be technical only and executed according to a master plan available to the prison staff. On the other hand, Abu Ghraib was also a security apparatus, which as Foucault explains, attempts to manage the flow of unidentifiable ele­ments into sovereign, disciplined space. Low-­level military police also had to determine if prisoners should be classified as terrorist threats. They had no clear guidelines ­for this task because they had to assess ­people whom they did not know through normal disciplinary procedures. In such an ambiguous situation, they in­ven­ted the criteria ad hoc while possessing total control over the detained individuals. They pursued extreme mea­sures to “soften up” the



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 27

prisoners with the aim of acquiring more information from them to help determine their status. That contradictory situation, which emerged through Abu Ghraib’s institutional design, was a gray zone in which military police obtained sovereign control over their prisoners f­ ree from bureaucratic regulation. Similarly, though with far less egregious results, Mountz (2010) examines what officials in Citizenship Immigration Canada call the “long tunnel thesis,” or the pro­cessing time for p ­ eople before they are officially recognized as refugees entitled to certain rights. The phrase refers to the corridors one traverses in an airport’s international terminal prior to reaching the passport-­control booth. Even though travellers are physically on Canadian territory, they still lack a legally recognized status ­until their passports are stamped. ­Until that moment, travellers lack recourse to any ­legal protection from ­those who hold sovereign authority over them, rendering the “long tunnel” a bureaucratic gray zone. Mountz describes mid-­level man­ag­ers and employees in this example negotiating the po­liti­cal climate as they determine how to pro­cess Chinese travellers claiming refugee status in British Columbia in 1999. Lauth Bacas (2014) describes a similar situation with regard to unauthorized mi­grants held ­under “administrative detention” in Lesbos ­after crossing the sea border from Turkey. Again, the decision of how to proceed is left to relatively low-­level officials unequipped to make the ­legal judgments required for the situation at hand. In line with Schmitt (1985: 17), who sees an “infinitely pliable” configurations of sovereign authority, those who hold such authority might not be state agents at all. In this regard, ethnographic approaches to sovereign actions, so often premised upon “security threats,” reveal the limitless variety of their appearances (Goldstein 2010: 492). Albahari (2015: 18–19) argues that such actions are hardly coordinated through a clear hierarchy of command, but rather are the effect of a “multivariate sovereign system . . . ​that extends throughout the holding facilities in urban peripheries of Eu­rope; heavi­ly patrolled and virtually fenced Mediterranean straits; North African oases; desert fences; and West African fisheries.” Similarly, Kalir and Wissink (2015) show that the state agents responsible for the deportation of illegalized mi­grants in the Netherlands, and the NGO workers attending to their needs, ultimately participate in the same “deportation continuum” ­because they share categories for understanding illegalized migration. Through the example of deportation, Peutz and De Genova (2010: 2) likewise argue that the state amounts not to an ontological t­ hing but

28 Introduction

rather to a configuration of social relations: “Although conventionally considered a ‘natu­ral’ or inevitable response on the part of sovereign states exercising their prerogative, if not obligation, to control their borders and regulate entry based on membership, deportation is in fact the expression of a complex sociopo­liti­cal regime that manifests and engenders dominant notions of sovereignty, citizenship, public health, national identity, cultural homogeneity, racial purity, and class privilege.” Deportations show how laws and regulations can be written to remove “undesirables” from the po­liti­cal domain. Law follows the sovereign desire rather than contains it. Inda and Dowling (2013: 2) aptly refer to this pro­cess as “governing immigration through crime,” or passing laws and issuing executive o­ rders that narrow the scope in which mi­grants can “legally” conduct themselves on the state’s territory. The resulting strug­gle captures the dynamic of how the sovereign identifies threat, defines normality, and pursues courses of action accordingly. (See I. Feldman [2015] for a historical example of this point in Gaza during Egyptian rule.) Examples of gray zones abound in a variety of contexts that may or may not involve the formal state. Reeves (2013) charts how Kyrgyz mi­grants working in Rus­sia endure a situation in which the mi­grant’s relationship with employers and state agents supersedes the authenticity of their travel and work documents. Existing in a generalized space between law and its application (Asad cited in Reeves 2013: 509; see also Theodore 2012), ­these mi­grants remain vulnerable to exploitation and deportation depending upon ­whether their documents are recognized. Sovereign authority over o­ thers in this gray zone is perpetrated in the ­labor market rather than in a bounded space of state control. Not all situations in gray zones aim to destroy bodies or leave them in a permanent, liminal phase (see G. Feldman 2014: 75). Some researchers have studied how the state of exception can at least provide a certain stability to daily life, despite the deadly consequences for t­ hose who step out of line. Penglase’s (2009) account of police and drug traffickers vying for power in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas portrays how each side destabilizes the other’s presence but, in the pro­cess, must somehow serve the people’s security needs and so also stabilize daily life to justify their respective authorities (see also Rozema 2011). Jusionyte (2015) shows in her ethnography of the tri-­border area of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil how drug traffickers pose as state officials, and how state officials themselves use their authority to disguise their support of trafficking. She argues that this “camouflage”



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 29

does more than cover up illegal activity—­apropos of the gray zone, it indicates the futility of distinguishing between legal/illegal, as ­these categories themselves are effects of how state authority is invoked by situated actors (132). Indeed, Heyman (2013: 304; see also De Genova 2002; Inda 2006: 7–8) has argued that anthropologists must address pro­cesses of legalization and illegalization lest we make a fetish of discrete categories. The gray zone also serves conventionally “good” purposes. Fassin and Vasquez (2005) explain that the Venezuelan government declared a state of emergency during the 1999 torrential flooding (known as la Tragedia) so that it could act directly to save lives regardless of social status. Despite setbacks and abuses, the overall emergency response laid a foundation for then president Hugo Chávez’s efforts to renew an egalitarian national society. Similarly, Gupta (2012) asks how well-­intended development programs aimed at raising the quality of life of India’s poor nevertheless go awry, leaving millions exposed to death. He examines w ­ hether Agamben’s state of exception can account for the good intentions of ­those acting with sovereign authority. ­These examples of good intentions and provisions of security, however, do not move their recipients out of Agamben’s homo sacer category, b­ ecause ­those recipients are not granted a constituent presence in po­liti­cal space as par­tic­u­lar persons. Hence they remain examples of the first sovereign form. Regardless of the subjects’ quality of life, they do not play constituent roles in the polities that they inhabit per the second sovereign form. They are t­ here to be acted upon—to be saved, damned, or ignored. ­These diverse results speak to Foucault’s (1990: 137) point that biopower is capable of saving or destroying entire populations with mere technical decisions. Žižek (2002: 94) expressed it most succinctly when noting that “perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment of the ‘local population’ as homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan—­one is never sure what it w ­ ill drop, bombs or food parcels.” In short, the first sovereign form dehumanizes the po­liti­cal subject—­that is, it removes it from the po­liti­cal field—­regardless of what it is ­doing to the body of homo sacer. We see that the sovereign is an effect of a hegemonic configuration of social relations more accurately described as the status quo than the state. This point negates the liberal distinction between the government and the governed (Bigo 2006: 36; see also Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Kauanui 2017; Shneiderman 2013). A subtle interplay characterizes the relationship between sovereign agents and the proactive subjects that they attempt to manage. (See Sigona 2015

30 Introduction

with re­spect to refugees.) Hence Bigo (2014: 197) correctly notes that anthropology’s contribution to the field of critical security studies is “open to being surprised by the inventiveness and capacities of ­human beings when they are in ­actual relations. . . . ​This applies to how one conceptualises states, bound­aries, sovereignty, security, risk, freedom, justice, privacy and democracy—­these need to be discussed relationally.” Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski (2014: 1; see also Samimian-­Darash and Stalcup 2017) summarily explain that security practices transpire within specific material, historic, and socioeconomic conditions, thus locating them in the give-­and-­take of lived history. Likewise, social scientists struggling to understand sovereignty should not uncritically deploy the state’s own analytical categories—­“citizen,” “refugee,” “immigrant,” “alien,” and so forth—if they wish to capture it as a phenomenal real­ity (see Albahari 2015: 11; Carey and Marak 2011: 3; Coutin 2000: 10; De Genova 2002; Mahdavi 2011: 33). ­Those ­actual relations, through which we are composed and compose ourselves as subjective beings, most certainly have elite players with an unusual amount of leverage to move events in their preferred direction. ­Those players can include anyone, including government officials, business leaders, financial experts, populist figures, and pop stars. However, the status quo cannot be reduced to any one of them. (Even dictators require networks of police and other alliances to sustain them.) Sovereign action amounts to the strug­gle to arrange the social field according to the hegemonic desires emerging from that very strug­gle. Again, states ­don’t do ­things; ­people do. The gray zone is not a separate realm of ­human activity that security agents enter by crossing a well-­marked threshold. Rather, it is the mesh in which much of ­human relations transpire. Most analyses focus on gray zones associated with the first sovereign form, replete with top-­down authority situated in some kind of vertical relationship. Yet the undercover investigative team mixes the first and the second sovereign forms due to their formal location in an interior ministry bureaucracy, which gives the opportunities for unsupervised work, and their own egalitarian social organ­ization. This peculiar situation provides an opportunity to act in a gray zone associated with the second sovereign form.

Anthropology of the Police/y Noting that critical theorists for a c­ entury have conceptualized police as segues into deeper social questions, Karpiak (2016: 420) summarizes that police have been “good to think.” This observation leads to the question that “if police



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 31

have been such a productive tool through which to think, how does the emergence of anthropological research proj­ects focused squarely on such prac­ti­tion­ ers stand to change that thought?” (423). My answer is not simply that anthropology’s ethnographic approach shows how ­things “­really work” on the street, to put it colloquially. Ethnography no longer distinguishes the discipline. Rather, in striving to apprehend the “real,” an anthropological approach illuminates ­human possibilities. ­Human strug­gles at par­tic­u­lar points in space-­time generate historically contingent worlds that only obtain the semblance of ontological permanence. The discrepancy between the strug­gle, which could have multiple outcomes, and what resembles an ontological world, means that other worlds are pos­si­ble, even if they are not yet apparent. Anthropology’s radically empirical approach (dif­fer­ent from an empiricist approach) recognizes this discrepancy ­because it sees the difference between ­actual conduct and hegemonic narrative. The latter strives to discipline the former. It reveals that being h ­ uman is an equivocal endeavor. H ­ uman beings are never fixed in the relational fields they inhabit, ­because they constantly strug­gle through and against them. Other possibilities knock on the door when p ­ eople jointly act to constitute a world they want. In keeping, this pres­ent ethnography of an undercover investigative team attempts to show how that team’s members strug­gle to create a world dif­fer­ent from the one they inhabit, a world that is constitutive of their own thinking, judging, and acting, per the second sovereign form. Academics and the media have rightly paid much attention to repressive policing around the world. My proj­ect ­here is not to contribute another book to this well-­known phenomenon. Rather, it is to take advantage of rare access to an undercover investigative team, whose work differs significantly from public order police: investigators operate clandestinely to prevent suspects from knowing that they are ­under investigation, whereas public order police openly convey their presence to discourage potential criminal acts. Investigators gather evidence of crime rather than pursue crime prevention. The public sees uniform police but not investigators. This par­tic­u­lar team shows two distinctive features: the egalitarian organ­ ization they maintain among themselves, and their relative in­de­pen­dence from the vertical bureaucracy in which they are h ­ oused. Yet crucial to the analy­sis is the relations between the team members themselves, the surrounding bureaucracy and intra-­EU networks, and the networks of p ­ eople they investigate. Indeed, sociologists and criminologists have a long history of studying the police in what we familiarly call a social context, sometimes deploying the term

32 Introduction

“ecol­ogy” to show a dynamic interde­pen­dency between police and the surrounding neighborhoods. For example, as crime rates increase in areas with broken social networks (Kane 2002: 869–70), police are expected to take more initiatives to deal with the threat, which increases the likelihood of their use of excessive vio­lence. That vio­lence, in turn, builds greater re­sis­tance to the police in the same area, thus potentially generating a vicious-­circle effect. Similarly, police can perceive “victim deservedness” (Klinger cited in Kane 2002: 871), in which victims in high-­risk areas are considered to have brought the criminal activity upon themselves by their own choices. Such a perception leads police ­either to react to crime with less vigor or to engage in malpractice, both on the assumption that normal police procedures do not apply in places with endemic crime. Such responses might then become the normative order of district-­level policing (Herbert cited in Kane 2002: 871). Terrill and Paoline (2003: 1006) argue that such a relationship between the police and the neighborhood creates a we-­ them mentality and isolates the former from the latter. The police then look to each other for mutual support, which often creates an ethic among them of toughness on the street. Se­nior officers with experience in defusing potentially violent situations teach ju­nior officers how to do the same (Bayley and Garofalo 1989: 2). By this logic, however, once a culture of aggressiveness sets in, se­nior officers become agents in its reproduction. The loyalty that members of a police force show each other is premised upon a need for survival in an ecol­ogy in which (1) the community is posited a priori as “other,” and (2) the police themselves are or­ga­nized in a vertically integrated bureaucracy with se­nior officers socializing ju­nior officers into their roles. Loyalty appears similar to a military situation, with hierarchical units immersed in a hostile geographic-­cum-­cultural space (Skolnick 1975: 11). Manichaean definitions take over one’s understanding of the other, rather than any effort to understand other persons from their own standpoint (Robben 2010; see also Grassiani 2013, 2015). Hence a connection appears between strictly vertical forms of social organ­ization and the propensity to cast antagonists in ste­reo­typed, categorical ways. This feature carries over when police move into the gray zone, often resulting in abuses against minorities and immigrants. Studies of criminal investigators are woefully lacking in comparison to research on public order police (Brodeur 2010: 3). The existing field-­based studies of undercover investigating emphasize the attraction to undercover work.



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 33

Officers might be drawn to its mystique but also might regret the impression that they are ­doing “dirty work” (Loftus, Goold, and Mac Giollabhui 2016: 643; Loftus and Goold 2012). Lines between good and bad, as well as between heroes and villains, inevitably blur (Marx 1988: xix). Miller (1987) notes that undercover officers in normal police precincts often take ­those assignments as their very first rather than switching into them ­after gaining experience as a uniformed officer. In effect, the path chooses them as they are not in a position to refuse the request for undercover work. This practice of initiating new recruits through undercover work makes them complicit in any illegal activity they may have to perform in the gray zone, a situation resembling the initiation of new recruits into or­ga­nized crime. Again, moral divides begin to crumble in the gray zone. ­These officers generally do not develop investigative strategy, but rather leave that responsibility to supervisors (36–37). Undercover work pursued within normal police precincts, then, never fully escapes the standard hierarchies in which it is situated. Policy and police form two sides of the same coin. Garriott (2013) charts a genealogy of police, dating back to Eu­rope’s absolute monarchies, that shows the inherent totalizing tendencies of policing in the modern state. Parallel to earlier work on the anthropology of policy (G. Feldman 2012: 59; Wedel et al. 2005: 35; see also Shore 2000; Shore and Wright 1997), he notes the deep etymological and practical connections between the words police and policy, in which the former originally possessed a positive connotation, now reserved for the latter, of providing for the economic, material, and moral well-­being of the polity. In its con­temporary usage, police carries a negative connotation of patrolling the border between “right” and “wrong” or “­legal” and “illegal.” Both usages, however, concern themselves with the population’s security in some specified territorial domain, e­ ither through encouraging its prosperity or protecting it from maleficence. It follows that policy making and policing are not merely activities that certain state employees do. Rather, like sovereign action, both activities signify efforts to (re)order the entire social field, usually from positions of considerable structural power (regarding policy see Shore and Wright [1997: 4]; regarding police see Karpiak [2016: 420–21]). Indeed, in rightly pressing anthropology to focus its gaze on the productive sites of state power, Karpiak’s (ibid.) observation that anthropologists are latecomers to the study of police echoes earlier remarks regarding the study of policy (Feldman 2005; Shore and Wright 1997: 6–7; Wedel and Feldman 2005: 1).

34 Introduction

Anthropology of the police and of policy showcases a variety of apparatuses and assemblages that encapsulate a wide array of state and nonstate actors, all somehow struggling to maintain or transform sovereign order. This perspective, also found in the also burgeoning anthropology of security (Jusionyte and Goldstein 2016; Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski 2014: 2), allows us to defetishize police and focus instead on how policing is effected relationally (Fassin 2013). As Martin (2016: 477) puts it, “The larger lesson about police is that they are not a neatly encapsulated institution around which regime change pivots. They are, in the first place, laborers: a vocational group working in a messy, historically received field of powers and practices.” ­Those fields sometimes disempower the police. Jauregui (2013, 2016) shows in an Indian village how the institutionalized police must subject themselves to persons of high social standing, thereby placing status above the law in the maintenance of sovereign order. Expanding the m ­ atter geo­graph­i­cally, Garriott points to the rise of policing coordinated through international organ­izations such as the United Nations and Interpol. We can add the dense web of bilateral and multilateral cooperation among liberal democracies and, in the pursuit of terrorist networks, even cooperation among rival states such as the United States, Rus­sia, and China. The security concerns in this case range from suspected terrorists to refugees, mi­grants, and asylum seekers. If policing emerges in the sovereign’s quest to visualize the totality of its territorial space, then the globalization of policing suggests the same ambition on the world stage, the domain of global-­liberal-­humanitarianism (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010b: 13–16). This book illuminates how the investigative team works from its par­tic­u­lar location in a global field of policing and security networks pursuing a host of smuggling and trafficking networks. On the one hand, they fit squarely in a traditional state ministry. The team members hold traditional bureaucratic positions and are, formally at least, subject to a vertically arranged chain of command. To this extent, they mirror any normal police investigation unit. On the other hand, they are situated in a wider security apparatus that has them cooperating with counter­parts in a variety of EU countries. Moreover, the targets of their investigations must have transnational ties if they are to fall u ­ nder the team’s l­egal mandate for investigation. ­Those investigations, then, involve suspected rings linking countries such as China, Georgia, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, and several Latin American countries.



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 35

The Main Location: Miranda Street The criminal rings the team investigates are spread across the globe, but when routing their activities through this country they concentrate in a relatively small area of this cosmopolitan city. That area is found along a boulevard named Miranda Street (pseudonym). It leads from a lower, downtown square and out of the heart of the city u ­ ntil it conjoins with a ring road at a higher elevation. No building along its entire length exceeds five stories. Many immigrants live on this street, where they meet friends and acquaintances, shop for goods from their home countries, or transfer money to relatives abroad. In the 1970s, Pakistani families owned several furniture stores spread over several blocks closer to the square. ­People of all nationalities bought their furniture on this street u ­ ntil a major wave of commercialization in the 1980s brought in global retailers, which underpriced them in suburban outlets. While a few furniture shops linger on, mostly unilluminated neon signs are all that remain. Up through the 1970s many of the pensions in the downtown portion of Miranda Street served rural workers, who would rent rooms ­after the harvest to work as urban laborers in the off-season. Yet t­ hese small ­hotels lost clientele when the work began to dry up. Shortly thereafter, banks began offering cheap loans so more ­people could buy homes in or around the city. This change, too, hurt many of the hostels. This block of Miranda Street had been known for prostitution before ­these changes ­because brothels had been ­legal. It was thus prepared for foreign (non-­EU) prostitutes, who began circulating in the country ­after the creation of the EU’s passport-­free Schengen Area. The area’s population is divided between immigrants and nationals, mostly pensioners benefitting from rent control. A variety of shops line the street, selling every­thing from groceries to cell-­phone plans, to a wide variety of cheap consumer goods. Pakistanis own the cell-­phone shops; Chinese, most of the grocery stores. Cafés and restaurants are aplenty. During an early morning walk, Brian’s gaze swept across win­dow ­after win­dow in an apartment block. “I think I have been in most of ­these rooms at one time or another,” he says with a blank expression. The large historic square at Miranda Street’s beginning features hair salons, spice and food shops, beauty shops, and general retail stores. Chinese characters appear on many of the signs. At the intersection with the square, a staircase leads downward to a pedestrian underpass filled with even more retail shops, selling every­thing from luggage to foodstuffs to cheap jewelry. The shops are distributed over three stories that descend further into the ground, leaving only the

36 Introduction

top floor available for scattered rays of sunlight. It is packed with stores owned by Chinese, Pakistanis, and Indians selling goods straight from the distributors: clothes, accessories, shoes, toys, suitcases, spices, and so forth. The hot, stale, underground air smells of e­ ither spices or the chemical odors of cheap plastic. ­There is no natu­ral light, and the corridors between the shops are filled with boxes, some empty, some with goods in them. Families own most of the shops, and some sit lethargically in the corridor when business slows. Passing through ­these first eight blocks of Miranda Street, a tinier square sits with an unkempt monument, where Nigerian prostitutes solicit customers. (The team’s headquarters is a ten-­minute walk away.) Opposite the street from this square, an alley reaches ­behind some buildings. Once highly active with national prostitution and drugs, the alley sits adjacent to the small area that the city is gentrifying to attract businesses that cater to tourists. It is now filled with more stylized cafés and restaurants. In the eve­ning ­there is a stage for live m ­ usic and food stalls as well. The buildings in this renovated square have the old architectural charm of any southern Eu­ro­pean city, but they fell into disrepair over the last several de­cades. In graffiti, someone had spray-­painted on a wall of a decrepit building, next to a recently renovated one, the En­glish phrase “Gentrify who?” Moving a further three blocks ­toward the ring road, Miranda Street becomes more upscale, featuring more fash­ion­able h ­ otels and more expensive shops. A major government immigrant ser­vices center is located at the border between the poorer and wealthier blocks. ­Here, paperwork can be pro­cessed so that one’s status remains l­egal in the country. It also has some ser­vices aimed at immigrant integration, such as cultural workshops, job training, and f­ amily support ser­vices. A Western Union outlet and two banks have offices in the center as well. Back at the beginning of Miranda Street, in the mix of Chinese and South Asian retail shops, sits one of the last remaining old-­time national cafés on ­those blocks. “It d­ oesn’t get more national than this,” David once said of the tiny café with only two t­ ables and six chairs. Customers often stand while they drink their coffee (espresso) and then leave. A promotional calendar shows pictures of popu­ lar football teams. ­There was a photo­graph of a scenic part of the country on the wall. One could buy candies, pastries, beer, local liqueurs, and spirits by the shot. Vincent described it with a guffaw as “our national embassy on Miranda Street.” The owner is an in­for­mant for the team. He updates them on recent development in their neighborhood, which features a mosque, a base for an al-



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 37

leged Pakistani smuggling ring (a judge acquitted them when the case fi­nally reached court), and an illegal Chinese casino tied to a stalled investigation. Max quipped, “The Chinese in the case are too power­ful. Our big bosses are worried about the politics.” Often it is the el­derly nationals who rent to immigrants that come to chat with the owner. Hence he has become a good source of information. If the team is interested in a certain address, then they can ask him about the building, who enters and exits it, and what has been g­ oing on around it. It is a “safe harbor” for the team, as Frank puts it. A ­ fter finishing lunch at a nearby illegal Chinese restaurant, Brian, Frank, David, and I walked up to the café for an espresso. Since Brian had covered my meal, he said, “You can get the coffee.” In addition, the proprietor prepared four shots of local liqueur for us. When we finished, the team started to exit as the proprietor rang up the bill and handed it to me: 1 euro and 80 cents. Surprised, I asked Frank, “Four shots of espresso and four shots of booze only cost 1.80? That ­can’t be right.” Frank explained that the proprietor was charging only for my liqueur. “He was happy to give them to us. He would have been offended if we tried to pay.”

Chapter Outlines The four empirical chapters, taken together, show how the team move between the first and second sovereign forms via the gray zone as they covertly investigate suspected transnational criminal networks. This portrait w ­ ill show how personhood is constituted differently in ­either sovereign form. All along, it ­will show that the gray zone is not necessarily a deep, walled-­off space, like a camp or a secret prison, though it can certainly manifest itself as such. Rather, it is a realm woven into the fabric of social order through which actors—­state actors and nonstate actors—­regularly circulate. Chapter 1 examines the team’s own internal organ­ization and their place in the overall Immigration Ser­vice, showing how that organ­ization creates mutual re­spect for each other as dif­fer­ent but equal team members, and allows the team to keep their distance from the bureaucracy when they enter the gray zone per the second sovereign form. It also allows the team to see the p ­ eople they investigate as par­tic­u­lar persons rather than as abstract immigrant ­Others. Their draw to the gray zone, per the second sovereign form, is that it materializes from their own thinking, judging, and acting as par­tic­u­lar persons, unlike normal bureaucratic work. They obtain a worldly existence in it, along with a sense of ethical mea­sure when dealing with criminal suspects and marginalized mi­grants. This chapter

38 Introduction

necessarily distinguishes agency from action, with the former referring to the manipulation or challenging of rules, which ultimately remain intact, and the latter referring to the constitution of alternative sovereign spaces, however fleeting in appearance. It fi­nally explains how thinking, judging, and ultimately acting transform the actor from an equivocal and divided subject into one that gains a unified identity in the eyes of fellow actors. Chapter 2 examines two dif­fer­ent modes of being with the self and the other through a comparison of vio­lence in both sovereign forms. Insofar as vio­lence in the gray zone marks a departure from law or normative be­hav­ior, it amounts to a foundational sovereign act. Per current debates in anthropology, the chapter uses this comparison to argue that ethics are extraordinary, insofar as they signify a break with social order. The chapter then considers some general inclinations of h ­ uman character that lend themselves to action in e­ ither the first or the second sovereign form. Rather than crudely align character types with each form, the point is to highlight how dif­fer­ent ­human potentialities are likely to flourish in each sovereign form. Focusing on Frank, the team’s chief investigator, the chapter then shows how the team cultivates its identity so that their actions draw on the particularity of each team member. The chapter concludes by explaining the team’s mea­sured ethical conduct in the gray zone through Appiah’s (2010) notion of honor, a princi­ple of action that is central to the second sovereign form but archaic in the first sovereign form. Chapter 3 examines state secrecy as a cover for action in unpre­ce­dented situations, although secrecy serves other purposes as well. As action initiates something new, it must necessarily start in secret, given the challenge it would pres­ent to the status quo. However, it must ultimately reach some kind of public, so that the actors obtain the worldly existence that they seek. The chapter argues that secrecy does not lie in the deep recesses of a mythical state; rather, it is woven thinly through the social fabric. This situation renders the white zone—­the space of legitimate order—­dependent upon, and so at risk from, the judgments and actions that sovereign agents take in the gray zone. The chapter focuses on the team’s relationships with in­for­mants, and the techniques of their surveillance operations, to show how t­ hese investigative activities secretly link the team to ­people in wider society. Ironically, the security state needs the team to conduct secret action in order to fulfill its own security needs. At the same time, if the team works in secret, then it can also operate on its own ethical accord,



Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones 39

without oversight but with the frustrating restriction of not being able to publicly show themselves. Chapter 4 shows how the team interfaces with transnational criminal networks, thus shifting the analy­sis to a global stage. It points to the blending of licit and illicit migration to show how h ­ uman smugglers and traffickers take advantage of ­legal ambiguities to move ­people across borders. Empirically, it explains the EU’s approach to migration management, and how actors of all kinds manipulate it, both within the external border and abroad in its diplomatic relations with third countries. The chapter then examines three investigative cases involving: (1) high-­end prostitution in a brothel fronting as a dance club; (2) low-­ end prostitution or­ga­nized by a Nigerian trafficking ring; and (3) pickpocketing and prostitution conducted by a Roma crime ring. ­These examples shed light on how clandestine networks and security agents engage each other in a global gray zone—­that is, outside the confines of the first sovereign form. To initiate a discussion on action in the gray zone, the chapter utilizes Hardt and Negri’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics. While not without their critics, Hardt and Negri still provide the most lucid perspective for thinking about questions of sovereignty and counter-­sovereignty in a world where h ­ uman connections hardly obey the territorialized demands of the traditional nation-­state. The Conclusion establishes the philosophical argument that the gray zone, per the second sovereign form, is central both to action and to being in a globalized world. It further elaborates Hardt and Negri’s argument on sovereignty and action to pinpoint its limitations. That task requires an examination of Spinoza’s argument on the strug­gle of being and becoming (i.e., conatus), b­ ecause he inspires their, and much of contemporary post-Marxist, thought. The chapter argues that Spinoza, in keeping with the intellectual trends of his day, relies too heavi­ly on abstract reason, even if his philosophy rejects the transcendental premise of earlier Western po­liti­cal phi­los­o­phers. Drawing on Arendt, the chapter provides a more refined view on immanence, potentiality, and plurality than this intellectual trajectory currently offers.

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Chapter 1

The Ambiguity of Truth The Ephemeral Limits of Security Apparatuses We have to give rights to every­one for justice, but what about ­doing justice? Max, undercover police investigator

The Garden of Eden “That would be like Adam and Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden,” explained Brian. Arrests and searches often lead the team to large amounts of cash, obtained through the suspected crime, that must be seized as evidence. They could easily steal portions of this money and get away scot-­free. Yet over coffee on a windy riverside after­noon, Brian asserted a taboo on a biblical scale: never steal money during an investigation. If any team member ­were to do so, then it would symbolically lead to their eviction from the Garden of Eden and into the world of sin. Accordingly, they agreed that if they crossed that par­tic­u­ lar line, then they would become the same as the criminals they investigate. I asked them why stealing money qualifies as the cardinal sin, rather than, say, stealing phone chargers. (Murder does not apply, ­because they rarely draw their guns and have never fired them.) They often need to quickly and illegally download data from cell phones when their ­owners are unaware. ­Those cell phones must be plugged in if their batteries are dead. Since their equipment bud­get cannot cover the cost of the sheer variety of phone chargers necessary, they have illegally amassed a sizable collection, all taken during their searches of cars, ­hotel rooms, and residences. Brian replied first: “­Because money would be for my benefit only, but phone chargers would be for the team.” David added that “money is the origin of all evil,” nodding to Skolnick’s (1975: 4) point that bribery often appears in association with police brutality. “What is the objective of the guys we investigate? Profit. . . . ​If we take money from a criminal, then that money was already stolen from someone e­ lse who suffered for him [the criminal] to get it.” Frank elaborated: “We are professionals. It’s not our money. If we take the money, then we are the same as them. We have princi­ples—­ honesty, loyalty, duty. It’s our job.” Brian chimed in again: “­There is a kind of pride in seeing yourself as a good guy. What would be the advantages? Money? 41

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­ here is a certain dedication to the cause, the job, ourselves. It’s our T ­conscience . . . ​but I believe it is also a ­matter of not needing it. If one of my kids ­really needs something that I c­ an’t provide, then prob­ably I would do it.” Yet their dedication “to the cause, the job, [them]selves” needs explanation. If the expressed wish to be a “good guy” signifies more than just a flattering self-­image, then how can an analy­sis of the team’s actions in the gray zone help illuminate that explanation? This chapter first examines the structural conditions upholding a seemingly transcendent bureaucratic state, which then isolates and instrumentalizes its own functionaries. This task allows us to ­later detail the disempowering effects of vertical bureaucracy that institutionalize the first sovereign form and provide a contrast to the second. The chapter then shifts to an empirical illustration of the Immigration Ser­vice in which the team works. By fleshing out how the ser­ vice conducts investigations, it becomes clearer how the team enters the gray zone in which they establish the second sovereign form, however fleetingly. The next section then addresses that question by focusing on the team’s control over the narrative of the street-­level investigation. That control provides them the necessary cover to move in and out of the gray zone, where they can act more fully on their own ethical assessment. This point leads to the following section, which explains how the team’s social organ­ization contrasts directly with the standard, atomized, hierarchical bureaucracy in which they are enmeshed. While that bureaucracy separates, isolates, and stratifies its state agents, the team’s own organ­ization is dependent upon each member’s recognition of the ­others as dif­fer­ent but equal team members. Three f­actors stand out in their organ­ ization: egalitarianism, a deep familiarity with each other, and the similarities the team sees between themselves and the suspects they investigate (G. Feldman 2016). ­These ­factors enable the team members to constitute an alternative sovereign space within the gray zone, which embodies what Hannah Arendt (1998: 192–201) called a “space of appearance.”

Keeping Agency in Perspective The investigative police team act within and outside of the larger security apparatus of which they are a part, a contradictory statement signifying their frequent shifts between the first and the second sovereign forms. This flexibility they enjoy raises the intriguing question of where lies individual agency in bureaucracies, technocracies, and apparatuses, a question that anthropologists of



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policy have examined in a variety of circumstances. They study the interplay between state policy, the social milieu in which it is conceived and implemented, and the agendas of its handlers and policy targets. Shore and Wright (2011: 3; see also Hull 2012; Shore and Kawharu 2014; Smith et al. 2011) point out with subtlety that while policy legitimizes the prevailing social order, it can only become what the vari­ous handlers do with it. Policies work not only as imperative demands on passive bureaucrats but also as reference points to be cited as justifications for localized decisions and activities. This fact does not mean that policy makers have personal control over policy pro­cesses or policy effects. To rework a policy locally does not mean to reinvent it locally. The chain of officials ­handling the policy rarely destabilizes the hegemony that enabled it in the first place. We must therefore, pace Fairclough (cited in Shore and Wright 2011: 14), be cautious about seeing each phase of a policy-­making pro­cess as a retranslation and ­wholesale contestation of the policy itself. Individual agency undoubtedly precludes the policy plan from perfectly corresponding to policy implementation, let alone policy effect. However, this fact does not fundamentally disturb the status quo; it can sustain the status quo just as much. The meta­phor of a mimeographed sheet of text well illustrates this situation: while each iteration of the original differs slightly from what preceded it, we can hardly conclude that it has been rewritten, even a­ fter hundreds of pages have run through the photocopier. The reason for agency’s relatively minor impact on the status quo is that the actors deploying their own creativity are primarily isolated entities. In contrast to action, which is a joint endeavor among po­liti­cal equals, agency better describes individual initiatives that do not lead to the foundation of a new po­liti­cal space, ­because isolated individuals cannot establish po­liti­cal spaces between them. (Other­wise, they would not be isolated and would be carry­ing out action.) At most, agency results in individuals manipulating systems for what­ever reason they may. What stands out in the history of the modern, bureaucratic state—­and its wider policy field—is not valiant acts of re­sis­tance or subtle maneuvers that undermine the state’s vision for society. Rather, it is state agents’ loyalty to bureaucratic pro­cess and their uncanny ability to block off the negative experiences of a policy’s target population, even when they see its disastrous effects firsthand. For example, Heyman’s (2002) analy­sis of US immigration officials of Mexican ancestry shows how deeply they internalize the mainstream norms of the United States and of the immigration bureaucracy itself. This effect insulates them

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from Mexican and Latin American immigrants’ appeals for flexibility. Herzfeld (1992) coined the term “secular theodicy” to explain how Greek state bureaucrats morally absolve themselves from the damage done by the policies they enforce. The importance of Heyman’s and Herzfeld’s work, along with the paradigmatic thinkers of the post–World War II era working on questions of mass conformity (Arendt 1968, 2006b; Fromm 1965; Hoffer 1951; see also Bauman 2001), is that they vigorously pursue the pressing question of why ­people refrain from taking action with such regularity. If we are to properly understand the rare examples of action in­de­pen­dent of bureaucratic mandates (which does not mean we have to agree with ­those actions), we must also appreciate that which systemically precludes their appearance.

Hobbes’s Foresight: Policy, Apparatuses, Technocracy, and Sovereignty The foundations of the individual agent’s relationship to the state (or status quo) help clarify how modern bureaucracy, sustaining the first sovereign form, precludes the appearance of the second. Arendt’s (1968: 139–47) landmark study of totalitarianism highlights one pivotal moment with a novel interpretation of Hobbes’s Leviathan that reverses the logic through which it is usually understood. The top-­down, centralized Leviathan state materializes not b­ ecause a mass of undomesticated ­people, doomed to their naturally violent inclinations, require an overarching enforcer. Rather, Arendt interprets Hobbes as anticipating the domination of the new bourgeois citizen, who demands power for himself in a new socioeconomic order based on private property. In other words, what Hobbes casts as a natu­ral given (endemic individual competition and conflict), he analyzes as an unpre­ce­dented effect of a new economic foundation. Radical isolation emerges as each actor demands ever more power to gain advantage over ­others. The new historically par­tic­u­lar order calls forth the Leviathan ­because a society based on the individual accumulation of power w ­ ill inevitably erode its own foundation: strictly speaking, a polity based on individualized power cannot establish a foundation in the first place. Hence the state must usurp the right of vio­lence, so that its citizens can acquire ever more property-­cum-­power without lapsing into a perpetual conflict as they continuously strive to gain advantages over each other. Arendt points out that Hobbes’s Leviathan differs from all preceding forms of government expounded in Western po­liti­cal philosophy b­ ecause it is not premised upon any foundational law such as a natu­ral



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law, or a Divine law, or a social contract that distinguishes between right and wrong for the public’s sake (139). Instead, the pre­ce­dent is set to reduce government to the agent that arbitrates citizens’ private interests. Per Arendt’s read on Hobbes, this new world order is unashamedly utilitarian. Rejecting any noble purpose or teleological end to justify its existence, the modern state can claim no other purpose than efficiently maintaining order. Foucault (2007) enlarges this point in his own analy­sis of the raison d’état, which he argues is nothing more than the maintenance of social equilibrium (i.e., the equilibrium between territory, population, and sovereignty). Hence for Foucault (257), raison d’état is entirely self-­referential b­ ecause nothing about it “refers to anything other than the state itself.” If this is so, then the harrowing upshot is that the state—or the status quo—­cares nothing for the par­tic­u­lar individuals as thinking and acting entities capable of inaugurating new chains of events and founding their own par­tic­u­lar sovereign spaces. It only aims to cultivate economic growth as the basis of that stability. In this context, the h ­ uman impulse for being and action must appear despite the state rather than ­because of it (G. Feldman 2015: 4). In other words, in the first sovereign form, that impulse is not the cause of an enduring po­liti­cal order in which par­tic­ul­ar ­human beings take on a phenomenal real­ity in one another’s presence. Rather, it constitutes an obstruction to that impulse. As such, the state animalizes—­that is, removes the subject’s po­liti­cal voice—­those who belong to it and enables Hobbes’s famous maxim that “the life of man, [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (1968: 186). However, the prob­lem lies not in the natu­ral conditions u ­ nder which life has been granted to us but rather in the historically par­tic­u­lar circumstances into which we insert ­those naturally given ­human lives. While nature may have made life too short for our preferences, it cannot be held responsible for its being solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish.

An Immigration Ser­vice as a Blueprint and a Field of Relations If Hobbes’s Leviathan lays the foundation for the modern territorial state, replete with an integrated range of executive bureaucracies, then our postmodern, globalized, neoliberal world has shifted to apparatuses. E ­ ither one links the individual’s biological reproduction to social reproduction, and reduces the po­liti­cal to the technical work necessary to maintain that link. (Hence elections in mass democracies pivot so heavi­ly on the economy and security.) In contrast to the narrow scope of bureaucracies, apparatuses are composed of a “thoroughly

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heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative mea­sures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (Foucault 1980: 194–96; for a fuller discussion of apparatuses with re­spect to global migration see G. Feldman 2011, 2012; for similar analyses with re­spect to infrastructure drawing on Latour, see Lin et al. 2017; Xiang and Lindquist 2014; see also Chalfin 2014; Chu 2010: 5, 2014). They have expanded drastically in the post-­Fordist era, in which tasks for common proj­ects, like manufacturing, are dispersed throughout space and held together through hegemonic logics of governance akin to what Hardt and Negri (2000: xii) call “Empire.” Apparatuses deeply condition the movement of ­people through space, through their material characteristics, knowledge practices, and ideological assumptions. They are also more than their elementary parts; they are “system[s] of relations that can be established between ­these ele­ ments” (Foucault 1980: 194–96; see also Brodeur 2010: 4). ­Those relations proliferate as ever more categories of persons fall u ­ nder the rubric of “security threat.” Technical judgments identify new threats and provide mechanisms to track and contain them. Apparatuses, therefore, possess an inherent flexibility and exhibit a vital expansive quality. The term “technocracy” (connoting rule by experts, per Mitchell [2002]) seems more central to apparatuses than does bureaucracy (connoting rule from a desk), although clearly both are at work. In any case, apparatuses are not totalizing in their gaze, even if such a dream underpins the logic of their operations. Marginal spaces abound. In such spaces, the team find opportunities to establish, albeit temporarily, the second sovereign form ­because of a contradiction in the apparatus itself: the need for undercover investigations creates a situation in which the team work in­de­pen­dently of the intense surveillance mea­sures to which most technocrats are subject. Insofar as they, like so many other ­people, strive to avoid their own superfluousness, we must ask how they take advantage of the blind spots in the EU’s migration apparatus. That question leads us to their immediate institutional settings. The country in which the team work features a wide range of police forces, each with dif­fer­ent mandates and competencies. ­These national-­level forces are located ­under a variety of government ministries. The Interior Ministry contains the Immigration Ser­vice, which is further subdivided into the Departments of Border Control, Document Control, Administrative Analy­sis, and Criminal Investigations, among ­others. The Criminal Investigations department is subdivided



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into five groups, one of which is the investigative team. This department focuses on transnational or­ga­nized crimes that carry at least eight-­year sentences. Four of its five groups specialize in criminal rings originating in specific geographic regions (Africa, eastern Eu­rope, ­Middle East/Asia, and Latin Amer­i­ca). ­These four groups work at headquarters, mostly at desktop computers. They conduct rec­ ord searches and data analyses and have instant access to EU databases such as the Schengen Information System (SIS), the Visa Information System (VIS), and Eurodac (the biometric fingerprint database for asylum applicants), which store information on all travellers who enter national/EU spaces. They also have access, by request or by warrant, to a number of national databases containing phone rec­ords, banking rec­ords, and vital statistics. A “chief” leads each of these groups and by extension w ­ ill manage the case investigation on a daily basis for a state prosecutor. (I refer to officers from t­ hese four groups as “desk” investigators, though they occasionally conduct street work.) As the fifth group in the Criminal Investigations department, with Frank as its chief, the investigative team is responsible for all street-­level investigative work (e.g., surveillance, searches, and arrests). They perform t­hese tasks at the request of the desk investigative groups. However, at times, responsibilities bleed across the lines between the team and the other groups, and the latter ­will occasionally do surveillance themselves. The team does some data analy­sis itself, in par­tic­u­lar creating cluster diagrams to map social connections based on information downloaded from suspects’ cell phones. A distinguishing feature between the team and the desk investigative groups is the indifference that the team hold t­ oward their own official ranks. Their ranks, along with all other employees in the Immigration Ser­vice, are based on the year that they completed their rookie training. ­Those in the same year ascend roughly simultaneously through the pay grades. ­Those in higher positions ­will be held responsible for prob­lems that emerge in an investigation, but they w ­ ill also be favored for any new opportunities that arise (such as trips to other Eu­ro­pean cities to attend conferences). However, Frank has cultivated the team to work in a much more egalitarian manner. As he explains, “My group, instead of the ­others, has no hierarchy. That means I d­ on’t interfere. ­There is a formal hierarchy, yes, but we d­ on’t care about that. If Max understands the Chinese case best, then it is best that he calls the shots on that one. I ­won’t interfere.” David jumps in immediately to validate Frank’s explanation: “He listens to our ideas and

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opinions. ­He’ll tell us if it is stupid or good. ­He’ll let us go for it if it is good.” His praise of Frank is hardly an empty platitude. David is the farthest ­thing from an ass-­kisser that I ever met who still managed to keep his job. Cases officially begin in a state prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor coordinates an investigation with the chief of a desk investigative group and with a judge. The chief w ­ ill manage the case daily by assigning p ­ eople to conduct rec­ ord checks, liaising with other governmental offices for information, and communicating with the team about the necessary street work. A judge ensures the legality of the investigation and must approve (and periodically reapprove) such mea­sures as home searches, wiretapping, and deep-­cover operations. The team conduct ­these types of operations but, when following procedure, they must ask the prosecutor to obtain a warrant from a judge. If the prosecutor relies on evidence brought in from another member state, such a judge would likewise decide if the methods of its retrieval meet their own national l­ egal standards. This decision often occurs ­because or­ga­nized crime moves across national borders within the EU, so requires cross-­border police cooperation. If only one country is conducting the investigation, then cooperation from other member states is usually done informally. When member states jointly conduct investigations, they must calibrate their l­ egal standards prior to the start. The EU agency Eurojust facilitates this pro­cess so that evidence and investigative procedures in one participating country can be admissible in the court of another. Europol might also be involved as a clearing­house of criminal rec­ords, ­legal information, and contact information for investigative personnel so that member states may better coordinate transnational investigations. In any case, investigators regularly contact their counter­parts in other member states, often via email, for any helpful information that ­those counter­parts might have on an investigation. They sometimes ask counter­parts to conduct surveillance for them in their own countries. To be sure, investigators generally value informal cooperation. They share a unique sense of camaraderie, in that they wish their counter­parts in other member states to see the quality of their work. Relations across national lines are usually much more collegial than adversarial. However, dif­fer­ent police forces within member states compete against each other to accumulate contacts and cooperative arrangements with their counter­parts in other EU countries. They even conceal t­ hose contacts to protect their advantage over rival groups inside their departments and in other bureau-



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cracies across the country. Intra-­EU cooperation carries a high po­liti­cal premium in the se­nior levels of administration. Of course, the overall investigative pro­cess flowing across groups, units, agencies, and ministries f­aces plenty of potential obstacles given the number of parts in the information apparatus. Conflicts, ambiguities over responsibilities, po­liti­cal interests, and personal interests cloud what might other­wise be a smoothly functioning investigation. For example, the team is occasionally asked, by implication, to do ­favors for the odd se­nior official and parliamentarian. Personal ­favors for information might be passed along discreetly to Frank from higher-­ranked officials, often ­those who owe their positions to top figures in their po­liti­cal parties. (As governments appoint the se­nior strata of the ministries, obligations are owed to t­ hose who got them appointed to t­ hose positions.) Sometimes ­these requests pertain entirely to personal concerns, such as developing a profile on a ­daughter’s new boyfriend. Other times they pertain to po­liti­cal infighting, or are internal cases in which it is hard to determine if the motivation is po­liti­cal or ­legal. Moreover, it always remains unclear what Frank himself under­stands about the request, and how much of it he shares with the team. When I asked John for his opinion on ­these situations and ­whether they consider it a waste of their time, he replied, “We know the rules of the game. We need equilibrium in the system. For example, we need them to support us when we go into the gray zone. We might buy software that is illegal to use, but we need them to approve the purchase by identifying it as another cost. ‘We scratch their backs and they scratch ours.’ ” ­These requests occur rarely (only a ­couple of times per year). But, as Max reckons, “They last forever. They are golden. They are like stocks. ­Today they are worth ‘y’ for an MP, but if he becomes a minister, then they are worth ‘x’. If he leaves parliament, then they are worth zero.” More commonly, however, the team reaps l­ittle benefit beyond less bureaucratic hassle and more protection from se­nior officials when they operate in the gray zone. He adds, “We ­don’t get that much, ­really. It is like nuclear deterrence. We would never use this information on our own. We w ­ ouldn’t be offensive with it. Then, we would ­really lose. Ultimately, we just want to work and keep our lifestyle. We are low-­ranking and low-­paid. We just want to work without being troubled by politics.” Within the wider field of bureaucratic relations, the investigative team identify themselves as qualitatively dif­fer­ent from their cognate units. They emphasize their own freedom of decision making and action compared to the other

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units, which are far removed from real p ­ eople’s lives and composed of deadening, routine work. ­These differences create tensions between the team and the other investigative groups ­because the team can set their own hours according to the needs of the street investigation. If they do not need to start a surveillance u ­ ntil 1 p.m., then they w ­ ill not arrive at headquarters u ­ ntil noon. They must be prepared, however, to work that surveillance ­until their targets have returned home, which can be well a­ fter 11 p.m. They keep street props in the office, such as a skateboard and a soccer ball, which are fun to play with during  downtime. They also can dress according to the needs of the surveillance. Usually, this means informal attire, which contrasts with the professional dress code of the other investigative groups. The allure of operating clandestinely on the street makes for more in­ter­est­ing experiences than what is found in an office. The team enjoy tackling the challenges they encounter as a form of self-­expression. The topic always leads to lively conversation. As Brian notes, “We can be our individual selves. This is dif­fer­ent from other units. That’s an asset for us, but it would be a liability in other units. This is needed for our job.” In addition to the desk investigators, the team regularly contrast their experiences of being to t­ hose of passport control officers who work in the Immigration Ser­vice’s border-­control department. This task signifies to them the most monotonous and degrading type of work that can be assigned to someone in the Immigration Ser­vice. In the summer months, they are often seconded to border control to help pro­cess the large numbers of tourists circulating through the city’s airport. As David remarked, ­There’s gotta be some point to what ­you’re ­doing. If I stamp thirty passports, ­there are no consequences ­whether I do it or not. The job itself was just the most mind-­numbing ­thing to do. At first, you try to be positive and do the best you can. Then, you try to do as ­little as you can. Have you seen the guys working all their lives at an egg-­processing plant? The eggs keep coming past them on a conveyer ­belt, and they say, ‘Good egg, good egg, good egg, good egg . . . ​rotten egg. . . . ​good egg, good egg, good egg.’ I caught an African man with a passport that ­wasn’t his own. The guy had a French passport, but he goes to the non-­EU passport control line. The only similarity he had with the picture was that he was black. The guy in the picture had a slightly swollen and droopy eyelid. You could see that the man with the passport poked himself in his eyelid to match the picture, but he poked himself in the wrong eye! I sent him to biometrics for a comparative analy­sis. He failed and was sent back. That was the most exciting part of the month.



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The team’s confidence verges on arrogance, real or perceived, even if o­ thers from the Immigration Ser­vice enjoy popping into their office to chat and gossip. Desk investigators frequently accuse the team of relentlessly pushing their own agenda. Frank indeed aggressively champions the team’s successes up the chain of command and spotlights the desk investigators’ ­mistakes. To stress their incompetence, he once rhetorically asked them if they needed him to “wipe their asses with baby lotion.” Some desk investigators, in retaliation, filed an official complaint of harassment with the ministry’s l­egal office. Yet s­ imple arrogance does not fully explain Frank’s tone and per­sis­tence. Instead, he protects the team by playing offense more than defense. Changes in se­nior personnel in the Interior Ministry come with promises of department reor­ga­ni­za­tion and cost cutting measures. Frank’s promotion of his team aims at protecting them from any pos­si­ble restructuring, most of which, they surmise, is only intended to give new se­nior figures an air of taking action. ­These potential changes threaten not only the team’s thrill of working together but also the quality of evidence procured for investigations. For example, several se­nior officials would be quite comfortable having each of the desk investigative groups conduct their own street work. The team abhors this idea, though not ­because it puts their own role at risk. (Furthermore, they would likely not be laid off in any orga­nizational restructuring, but they could be reassigned to positions that they would find much more boring and isolating.) In their opinion, the other groups are incompetent on the street. ­Those groups underestimate the skill it takes and the personal disposition that one must have to appear inconspicuous during surveillance operations. They lack the team ethos that street work requires and the knowledge of the city’s contours and how ­people move through them. They do not thrive on the uncertainty that appearing in public space brings. Street work takes a considerable amount of self-­confidence to stay relaxed in unfamiliar surroundings. As David reasons, “They [desk investigators] would go out and think ‘I must act normal.’ This is the beginning of a job gone bad. You ­really just need to be comfortable in your own skin when you are somewhere that you ­don’t normally hang out.” From the team’s standpoint, street-­level investigation could not differ more from the analytic tasks conducted in the office. As Brian put it, not so delicately: When they do their own street work, they fuck it up and the target knows that he has been u ­ nder surveillance. Then they ask us to do it, but ­don’t tell us that the target already

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knows. This is dangerous. They [the targets] can trap us in an operation and ambush us. We need to know if the targets knows he is being followed. They should tell us. They are supposed to have us do it.

Brian refers to an instance when the desk investigators deci­ded to do their own street work b­ ecause the team w ­ ere too busy to keep to the surveillance schedule that the desk investigators required. The desk investigators’ sloppy street tactics led to an unsuccessful operation—­the target spotted them. When the team resumed the case, their desk colleagues neglected to tell them what had happened. The target—­a Nigerian national participating in a trafficking ring—­now knew he was ­under surveillance and knew how to run countersurveillance maneuvers. Had Frank and the team been aware of this fact, they would have structured their own surveillance operation much differently to avoid potential dangers. Brian describes the situation: The neighborhood this guy lives in is a rough neighborhood, all black immigrants. He goes to the café when we see him. [Brian, Frank, and David w ­ ere already in the café.] Then, he goes out and starts to pretend to go to a car to see if he could provoke us to move. We d­ idn’t move. He then walked across an open field so that he could expose us in an open space. That way he could confirm that we w ­ ere the same p ­ eople in café [i.e., by dragging the team along to an open space, the target could then spot them in two dif­fer­ent places, on the safe assumption that the only likely reason to see them in ­those two dif­fer­ent places was the fact that they w ­ ere following him]. The guy gets into a car with someone ­else, and they drive to see his ­lawyer in another part of town. The l­ awyer gets into the car with them, and they start making funny moves in the car like turning around in odd locations, changing speeds randomly to see if anyone in a dif­fer­ent car does the same ­thing to keep up with them. They go to a café, and we park near it. The ­lawyer comes out and knocks on our win­dow and shows his card. He says, “I want your ID. I am t­ hese guys’ ­lawyer. I want your ID and I w ­ ill call the police.” I said, “I am not giving you my ID. You can call the police.” From the back seat, David yells out, “I ­don’t believe ­you’re a ­lawyer. You w ­ ouldn’t dress like that! You look like you sell cars!” [David’s strategy was to act in such a way that no police officer would in a situation like this one.]

The ­lawyer still called the police and motioned his Nigerian clients to come over to where he was standing by the car. Brian got out, and the clients identified him to their ­lawyer. The l­ awyer asked why they ­were following them, to which



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Brian replied that he would wait for the police before he talked. Ultimately, Brian had to lie to the police when they arrived to extricate Frank, David, and himself from the situation: I then lean into the car and tell Frank to start the engine and go. I stayed ­behind and told the ­lawyer that ­there are a lot of crooks in the world. The police came and I talked to them in private. I told them that our target is a w ­ oman who met t­ hese guys in a café and that we followed them as some of her contacts to learn a bit more about them. Then I left and the police explained every­thing to the l­awyer. . . . ​Now, imagine if t­ hose guys w ­ ere selling drugs and they thought that we ­were also sellers moving into their territory. That would be very dangerous.

In fairness to the desk investigators, the Criminal Investigations department is overworked and understaffed. Cases take longer to close than anyone desires, and for ­every case a state prosecutor can actually investigate, many more criminal acts occur without attention. The dual pressures of time and financial constraints prompt the desk investigators to do their own surveillance, but their lack of skill and experience leads them to make basic ­mistakes in the operation. Yet Frank ­will never fail to flag t­ hese errors for the sake of keeping the team together and for the success of the investigation itself.

How Is the “Truth” Obtained? Control of the Narrative as the Passage to the Gray Zone Mere bureaucratic overlaps, infighting within departments, and rivalries across policy terrain scarcely illuminate the mode of action when sovereign agents forego ­legal restrictions or policy mandates. ­These issues alone shed no light on the gray zone. At most, they highlight opportunities for the ambitious to pursue their personal agendas, but the advancement of competing interests is not the ultimate question in this analy­sis. The questions ­here are how the investigative team enter the gray zone and how they conduct themselves while t­ here, a space where sovereign authority is theirs to define. The threshold between the team’s normal order and the gray zone is well drawn out in comparison with overseas intelligence work. Operating in foreign countries, spies are not beholden to ­those countries’ laws at all. Spies are limited not by ­legal considerations but rather by po­liti­cal ones. If spies get caught, then their fate rests in the hands of diplomatic negotiations. Their safe return

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home is a ­matter of bargaining between their own government and the government upon whom they have spied. In contrast, undercover investigation is subject to ­legal restraint. ­Lawyers can interrogate investigative procedures before a judge. If summoned as witnesses in court, they ­will spend hours reviewing their surveillance reports so that they can answer a l­awyer’s questions in cross-­examination. Hence, even though the investigative team work on the street with l­ittle oversight, l­awyers, se­nior officials, and occasionally parliamentarians ­will still want to know, as David so characteristically put it, “what the fuck we are ­doing.” Yet David sees more resemblances to a counterinsurgency unit than a uniformed police squad. Furrowing his brows, he continues: I think that our work is between both, but closer to counterinsurgency work. For what I know, part of the challenge is trying to find out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys, ­because most of the time they are all together, and try to isolate one from the other in a way that we can pick up on the one we want, and spare what we d­ on’t want to get. This is what we do most of the time. We try to win his trust so we can get a higher target.

The artful transgression into the gray zone occurs through the team’s control of the story line of what happened on the street during an investigation. They alone supply that narrative ­because no one ­else can corroborate events. That narrative gives them cover when they act on their own ethical judgments outside of ­legal and policy constraints. They cannot enter the gray zone through fiat, holding a cavalier attitude t­ oward e­ ither the law or the po­liti­cal context if t­ hings go awry. Vincent explained, “It’s like basketball. The ball is already over the line. If the player has his feet just inside the line, then he can reach over and try to bring the ball back to the court. You still have to re­spect the rules.” John, contrasting the team’s work with that of the desk investigators, explained that “in their work, they can get proof through the l­ egal way. The person working in surveillance has to be very careful ­because every­thing ­will be written. This is dif­fer­ent ­because we are on the street.” Two examples are particularly relevant to understanding how the team shifts from scripted l­egal and policy terrain to the nebulous gray zone. While we sat at a sidewalk café watching a door across the street from which a suspect would eventually exit, Max invoked a meta­phor to illustrate the first example:



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This is a white cup. Every­one can see that this is a white cup. But a judge ­will not see that it is a white cup if the evidence that it is a white cup is not obtained the right way. He ­will ask, “Where are the warrants?” Every­body knows what it is, but if you ­don’t follow the rules, then it is not part of the investigation. It frustrates me a lot. We have to give rights to every­one for justice, but what about ­doing justice. If we d­ on’t do it by the book, then ­there are disciplinary actions. A l­awyer ­will always find a flaw. They ­will interrupt justice.

To preclude this potential prob­lem with the judge, the team make a crucial distinction between “evidence” and “intelligence,” a distinction that gives them power over the script and the necessary protection for entering the gray zone. “Intelligence” is any information used to investigate suspected criminal activity. It does not appear in court. “Evidence” is information directly tying a suspect to a crime and must appear in court. The team would never pres­ent intelligence in court, lest their methods of retrieval be exposed: “If you ­don’t follow the rules, then it is not [officially] part of the investigation.” Evidence, of course, ­will appear in a surveillance report, while intelligence is never recorded in any official document, testifying to the fact that documents are not passive instruments of clear bureaucratic procedures. Rather, they are strategically crafted so that policy makers (or any state agent) instrumentalize them for their own purposes (Hull 2012: 252). In this vein, the team ­will find a ­legal way to pres­ent intelligence as evidence. For example, the team needed to know if a Chinese owner of business suites in a downtown building was r­ unning a brothel. However, paying for sex with a prostitute managed by a pimp is illegal, so no team member could patronize the establishment to obtain direct evidence. Yet they could not determine if it served as a brothel without g­ oing inside (and furthermore, Chinese brothels in the city only cater to Chinese clients). They provided a Chinese in­ for­mant with €150 to solicit the establishment’s ser­vices and to ultimately confirm it as a brothel. This information can be used only as “intelligence” ­because of the team’s illegal involvement in its procurement—­that is, ­because they aided the solicitation of sex from someone controlled by a pimp. They can use this intelligence, however, to justify the time and money for an operation to legally obtain evidence (most likely including audio recordings of ­people having sex, condoms found in the trash cans outside the building, and confessions from ­people patronizing its ser­vices when the bust occurs). If a judge, prompted by a defense attorney, ­were to ask how intelligence was obtained—­that is, how they

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knew the a­ ctual use of ­those suites ahead of the arrest—­then the team would argue that they cannot reveal their sources lest it jeopardize their in­for­mant’s safety and security. No judge would push further, thus tacitly approving the team’s right to invoke a state of exception. This small example illuminates the banality of maneuvering in the gray zone, and suggests how easy it could be to expand operations in it. This situation recalls the point that sovereignty—­and thus sovereign action—­results from a configuration of social relations, embodied h ­ ere in the team and the judge. Though all are public employees, no relationship exists between them in their professional capacities as they work in separate branches of government. The team even complain that many judges are frustratingly soft on the suspects brought to trial. It requires much time and effort to marshal the evidence needed to bring suspects before a judge. Yet the team and the judge are united by a tacit understanding of the word “security,” an understanding that allows them to uphold not the law per se but rather a larger social order premised upon what­ever meaning of that word they attribute to it. Per Schmitt (1985: 5), in specifying such meaning, the sovereign decides the exception and therefore the norm. Frank described the second example as he stood in the doorway of the team’s office at headquarters. Between drags on his cigarette, he explained, “For us, we always seek the truth. For us, the truth is the right ­thing, even if we have to lie.” The lie to which he refers is not a falsehood but rather an inference for which ­there is no direct evidence. They maintain that they know the truth based on experience rather than on direct observation, which could never be obtained ­under any imaginable scenario. Take the hy­po­thet­i­cal example of ­whether suspect A retrieved a bag left in a closet by suspect B: it would stand to reason that if the latter ­were seen entering the closet with the bag and exiting it without the bag, and the former entered the closet without the bag but exited with it, then the latter left it for the former, even though the team never witnessed a direct exchange. Hence the “truth” is not a specific object or event that the investigators must “see.” Rather, the truth is that which a judge recognizes as sufficiently compelling reasoning, based upon some amount of sensory evidence, to reach a conviction. Thus “lying” only means to obscure how information was obtained. Other forms of manipulation also occur. If warrants are needed to tap phones or enter h ­ ouses, then the team might pres­ent their argument to the prosecutor



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in such a way as to expedite and increase their chances of obtaining a warrant from the judge. They could stress such urgencies as an underage prostitute in danger or suspicions of h ­ uman trafficking. ­These situations are more likely to prompt a quick and favorable reply from a judge given the po­liti­cal importance of EU states being seen as committed to combatting ­these prob­lems. Indeed, the team has plenty of opportunity to blatantly lie and baldly fabricate reports. Brian rhetorically asked, “Do you know how easy it is for cops to frame ­people? We could do it very easily if we want to.” A primary reason that they do not, and this can be argued without naïveté given their horizontal arrangement, is a sense of justice. Brian continued: The under­lying ­thing in our work is justice. Sometimes our work is dirty. But we d­ on’t harm anyone we ­don’t need to. ­There is an honor among what we do: d­ on’t forge surveillance reports. Can you imagine how easy it would be to put someone in jail? Still, think if we ­were caught. The image of the unit would be tarnished. We would lose credibility. The judges would not trust us.

Discussed at greater length in Chapter 2, honor, as well as justice, is at play. I replied to Brian, “Is honor impor­tant in other jobs, like taxi driving or financial analy­sis?” He answered, “No, honor only m ­ atters when t­ here is credibility on the line.” Though not a quality associated with modern sovereign authority, Brian’s appeal to honor, within the second sovereign form, keeps his worse impulses in check in the gray zone. Honor refers to the esteem one is held in by ­others for one’s good judgment, noble speech, and right action. Of course, the meaning attached to t­ hese attributes can always be ethically questioned, but the second sovereign form makes no pretense to universality. In contrast, conformity and allegiance to universal social norms hold the first sovereign form together, as Tocqueville (1988: 246–61) recognized already in the early days of liberal democracy. The question then becomes, in what orga­nizational form does honor become an organ­izing princi­ple?

The Organ­ization of Space, Mind, and Being in the Gray Zone The fact that the team’s work allows them to even think to use an antiquated word like “honor” testifies to the inbuilt limits of the state’s technocratic security apparatus. Ideally, an apparatus should operate so efficiently that no par­tic­u­lar agent need make an ethical judgment (G. Feldman 2012: 197–98). Failing that,

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apparatuses necessarily rely on their own agents to operate in the gray zone to compensate for what the law cannot control or condition. This contradiction puts the security state’s objectives at risk b­ ecause its frontline investigators are momentarily working as f­ ree agents, so to speak. The outcome w ­ ill be unpredictable. However, as Frank explains, “We need results. If we get results, then it works for us and it works for the director.” Yet the team’s f­ ree rein in the gray zone does not foreclose the ample opportunities for them to abuse suspects, ignore victims, and ingratiate themselves, however pos­si­ble. The task is to identify t­ hose conditions that enable the team to act with ethical mea­sure when so many indulgent opportunities are available to them. Three salient conditions emerge in the team’s case: egalitarianism, a deep familiarity, and similarities with targets. ­These conditions premise the second sovereign form b­ ecause they allow the par­tic­u­lar person to come forth and constitute po­liti­cal space with persons, creating a situation where sovereignty, however ephemeral, emerges from ­those persons’ actions. For that form of sovereignty to succeed, actors must recognize ­others as precisely that: persons. Mutual recognition does not beget a utopian society. Subjective beings cannot generate an objective and timeless polity. Instead, such a polity w ­ ill amount to a space where persons assess each other as par­tic­u­ lar subjects, thereby humanizing each other in the act itself. Yet action in the gray zone leads to radically dif­fer­ent results depending on ­whether it is associated with the first or the second sovereign form. The three salient conditions are as follows: Egalitarianism. Although the team have a chief in Frank and an internal ranking system based on se­niority, their decisions on major actions and annual priorities are reached by consensus, regardless of rank. They are not promoted by nomination, so they do not compete against each other for ­career advancement. If a more desirable job w ­ ere to become available, they would compete against candidates from across the ministry or the country. This situation saves them from wondering about each other’s hidden agendas. As David explains, “In ­today’s society, you are taught to compete. If you have this idea of teamwork . . . ​ if Vincent tells me I did wrong and I understand this as competition . . . ​then you ­won’t be able to stand each other.” This kind of egalitarianism creates “a plea­ sure in working with friends,” as Frank explained. This egalitarianism differs from that of abstract citizenship in the nation-­state. It does not equalize ­people as identical carriers of a putative shared essence. Similarly, it is not a function



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of each being a properly trained bureaucrat as capable of deploying means-­ends reasoning as anyone e­ lse. Instead, their equality derives from the mutual guarantee that each member of the team can appear as a par­tic­u­lar speaking subject. If they w ­ ere not so or­ga­ nized, then such appearances would not be pos­si­ble. That guarantee means more than just vocalizing one’s opinion. Instead, it means that the speaker can try to persuade the o­ thers of an unpre­ce­dented course of action. David explained the difference by referring to his basic military training earlier in life: “In the military, team spirit is mostly based on how much you suffer together . . . ​in training exercises, in the conditions ­you’re living in, in taking shit from your superior officers.” In other words, equality is achieved through a common animal endurance rather than through soldiers’ respective pre­sen­ta­tions of self in the planning of operations. Skolnick (1975: 11) points out that police units modelled on a military pattern w ­ ill refer to a martial conception of order, where obedience to command is the first priority. In ­these cases, decisions travel top-­down, with no soldier distinguishing himself from his comrades by questioning the order (10). Despite its strategic importance during the chaos of war, this obedience precludes premising the unit’s action on the plurality of perspectives pres­ent among the individual soldiers. One investigation pushed their egalitarianism to the limits ­because it held ramifications within the broader ministry and potentially among themselves. An impor­tant surveillance occurred on a Saturday eve­ning when six of the seven team members w ­ ere on vacation. Obtaining crucial evidence of an association between two suspects could best be done by photographing them in a restaurant that phone taps indicated they would visit. One team member alone could not conduct the surveillance, and, given its importance, they could not assume that such a meeting would take place again. According to their egalitarian princi­ ples, it was agreed that the entire team, with the exception of one member, vacationing out of town, would join their lone colleague to conduct the Saturday night operation. No one member should be abandoned to such an impor­tant task, and internal rank should not determine who must work during vacation. They obtained the video images of the men, but ­were also surprised to see that the meeting also included a ­woman. Her role was to offer sexual ­favors as an extra incentive to the cash that one of the men would receive from the other for procuring fraudulent travel documents.

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This surveillance success, however, put the team in a difficult position. As the most experienced team member and the team captain, Frank has acquired much po­liti­cal capital in the ministry, along with a host of allies and antagonists. Surveillance results would normally be reported to the team’s unit head. However, a higher-­ranked official, and Frank’s close ally, asked that he be informed first ­because he wanted credit for breaking the news at a se­nior meeting on the Monday morning. Frank was prepared to honor his ally’s request at the risk of offending the unit head, but the team pushed back against him. They did not want to irritate the head by skipping up the chain of command. Only Frank would be able to withstand that resentment, given his alliance with the next-­highest official. The surveillance run concluded at midnight, and the six team members returned to headquarters to discuss the ­matter. Frank sat ­behind his desk and asked, “OK, what do you all think?” They launched into an animated discussion, with David frequently employing physical comedy to lighten the mood. At times, they grew tired of the discussion and left the building to smoke cigarettes. They reviewed the ramifications depending on which se­nior official first received the news. Fi­nally they convinced Frank to speak to the unit head first. Frank agreed to call him on the Sunday eve­ning. Meanwhile, the team turned off their cell phones to avoid calls from se­nior officials. Frank resolved the prob­lem by the Monday morning: he told his higher-­ranked ally that he must inform his unit head lest he place his team in an awkward position. Frank let the head know that he had already spoken to his ally but that the ally would keep the information to himself, thus leaving the prerogative to the unit head. If Frank had invoked his bureaucratic rank to achieve his personal agenda, with no regard for the team members’ interests, he would have set a dangerous pre­ce­dent. To have invoked rank would have silenced his colleagues and have insisted on their obedience to his command. This situation would have precluded their presence as par­tic­ul­ar speaking subjects, and so their po­liti­cal equality. It would have established them as officers expected only to follow ­orders. The character of competition between them would then have changed ­because each would have been inclined to act according to Frank’s interest, ensuring that each of them stayed on his good side. Team members would have then received each other’s proposals suspiciously b­ ecause they would have searched for hidden agendas that might come at their own expense. Therefore, at stake in Frank’s ultimate decision was not simply the wrath of the



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unit head but rather the basic conditions of how the team appears and acts in the gray zone. Deep familiarity. The team remain on call twenty-­four hours a day to follow leads on investigations, to respond to emergency situations, or to conduct operations. They spend more of their waking hours with each other than with their families. Most of their operations involve lengthy and slow surveillance runs. One day began at 8 a.m. with Brian, Vincent, and I watching the front door of a low-­ end pension ­hotel for a young Nigerian ­woman whose asylum case was u ­ nder adjudication. The team needed to learn if she worked as a prostitute, and, if so, who controlled her. We parked next to a nearby, decaying apartment complex and wore yellow hard hats (to pose as building inspectors). Four hours passed, but we did not see the ­woman, so Brian and Vincent called the other members for lunch to discuss ­whether they should stay on this case or switch to another. ­After such a quiet morning, they deci­ded to switch cases. The new case involved an owner of a (dif­fer­ent) Chinese restaurant. The team had credible evidence that he used the restaurant to cover for a smuggling operation. They needed now to confirm his residential address. They started watching the restaurant at 3:30 p.m., when phone taps indicated he would arrive. Their plan was to follow him home a­ fter he left. At 3 a.m., the man exited the restaurant and walked to his apartment one block away. This event was the only active part of a nineteen-­hour day. Given so much inactivity, the team occasionally plays the “dilemma game” to pass the time. As Brian, explained: You have to remember, Greg, that we spend a lot of time together. At this point, we have talked about every­thing. We know every­thing about each other. We have nothing left to talk about! So, we play this immature game. We give a kinky sexual scenario to one of the team. We think about it for a long time. It has to be good and hard to answer. Then, we make the guy answer!

The scenarios force the player to choose between two highly embarrassing sexual options, both of which ­will leave him red-­faced and shamed. On one level, the game is simply an immature way for guys to pass the time. On another level, it ensures a necessary openness to each other—­not an openness demanded of a military recruit whose individuality needs to be broken, but rather an openness that reveals the most par­tic­u­lar and personal parts of themselves. Importantly, participation is not required. (Max, for example, finds the game too personally

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invasive, so does not play.) Nevertheless, it cements trustworthiness among necessarily dif­fer­ent characters whose lives are deeply intertwined and highly interdependent. Deep familiarity generates mutual re­spect for each other as complex and par­ tic­u­lar ­people. As Frank explains, “We know that David’s background in the working class gives him a good understanding of the street. Brian has travelled more and is good at understanding where ­these ­people come from [i.e., smugglers and victims]. Max is good with databases. He used to work in auditing.” For Frank, who originally cultivated the team’s egalitarianism, ­these differences are not just utilitarian. They create the widest range of perspectives to be compared and contrasted when deciding on the “right ­thing” to do in the gray zone. This re­spect for particularities likewise pushes them to recognize similarities between themselves and their targets. Similarities with targets. The team research their targets’ social backgrounds and daily routines. They create cluster diagrams of suspected rings on their office walls, with photo­graphs of their members obtained from surveillance runs and from state and EU databases. To gather sufficient evidence for the prosecutors, they must see them as well-­rounded p ­ eople living complex lives rather than as pejorative ste­reo­types violating the territorial nation’s ostensibly pure space. They know firsthand about honor among thieves and appreciate that contingent events, not innate evil, have s­ haped their paths. This generates some re­spect for the suspects. As David explains: I like the talent of theirs in picking a high-­security door in a minute. I re­spect the guts for robbing someone’s ­house for three hours. This guy came out with 22,000 Euros, silverware, computers, and two guns [he robbed a judge’s ­house]. . . . ​They are like us. They ­really take care of each other. They have good leaders. And a good leader has to have good followers. You have to admire them.

However, this re­spect comes to a quick end with vio­lence. He continued, “I ­don’t re­spect men beating up w ­ omen. I d­ on’t re­spect vio­lence.” While the law normally divides the two sides, the team maintain that thinking distinguishes them in the gray zone. As David remarked, “A criminal barely thinks about the consequences, only the action. A normal guy thinks.” An appreciation of the similarities between themselves and their suspects also carries an understanding of how contingent events shape one’s life course.



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To the question of what leads someone to a life of or­ga­nized crime, Brian answers: A [rural] Georgian guy . . . ​finds no jobs, sees his mate joining a socially deep organ­ization and [having] a better life in cities. . . . ​They go abroad, they have watches, they have cars. They join the mafia’s ju­nior ranks, first just ­doing small ­things, then slowly [moving up]. Of course they are not forced to join, but I never saw a Georgian guy four thousand kilo­meters from Tbilisi that w ­ asn’t a h ­ ouse burglar. Stay in Georgia and you w ­ ill be guarding sheep for life. Ask how many of us planned to be cops? [Like them,] we all ended up being cops by ­things that life imposed on us, like unemployment, lack of professional opportunities, or simply no other choice.

This re­spect checks a potential impulse in the team to exceed reasonable mea­sure when they enter the gray zone, b­ ecause they do not see t­ hose against whom they act as ste­reo­typed “­others.” If their suspects ­were voided of their particularity, ­these “­others” would become less than ­human, so the vio­lence done to them would carry no ethical consequence. In the starkest gray zones associated with the first sovereign form, ste­reo­typed p ­ eoples stand one step away from the status of homo sacer. On the other hand, certain instances have the team protecting ­people from the law. In one instance, David and Brian w ­ ere called to the airport to investigate a coyote (a h ­ uman smuggler) arranging transport for two dozen Ira­ni­ans travelling to Germany. Border-­control officials had detained all the passengers but had kept four of them aside (­because they remained unsure about them). ­These four passengers’ cover story maintained that they ­were travelling to a business conference, but the team learned that no such event was taking place at their final destination. David and Brian told a husband and wife among the four that they could ­either arrange to send them back to Iran or help them continue to Germany. They needed the ­couples’ confession to learn more about the coyote. They gave them ten minutes to think it over. When they returned, the ­couple explained that they w ­ ere in fact only g­ oing to Germany to see relatives and had no business purposes ­there, contrary to their documentation. David told them to stick with their cover story and to pass through border control. David would protect them by ensuring the border officers that their story was straight. The ­couple was to meet them ­later at their ­hotel as their flight for Germany left the next day.

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At the ­hotel, the w ­ oman told them where the coyote passed through border control, so they could more easily check the video recordings to identify him. She even volunteered to arrange a meeting with him at his h ­ otel. The ­couple proceeded by plane to Germany without difficulty, and Brian and David filed a report on the coyote. The case was ultimately dropped, but, as David explained, “We ­were quite happy with the way we acted. And, so w ­ ere they. We could have gotten into trou­ble with higher ranks in the airport. They would not have gotten through without us. We kept our word.” This story’s significance is explained not by Brian and David’s altruism but rather by their willingness to consider ­these travellers’ story on its own terms. In so d­ oing, they treated the ­couple as equals. True, they had a utilitarian interest in the ­couple’s cooperation, but they nevertheless did not need to risk a reprimand to get it. The willingness to see o­ thers as ­people, with par­tic­ul­ ar needs, is a precondition of the po­liti­cal equality that, on the one hand, minimizes the risk of abuse in the gray zone, and, on the other, creates situations where one might even take risks for someone e­ lse’s sake. Had they followed policy prescription to the letter, David and Brian would not have taken the chance for the ­couple. Max’s experience as a trainee in border control offers an example of the faculty of thinking at work. When a Venezuelan man tried to enter the country as a tourist, Max asked him several first-­line questions, and the man’s answers began fitting the profile of an illegal immigrant. Rather than proceed to the second-­line questions, Max explained, “I went straight to the point.” He asked the man, “Are you a Catholic? Do you believe in God? If so, then you’ll tell me the truth.” The man then explained that he had planned to go to another EU country to work with his cousin, but without authorizing papers. The story ends with Max following prescribed mea­sures at the cost of reaching agreement with himself: “He was coming as a ­simple man. I did a lot of harm to someone’s life. I was enforcing the law. I was enforcing a man’s law to deny another h ­ uman being to live as I do. It’s enough to feel guilty about. I hated that airport job ­because of that. [Still,] that Catholic guy thanked me for treating him like a ­human being ­because I ­wasn’t rough with him as I was deporting him.” Max saw himself as a perpetrator of evil while he conducted the normal, bureaucratized procedures of border control. His thoughts did not challenge the status quo in that situation, but his thinking about it—­his very reflection on it—­enabled him to see the man’s viewpoint on equal terms with his own. His thought-­work ­later prompted his and Brian’s establishment of the “humanitar-



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ian corridor,” the name they jokingly gave their two adjacent passport control booths at the airport. Brian’s interest in establishing the corridor followed on their recent completion of an investigation against a Georgian burglary ring. The team took g­ reat pride in cracking this case b­ ecause the ring ran a highly sophisticated operation, which had significantly raised the team’s per­for­mance. No less impor­tant was the fact that the financial crisis of 2008 was at its peak, and austerity mea­sures for government employees had just kicked in. Brian felt less interested in complicating the lives of economic mi­grants, who ­were simply trying to feed themselves and their families: “It put ­things in perspective for me, so anyone fitting the profile of an economic mi­grant, Max and I let through. They are easy to spot. They pretend to be tourists but ­don’t have any clue of what they want to see when they get h ­ ere.” During a subsequent summer secondment to the border-­control ser­vice, they admitted for three months, without questions, mi­grants fitting the profile of ­those seeking illegal employment in the Schengen Area. Brian estimated that about ten per day came through, thus bringing the total to roughly nine hundred ­people. Yet the importance of law and bureaucratic regulation is the protection it promises from the follies of p ­ eoples’ par­tic­u­lar judgments and actions. I asked, “Why should you take the law into your own hands? What if you judge badly? Why not play by the rules and let the judges judge legally obtained evidence?” David replied, “Why should I judge, rather than a judge? ­Because I am actually seeing girls being abused in prostitution. ­People who write the codes and the laws are far from real­ity. I see the real­ity. I [might have] to make my own rules of engagement, but I must always have the conviction of my colleagues.” Note that David’s explanation indicates that his colleagues’ conviction is not guaranteed; rather, he must necessarily persuade them. What­ever action they might take in the sovereign space of the gray zone, it ­will be deci­ded in reference to their own judgments as to what constitutes “the truth about crime,” which Jean and John Comaroff (2016) identify as the key phenomenal event through which ­people understand con­temporary sovereignty and social order.

The Subject of/in Two Dif­fer­ent Sovereign Forms The team contrast themselves against colleagues whose work epitomizes routine, drudgery, and predictability. Such work, ­whether desk investigations or passport control, is to be avoided. For them, it deadens the mind. One might ask if the team are not simply attracted to street work as another type of extreme

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sport that thrives on an adrenaline rush. However, street work rarely gets so intense. Arrests, high-­speed chases, or dangerous situations occur no more than a few times a year, leaving a large amount of downtime (Fassin 2013: xii, 68). Instead, to evade monotony and circularity they seek presence as p ­ eople whose actions originate from their own par­tic­u­lar judgments about what to do and how to be in the world. To this end, suspects and victims become p ­ eople whose thoughts they must learn to think and whose interests they must examine. They must try to see the world as t­ hese ­people do. Much of the time this activity resembles “scanning,” or determining suspects’ motives and desires so that the team can outwit them in an investigation. Since one scans objects, as opposed to engaging subjects, then it mainly “feeds the machine,” as the team might say. Yet on another level, their own horizons as thinking persons expand the more they see suspects and victims as ordinary p ­ eople with the ordinary goal of trying to make ends meet, what­ever standpoint they occupy. In contrast to border-­control officers, the team’s actions pertain to their own assessments of situations, their own considerations of the perspectives of the p ­ eople involved, their own judgments about what should be done, and their own deliberations about a proper course of action (G. Feldman 2016). They see this dimension of their job as the decisive difference between them and the desk investigators. The contrast becomes clear conceptually when recalling that the raison d’état amounts to nothing other than ensuring that the population stabilizes and reproduces itself. Virtue and honor are not systematically part of the enterprise. ­These are the characteristics of extraordinary actions that win the approval and approbation of one’s peers. Such actions cannot, by definition, be systematic, ­because they change the historical direction of events in unplanned and unpredictable ways. Sovereign action in the second form starts time anew, which means in new directions. Systems cannot accommodate such par­tic­u­lar actors, so virtue and honor are threatening qualities to the first sovereign form, despite the lip ser­vice they occasionally receive. ­People themselves must find a way to incorporate t­ hose qualities into their collective lives despite the conditions that the first sovereign form imposes. To stand out as one’s own distinct self—­that is, Homer’s use of the term heroic (Arendt 1998: 186)—­would disrupt the redundancy of the raison d’état and the bureaucratic work that makes its pos­si­ble. ­Labor, as a circular pro­cess, not only frustrates the impulse to appear in the world but also obstructs it from playing a constituent role in it. When we



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describe our lives as “walking on a treadmill,” we are celebrating neither life nor the status quo, which renders our days redundant. In the gray zone, the team constitute a radically dif­fer­ent kind of sovereign power. ­Here, precisely, we find the thrill and the attraction the team feel for their work. It is not a power over them, per normal state-­based sovereign authority, but rather a sovereignty that precipitates out of their own empowerment as a group of persons who decide for themselves how jointly to take action. Traditional state sovereignty isolates and compels the individual to protect and to sustain a status quo that exists for the status quo itself. It subordinates the individual itself, even if it encourages all the creativity that an individual can muster to fulfill their assignment. The space of traditional state sovereignty persists regardless of the individual souls circulating through it. In contrast, the team’s invocation of the second sovereign form creates a polity that directly expresses their own particularity. Their recognition of equality in the gray zone looks in two directions. One direction gazes inward among themselves as they listen to each other’s assessment of what should be done. Frank’s foregoing of hierarchy and its incumbent top-­down command structure allows all seven team members equal chance to pres­ent their assessments and rest assured that each has a fair chance to persuade the o­ thers of its importance. It likewise follows that each listener must be willing to accommodate that argument if they become convinced. This arrangement protects the appearance of each team member as a par­tic­u­lar participant in the deliberations and subsequent actions. Each member’s own personhood would be lost in a hierarchical arrangement ­because to follow instruction, at most, invites an actor’s creative powers in implementing ­orders. However, it invites no thinking assessment from the par­tic­u­lar person of the ethical validity and significance of what should be done. It eliminates the par­tic­u­lar person’s appearance in the bureaucracy. The other direction gazes outward to the suspects, victims, in­for­mants, and bystanders tied into an investigation. That gaze has them each assess the standpoint of ­those persons and weigh that assessment against the needs of the investigation and their own ethical judgment about the situation. To see ­these persons as p ­ eople trying to make ends meet is an exercise of recognizing them as equals. However, this recognition never means naïve agreement or uncritical empathy. It only means that the “other” should be represented in one’s own

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mind from the other’s own standpoint (Arendt 1992: 43; 1978: 258). Literally or figuratively, it means that the other should be given a chance to speak on the basis of their own experience, which is then examined from as many dif­fer­ent perspectives as pos­si­ble. It has the actors fairly assessing alternative standpoints so that they can make the wisest judgment about what is to be done in such a way that they can live with themselves for what they ­will be ­doing. To expand the discussion in the Introduction, the materialization of a space of appearance requires two steps, schematically put. The first step is “thinking,” which has the actors examining the standpoints of t­ hose involved in the ethical dilemma, a move that provokes the two-­in-­one thought dialogue about how one should live in the world with ­others: the Ira­nian travellers, the Georgian thieves, and each of the team members themselves with re­spect to Frank’s decision to first notify his superior officer. “Thinking” strives to bring the thinker into agreement with the self about how to act in the messy empirical world, when pregiven codes of conduct do not apply. In the gray zone, ­there are no pregiven ­legal codes. Arendt defines thinking specifically as a two-­in-­one dialogue where one must reach inner agreement to avoid living in contradiction with oneself. Thus, thinking’s stimulus lies precisely in how p ­ eople, events, and situations in the world “out t­ here” impact the par­tic­u­lar thinker (G. Feldman 2013: 145–48; Jackson 2005: 31, 48). This approach does not assume an a priori unified subject as in liberal po­liti­cal theory. Thinking fractures the subject as we talk to ourselves about how to engage that messy world in such a way as to reach inner agreement and thus end the discussion. Indeed, it is engagement with the world—­that is, the encounters with persons with alternative standpoints—­that c­ auses the fracture. The thinker “trades places” with t­hese ­others, as Husserl would have put it (see Duranti 2010: 21), and carries the repre­sen­ta­tion of the other (not the Other) in one’s mind. From ­there, the thinker splits into two subjects when examining that repre­sen­ta­tion for any reason to change the thinker’s public conduct. Ultimately, one must re­adjust oneself to the new real­ity in order to bring the turbulence of thought. This closure occurs when the thinker reaches inner agreement about how to live with the other subject(s). Such agreement, backed up with public action, brings unity to the other­wise split subject, which allows the thinker, as former team member Edward described it, “to sleep at night with my head on the pillow.” However, by this reasoning one must also act to try to reconstitute the field of ­human relations, not just think about how one should act. Again, the thought



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dialogue was originally prompted by worldly experience that irritated the settled conscious of the thinker-­actor. Therefore, the second step sees the actor returning from the solitude of thinking and presenting his thoughts about an ethical course of action to cohorts. Recall again what David said about deciding to violate the law: “I must have the conviction of my colleagues.” The ele­ment of persuasion and consensus is central to the experience of original action. It becomes a sovereign space of their own, outside of l­egal and bureaucratic constraint, where they experience the thrill of founding—­albeit temporarily and fleetingly—­a sovereign polity of their own par­tic­u­lar making. Indeed, to constitute a new world out of lawless space is the foundational sovereign act par excellence, which, if premised upon par­tic­u­lar speaking subjects, allows each actor to mutually confirm the ­others through the joint action itself. This result signifies a radically dif­fer­ent sovereign act in the state of exception, or the gray zone, ­because they neither abused nor ignored t­ hose whom they held u ­ nder sovereign control. Again, the differences between the gray zones of the first sovereign and second sovereign forms result from the dif­fer­ent organ­izing princi­ples that held each sovereign form together. In the latter, it consists of horizontally arranged relations and recognition of the particularity of another person’s standpoint. In the former, that order consists of the top-­down order incumbent in vertical bureaucracy, along with the structural isolation of both the sovereign agents and the targets of state policy. To the extent that ­people are atomized and or­ga­ nized hierarchically, their actions w ­ ill reflect self-­interest, personal survival, and at some point the objectification of ­others—­that is, the elimination of their po­liti­cal voice. It ­will likewise, and more openly, induce conformity ­because in atomized situations personal safety is most easily found by huddling together rather than by standing out with one’s par­tic­u­lar perspective. Positive results can certainly result from the former (e.g., mass inoculations, universal health care, and f­ ree basic education). ­These achievements, however, view the subject en masse, as a specimen of a national or even global species. The subject becomes an object to be acted upon, for better or for worse. In the latter, persons come to life as par­tic­u­lar subjects. Their bodies could well be on the verge of death, but their personhood ­will flourish (see G. Feldman 2015: 6). If ­people are or­ga­nized in an egalitarian arrangement that protects each’s par­tic­u­lar perspective, the princi­ples of action that legitimately invoke honor, virtue, and justice spring forth out of their own deliberation and consensus.

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(See also Rozakou 2016 for joint action among refugees and Greek citizens.) ­These characteristics preclude vigilante justice, which can other­wise be read into Max’s comment about d­ oing justice despite the law, and into David’s comment about seeing the real­ity and having to make his own rules of engagement. Mutual recognition requires that David obtains the “conviction” of his colleagues, as he explained. Even if it d­ oesn’t lead to agreement, it allows them to obtain a ­wholeness in the experience that has been fundamentally lacking in the first sovereign form ever since Hobbes wrote his insightful book.

Chapter 2

Identity and the Investigative Team Vio­lence, Sovereignty, and Personhood Well, ­there is no order in the chaos of what is “me” . . . ​if I think about it, I’ll end up realizing that I’m able to go completely dif­fer­ent ways in similar situations. David

Vio­lence, Sovereignty, and Personhood Vio­lence is not a normal part of the team’s activities. They only rely on it in exceptional circumstances. As Agamben’s work, drawing on Schmitt, has made clear, the sovereign appears in full force in exceptional circumstances, which the sovereign is empowered to declare. Exceptional circumstances transpire outside the scope of law. If law, and the norms to which it refers, are the basis of public order, then we must ask what conditions the sovereign’s action in a state of disorder, that is, the state of exception when the sovereign strug­gles to restore order through direct intervention. This action does not transpire in a historical vacuum; the sovereign is no metaphysical, godlike actor arriving on the scene from no par­tic­u­lar place. Again, sovereign power is an effect of a particular configuration of ­human relations in which ­those who may act with impunity assume a sovereign mantle. David’s remark that he can “go completely dif­fer­ent ways in similar situations” is instructive, but it requires a more nuanced explanation than what it implies. Insofar as states of exception remove the usual restraints on law and norms, the actions any par­tic­u­lar sovereign actor takes are conditioned (not determined) by the field of ­human relations in which that actor is suspended. The absence of law and norms opens up countless possibilities to that actor. However, ­those possibilities are still contained within a more or less fixed range established by the field of relations in the state of exception. David, for example, can undertake highly unusual actions, but t­ hose actions are not random occurrences. He imagines and pursues them in reference to the possibilities that any given state of exception offers. The question of sovereign action invites the question of vio­lence, ­because vio­lence amounts to the silencing of its target regardless of any existing norm

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or law that might have other­wise protected the target. Such vio­lence is therefore a foundational act aimed at (re)constituting order in a field of historically contingent ­human relations. It is a unidirectional act of force that “has no fixed ground” beneath it (A. Feldman 1991: 1–2). It is a command that recognizes no reply and thus no speaking subject. We most easily imagine vio­lence as blows against the body, but such blows aim to eliminate the victim’s power of speech more than to break the body, for the sake of establishing or maintaining a certain kind of social order. By silencing an other­wise speaking subject, it imposes vertical authority akin to the first sovereign form. Significantly, however, state agents as perpetrators of vio­lence in the gray zone are likewise silenced ­because they unreflectively execute command. (If they are in full agreement with the vio­ lence, then they are willing agents.) The perpetrator asserts an abstract vision of order on the victim, but the former only acts as a generic component of that order. ­After all, an agent is a means and a tool rather than a voice speaking from a par­tic­u­lar standpoint. Per the first sovereign form, ­whether in military, police, or bureaucratic action, if agents do not agree with the order, then they must act in the world contrary to their own ethical judgments. Trapped in the first sovereign form, they might invoke “secular theodicy” to get through the discomfort (Herzfeld 1992: 5–10). However, agents might not recognize differences between their own ethics and the systems they represent. Suffering in the external world, then, cannot prompt the agent into the two-­in-­one thought dialogue through which an actor examines other standpoints to determine if he accepts how he lives in the world with o­ thers. Per the second sovereign form, if the agents w ­ ere to participate as equals in the deliberations preceding the action, they would be fully pres­ent as speaking subjects in all phases of the event itself. The event emerges from their joint action as par­tic­u­lar persons. The event constitutes their personhoods, and the personhoods constitute the event. Personhood, deliberation, action, and the public space through which ­these events transpire are all mutually constituted. Similar to Keane’s point (2016: 18–19; see also Faubion 2011), ethics call forth the actor’s exemplary action, which becomes the necessary conduit for the actor’s appearance in the world. Echoing Aristotle, ethics are thus virtuous ­because the action exemplifies the “essence” of the par­tic­u­lar person. (Keane would not argue that the subject is essentialized as a natu­ral ­thing, as perhaps Aristotle does, but, more likely, that the action itself essentializes the actor in a social field through the meaning it publicly obtains.)



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Vio­lence is the exceptional act par excellence. The way sovereign actors deploy it reveals much about how the two sovereign forms draw out dif­fer­ent dispositions in ­human being. Inspired by David’s comments about who he is able to become, this chapter begins by showing how vio­lence in the gray zone expresses one’s personhood and regards the “other” much differently in the two dif­fer­ent sovereign forms. It then reviews Primo Levi’s description of a Jewish leader in a ghetto answerable to Nazi authorities and tracks the life histories of two team members—­Brian and David—in depth. This exercise highlights how dif­fer­ent aspects of ­human character flourish or wilt in the gray zones associated with each of the sovereign forms. It then discusses the investigative team’s cultivation of their professional identity, with par­tic­u­lar emphasis on Frank’s leadership style, to learn how they attribute meaning to their work. The chapter concludes by marking the role of honor, per Appiah’s understanding, as the guide of action in the second sovereign form.

Two Acts of Vio­lence in Comparison Humphrey’s (2008) analy­sis of the reassembly of individual subjects in the moment of action helps further explain David’s self-­observation. She argues that the subject remains internally divided ­until embarking on a course of action. Action and the reunification of the self do not preclude other ways of being or other pos­si­ble actions, but Humphrey concludes that subjects possess a sharpened “sense of who they are” in a “decision-­event” out of a random set of pos­si­ble personae (374). She writes that the “decision” to act instantiates the recomposed subject, who starts “plumping for a specific way of being,” and so reprioritizes the other possibilities that ­were in play ­until the decisive moment (363). Humphrey’s perspective came to mind during an after­noon sitting in a parked car during a slow surveillance operation. Brian talked about slapping a Chinese suspect during an arrest, and chuckled about the subsequent surprise on the man’s face. I pushed him on the topic. According to Brian, foreign suspects often feign misunderstanding of verbal commands to find ways to resist complying. He elaborated, “The slap is designed not to damage the face and certainly not to bruise or draw blood. It’s only to gain control of the situation.” David, as he often does, stabbed at me for being so apparently naïve: “We are not saints, Greg.” John chuckled in agreement. However, I know well how to stab back: “So, what is the difference between what you are ­doing and police brutality against African Americans?” John replied with agitation that police brutality happens

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a­ fter the police gain control of the situation, whereas Brian was only trying to gain control in the first place. He added, “We d­ on’t go that far, but we have colleagues in other departments who do.” As David had done in other interviews, John argued that he would never let his colleagues use excessive force. While the threshold between an excessive and acceptable amount of necessary vio­lence is vague (Fassin 2013: 126–28), the following two examples of vio­lence illustrate the dif­fer­ent ways that it instantiates the dif­fer­ent sovereign forms and concomitantly dif­fer­ent modes of being and relations to ­others. Act I exemplifies the first sovereign form, and it features an excessiveness that collapses the means and the ends together in a strug­gle to maintain sovereign order for its own sake. Act II exemplifies the second form, and it features mea­sured vio­lence targeted at specific ends, which the team deci­ded ­were required for justice to prevail, even though the law did not require them to act.

Act I

The team had been investigating a Georgian man against whom they had accumulated evidence of breaking and entering and burglary over the course of several weeks. The man entered on different occasions at least six apartments around the city between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., and exited with bags that suggested stolen goods. Usually, he would sell the goods to a pawn shop by lunchtime in order to obtain cash. The team believed that the overall investigation had gathered sufficient evidence against this individual, so they wished to arrest him. However, the chief investigator, wanting to see if he was part of a larger network, deci­ded against it. (Several Georgian networks had been arrested across Eu­rope in 2013. The team had done three separate cases in their district since 2012. The most recent, in 2014, led to the arrest of eight suspects, who ultimately received sentences of between six and fifteen years.) On one particularly long day, the late eve­ning hours had the team finishing reports for the previous night’s surveillance, and they w ­ ere next preparing to do a very early morning arrest on the Georgian suspect. The tight time frame precluded them from returning home for a few hours’ sleep. ­After completing the reports at midnight, they decamped to an outdoor café for beers. By three in the morning, they moved to set up on the Georgian man’s front door. His modus operandi had been to arrive at the predetermined site for his burglary by four in the morning with an accomplice. This morning was no dif­fer­ent. A few minutes a­ fter 3 a.m., the man exited his apartment, in a low-­end suburb on the outskirts of town,



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and entered his car. He had already shown himself to be well attuned to surveillance by making maneuvers designed to pull cars along with him on unusual routes, where he could identify the cars (and possibly the drivers) on an isolated road. Following him at such an early hour would be difficult, so the team divided into three cars, with each car waiting at subsequent intersections where he would likely cross. The risk of detection would be too high if they tried following directly. Based on intelligence from earlier surveillances, the team correctly guessed the neighborhood where he would park. From ­there, it would be much easier to conduct street surveillance on foot. The man parked his car, hopped out on to the sidewalk, and began his usual feigned activity. He dressed in jogging clothes, equipped with a mobile device strapped to his upper arm to listen to ­music, and began stretching as if to prepare for a run. A partner who joined him at this point was also dressed as a jogger. Together, at 4 a.m., they began jogging through the relatively upscale neighborhood with classically designed apartment buildings, lots of cars parked on the street, and leafy trees evenly distributed along the curbside. They soon entered an apartment building, where they remained ­until 6 a.m. The team positioned themselves discreetly to keep watch on all the building’s exits. When the two suspects exited, the chief of the desk investigative group responsible for this case gave the team the order to arrest them. (Recall from Chapter 1 that some operations are coordinated by other investigative groups as the team itself conducts the surveillance work for ­those groups.) Max, Brian, Frank, and John pursued one suspect, who lay down on the ground upon their first command. They kept guns pointed at him u ­ ntil Brian handcuffed him. The other suspect, the one whom they had tracked from his home to the apartment building, began r­ unning away. Vincent and David, wearing ski masks, followed, calling out to him to lie down. The man did not. David was unsure ­whether the man either did not understand the national language, did not realize the police (rather than a criminal gang) ­were chasing him, or was trying to evade arrest. In any case, no second-­guessing took place. Vincent and David caught up with him, and the man was felled to his knees with one blow of Vincent’s baton. David followed with a series of short kicks to the man’s ribs, so that he lay flat on the ground. From that position, the man still resisted the handcuffs. At this point, the lead investigator from the other group, who had been coordinating the arrest, arrived. He began jump-­kicking and slapping the suspect to facilitate putting on handcuffs. The three of them next put a mesh bag over the man’s

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head and tried lifting him back to his feet to take him to the car. As the man strug­gled, ­either from re­sis­tance or sheer disorientation, the lead investigator punched him twice in the stomach. ­After the man was subdued, David also placed a bag over the other suspect’s head, who had been fully cooperating throughout his apprehension. This move is not a standard arrest procedure, but David initially justified it as a means (1) to prevent the suspects from seeing the team’s ­faces and cars and (2) to discourage attempted escape or any form of re­ sis­tance. (The bag disorients the suspect and guarantees his compliance.) This was the first time that David had used bags, and he insists that he would only use them on suspects with a violent criminal history. When they fi­nally brought both suspects to the car, they removed the bags and showed them the arrest warrants. David ­later reflected that the force used against the suspect a­ fter the suspect was down was excessive. He was referring to the lead investigator’s kicks, slaps, and punches. David could understand the lead investigator’s first jump on the suspect’s back b­ ecause, from the investigator’s perspective, he could not tell if David and Vincent had gained control of the situation. However, the additional kicks to the ribs (David’s doing) and punches to the stomach w ­ ere unjustifiable and could potentially land them in trou­ble. Had the suspect needed hospitalization, it would have immediately implied police brutality, with the subsequent ­legal ramifications. The investigator replied first that he did not remember striking the suspect, then justified himself by describing it as “the heat of the moment.” Yet the episode highlights Fassin’s (2013: 126) point that the work of public order police relies on vio­lence as the continuation of force by other means, a paraphrase of Clausewitz’s (1979: 119) famous maxim that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” Graeber (2015: 73) takes the point full circle, noting that “police are bureaucrats with weapons.” The investigator used to work for the “blues”—­the uniformed street police responsible for public order, who are much rougher than the investigative team during arrests and apprehensions. The former routinely perform such operations and are trapped in an overtly antagonistic relationship with ­those acting in legally marginal ways. Their posture is defensive, because they claim that they are targeted for attack by disruptive members of society. Reflecting several months ­later on the eve­ ning, David explained that uniformed police have a dif­fer­ent dynamic: “They can be like hooligans at soccer matches. The group pushes them to do stupid ­things, but you have to understand one t­ hing: if one cop acts badly in a public



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order situation, then twenty other cops with him w ­ ill follow on. Cops are always outnumbered, so if one swings [his club], then they all swing. Prob­ably the investigator saw the situation like that.” David’s interpretation suggests not that vio­lence operates according to its own inherent logic but rather that it appears in a field of contingent relations in which actors deploy their own justifications for vio­lence. (See Robben 2005.)

Act II

At 8:45 p.m. we walked to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner a­ fter five hours of surveillance through urban neighborhoods, on the subway, and in an immigrant suburb. We had been looking for connections between suspects in a Europe-­wide Nigerian human-­trafficking ring. On the way to the restaurant, Brian explained another case, one involving a Romanian trafficking ring that circulated teenage prostitutes throughout Western Eu­rope. To close this case, and to satisfy their consciences, the team had entered the gray zone: We had a high-­value in­for­mant on the Romanian case. This guy sells drugs, guns, stolen goods, but he has limitless information about the Romanian ring ­because his girlfriend used to be a prostitute in it. We called him in and told him that we ­won’t arrest him ­until he stops giving information. He was so well placed that we had to blackmail him. This is illegal. They must give information voluntarily. But we have no ethical prob­lems. The guy is a motherfucker.

This high-­value in­for­mant was not the only in­for­mant on the case. Another one, an immigrant, owns a cell-­phone shop. He had unwittingly sold new phone plans to the Romanian ringleader (who routinely changed numbers to avoid police phone taps). The team could not close the case ­unless they knew the ringleader’s current phone number. The shop’s owner refused to cooperate the first time they approached him. The next time, however, Frank and Max went to his shop and, throwing every­thing on the ­counter onto the floor, demanded that he provide them with the Romanian’s new numbers. If he refused, they would have examined his immigration paperwork. The threat gained his cooperation. We arrived at the restaurant, which operated in violation of municipal health codes. The team did not report them to the public health inspection office because the restaurant offered them a sanctuary. The staff could not speak the national language, only Mandarin, so the team could talk freely among themselves away from headquarters. During Christmas dinner, I pushed them on their tactics

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for gaining ­these in­for­mants’ cooperation. What right did they have to break the law like that? In response, Brian explained the situation of a fourteen-­year-­old girl entangled in the case. The girl’s ­mother had sold her to the trafficking ring for less than fifty dollars. She was smuggled into the country with a fake ID and made up to look ten years older. An extended ­family composed the ring, with cousins and siblings controlling cells of three or four prostituted girls and women. The team arrested some of the ring, including the leader. They brought the girl into protective custody b­ ecause the ringleader, from jail, instructed his brother-­in-­law to threaten to burn her ­house down if she testified. Crying, she called Frank for help. Frank contacted Brian and said, “We know who made this threat and where he lives.” They consulted their teammates, who agreed that they should act directly against the brother-­in-­law. They knocked on the door of the ­house where he rented a c­ ouple of rooms. A very large man opened the door, filling the doorway. Frank pointed his gun at him and said, “Where are the Romanians?” The man frightfully backed away and pointed to their apartment. The brother-­in-­law was inside the room with his wife, his s­ ister, and two teen­ agers. They told him to come with them. He complained with flagrant hand gestures, so Brian restrained him by placing his wrist in a stress position. As they walked him out of the h ­ ouse, the man head-­butted the doorframe, causing streams of blood to run down his face. Brian and Frank remained unfazed, since tougher suspects often attempt to create an impression of police brutality. Frank turned on the siren to show onlookers that the police had the situation ­under control. Once at the office, they gave him a choice: “You can go home, get your t­ hings, and leave the country ­today, or we ­will deal with you.” Brian then explained to me, “We d­ on’t bluff. If we make a promise to help you or hurt you, we keep it.” The team never saw him again. The girl had kept a good relationship with her s­ ister in Romania but could not afford a phone plan to talk to her, and she asked Frank for help. By law, he should have no contact with her lest he biased her as a witness, but he paid for the plan anyway. The girl ultimately testified in court, with voice distortion and from ­behind a curtain. Her testimony provided necessary supporting evidence, such as the conditions in which she was kept, the brutality she suffered, and the contacts that she knew the ringleader had maintained. The phone taps revealed how the ringleader would coordinate the operation with his relatives, how the girls w ­ ere to be treated, when they should eat, how much they should charge their clients, and how they w ­ ere to display themselves on the street. Other



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evidence included proof of money transfers to Romania, a large amount of cash in their ­house, and corroborative evidence from the Romanian police. The house also contained several bats used to beat the girls, something confirmed by the girl’s testimony and also that of the neighbors’ who had heard their screams. Surveillance recorded the ringleader beating members of rival gangs and claiming their prostitutes for his own operation. The ringleader is now serving a fourteen-­year sentence. To provide prosecutors with sufficient evidence and do what they deemed to be “the right t­ hing,” the team committed four crimes: illegal entry, illegal detention, abuse of power, and contact with a witness. In addition to risking the potential ­legal repercussions, they had put themselves in physical danger during the unwarranted arrest. They had to enter the gray zone for the sake of the investigation and for the sake of their own consciences. However, the ethics of their actions carry dif­fer­ent inflections when viewed from ­either the state’s perspective or their own. The state does not need the girl’s par­tic­u­lar plight to be eased. It did not compel the team to take care of the ­matter through extralegal means. Yet the fact that they did act supports the state’s agenda insofar as greater tranquility is brought to its territorial domain. Nevertheless, the team’s reason for acting—­and the second sovereign form it implies—is much dif­fer­ent from that of typical actions conducted on behalf of the security state. The plight of the fourteen-­year-­old girl signified to them an evil constituted in a field of ­human relations of which the team wished not to be a part but w ­ ere in a position to rectify. Moved by a sense of injustice, Frank and Brian needed to persuade their colleagues to act against the pimp. Team members allowed the Romanian girl to speak to them, as it w ­ ere, from her own standpoint and to hear that standpoint with as ­little prejudice as pos­si­ble. Per Throop’s (2010) formulation, they did not force her experience into their own unexamined frame of reference. Their openness to her situation implied an equality that necessarily recognizes each individual’s “irreplaceability” (276). They considered her situation as best they could on its own terms, ­after she had asked Frank for help. They avoided prejudging her (e.g., by dismissing her based on ste­reo­types about Romanian w ­ omen) or deciding that she was not worthy of the risk in any case. The pimp and the in­for­mants, I suggest, likewise stood as equals in their minds—­that is, as ­people whose standpoints they needed to take seriously. If not, then they could ­either have dismissed them as unimportant or have abused them as a ­matter of indulgence, neither of which actions

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would have helped the girl. The emphasis on equality does not mean an unquestioning ac­cep­tance of o­ thers’ actions as a m ­ atter of moral relativism. Rather, it means a willingness to assess the perspectives of ­others—­disagreeable as they may be—­before deciding how to act in situations involving them. To honorably resolve the situation, the team exercised mea­sured vio­lence as a means to the end of protecting the girl rather than using gratuitous vio­lence as an end in itself.

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Violent acts impose order unilaterally on their victims, but the implication for the victim’s and the perpetrator’s personhood vary according to the sovereign form in which the acts transpire. Act I occurred primarily b­ ecause the investigator from an adjacent unit lost his cool “in the heat of the moment.” We can replace that meta­phor with another: “He lost his head,” signifying the voiding of himself as a thinking, deliberative actor. The perfect sovereign agent of the first form is a nonthinking agent, hence we must consider his action in relation to it. Benjamin (1986: 278–80) explains that the state operates on two forms of law: positive law and natu­ral law. Positive law guarantees the justness of its ends as long as the means to secure ­those ends are just. The decision about the justness of the means is arrived at historically, through par­tic­u­lar judgments about what is proper, right, and acceptable to enforce ­legal order. If no such judgment ­were to happen, the means used to uphold the specific law could amount to greater violation than that which the law itself was designed to preclude. Logically and historically prior to positive law, the act of sovereign foundation invokes natu­ ral law as an indisputable justification for any means necessary to (re)constitute sovereign space. In this case, the means and the ends of sovereignty thus blend together, placing both outside of debate in order to secure an unquestionable foundation from which all e­ lse proceeds. This logic of natu­ral law is carried through via abstract reason, regardless of the historical circumstances on which it is imposed. From the standpoint of natu­ral law, the investigator’s vio­lence was justifiable not merely (if at all) to gain control of a situation, but rather as a mea­sure to preserve the state’s prerogative to command the law. In effect, the investigator interpreted the suspect’s actions not merely as defying David’s and Vincent’s order to stop evading arrest but also as challenging state sovereignty itself. His excessively violent response conveys that not just the law but also the



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state would become impotent. Since natu­ral law, rooted in abstract reason, is not checked by—­that is, does not recognize—­any alternative standpoint, then vio­lence can be perpetrated ad infinitum merely for the sake of maintaining state sovereignty, or, put simply, the status quo. Sovereignty and vio­lence appeared in Act I; personhood did not, e­ ither in the victim or in the perpetrator who lost his head. Such vio­lence in the first sovereign form potentially knows no end ­because the perpetrator engages no alternative perspective (i.e., he engages no other person). Hence no check on such vio­lence is available. The only reasonable justification for vio­lence ­under “natu­ral law” is circular and thus never-­ ending: the sovereign state may use unlimited vio­lence ­because the state is sovereign. The investigator’s moment likewise signifies what Balibar (2009a: 12) sees as “extreme vio­lence,” through which the sovereign eliminates the possibility of re­sis­tance, so likewise eliminates any dialectic through which po­liti­cal space can be constituted (13). The vio­lence thus (re)constitutes the first sovereign form through the denial of po­liti­cal voice to the other. Balibar, similar to Benjamin, maintains a distinction between extreme vio­lence and vio­lence, which is limited by the rationality of the means-­ends relationship (16). That distinction pivots on the elimination not simply of the bodily victim of vio­lence but, more specifically, of the very personhood of the victim. In other words, extreme vio­ lence, which is realized only in the gray zone, holds the victim at the threshold between life and death so that the subject loses po­liti­cal, ­legal, and moral being but yet is not permitted to die. Embodying the first sovereign form, the investi­ gator held the Georgian suspect at this threshold. Note that in Act II, vio­lence was conducted according to neither positive law nor natu­ral law (of the first sovereign form). The former gave no ground for the team to act as they did against the pimp or the owner of the cell-­phone shop. The latter, as the basis of state sovereignty, was never in jeopardy, ­because the girl’s fate posed no threat to the foundation of state sovereignty. In Act II, the team used vio­lence as a mea­sured means to achieve a specific end. It differed from the vio­lence justified by positive law b­ ecause the law did not require that the team pursue the end in the first place (i.e., it did not require that they save the girl from the pimp’s threat). It was the team who deci­ded that the end was just, and also that the violent means to achieve it be kept within certain par­a­ meters. In the second sovereign form, the team could render an ad hoc decision with no ­legal pre­ce­dent and initiate the action necessary for them to

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resolve their inner-­thought dialogues about the girl’s fate. They wished not to be a constituent part of a world that perpetuated her suffering. They instantiated themselves as thinking and judging beings who obtained worldly appearances as themselves, so to speak, through their actions. Returning to David’s, or anyone’s, capacity “to go completely dif­fer­ent ways in similar situations,” the only similarity in the above two acts of vio­lence is the presence of vio­lence itself. I suggest that the difference David refers to is that of the radically dif­fer­ent fields of relations, or sovereign forms, in which he might deploy vio­lence. He would be prone to becoming two radically dif­fer­ent characters in e­ ither one: a passive sovereign actor using limitless vio­lence as both the means and the end (Act I), or a judging actor using vio­lence as a limited, strategic means to an end (Act II). ­Those possibilities are inextricably linked to w ­ hether he acts relative to a field of relations characteristic of the first sovereign form or the second.

Extra/ordinary Subjects in Gray Zones: The Stories of Chaim Rumkowski, David, and Brian As mentioned in the Introduction, Primo Levi sees that moral ambiguity flourishes in situations of strict, vertically oriented bureaucratic administration. This atomizing social arrangement pits individuals against each other. Consequently, it foments a strug­gle of all against all to move upward in the social ranking as the only means to secure a place for them in it. Levi sees that certain character dispositions are favored in such an arrangement. I describe Levi’s portrait of Chaim Rumkowski so that I may distinguish Rumkowski’s modus operandi in the first sovereign form’s gray zone from certain dispositions in David and Brian that lend themselves to the second sovereign form. ­These character sketches do not mean that personality types crudely align with each of the sovereign forms, only that each sovereign form caters to dif­fer­ent character dispositions that must reside to some extent in all of us. They draw on dif­fer­ent potentialities in the subject. This move is necessary if we are to forego the simplistic liberal argument that the subject is formed prior to entering sovereign space, or to forego the increasingly fash­ion­able neurological arguments that par­tic­u­lar configurations in the brain’s wiring induce us to act in our unique ways. Instead, the under­lying orga­nizational arrangement associated with ­either sovereign form enables the same actor “to go in completely dif­fer­ent ways in [apparently] similar situations,” to quote David once more.



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Levi (1988: 60–69) sums up Rumkowski’s story thus: “Like Rumkowski, we are too dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility.” But again, this dazzling ignorance is likely more pres­ent in a bureaucratic social milieu where “half-­consciences” (69) thrive in petty, subordinate positions, excusing themselves with the logic: “ ‘If I did not do it, someone e­ lse worse than I would’ ” (68). Rumkowski, a Jewish businessman in Lodz, pursued a mediocre ­career and carried a reputation as “energetic, uncultivated, and authoritarian.” His role as director of vari­ous Jewish charities in the city kept him in the public eye (62). He became the president of the Lodz ghetto, setting himself up as the liaison between the SS and its Jewish residents. This was a cursed position, but it offered an increase in social rank, and Rumkowski deeply loved authority, prestige, and social re­spect. For the Nazis, however, Levi reasons that he was the perfect candidate for the position, seeming to be “a fool with an air of respectability—in short, the ideal dupe” (62). He quickly began to see himself as an enlightened monarch, which the Nazi overseers encouraged only b­ ecause they appreciated his sound administrative skills. Rumkowski aspired to win the obedience and admiration of the residents of his ghetto. He ordered coins minted and stamps printed with this image. He rode through the streets in a carriage drawn by a small, emaciated ­horse. Henchmen and flatterers surrounded him in his “court,” while poets praised him for his “firm and power­ful hands.” The starving c­ hildren of the ghetto w ­ ere assigned essays in school on their “beloved and providential president.” Rumkowski also or­ga­nized six hundred guards with clubs to repress dissent and enlisted an unknown number of spies. For his public speeches, he mimicked the oratorical style of Hitler and Mussolini. Levi argues that Rumkowski’s attitude “sprang from his condition as a small tyrant, impotent with ­those above him and omnipotent with ­those below.” Yet Rumkoswki also worked tirelessly to protect his ghetto from Nazi abuse, if only to preserve his own authority. He managed to rescue his councilmen from the hands of the Gestapo, all the while enduring their jeers and slaps with dignity (Levi 1988: 64). He bargained with the Nazis to minimize the amount of cloth taken from Lodz’s tailors and the number of residents deported to Treblinka and Auschwitz. Eventually, all ­were deported, including Rumkowski himself. Two versions of Rumkowski’s own deportation remain. In the first, he fought to prevent his b­ rother’s deportation lest they be separated, but accepted the option of being deported with him so they could remain together (65). In the second, a businessman who profited well during Rumkowski’s term

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as ghetto president attempted to keep him in place. The businessman, however, could only manage to procure a special letter for Rumkowski assuring him special treatment during his deportation, specifically that he should be allowed to travel to Auschwitz with his f­amily in a special car attached to a much longer train of packed deportees. However his exit from the ghetto tran­spired, he did not survive the gas chamber (66). Levi maintains that Rumkowski’s story sums up the entire theme of the ambiguity of the gray zone. He was neither a monster nor a common man, “yet many around us are like him.” Writing meta­phor­ically, Levi reasons that men such as Rumkowski gather at “the foot of ­every throne,” by which he must mean in situations of extreme vertical authority. ­People like Rumkowski are “blind first and criminal ­later, frenziedly dividing among themselves the shreds of iniquitous and moribund authority” to which they ultimately develop an addiction and become possessed by “childish dreams of omnipotence.” This ­human possibility does not result from the ghetto as a par­tic­u­lar place; rather, it prevails “even ­under conditions seemingly designed to extinguish all individual w ­ ill.” Levi concludes that in Rumkowski, as in his more famous role models, the syndrome of undisputed power produces “a distorted view of the world, dogmatic arrogance, the need for adulation, convulsive clinging to the levers of command, and contempt for the law” (1988: 67). If Chaim Rumkowski groveled at the throne of bureaucratic power per the first sovereign form, then what makes David and Brian gravitate to their experience in the second sovereign form? The characteristics that thrive in the second sovereign form serve as counterpoints to t­ hose that thrive in the first: a mea­sured sense of one’s limitations, coupled with a desire to open one’s self to the unknown lying beyond. Openness and curiosity coexist with a capacity to scrutinize impartially the p ­ eople and situations one encounters. A closer look at David’s and Brian’s life histories shows some of the dispositions that help explain their attraction to the second sovereign form. ­These include a sense of adventure as a means to show them new persons and experiences, but tempered with a re­spect for the limits that the real world imposes on them. Both possess the confidence to inject themselves into unfamiliar situations, but neither is so arrogant to think that ­those situations, and the persons they encounter in them, are easy to under­ stand. Hence they are prone to let them speak to them as much as they can. This openness, which does not mean naïve agreement, renders them thinking



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subjects whose two-­in-­one thought dialogue can be prompted by the world they inhabit. For David, the experience of surfing brings this limit into full relief, while for Brian it was an experience in southern Africa as a young adult.

David

At age thirty-­eight, David saves a stash of income for plane tickets that w ­ ill take him to beaches for surfing trips. He picked up surfing at age seventeen, when he deci­ded that school no longer held his interest. He sought adventures that would make him laugh—­along with surfing, ­these adventures included drinking beer and smoking weed. (It also would have been better for him, he insists, had he discovered girls ­later: “If you receive some response from them, then you want more. When ­you’re loved back, it makes it more complicated to focus your attention on other parts of your life.”) Far from a thirst for high-­adrenaline activity, David’s attraction to surfing exemplifies a Kantian love of the sublime, through which he realizes the smallness of his existence and the magnanimity of nature itself. The experience of surfing, he reasons, strengthens his ­will to get by in life, keeps him attuned to the unexpected, and keeps his ego in check: No two waves are alike. You are always challenging yourself. It’s one of t­ hose ­things; even if you are the most eloquent man, you cannot explain how g­ reat it is. You spend hours in the ­water for a few seconds. Then you have to paddle back. It’s that sense of the movement of that glide that attracts h ­ uman beings. That speed. ­You’re exploring nature’s energy and it is dif­fer­ent from all other movements. As soon as you go out to sea, you are a small ant. You have no control. The sea undresses us of that feeling of control. A head-­high wave ­will make you feel hopeless. Learning to deal with it is good. ­There is so much energy even in a small wave. ­You’re out of your ele­ment. ­You’re not supposed to be in the w ­ ater. We ­don’t have gills. ­There’s a lot of lessons you can learn. For instance, you’ll never know ­until you go. You’ll never know how good the wave is u ­ nless you try it. It teaches you to take that step. It teaches you to take the opportunity when it comes. When the w ­ ater holds you ­under, and you ­can’t get out, it teaches you that prob­lems in life a­ ren’t that big.

If ­humans, unlike animals, have no natu­ral place in the natu­ral world—if we did, then we would not need culture or the h ­ uman artifice to secure our place in it, and instinct rather than laws would govern us—­then we must necessarily go to ethics to figure out how to get by. David locates his sense of ethics in an

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old-­fashioned upbringing by parents of modest means, in the enduring lessons of the church (even though he abandoned religion long ago), and in his experiences in the military (where he was a special forces commando). David’s f­ather worked as a w ­ holesaler in the grocery industry, which required him to travel away from home ­every three months. His ­mother ran the ­house­hold. David, his s­ isters, and their parents attended church e­ very Sunday ­until David was twelve years old. At this point, church teachings no longer made sense to him, so he successfully resisted having to continue to attend. David reflects that the basic teachings stuck with him, such as “Do unto ­others as you would have them do unto you.” He explains that he “was raised on the street like it should be. I ­wasn’t playing with Playstation. Since I was five years old I was playing football on the street. We used rocks for the goals.” Both David’s parents came from poor villages. Their routine reply to his disappointment at not getting the ­things that he wanted as a boy was, “You d­ on’t have to complain; you have food on the ­table.” As he grew, they would explain that what­ever he wanted, he must find a way to pay for it himself. “We lived good, though.” David summarizes his material conditions during childhood: [My parents] tried to teach me many t­ hings. If I wanted something, then they said I’ll have to work for it. I s­ houldn’t lie or steal. They taught me to re­spect elders. At the t­ able, if [my ­father] was speaking and I started speaking, then he would say, “If a dog is barking, then the other one puts his ears down.” This stuff ­isn’t taught anymore. I got along with my parents well. Whenever my ­father would travel for work, my ­mother would be counting my bad deeds for him while he was gone.

The life lessons that his parents tried to instill in him mirrored the efforts of his schoolteachers: “I would get beaten on the hand if I misspelled something. Twelve hits for each writing m ­ istake and twenty-­four hits for not d­ oing homework. . . . ​Kids ­today are text­ing in class. Teachers take away the phone and the kid slaps the teacher. That happens! Can you see how w ­ e’ve gone from one extreme to another?” David met his wife in high school. He was sixteen, and she was thirteen. Seeing her at a beach by a lake, he went right up to her, thinking she was older. “It was one of the first times I ever tried to charm a girl.” They dated off and on for a few years u ­ ntil David was twenty-­one. From that point forward they have been together and now have two young d­ aughters. Betraying his outwardly macho mannerisms, he explains that “in relationships every­one has to give up some-



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thing. I ­don’t know many men who do ­house cleaning. My wife still has trou­ble when her ­father ­doesn’t do h ­ ouse­cleaning. It is unfair to her ­mother.” The strong role of his parents’ upbringing, combined with the street smarts he developed in his teenage years, gave him confidence in frightening situations, but also an awareness of his limitations: School was always a walk in the park in terms of learning. I w ­ asn’t a bad boy or a nerd or a geek. My neighborhood had the highest crime rate in the country. It’s not even close to the worst areas now, but I always had to keep an eye on my back: Who’s ­going to beat you up? Who’s g­ oing to take your lunch money? By age twelve I learned to keep an eye on ­things.

He did quite well at that. Few boys would date his younger ­sister, ­because most feared her older b­ rother. As he went through high school, his role models became older teen­agers, with whom he enjoyed drinking shots of wine and playing ­table football. ­Because his ­father gave him no money to spend on himself, he began working in a construction site at age fourteen, helping the carpenters build wood frames to hold together concrete foundations. He also worked for his f­ ather selling catfish. The freedom that his own income granted him led him to drop out of high school. (He fi­nally finished high school in his early twenties, at which point he joined the military.) ­These jobs ultimately allowed him to save up for his first surfing trip to Costa Rica, and then his travels took him to the Philippines, Singapore, and South Amer­i­ca. David’s time in the military taught him maturity, loyalty, and camaraderie, regardless of who one’s colleague is. In his own words: I loved my time in the military. When you go into the military, ­you’re basically a kid. It gets you used to hierarchy, and that’s impor­tant, too. You have no idea of what is expected. But ­you’re expected to grow fond of your teammates so that you ­will sacrifice yourself for them. They impose a year of difficulties that you w ­ ill need your colleagues to overcome. This ­will develop spirit in you. Then, you w ­ ill be expected to feel the same for guys you ­don’t know on the new special forces team. By this time, they know what is expected of you. I had no reason to like the guys I was with. Some ­were thieves, but in the military they are all comrades and would take a bullet for you. You do it w ­ hether you like them or not, regardless of what the command is that you are given. This w ­ ill stay with you for the rest of your life. I ­will stand by the man next to me wherever I am.

David excelled as a commando, specializing as a paratrooper and learning all sorts of operational skills (e.g., invasions, hostage rescue, and long-­term

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patrols without food or ­water supplies). Given his excellent field skills and strong command of En­glish, the US special forces tried to recruit him during a promotional mission to allied countries. They displayed advanced equipment like a C-130 Hercules transport jet. They promised to help him with citizenship, and the salary would have been much greater. The offer tempted him, but he declined: We ­were impressed. We could get used to this! But we realized how dependent upon technology they ­were. We ­were ­doing a night jump and they had the map and the final destination, but their GPS broke down. They ­didn’t know where to go. They stayed three days ­behind a bridge. But they c­ ouldn’t complete their mission. We d­ idn’t know what happened to them. We ­were afraid we could be responsible for them.

This sense of horizontal loyalty evaporated when David first arrived at the Immigration Ser­vice. In the civil service, personal agendas became clearer to him. In the military, even superior officers would stand by the soldiers, but their counter­parts in the civilian bureaucracy are apparently more interested in getting home by 5 p.m. The investigative team became a welcome oasis for David, even if the sense of loyalty and commitment grew more slowly than it had done in the military. Its members do not endure basic military training together, but also the quality of togetherness differs markedly. In the military, David explains, it is a function of “how much we suffered together,” regardless of who is in the military unit; on the investigative team, it is a function of “how we work together as individuals. We all contribute and support each other, but I also like every­one on the team. Outside of the military context, I might not like the other commandos.”

Brian

Brian is an intelligent and charming fellow who holds high professional ambitions and excels at networking. But he is also a consummate outsider, easily turned off by other p ­ eople’s careerism and prejudices. Having grown tired of Islamophobia, he takes it upon himself to read up on Islamic culture and history. Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations, a discipline that satisfies his curiosity about modern history, politics, and security. As skilled as he is in reading p ­ eople, Brian can use his insight e­ ither to protect them from harm and injustice or to swiftly apply the law. If his job w ­ ere less engaging, his intellectual curiosity might have pushed him into postgraduate education. However, he is more a man of ­doing than one of writing and contemplation.



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If Frank takes responsibility for the team’s egalitarian modus operandi, then Brian gives it character, pushing his colleagues to enjoy themselves at work as themselves. Brian grew up as an only child to parents who had no university education. His paternal grand­father, illiterate, worked as a mason ­after he moved to the city as a young man. His wife, Brian’s grand­mother, worked as a seamstress for high-­ end fashion companies. Brian’s ­father and ­uncle (they ­were twins) did not complete high school. His ­uncle became a travelling salesman representing clothing companies, while his f­ ather became a man­ag­er in a gas com­pany. “Every­one from their generation was like that. Many never went to university, and some only started in their forties.” Brian’s m ­ other had the opportunity of attending university when he was fifteen, but she declined it. She began work in the ­human resources department at a bank, eventually rising high enough to direct that department. She was overprotective, as Brian recalls, but certainly instilled a re­spect for ­women that at times defies the culture of masculinity that infuses his professional world. A big influence on Brian from his home life was his ­father’s library. Though lacking a high-­school degree, his f­ather became an avid reader, which rubbed off on Brian. The fact that the tele­vi­sion only offered a handful of channels prob­ ably afforded Brian more opportunities to browse his f­ ather’s books. His ­father’s interests, which Brian would inherit, w ­ ere in modern history, specifically World War II and Cold War geopolitics. The two used to watch history documentaries together. Brian often asked his f­ ather who the “good guys” w ­ ere in the war. His ­father would reply irritably, “­There’s no such t­ hing as good guys. ­There are just Germans and Americans.” As Brian reflects, “I never forgot that. He got upset when I kept asking that. For him, it was a ridicu­lous question. He was telling me to look at t­ hings critically.” Yet if any singular event impacted Brian more than o­ thers, it was his experience in southern Africa during his two years a­ fter high school. His f­ ather’s good friend, practically an u ­ ncle to Brian, worked with international organ­izations tied into the United Nations system and the World Bank. Brian grew up enjoying the stories he had to tell about countries in the global South. Brian was somewhat disoriented ­after his graduation, so the ­uncle, at the request of his ­father, arranged for him to work at a safari park in southern Africa, near his u ­ ncle’s residence. His u ­ ncle had been posted for a major development proj­ect, living a diplomat’s life in a luxurious ­house with ­drivers. Brian joined him for one

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month before relocating to a camp in the park from where tourists w ­ ere taken on expensive safaris, and where scientists ­were accommodated for field research. Tourists, particularly impor­tant for this southern African country’s GDP, meant that a military unit patrolled the park to protect the wildlife from poachers. As Brian explains, “The life of a rhino is worth more than any poacher or border crosser.” Attached to the military unit was an animal tracker, who also tracked poachers, whom the soldiers would shoot to kill. Brian became the tracker’s apprentice. The tracker taught him how to read animals’ footprints to determine where they ­were moving, what they ­were doing, and how long ago the prints ­were left. He even learned to identify the age of the animals and ­whether or not pregnant females ­were among them. The tracker could read the footprints of ­humans just as accurately as he could ­those of animals. Similar to an investigator, he would gather information for the military hit team, who would use it to locate and shoot the poachers. The tracker lived as a loner among the military team, which facilitated a close relationship with Brian, also an outsider during his year in the park. Brian fondly recalls the tracker teaching him to hang his boots several feet above the ground e­ very night to stop scorpions crawling inside for warmth. The tracker was killed in a cross-­ border raid, partly in an act of revenge and partly as a function of a local conflict stoked by regional geopolitics. Brian himself was caught in the gruesome skirmish. “He was beaten to death. While that happened to him, I was tied by my wrist to the side of a pickup truck. The palm of my hand was somehow cut open with the flesh folded back. Someone at the base camp sewed it back together. I could only watch them beat my friend, as they beat me too. Half of my body was broken.” Brian tried to identify the tracker’s killers. A ­ fter a few months, the military unit (without Brian) crossed the border to exact revenge on them. By chance, they had died a week earlier in a car accident, so the military took vengeance by beating their relatives. The unit’s own raid was reported to the local authorities, who brought the issue to their government’s attention. From ­there, it became a regional diplomatic crisis. The ­uncle understood Brian’s awful experience but instructed him to leave the country within twenty-­four hours. As Brian recalls: I could only take the clothes I was wearing at the time and my dog. I had to make a leash out of shoelaces. I flew twelve hours home. My grand­mother started crying when she



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saw me at the airport when she saw how I looked. I was completely fucked up. I missed every­thing I had ­there in the park and no chance to say goodbye to anybody. It was worse than being a refugee ­because they leave slowly and not alone.

The impact of his time at the safari park stayed acutely with him for several years, and the number of p ­ eople with whom he has shared the details can be counted on one hand. He has always wondered if p ­ eople ­will believe him or if they could fully understand it: “It is something you ­don’t want to tell anyone for ­those reasons.” He explains: I was a dif­fer­ent person when I came back. ­There was a certain tension, a kind of trauma. I had a state of alertness. To keep a connection to that time, I used to put shoes up at night just like my friend had taught me at the camp to keep scorpions out while I slept. I tied the laces together and hung them from something high off the floor. I started seeing every­thing dif­fer­ent ­because of what I had seen: poverty, starvation, ­people eating from garbage, ­people digging at the ground with their fin­gers to find seeds.

At age twenty, Brian enrolled in university, where he met his first wife. She was the anthropology professor for one of his first-­term classes. Eigh­teen years his se­nior, she had lived extensively in ­Kenya and spoke fluent Swahili. She worked on building ­women’s cooperatives throughout Africa, where she had seen serious poverty. She was a w ­ oman who could fully grasp Brian’s experience. Seventeen years ­later, talking to me, he smiled and confessed, “I fell in love in forty-­five seconds.” His then-­wife enriched not just his African experience but also his appreciation for ­women’s perspectives. Though he rarely mentions as much in the com­pany of men, he recognizes the personal benefit he gained from reading, at her suggestion, Doris Lessing’s Love, Again, the story of a sixty-­five-­year-­old ­woman who begins affairs with much younger men, experiencing a gamut of feeling and emotion that she had thought was the preserve of younger ­women only. It is difficult to gauge how we interpolate past experiences and what impact they have on our personal and professional lives. Brian insists that ­these experiences have not impacted his professional life at all: “I would spend a w ­ hole night crying in Africa from what I saw. It gets me into conflict with myself b­ ecause of the situations I see now. But the outcome is the same as if I ­hadn’t gone. It affected me as a h ­ uman being, but it d­ oesn’t affect my work.” The crucial distinction he makes, of course, is that between being ­human and being an employee. When I asked if he is not a ­human being at work, he replied, “In this job

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we are only a l­ ittle constrained, but still . . . ​whenever we go to the gray area, we go to feed the machine. When we go ­there, it is offensive more than defensive.” Brian’s explanation is more ambiguous than his assertion that his southern African experience “­doesn’t affect” his work. If they are “only a l­ittle constrained,” then something other than the machinery of investigative pro­cess must be informing his judgments in the gray zone.

Extraordinary Ethics David and Brian share a certain depth of perspective and reflectiveness. They both have an adventurous side, but their adventures are not motivated by the lust for an adrenaline rush. Rather, ­there is something in ­those experiences that make the two men appreciate their own limits while testing to see if they can extend them. Likewise, David and Brian enjoy travel to poor countries, where, Brian says: “You gain the resources to solve ­things. It gives you the empathy with ­people. You can deal with prob­lems and discomfort. You have to have the confidence that you can work ­things that ­don’t get sorted out by themselves. It gives you a new perspective. Empathy is impor­tant for work b­ ecause we are always dealing with ­people. Travel gives you that experience.” David and Brian, like their teammates, are also motivated by a strong sense of loyalty. They are neither zealots nor idealists. They are neither deep nationalists nor mindless servants of the security state. They see clearly the ironies of their work and readily grasp the difficulties confronting suspects and victims. They see how they themselves are so often instruments of the state. They search for their own meaning in a situation even if they are not in a position to act upon it. As such, they recognize a disjuncture between what they do and what they think about what they do, as would any reflective person. Although their work so often “feeds the machine,” it often also provides them opportunities to jointly act in the world in ways that they decide it must be acted upon. Actions such as ­these reflect their own consciences and so they instantiate themselves in new situations. Joint action becomes an act of renewal. Committed to the pursuit of new horizons, Brian and David are drawn to the investigative team ­because they are drawn to the second sovereign form. This openness, tempered with discernment, creates the possibility for new foundations and new directions. For this reason, ethical action and po­liti­cal action (which differ in degree, not kind, per the Introduction) are extraordinary by definition. Po­liti­cal action establishes new space between actors, ­whether in



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the first or second sovereign form, ­because it occurs in a lawless zone where the normal is not defined and where its redefinition w ­ ill be par­tic­u­lar to the actors through their very action. Calling this act an “exception” stands to reason b­ ecause it is distinct from the ordinary, normal, or routine. Leading proponents of “ordinary ethics” use this phrase to highlight that any person is inherently capable of defiant and creative action. The term’s limitations, however, become clear when we do not distinguish the inner-­thought dialogue, which offers countless possibilities, from the action that ultimately appears in and reshapes the world. Thinking, judging, and acting are distinct experiences, even if they are interconnected. This point is crucial for understanding action in the second sovereign form’s gray zone. Per Das’s (2015: 82) formulation, the term “ordinary ethics” should convey that the “everyday” amounts to more than a “site for routine, repetition, and acquired habits.” Accordingly, we must understand how “ordinary, everyday acts stand up to the horrors of ethnic, sectarian, sexual vio­lence and at the same time be capable of morph­ing into t­ hese very acts of vio­lence” (55; see also Lambek 2010a, 2015b: 16). Drawing on Wittgenstein, Das sees the par­tic­u­lar subject as a limit—­ meaning subjectively positioned in the world—­through which the particularity of one’s personhood interprets worldly experience. Hence: “It is Wittgenstein’s thought that the subject is the condition of experience” (2007: 4, italics original). Yet the ­human capacity for language enables persons to reshape, re­create, and reconstitute the world. As language itself is not fixed, it is the vehicle of (re)creation in ordinary experience. As we can step in countless directions at any given moment, that ordinary moment cannot then be reduced to mere repetition of an existing habit. Lest we underestimate the “ordinary,” we must recognize how the everyday involves a strug­gle to comprehend our world so that we can live in it with good conscience. ­These mundane reflections mean for Das (133) that the ethical should not be reduced to a spectacular moment of breakdown of “habitual modes of dwelling” but rather should include the sustained moments of reflection that p ­ eople undergo. The strug­gle of reflection renders each moment dynamic and vulnerable to change, thus eliminating the divide between ordinary and extraordinary (see also Friedrich’s [1986: 18] notion of “poetic indeterminacy”). Yet the worldly changes that result from this view of ethics (or poetic indeterminacy) are akin to the changes meta­phor­ically described in Chapter 1 through mimeograph: each copy differs from the previous one, though changes

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through time do not alter the form of the written text per se. Instead, what ­matters for the order in which we are all suspended—­that is, the state/status quo—is not the individual’s existential strug­gle to understand the ethical and contemplate a course of action but rather the actions themselves that we take (or refrain from taking) to replace that order with something unpre­ce­dented so that we no longer strug­gle with existential agony. Moral tenets legitimate that social order, equipped with its norms, obligation, and rules (Faubion 2011; Keane 2016: 20–21; Zigon 2008: 165; see also Fassin 2012: 5–6). Morality is the template for socially acceptable conduct. In contrast, “ethics” refers to how we choose to act in what we identify as a moment of moral breakdown. This unpre­ce­dented moment, for which t­ here is no template for conduct, demands that we think—­i.e., that we examine the standpoints of ­others through an inner dialogue—so as to find a new course of action to constitute the world in which we wish to live. H ­ uman beings, as po­liti­cal creatures, possess the potential to inaugurate new chains of events when the routine no longer satisfies, but this does not mean that they ­either ­will or can do so. The reflection itself—­the agony of the internal existential strug­gle, or the turbulent two-­in-­one thought dialogue—is confined to the life of the mind, that inner life that we live away from worldly order. Hence Heidegger’s remark that when we think, we are “out of order” (1959: 12)—­similarly, Zigon’s “stepping away” (2008: 165) or Laidlaw’s “reflective evaluation” (2014: 44)—at which point we pose no threat to order ­because we are consumed with thinking. Ethics may be immanent, insofar as the potential for ethical actions is incumbent in the ­human being, but this capacity does not alone make ethical action ordinary (see Lempert 2013: 371). One’s inner strug­gle is insufficient to inaugurate a new chain of events, which, by definition, can only be extraordinary ­because it has never yet appeared in the world. If “ordinary” is to incorporate all ­human thought and action, then it loses its explanatory power for lack of distinguishing between the two (see Lempert 2015: 136; Zigon 2014: 749–750). If we identify “ethics” as both routine and extraordinary, then the term becomes incapable of explaining what happens when we act for change or in defiance of norms, laws, mandates, and ideological tenets. The power of the second sovereign form would remain largely unrecognized and so underestimated. Lambek (2015a, 2015b: 44) points out, rightly in my view, that the ethical is effected by our judgment, or by a “pro­cess of discernment.” However, I doubt that this pro­ cess occurs often to any significant degree, which is why we rely on prejudice, meaning prejudgment, to help us navigate a social order, however just or unjust



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that order might be (Arendt 1978: 4; see also Zigon 2008: 164). If we ­were to engage in as much discernment as the lit­er­a­ture on ordinary ethics implies, then we would be para­lyzed by inaction. Distinguishing between reflective thinking and acting is impor­tant ­because it clarifies w ­ hether our internal existential strug­ gle results in a constituent change to the space that ­people jointly inhabit.

Team Identity To create lasting bonds outside of l­egal frameworks takes a certain amount of familiarity. When I first proposed to Brian that I conduct an ethnographic study of his undercover investigative team, he explained that first I would have to join them for lunch . . . ​­every day. Regardless of where each of them is in the city, they ­will all congregate for lunch. The event usually lasts an hour to ninety minutes depending upon the speed of the restaurant ser­vice, the number of issues that the team want to discuss, and the timing of the work to be done in the after­noon. Regardless of austerity mea­sures, restaurant patronage has not significantly decreased in this country. Likewise, the team would not think of bringing their own lunch to work despite their own pay cuts. Lunch reinforces group identity through the sheer plea­sure of the conversation that it affords. The team particularly enjoy patronizing restaurants that they know their desk investigator counter­parts would avoid at all costs. ­These are typically foreign restaurants such as Chinese, M ­ iddle Eastern, and Indian, so dining at any of them guarantees that their counter­parts ­will not overhear them. They also know that any classified discussions they have w ­ ill not be understood by the staff in Chinese restaurants, most of whom are first-­generation arrivals. For the team, this taste for food carries a po­liti­cal connotation: if one eats beyond one’s national cuisine, then one is willing to see the world outside of nationalist lenses. The reluctance of their colleagues in the other groups to stray far from familiar food implies a reason why they could never make it in street surveillance. One must be comfortable trying new ­things and staying in places where one looks dif­fer­ent, such as ethnic restaurants in immigrant neighborhoods. Yet the team remain committed to their local favorites and initiated me by ensuring that I tried them. Many of ­these dishes are seafood, and w ­ ere rather exotic for someone accustomed to a traditional Canadian diet: octopus, cuttlefish, and shark (not endangered, but rather overpopulated, as I was told). Back at headquarters, located on a busy but leafy street near a park, the team’s office is a long rectangular space with dilapidated fixtures such as stained

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ceiling panels, loose floor tiles, and chipped paint on the walls. Theirs is no high-­ tech, pristine command-­and-­control center, even if their computers are connected to advanced, classified databases. Rather, it resembles the set from a 1970s American cop show like Baretta or Starsky & Hutch. Eight dishevelled desks are scattered throughout the room, all connected to a single, slow printer. Mementoes adorn p ­ eople’s desks: old Soviet badges or pins; an Eiffel Tower key chain; an exercise hand grip to build forearm strength. A few bookshelves hold the files and paperwork from ongoing and past cases as well as volumes of the national criminal law. A small refrigerator keeps cool what­ever beverages and food items are put t­ here. They enjoy, but do not abuse, a ready supply of wine and liquor. Heaped in one corner are skateboards, soccer balls, a basketball, and an array of other items that might help them blend into one street scene or another. Brian is particularly proud of learning to skateboard so that he could justify hanging out in a certain neighborhood for extended weeks to collect intelligence on a case. Even the director personally applauded him for his ingenuity and success. Two types of images fill the walls. One type displays material relating to cases. Normally, ­these involve e­ ither headshots of suspects, obtained through vari­ous immigration rec­ords, or action shots grabbed from the stills of a high-­resolution long-­range video camera during surveillance operations. All of the images are neatly arranged, with clear lines connecting them to yield a map of social relations. The map of a case concluded just prior to my fieldwork featured a thirty-­ five-­year-­old Roma man at the top with three underlings (two men and one ­woman) below him who, in turn, each had a three to four young w ­ omen, perhaps teen­agers, whom they managed for prostitution. A similar chart, for an ongoing case (discussed in Chapter 4), showed the ­faces of Nigerian ­women, aged approximately fifteen to twenty-­two. ­These images ­were standard issue from the refugee and asylum unit, ­housed next to Criminal Investigations headquarters. ­These ­women had all claimed asylum, before fleeing from the open detention center where they ­were being held while their cases w ­ ere pro­cessed. (By law, juvenile applicants cannot be detained in closed centers a­ fter sixty days.) Next to them ­were action shots of three Nigerian men, who would ­handle them while they w ­ ere in country and waiting to be moved to Germany, where they would work in prostitution for their “mama.” No less impor­tant are detailed maps of the country and of the region surrounding the city. The other types of images are mainly Brian’s camera work. He enjoys photography and photo editing. He routinely takes pictures of the team while on the



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street and, with the aid of enhancing features, converts them into jokes by adding text. He refers to his photographic work as “propaganda.” ­These images cast the team as a parody of an elite Soviet or American paramilitary team. They keep both bases covered. One mock insignia identifies the team in the manner of “Seal Team 6.” Another, featuring Cyrillic characters, spells “special forces” in Rus­sian. Other shots show the team in action on the street, with the color hue adjusted to give the image a gritty look. The caption below reads, “Despite the press release, we know who killed Bin Laden.” Making fun of the other investigative units’ complaints about Frank’s bullish style in advancing the team’s successes, another photo shows David in a diminutive pose, with Frank’s eyes, intoxicated by power, staring at the camera. Brian has inserted the caption, “Bow to your master.” Other photos show the team in tough-­guy poses on the street, with clichés in En­glish pulled from the internet: “My boss can kick your boss’s ass” (referring to the “cult of Frank” discussed below); or, “You can sleep soundly in bed ­because rough men stand ready in the night.” The only photo­graphs of ­women posing provocatively is a 2008 Playboy calendar—­a retro edition featuring Playmates from the 1960s—­stuck in an obscure location in a distant corner of the room. Their concession to Cecilia, whom they confess must tolerate their antics, is a full portrait of an oiled-up male hunk with a winning smile and six-­pack abs. Cecilia readily remarks, “Yes, they are immature and they talk about ­women, but as long as they ­don’t talk about me, then it is fine. They are ­children. The team has a very strong identity, but they are very good.” And, indeed, they do not talk about her or with her disrespectfully. In any case, gender differences, which remain more pronounced in southern Eu­rope than in northern Eu­rope or North Amer­i­ca, inform team identity through the larger cultural matrix. This was illustrated when the team hosted a small party for the criminal investigations unit. Frank brought a roasted pig to the office and proudly cut slices of pork for all the guests. As the party faded and the guests filtered out, and while Cecilia busied herself cleaning up napkins, paper plates, and plastic cups, her male colleagues returned to their computers to type up reports. Cecilia’s own desk, unusual for a ­woman in this part of Eu­rope, is decorated with the memorabilia of her favorite football club, which she follows with ­great devotion. The character of the team’s office differs drastically from t­ hose of the desk investigators. At most, the latter display just personal pictures on desks or on the walls. In contrast, the color of the team’s office reflects the their personalized and humorous esprit de corps, which makes ­others’ visits ­there pleas­ur­able.

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The humor and fun, in turn, make the job on the street more thrilling ­because the team approach it with more imagination. John explained it best: “The most impor­tant part of what I do is how much I enjoy it. It has to do with the freedom of what we do. The environment makes all of it more fun.”

Recruitment and Team Formation The seven team members are firstly employees of the national immigration ser­ vice. As a police force, they carry guns, make arrests, and are issued police badges. The bureaucratic arrangement of this division, however, cannot be taken for granted. Higher management can rotate personnel in and out of groups if they wish and even rearrange the ser­vice’s entire orga­nizational structure. If the plea­ sure and thrill of working together are positive ­factors leading to the team’s cohesion, then the negative ­factor is a fear of management breaking them up. Frank leads the fight against that prospect. (See Chapter 1). Frank began working in the Immigration Ser­vice in 1991; John and Cecilia, in 2001; Max, Brian, and David, in 2004. ­These last three w ­ ere among the 240 successful candidates out of a pool of 2,500. To receive their offer of employment, job candidates have to pass a series of exams, including educational exams to test their knowledge of history and current events and their basic literacy skills. Afterward, they need to pass physical exams lasting half a day, plus a further day of psychological evaluations. Before joining the team, Cecilia worked in airport border control, where the job’s rhythms differed considerably: “­There, they have clear work shifts, stricter scheduling. They ­don’t take work home; when it is done, it is done. It’s hard to get days off or schedule the days off. The bosses ­don’t like it. H ­ ere, the work is always 24/7, but arranging days off is much easier, and the team members work it out fairly among themselves whenever they need it.” John worked in border control at maritime seaports (and at a ­hotel’s front desk prior to that). Like Brian, he also majored in international relations, so a government job such as this one fits his interests. He has served on several operations in Greece and Italy with Frontex, the EU’s external border control agency, specializing as an interviewer of undocumented mi­grants ­either apprehended while being smuggled or rescued in sea operations. John began in the Immigration Ser­vice’s criminal investigations unit in 2005. Starting as a desk investigator, he quickly gained responsibility for leading cases as an “instructor” (not one



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who teaches, but one who gives instructions for the investigation). In this role, he was the main liaison for the state prosecutor and coordinates some field operations, among many other duties. His wife works as a government prosecuting attorney. Supported by her income, they live a comfortable, middle-­class life in a two-­story suburban home with two kids. His higher class position relative to his teammates creates no tension, though according to David, the upper class and the upper-­middle class see their jobs as an entitlement: “They see their c­ areer as something that is their right. ­Because they studied or worked or something, the job should be theirs. They almost see it as a gift. I’ve studied. It’s my job. It’s like a possession.” The team, however, remain untouched by such a sense of distinction. David continues: It can affect the team’s work ­because if it’s your right, then it is something you d­ on’t take care of. It’s yours. They ­won’t do shit if it’s a right. In a mixed team [with p ­ eople of dif­fer­ ent socioeconomic backgrounds], if some p ­ eople have this attitude, a­ fter a while the ones that ­don’t ­will start to think like the ones that do. They ­won’t care ­either. It ­doesn’t happen on our team even if they are upper-­middle class. They like the work and are motivated by our enthusiasm. John wanted to stay an extra half-­hour last night. (We had a five-­hour surveillance from 7 p.m. to midnight. The instructor said that we could leave at 11:30, and I was ready to go, but John said he would wait another thirty minutes just to see if the target came home late.) He’s married to a prosecutor, so he’s definitely upper-­middle class. He’s a good man, though. He w ­ on’t let you down. That’s why we chose him.

The team’s most ju­nior member (and the youn­gest), Vincent came to the ser­ vice in 2005. His university education is in mechanical engineering. He also holds a standard EU license, making him hirable across the EU. However, he only worked in that field for four months. His education influences the mode in which he explains the procedures of criminal investigations. Rarely did I have an interview with him when he did not diagram his explanations on the closest scrap of paper, and often on the paper table­cloths of restaurants during lunch. Vincent also participated in Frontex operations specializing in interviews. Though the youn­gest, least experienced, and perhaps most conventional of his teammates, Vincent possesses a shrewd and cynical perspective on institutionalized government authority; a strong sense of loyalty, reciprocity, and obligation; and an interest and ability to stand in the shoes of ­others. This skill always wavers

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between what Vincent’s wife, Katarina, described as “scanning,” in which he stands in someone e­ lse’s shoes only as a means to intelligence gathering, and empathizing, in which he examines the other’s standpoint to look for common ethical ground. Brian recognizes that “standing in the shoes of o­ thers” distinguished the team’s requirements but also knows of the slippage between the two: When you work at the airport you ­don’t have to know the ­little details of foreigners’ lives. With us, you have to be someone who knows at least a ­little bit of their world . . . ​ you have to have the ability to feel empathy with t­ hose ­people . . . ​you need to have the tools inside your head to imagine what it is to ‘walk in their shoes’ . . . ​­because if you ­don’t, they ­will always be alien to your world. You feel threatened by that person (­because of lack of knowledge) you ­will prob­ably decide against them. . . . ​On the other hand, I won­der if ­these qualities ­matter for criminal investigations. Maybe it ­will ­matter as tools to acquire knowledge over your target.

Vincent and John ­were both recruited to the team from border control. The team considered four candidates internal to the Immigration Ser­vice. The successful two candidates, Vincent and John, lacked something that a casual observer might have thought a top priority: skill and discretion on the street. Vincent is a tall and beefy man whose size makes it difficult to blend in to a crowd, or, more difficult, to go unnoticed when t­ here is no crowd to hide in. John suffered a head injury resulting from a motorcycle crash a few years earlier. The impact affected his short-­term memory, which is gradually returning to full capacity. Thus on the street he occasionally strug­gles to recall license plate numbers and addresses. No less impor­tant, the team recognize that John’s good looks draw the attention of both ­women and men. Other­wise thought to be an asset, it works as a deficiency in street work ­because the surveillant becomes more memorable in the eyes of targets and passersby. John normally compensates for his prob­ lem by wearing hats, sunglasses, and drab clothing. Yet their prob­lems on the street are technical prob­lems that can be rectified with training and experience. David explained why the team offered John and Vincent their jobs: The technique can be taught [but first] we pick someone who w ­ ill be t­ here as a friend for us. What we need to [ask] is, “Would that guy have the stomach?” b­ ecause we ­don’t need a guy that in the ­middle of an operation says, “Man, I think that’s illegal,” b­ ecause



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I already know the law. What we need is a guy willing to take risks, in order to bring to justice guys that [prostitute girls]. And trust me, it’s not that easy. . . . ​Most of the ­people in my department would rather watch a football match on TV than watch an asylum center for hours.

Along with this trust in street situations comes egalitarianism, which Frank has cultivated from the start. This trust is ultimately a m ­ atter of re­spect and self-­ respect: re­spect for one’s teammates, who often risk ­legal repercussions to do justice, and self-­respect, with which one would not want to bear the onus for letting ­those teammates down. The reward is honor in the eyes of each other.

The “Cult of Frank”: Protecting the Second Sovereign Form His back curved, Frank walks with both hands stuffed in his pockets, ­unless one of them is holding a cigarette. Wisps of curly, graying black hair flop across his forehead as he swaggers along. His default demeanor is as gentle as a cuddly lamb, but he transforms into a hawk when he focuses his attention. They call him “chief” ­because his formal rank is chief inspector. Coming from his team, it often sounds like a term of endearment. The team appreciate his confidence in the six investigators that report to him. The chief does not direct the team in a bureaucratic fashion but cedes decision-­making authority on a case to whomever is most knowledgeable about it or has the most impor­tant skills for it. On day-­to-­day ­matters, therefore, the team run more like a hunter-­gatherer band as described in the classic po­liti­cal anthropology lit­er­a­ture: high egalitarianism, low internal ranking, and authority granted on the basis of experience in specific tasks. Bonds are held together not through codified law but rather through reciprocities, in which a person’s esteem is maintained in the eyes of the ­others. Frank’s easiness allows him to trust his team. As John noted, “This is why we talk in groups. Frank floats an idea, and we talk about the strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, we float ideas.” Consequently, the team trust him (Chapter 1). Trust underpins their egalitarianism, which carries with them into the gray zone. Given his twenty-­five years’ experience, Frank commands much re­spect in the Immigration Ser­vice. Prior to joining the ser­vice, he was a military police officer specialized in dog training. Always the player, he involves himself in multiple initiatives throughout the Immigration Ser­vice, initiating many of them himself. He has cultivated allies in high-­level po­liti­cal posts, which also means that he has inspired an equal share of enemies. Yet no one disagrees with his

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judgment, experience, and technical grasp. He draws enemies through style, not substance. Many in the ser­vice have grown annoyed with his constant promotion of his team and his uninhibited way of spotlighting ­others’ ­mistakes. Frank’s reply: “We get results. That is what m ­ atters. Often the ­others do not.” Both John and Vincent w ­ ere well aware of Frank’s style when they worked in other parts of the Immigration Ser­vice prior to joining the team. Vincent himself had held unfavorable opinions of Frank: I’ve been in a dif­fer­ent position, ­because I’m the last one hired ­here, just last year. ­There is a “cult of Frank” outside the group. I was working nine years outside the group and was part of the “opposition.” . . . ​Frank has a strong personality. . . . ​We [John and I] changed our opinions for the better. He likes good results, but he can be a bit aggressive about how he shows results to the other chiefs. I like this; it is impor­tant to show what we do. Sometimes, he puts too much pressure on them. He defends and protects our group a lot.

The cult of Frank, then, along with the entire panoply of parodic photo­graphs adorning their office, exhibits more than just exercises of “team building” repeated ad nauseam in the corporate world. As Brian explains: We are bound together with artificial t­ hings, so we can gravitate to that. That is also why we came up with our team code name, even though we are just having fun with it. It’s not just a friendship, but the mystique we create with artificial t­ hings. With the “cult of Frank” we magnify and exaggerate his qualities in a playful way to make him stand out . . . ​ to feed the mystique.

By drawing on the insights and advice of the members, Frank regularly suggests new initiatives to se­nior management: if one is on the forefront of change, then one can avoid being victimized by it. David conveys the ­matter like this: “Our national director calls Frank the ‘general director’ as a sign of his influence and experience. Frank is the Cardinal Richelieu b­ ecause anytime a new initiative comes out, he is b­ ehind it. When the national director says, ‘We need someone to pres­ent a proj­ect to do over the next three years,’ he asks Frank.” The term “cult” functions ironically b­ ecause groupthink has no place among the team, especially in po­liti­cal ­matters. Over lunch on a sunny July 2015 after­ noon, the team got into a debate about Greece’s rejection of an EU bailout offer.



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From his left-­wing perspective, David declared that he supported the vote even though he recognized that it would make times tough. “They made me proud to be southern Eu­ro­pean,” he concluded, to punctuate his point. Frank and John found this result irrational, leading Frank to point out that Romania has a bad economy but still manages to improve itself. Vincent and Brian maintain self-­ described centrist positions. Frank links the differences to the virtues of plurality: “It helps being dif­fer­ent. With the inputs from all of us, we reach consensus. Maybe ­there is a brilliant idea in ­there. We use it. We are not complacent. We take initiative. We ­don’t wait to be told what to do. Po­liti­cal differences reflect the personality differences and experiences, and t­ hese work together.” Max, the most skeptical team member, does not often join his teammates’ rambunctious debates. He stands alone as the only team member to declare that he would quit his work if he could. In contrast, the o­ thers enjoy their work too much to stop. Yet Max most often expresses a sentiment that the ­others as­ suredly share, specifically the damage the job inflicts on f­ amily life. All of their marriages (except Cecilia, who is not married) are ­under stress, and they spend much time away from their kids. Max often laments the time lost while his three-­year-­old son grows up. A long-­time colleague of Frank, David, and Brian, he finds much less fun in joking about the “cult of Frank.” His skepticism carries into the realm of national politics, where he disparages all parties and appreciates anarchism: I ­don’t say I am an anarchist, but I relate to some of their ideas. I ­don’t identify with how power is t­ oday. We’ve tried almost every­thing to manipulate t­ hose bastards. Maybe t­ here is another way. Anarchists can identify ­these prob­lems and maybe solve them. I ­don’t have any po­liti­cal affiliation: communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal. I’m me. That’s the ­future, Greg. You can be a ­little bit of every­thing. The internet lets us affiliate with what­ ever you want. I’ve voted across the ­whole spectrum.

Yet his ill-­defined politics is tempered by a latent populist-­nationalism, stronger in him than in his teammates, that shines through on the topic of illegal migration: “I’m not a nationalist, but a country should have sovereignty. The [illegal] mi­grant should be in his country. This is just fair to p ­ eople who made this country. ­Here, ­these mi­grants have more rights than the citizens. If they come illegally, ­they’re stepping on ­people in their own country who now ­couldn’t come. They are just breaking the rules.”

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Ethics, Action, and Honor The team’s careful cultivation of their identity—­through member recruitment, office décor, the pursuit of mind-­expanding experiences, and Frank’s tenacity in promoting the team’s talents—­gives it a shared meaning that carries into the gray zone per the second sovereign form. They find that space worthy of cultivation and protection not for mere professional ambitions. The team members are not riding on Frank’s coattails to advance their ­careers. (To do so could easily doom their f­uture as much as groom them for it.) Rather, it is a space where they can be—­that is, it is a space where they become ­free to make their own ethical judgments and act on them accordingly. Working together, they can appear on their own terms in front of each other in the form of action and speech. One might even define that experience as freedom itself. That appearance is only pos­si­ble ­because their shared space is premised upon a horizontal form of ­human relations whereby differences of perspective form the basis of their original judgments and unpre­ce­dented actions in the gray zone. While Frank modestly describes this experience as “a plea­sure in working with friends,” he points to how the fullness of our being in the world depends upon how we are related to the ­others in it. Appiah’s understanding of honor helps clarify what is at stake between the first and second sovereign forms. The first form requires the negation of the ethically reflective individual. Yet, apropos of the second form, Appiah argues that honor establishes connections among equals but does not limit equality to the caste or clique from whom the code of honor derives. Nodding to Aristotle, Appiah sees honor as conduct that allows us to flourish and live well (2010: xiv). He further maintains that the values we owe to ­others are subsets of values that guide our own lives. The resulting morality is based not on universalized notions of right and wrong but rather on shared understandings of what ­those notions should be. To enlarge, or at least to revise, moral codes is the work of ethical action. That work involves demonstrating how current practices—­slavery, Chinese foot-­binding, and rape leading to honor killing are some of Appiah’s examples—­humiliate ­people already in weaker power positions by reinforcing their lesser status relative to the perpetrator (145). Ethical action then begins from a personal moral sentiment (178) and signifies the fact that honor cannot simply be maintained as an exclusive, customary code of conduct (182). It must be rethought and revised as alternative views are brought to bear on the ­matter. ­Those private moral sentiments can become new public norms through ac-



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tion. Ethical action then enlarges the honor code to account for ­those ­people previously consigned to a lower social rank, thereby purging honor’s historical dependence on illegitimate hierarchies (187). In this formulation, ethics is limited not to private reflection but rather to the actions taken in shared public spaces (see also Williams cited in Keane 2016: 18). An implication of Appiah’s argument is that one’s being in the world is not a ­matter of self-­assertion. Appiah makes no liberal argument h ­ ere. Honor is a mutual phenomenon that accords re­spect and self-­respect (2010: xv). Any act not recognized as honorable thus fails to evoke re­spect from ­others and so leaves the actor lacking self-­respect for the subsequent alienation. The situation shames the actor for acting badly ­toward o­ thers. If one adheres to an honor code, then one responds with re­spect for ­those who do likewise and with contempt for ­those who do not. Appiah’s notion of honor reflects judgment and action in the second sovereign form. One appears in it not through self-­ assertion but rather through appeal to ­others for a course of action during which one discloses the self and is subsequently recognized by ­others. The motivation for that course of action is an inability to live with one’s self in a world of injustice of which one is an integral part. For Appiah, morality differs from, though is inherently tied to, honor ­because the former only guides us into judging right and wrong. The latter compels us to action ­because, phenomenologically, a sense of honor has us feeling “implicated by the acts of ­others” (204). To be sure, had the team not acted on behalf of the fourteen-­year-­old girl, they would have been implicated as ­people passively supporting an indifferent ­legal system. They would have lost honor in each other’s eyes. For that reason, they can be believed when they claim that they would not allow each other to engage in excessive vio­lence such as that carried out by their colleague in desk investigation.

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Chapter 3

The Thinness of Secrecy Secrecy is not that alluring. It ­doesn’t make the work cool. If it is unseen, how can it be cool? Cool is about showing off. Brian Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world. Georg Simmel (1906: 462)

Secrecy as the Cloak of Action Secrecy and the state share a complex relationship, but not one that eludes the researcher seeking to uncover it (Walters and Luscombe 2016; Walters 2015). Conventional thinking holds that if one lacks access to state secrets, one cannot comprehend the basis of state power. Philip Abrams (1988) points out the limits of this position to his neo-­Marxist colleagues, who worried that they could not understand the modes of cap­i­tal­ist oppression without understanding the secrets that state officials hide away from ­others. Abrams’s response to them was that state secrets turn out to be ­either trivial or theoretically predictable “when the gaff is blown” (62). Several de­cades earlier, Simmel (1906: 465) similarly noted that out of secrecy “grows the logically fallacious, but typical, error, that every­thing secret is something essential and significant.” Equipped with keen empirical observation and modest theoretical insight, what transpires unseen is not too difficult to infer. To be sure, if participant observation is impossible, then anthropologists have employed alternative methods to obtain revealing insights (Gonzalez 2012; Gusterson 1997; Nader 1972; Ortner 2010). Nevertheless, the actions of state officials ultimately result in a vis­ib­ le chain of effects, even if that chain leads back to the locked door of the proverbial smoke-­filled room. That meta­phor simply refers to the familiar pursuit of private interests at the expense of the public realm. The evidence w ­ ill eventually reveal itself in much the same way that the middle-­income double agent is seen unexpectedly driving a high-­end custom-­built sports cars, his l­ ittle bit of luxury paid for courtesy of a foreign intelligence ser­vice. Like anyone, state actors are linked to a wider social field through which their actions reverberate and leave an empirical trace for the outside observer. In his classic so­cio­log­ic­ al study The State in Cap­i­ tal­ist Society (2009), Miliband demonstrated this point regarding the class positions of officials working in the United Kingdom’s key governing institutions to 107

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show the state as an effect of class relations. Though Miliband does not examine sovereignty as a phenomenal experience, we can still take his insight that undercover state agents also w ­ ill invariably make their decisions in reference to the social relations in which they are suspended. State sovereignty—­the status quo—­becomes an effect of ­those empirically accessible relations. Thus an ethnographic view inside the security state shows us how security agents might use secrecy to sustain or challenge the status quo by virtue of how they engage the ­people throughout that social fabric. To that end, the analy­sis presented in this chapter does not focus on the security state’s routine invocation of secrecy as that which allows it to combat unseen threats. In that situation, the security state pres­ents the public with negative evidence to justify secrecy: “If you knew what we c­ an’t tell you, then you would agree with our insistence on secrecy.” Sovereign agents here operate on the security state’s technocratic logic, but they bring no ethical judgment to bear on the ­matter. Moreover, this chapter does not explain secrecy in terms of the “deep state,” which, if such a ­thing exists, amounts e­ ither to repressive policing for purposes of social control or to the hidden pursuit of private interest through state institutions. Again, t­ hese activities follow the technical logics of sovereign reproduction or of capital accumulation rather than the ethical judgments through which ­people distinguish themselves. Instead, the chapter discerns the function of secrecy, with re­spect to the second sovereign form, by developing Eva Horn’s (2011) argument that state ­secrecy creates a space of action that can ­either stabilize the state or open a space of exception that leads to vio­lence, corruption, and oppression. Horn avoids a simplistically oppositional view of state secrecy, in which we regard transparency as quintessentially good and secrecy as quintessentially bad. She explains that this dichotomy emerges only in modern democracy through its moralization of politics (105). This chapter develops Horn’s argument by asking not how secrecy allows the traditional state to stabilize its sovereign space (­because that question keeps its focus on the first sovereign form) but rather how secrecy provides a cover for action that allows the investigative team to operate in the gray zone per the second sovereign form. In this case, secrecy cloaks that which is not yet ready to be seen (rather than that which must never be seen). The chapter shows that secrecy does not lie primarily in the depths of sovereign institutions (e.g., in prisons, intelligence agencies, military bureaucracies, e­ tc.). Rather, it is thinly woven into the web of relations between state agents and the ordi-



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nary ­people with whom t­hose agents cultivate relationships as in­for­mants. Despite the risks it inherently poses, secrecy, and the gray zone where it flourishes, are required to maintain a v­ iable public space, which we might regard as the white zone. More specifically, strug­gles in the white zone demand action in the gray zone for the sake of maintaining or reconstituting it. The chapter addresses the connection between secrecy and the two sovereign forms through an examination of the team’s relationships with in­for­mants and the modus operandi of their surveillance work.

In­for­mants In­for­mants function in a world of secrecy that by design expands beyond networks of formal state actors into a broader social field. Their activities remain unknown to neighbors, colleagues, associates, and possibly even ­family members. Investigators themselves identify them to other colleagues on a need-­to-­know basis only. They provide information that might take weeks, if not longer, to obtain by conventional or official means. They speed up investigations, and so they decrease costs and increase success rates. Moreover, they are unaccountable to the prosecutor, so they avoid ­legal scrutiny as sources of information. Relying on criminal in­ for­mants often requires tolerating crimes in return for information that may prove unreliable. In many cases, it can lead to unintended harm and even death (Natapoff 2009: 4–7). In­for­mants normally provide intelligence, not evidence. The recruitment pro­cess requires an attunement to the nuances of a potential in­for­ mant’s needs, wants, and motives. Given his taste for espionage, Brian is the team’s main recruiter of in­for­mants. The secret of his success is not simply his personal charm. Instead, Brian can quickly ascertain another person’s interests and then craft a positive incentive for their cooperation. In his own words: It’s dif­fer­ent for every­one. For example, I meet someone at a party—­I’m constantly d­ oing this—my first step is to figure out what kind of information does the person have. Just get interested and ask chitchat questions. Then, if I feel she is trustworthy, then I tell her the truth about what I do and ask if they give information if we ask. They always say “yes,” except on a few occasions.

Why do they always say “yes”? ­People want to help. I give them protection. It w ­ on’t go to court. “You are helping ­people in my cases [who need help].” They give us information illegally, and we get the information

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quickly. To get it legally, it would take weeks. For example, imagine if we hear a phone call saying, “I’m at my ­house. Come h ­ ere now.” Do we have time to get the court to request the address from the phone com­pany? It would take a month. The source in the phone com­pany would take a minute.

Are they afraid of saying “no” to the police? I ­don’t know for sure, but it seems that ­people like to help, but some ­people ­don’t know how to say “no.” I have to play a ­little bit with emotion to stress they are helping ­people. I think that is not ­because they are afraid but it’s just their personality.

No one on the team recruits an in­for­mant ­unless all team members agree that the effort is worth the risk. The last word goes to whomever is leading the case, but the team must reach a consensus before initiating a recruitment effort. The handler (i.e., the recruiting officer) controls access to the in­for­mant. Brian explains that the team “does it ‘old school’,” which means that no one shares their in­for­mant with anyone ­else. This boundary includes investigators in adjacent groups and officers in other police forces around the country, but not his teammates. As he elaborates, “Whoever has the best in­for­mants gains status ­because of the access and control over the flow of information.” Yet, as Brian explains, in­for­mants must always get something they want, other­wise they would not cooperate in the first place. In some cases, they simply walk in off the street ­because they need the money. Such walk-­ins are only recruited if they have substantial access to criminal networks. Overall, the central role of in­for­mants in criminal investigations further testifies to the spread of networks and clandestine worlds, which are not deeply buried but thinly interwoven across a variety of networks incorporating p ­ eople who are other­wise involved in entirely dif­fer­ent activities, proj­ects, and strug­ gles. Curiously, no one tied into ­these clandestine networks holds a complete overview of their reach and scope, rendering secrecy a patchwork field of relations.

Category One

The team works with three categories of in­for­mants. The first category includes ­people working in organ­izations with access to vital information, which can be financial, such as that relating to banks, the electric com­pany, and the phone com­pany. The electric com­pany, for example, can help the team estimate the



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number of ­people living in a unit based on its energy draw. As Brian explains, “We tell them who we are and what we need and how they are legally protected.” If they work in government agencies, then help is usually provided. Bank employees are much more reticent. To be persuaded, they must come to believe that the information they have is crucial to the success of the case and that only their support w ­ ill result in a criminal conviction. Only the moral argument can be used to effectively recruit them; they receive no reward except the excitement of participating in undercover action.

Category Two

The second category of in­for­mants includes ­people working in businesses or living in neighborhoods where suspects are found d­ oing their daily errands. ­These persons include café ­owners, h ­ otel staff, and cell-­phone shop ­owners. In one case, a ­woman working the desk at a travel agency located at the city’s main bus station provided the team with numerous suspects’ travel itineraries. Her information helped them schedule surveillance on ­those suspects and coordinate with the police forces in the neighboring countries to where they w ­ ere travelling. In return, the team cleared up a sizable amount of red tape that had been obstructing her cousin’s visa application. Brian explained, “This way, we have a friend for life.” Cooperation is not always so easily provided, and the team does not always have a positive incentive to offer. In a dif­fer­ent case, they had been trying to identify young Chinese ­women whom they suspected of being trafficked or smuggled to work in a brothel managed by a Chinese husband and wife. The brothel occupied the entire third floor of a commercial building in a wealthy part of the city. The team knew that the brothel advertised in the ­free city newspaper. They also knew, from phone taps, that the o­ wners needed to renew the advertisement and planned to send one of the ­women to do so—of all the known individuals tied to the brothel, she was the only one who spoke the national language. Max and David set up at an outdoor café to watch the business’s front door. Vincent and Cecilia parked a few blocks away, near the newspaper’s advertising office. When the ­woman exited the building and began walking ­toward the office, Max notified Vincent and Cecilia of her movement. They then entered the newspaper office a few minutes before the w ­ oman, showed their police badges, and asked the receptionist to make a copy of the w ­ oman’s personal information. The receptionist readily obliged.

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What reasons might encourage someone to inform for the police, apart from the thrill? “Do you threaten them?” I ask. “­Wouldn’t that blow up in your face in the long run?” “No, of course not,” Cecilia replies. “We tell them what would happen if they do not. We would tell the receptionist that she ­will be subpoenaed by a court to provide the same information. Better to help now, than be bothered l­ater.” It remains an open question if such a subpoena would arrive. However, the answer eases the team’s conscience ­because it can be interpreted in a positive ethical light: we are saving the in­for­mant time and stress by asking them to reveal confidential information without a warrant now, rather than disturbing their lives by having to do it through formal l­ egal proceedings. I push the team further on this m ­ atter by asking what would happen if a category two in­for­mant ­were not intimidated by the prospect of testifying in court, or ­were sufficiently right-­minded not to cooperate in illegally supplying someone’s personal information. Cecilia replies that they would throw even more procedure at them and make the incon­ve­nience greater for them. Max and David once needed access to a ­hotel room occupied by a Venezuelan pimp travelling in the country with a nineteen-­year-­old Venezuelan w ­ oman who had come to the EU, likely to work in prostitution. It was hoped a search of the room would yield addresses, travel agencies, contacts, and other useful intelligence. An old f­ amily on the block, on Miranda Street, ran the small h ­ otel and reliably called the team whenever the ­couple exited the ­hotel (allowing the team to work other surveillance operations at the same time). The own­er’s son, who worked as the night man­ag­er, also obliged when the team asked to be shown the room. David ­later said, “He was happy to do it. This was the most exciting ­thing to happen to him in months. He’s prob­ably bragging to his girlfriend now.” To me, the man­ag­er looked annoyed by the request, so I asked Max what would have happened if the man­ag­er had refused to allow the team access without a warrant. (The team could not afford the time to obtain the warrant—­they did not know when the ­couple planned to check out. They had originally booked three nights but kept extending their stay, as the owner informed team the team each morning.) Max, looking askance, explained, “If the h ­ otel clerk refused to cooperate with us on an illegal search, then we would explain that we would have to knock on the door of each individual room in order to do a document check. The law permits us to do this. This would hurt his business and he would not want that.” The irony of the situation, then, is that the team could have coerced the



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man­ag­er into breaking the law so that they d­ idn’t have to enforce the law in such a way as to harm his business. Translators are a critical category two in­for­mant. Most cases involve ­people from countries speaking languages not commonly understood by EU citizens (e.g., Georgian, Hausa, and Mandarin). Such translators often have strong ties to the immigrant communities in the country. One thirty-­year-­old Chinese ­woman who is fluent in the national language, having lived ­there since age twelve, regularly works for the investigations on contracts. She works in the city as a professional translator and began working contracts with the team in 2012. Her primary responsibilities are translating audio recordings from phone taps and providing synchronous translations to phone taps during live surveillance operations. In the latter case, she stays at headquarters with the instructor (the lead desk investigator) and translates, verbatim, the dialogue of Chinese suspects to him so that he can relay the information to the team in the field. The team re­spects her sensitive position between them and the community where she lives. “I ­don’t worry too much, ­because they [the team] protect me. I have confidence in them,” she explains. I was unable to get a clear answer from her as to why she would take this risk, especially since she has ample business without it. Max ­later speculated that it was the allure, as David and Brian have said about other in­for­mants. He reasoned that “she likes the image of working with the police. She can proj­ect that to the community. She just has to be discrete about it. I know one t­hing. She loses money working with us, b­ ecause the fees [the Immigration Ser­vice’s standard fee] for translators is below what she can make working on the private market.”

Category Three

The third category of in­for­mant includes ­people the team meet on the street, so to speak. They normally help voluntarily and also receive no reward. They simply want to cooperate, or perhaps avenge some wrong t­ hey’ve suffered at the hands of a suspect. Given their experiences, t­ hese in­for­mants understand the game of policing. Nevertheless, the ethics of recruiting category three in­for­mants are particularly complex. Unlike category one in­for­mants, who have access to vital data, category three in­for­mants are individuals directly connected to cases ­under investigation or to cases that w ­ ill become investigations. Brian cannot play on their sense of justice, and must be aware of their loyalty to the friends,

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relatives, and acquaintances they ner­vously betray to the state. First, Brian must ease that worry: “I try to take the guilt out of him, ‘Listen, you are not a snitch.’ I’ll try to help him not feel bad. I’ll always give him assurances for the ­future.” Then, as ­these in­for­mants are involved in criminal activity, he works on them from two, opposite directions. With one hand, he strings them along, promising to give them what they want, which is why they became involved in the crime in the first place. He promises to help them. With the other hand, he reminds them, in strategic moments, that they know that he is a law enforcement officer. Therefore, if their relationship goes sour, Brian makes clear that he must fulfill his professional duties with an arrest. He explains a par­tic­u­lar situation to me on a rainy after­noon when he had just finished meeting such an in­for­mant in a café near a phone shop where the in­for­mant worked in a suburban mall: We know that a lot of corruption is connected to an embassy h ­ ere. I went to that embassy to get a visa. I had a trip I need to take to [this country]. A guy working ­there comes to me and tells me that his two kids need papers and asks me if I can help him get the residency permit. I checked up on the applications they made to get residency. It was all good, but I told him it ­will be complicated. That’s all I did. So, when he got the residency, he thought it was me who did it. He thought I got the paperwork through the complications! He was grateful.

So far Brian has taken no action at all, apart from lying about the application pro­cess. With that lie, he established a bond with a man on the inside of an embassy where fraudulent passports ­were being sold to nationals of the embassy’s home country. He only cultivated a relationship with the man to help him in the f­ uture. In fact, the passport fraud in this embassy was not even a formal investigative case. Brian took interest in it ­because the man approached him for help only a­ fter he learned that Brian works in the Immigration Ser­vice. Brian merely kept a relationship ­going that the man himself initiated. He kept in touch and now just some months ago, a­ fter he left, his son, who is in [Brian’s country], phoned me. He says, “I’m having trou­ble with the paperwork to get residency permits for my wife and d­ aughter. It’s a hard prob­lem.” I met with him twice and asked him to give me some paperwork that I can take to immigration to create the impression that I am helping him. I want him to be desperate and hopeful. I bring John to him to say that he especially works on ­these ­matters.



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Now, it turns out, this guy [the embassy worker] and his f­ ather make fraudulent passports with anyone’s identity. They do it very well. They can provide passports to anyone—­drug dealers, terrorists—­whenever he wants. It is easy to get starter documents in their country, no prob­lem.1 Can you imagine the danger t­ here?! John goes to see him to play the role of bureaucratic specialist. . . . ​I’m slowing down the pro­cess to string the guy along. The guy wants to be able to show his baby to his relatives back home. He ­can’t leave the country while his paperwork is being pro­cessed. He wants John to give him the email addresses of se­nior ­people in the ser­vice to pressure them to give him the documents. My se­nior boss [Not Frank, but Patrick, who directs the Criminal Investigations department] agrees to receive the request, and he replies that nothing can be done. He comes back to me for help. That was three weeks ago. I want to get him to a point where he is so stressed that he tries to corrupt me and ­will do anything. (He is the link between the embassy and the outside. He is the middleman. He knows p ­ eople d­ oing the shit at the bottom of the pyramid.) At that point, I’ll say, “Do you remember what I do? You must know what I have to do as an investigator.” It ­will be coercion, but I have nothing to lose except an in­for­mant. I can gain a lot b­ ecause he is a well-­placed source. He can lose his permits ­because his case is complicated.

In other words, Brian w ­ ill lure him into attempting corruption, and then blackmail him for information about the passport fraud lest Brian arrest him. The ethics of the situation are not easily untangled. Is t­ here ­really a threat that a passport could go to a terrorist through this embassy? In foreclosing such a possibility, how many more p ­ eople who need to buy fraudulent passports to access the EU l­ abor market ­will lose their chance? If Brian is correct that a terrorist might obtain a passport, how many lives might be saved? Does the man’s own desire to return to his home country to show his baby to relatives m ­ atter in Brian’s calculations? Brian maintains that he is not controlling his informants—he cannot simply get them to do his bidding. As he remarks, “If I say ‘You must do it,’ then he ­won’t do it.” He enjoys recruitment the same way one might enjoy a chess match. Each side makes moves in the immediate moment while also developing a longer-­term strategy. The game requires both logic and imagination. One player 1. A starter document, also called a feeder document, is a document that one needs in order to get a document that allows for international travel rights, such as a passport or visa. The most common starter documents are birth certificates and national identification cards.

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must decipher what the other is thinking: “It’s a game. It’s a risk. The person might be loyal to the other side. ­He’ll have the same understanding of your tactics. So, I have to establish a power relationship. They understand that the game is dangerous for them if they double-­cross us.” Re­spect for the opponent can grow just as easily as antipathy. ­There is a thrill in seeing what one can do given the limitations and opportunities of each situation. When I pressed Brian to admit that he likes total control over his in­for­ mants, specifically of the third category, he brushed it aside as a cheap shot. “No,” he answered. “I manage expectations. It’s like that with all in­for­mants.” If he found my question too crass, then I found his answer too nonchalant and incapable of explaining the allure that recruiting in­for­mants has on him. I followed up with an equally crass question: “What about your conscience in ‘stringing ­people along,’ as you put it?” He replied, For me, the in­for­mant is a tool. At best, I say “I ­won’t reveal your identity.” I ­will protect him. If t­ here are consequences for me, I still ­won’t reveal his name. I may not like him, but I’m not having a relationship. I’m d­ oing a job. I have no prob­lem at all. I wish I had more tools and money to press them and buy their ser­vices. They [i.e., in­for­mants] are not bribing me. They are helping me to do my job. I d­ on’t feel guilty about playing the game.

The game may not fully transpire in the gray zone (it is not illegal per se to recruit an in­for­mant), but it lacks oversight entirely and involves awkward and unequal power relations: as Brian said about the son of the embassy staff member, if an in­for­mant leaves the relationship, all Brian loses is an in­for­mant, but the in­for­mant loses the chance to fulfill what­ever critical need brought him into the relationship to begin with. Many category three in­for­mants want legalization in the country, so as Brian explains it, “I just put a string on them and hold. I ­don’t pull them along. I just ­don’t want them to go away. The better information they can give, the easier it is for me to convince the boss.” Indeed, any f­ avors Brian can do for the in­for­mant, such as expediting a visa application or even securing positive decisions on asylum requests, must be approved by the director of Criminal Investigations. For example, Brian ­handles an in­for­mant who is an asylum seeker from Senegal. This man has ­legal status in the country while his application is ­under review. Brian expects that the application w ­ ill be rejected and that the man w ­ ill be returned to Senegal, where he f­ aces a ten-­year sentence for an unrelated crime. The man first approached Brian and volunteered information just to establish a



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relationship. Brian has three sequential incentives to keep this man working as an in­for­mant. First, Brian told him that he might be able to help with the asylum decision, but he ­will need more information if he is to convince his associate director to intervene for him. In fact, getting the associate director’s approval is more difficult than convincing the official overseeing the asylum case. Once the former agrees, Brian need only explain that approving an application is critical for national security: “They always say ‘yes.’ ” Second, he told him that he could help him with a job. (The man wants to work in a ­hotel, so Brian arranged to have him interview at a job placement center.) Third, the man said that he wants to bring his girlfriend to the country. (This could also be arranged as long as he marries so that he can bring her u ­ nder the ­Family Reunification Act.) Some in­for­mants are known to have broken the law. Vincent handled an in­ for­mant with access to a smuggling ring. The in­for­mant held valid temporary residency papers but then made two ­mistakes that put him in jeopardy: he let his residency papers expire and he got too closely involved with the ring that he was informing on (by aiding and abetting ­human smuggling), which then made him more dependent on keeping Vincent well informed. As Vincent explained, “­These criminal in­for­mants all know that we can help them or make life difficult for them. We make this point clear to them.” The in­for­mant’s prob­ lem is further compounded by the fact that if he does not help Vincent in the investigation, then another member of the ring might, in which case the new in­for­mant could begin providing intelligence against him. Thus he has an additional incentive to stay ahead of his colleagues in the ring by supplying intelligence against them. “Do you like ­doing this kind of ­thing?” I ask Vincent. He answers: “Yes, it’s like haggling. It’s a bit of adventure. You have to have street experience to do this work with criminals. You ­can’t just be a desk investigator and do it. It’s dif­fer­ent with in­for­mants who are ­legal or citizens. We give them the thrill of helping out. We charm them.” What emerges out of the increasing number of in­for­mants is an expansive secret network between “ordinary” ­people and the investigative team. The security state relies on this network but must entrust its maintenance to the team. As Natapoff (2009) notes in the context of policing in the United States, the relationship with the in­for­mant is largely unsupervised and so is vulnerable to exploitation, misinformation, and endangerment of the in­for­mant, all of which can cause an investigation to go bad. Nevertheless, the lack of supervision creates a secret space where multiple possibilities for action exist. The enjoyment

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for the team, at least, is the unscripted character of the interaction. Technocratic procedures—at times literally codified in flowcharts—­foreclose the personal judgments that p ­ eople other­wise make in engaging o­ thers. ­These procedures reduce the actor to the technocratic logic itself, thereby eliminating his own ethical judgment. That judgment can only be rendered from his own par­tic­u­ lar standpoint and so is a requirement in effecting himself in the world. Yet, as across societal institutions more broadly, even the secret network of in­for­mants is becoming formalized, even normalized, for the sake of greater efficiency and transparency (at least to ­those admitted to the world of secret policing in the EU). Europol manages the Covert H ­ uman Intelligence Source (CHIS) program, though several EU countries do not participate in it. The CHIS program maintains a database of in­for­mants that is shared by national-­level investigators in participating states. Each EU country keeps a database of in­for­mants that describes their backgrounds, their knowledge, and the types of assistance they provide. The database then allows police to search for in­for­mants. An officer in one country can request that a police force in another ask their in­for­mants for information specific to the requesting officer’s investigation. Such requests can be made among member states ­either through Europol or through the CHIS program, which contains much more detailed information (e.g., ­family members’ addresses and c­ hildren’s schools). The in­for­mants’ incentive to be in the CHIS program is that they can receive a percentage of the assets apprehended in a case. Nevertheless, the program raises difficulties ­because police neither like to “wear out” their in­for­mants nor share them with ­others. As Brian explained it, in terms an academic should understand, “It’s like plagiarism. You do all the work [to recruit and keep an in­for­mant], but someone e­ lse takes your [in­for­mant’s] information and benefits from it!”

Avatars

Online avatars might count as a fourth category of in­for­mant, although they differ qualitatively from ­human in­for­mants. (An avatar is an instrument used to induce an unaware suspect into revealing intelligence.) Cecilia operates seven avatar characters on Facebook, using them to make “friends” with suspects who also have Facebook accounts. With ­these friendships, she learns many ­things about them (through the pictures they post online, through their chats, through the captions on their pictures, and through learning about the ­people whom the suspect “friends”). For a Nigerian case (see Chapter 4), she



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created a profile of a young ­woman from the same home state as the suspect. Through some quick internet research she learned the common names that ­people have in this part of Nigeria and chose one for her avatar. The avatar’s profile mentions her home town and the fact that she is now living in the same city as the suspect. Cecilia grabbed a picture of a young w ­ oman from the internet to use as the avatar’s visual repre­sen­ta­tion. “She” is an attractive young ­woman with a skin tone that is similar to ­others living in the same state. Through the friendship Cecilia can see the suspect’s network of Facebook friends, the pictures they post, the comments they make online, and the captions they upload. Cecilia cannot be sure if she is using language in a way that would seem normal to her Nigerian suspect. She had to learn how someone from the suspect’s home town would write “hello.” If the avatar and the suspect are not from the same country, then neither would know what to expect from the other’s use of En­glish. And it is unlikely that each would speak the other’s language. So they must communicate in En­glish. Cecilia also created an avatar of her own nationality that she w ­ ill use to “friend” the same Nigerian suspect as above. This way she avoids the language prob­lem. She first found an attractive ­woman who is the Facebook friend of an acquaintance. Cecilia made the friendship with her through another avatar. She tells me that if she sends out ten invitations to become Facebook friends, she w ­ ill get three ac­cep­tances. In this case, she got the ac­cep­tance she wanted. ­After getting her ac­cep­tance, she gained access to the suspect’s private pages. She “grabbed” all of her photos and replicated her own profile and style of self-­presentation. She uses this to sketch out his new avatar’s profile. She occasionally goes back to the real person’s profile to update her avatar’s profile and use the real person’s postings. This avatar and the Nigerian suspect communicate in Cecilia’s national language. Cecilia asked me with a surprised irony, “­Aren’t you ­going to ask me about the ethics of all of this?!” (The methods by which she creates the avatar are against national law—it is illegal both to provoke the suspect to conduct anything illegal and to grab information from a private online account like a Facebook profile. Specifically, Cecilia cannot legally take private Facebook information without asking the real owner of the account. When this information is put into investigative reports, it is justified simply as obtained through “open-­source” information.) I asked her about ethical violations since she so clearly does not mind the ­legal violation. She quickly responded:

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I ­don’t worry about it, not for two seconds. I just worry about the real person finding out. I d­ on’t worry, ­because ­there is no harm to her. I’m not using her real name, and I’m not saying t­ hings through her mouth. We would never do that. We change the basic facts that she posts. If she writes next to a photo that “I am at restaurant X with my friend Y,” then we change the name of the restaurant and the name of the friend, but we use the pictures. Her true name and her reputation are not harmed by our actions.

I ask if she gets useful information with avatars. She replies, The information is very useful. For example, when we wanted to arrest someone he had changed addresses right before we w ­ ere supposed to do it. But, he posted a picture of himself by his new place. We identified the new address by ­going to Google Earth and finding out the neighborhood. We showed the Google image to the police, and they told us more about the neighborhood. We found the car in the street and set up surveillance to find the exact building. Then, we knew where to make the arrest.

In­for­mant networks create substantial ties between the formal security state and the general population. ­These networked actors negotiate their relations through an ever-­shifting mix of ­legal guidelines and ethical judgments. They spread state secrecy thinly across the social fabric b­ ecause ­these ties vary widely in intensity depending on the moment. Informing is not a full-­time job. Yet, as ­those contacts reach farther, more p ­ eople are drawn into a gray zone, where the impossible becomes increasingly pos­si­ble. This fact makes sovereign action, most fully expressed in gray zones, all the more pliable and versatile. Such actions need not start with formal state agents, only with actors who are pivotal in maintaining or transforming the status quo. Indeed, the formal state can be replaced by networks of criminal gangs enforcing an alternative status quo (Penglase 2014) or by citizens enforcing their order in the absence of state security (Goldstein 2003, 2004). This fact, however, changes neither the role nor the functioning of secrecy.

Surveillance If relations with in­for­mants are direct and personal, then in surveillance, they are indirect, undisclosed, and impersonal. Surveillance is clandestine work that monitors the movements and activities of unaware ­others to determine who they are with re­spect to sovereign order by observing where they are. By far, most undercover investigative operations are surveillance operations.



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Primarily, surveillance involves covertly observing suspects’ actions to obtain evidence indicating criminal activity. Successful street work requires an intimate knowledge of the p ­ eople moving through and shaping the urban landscape. Surveillants need an easy air about them so that they can chat with passersby or shop­keep­ers, e­ ither to appear as if they belong or to solicit information from ­people that would seem entirely innocuous to them. Yet a surveillant experiences an anxiety, unknown to the desk investigator, while scanning each person who passes. The assumption is that danger can approach from any direction. ­After a week of walking through the side streets around Miranda Street, I realized that Brian was not just showing me the dif­fer­ent shops, apartment blocks, and street corners that ­were impor­tant to previous cases. He was scanning the area. “You never seem to shut it off?” I ask. “Not in this neighborhood, but in other places when I am with the kids. It does make you tired. I always check to see if ­there is a bulge under­neath the clothes along the waistline b­ ecause ­there might be a gun t­here.” Max’s wife complains that, when they go on vacation, while every­one around them is looking at the monuments and architecture, he is busy scanning for criminals. He adds, “And I spot them! I only ­really turn it off when I am playing with my three-­year-­old son.” As Frank explained, though, “It ­doesn’t ­matter if ­people see you. It ­doesn’t even ­matter if you look a ­little bit out of place. It ­matters if they think you are the police.” Greater technological capacity also increases a surveillance team’s capture of information. However, the team work at a low technological level, which is not in accordance with their wishes. Sophisticated and wealthy criminal rings regularly invest in technological devices. As Frank explains, “If a ring brings in thirty million Euros one year, it means nothing to them to spend five hundred thousand on technology.” Most of the suspects’ communication travels through social media like Facebook or WhatsApp. The team regularly request more technological capacity but are turned down, justified on austerity mea­sures. The team’s lack of technology is a source of embarrassment for them b­ ecause they know their counter­parts in other EU countries work with more advanced technology and so have to improvise their operations much less. The advantage of technology is that it grants access to spaces from greater distances through remote-­sensing devices that pick up conversations, or through GPS devices that track movements through space. Technology can reduce the costs of surveillance over the long term—it is expensive to deploy a team for dozens of hours. On the other hand, deploying technological devices can be difficult. Tracking and

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listening devices have to be put in place and then l­ater retrieved. If the target discovers a device, the investigation is blown, criminal activity ­will stop, and no evidence ­will become available. Still, the team maintain that better technology would allow them to gather far more information, which, as Frank also explained, is what police need to solve cases. I asked what technological devices they would like to have. Though they quickly mentioned night-­vision cameras, and small drones to look in win­dows, their first choice would be a device that grabs all data travelling through cyberspace within a given radius of its geographic location. It would be virtually impossible to use this device in any l­ egal capacity b­ ecause they would need a warrant to eavesdrop on ­people who are neither suspects nor even remotely connected to an investigation. Commercial vendors acquire ­these devices through sources that trace back to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Rus­sia, China, Israel, and the Netherlands. Equally con­ve­nient, but no easier to procure, is software that can be installed on a cell phone and that mirrors all data and transmits it to a receiver. It gives instant access to all data as it arrives on the phone. Without the software, the team can only retrieve data on the phone at the time that they secretly confiscate it. During ­these brief moments, they download the existing data and return the phone to its holding location, from where the suspect retrieves it before exiting the building. Although the team lack extensive technological support, their street work is sophisticated and effective. The art of street surveillance lies in an ability to anticipate where the target w ­ ill move to and what the target w ­ ill do upon arrival. But one does not practice the art like some sort of diviner who simply reads ­people. Like any craft, what appears as effortless execution to the outsider is the result of experience and much preparatory work. David compares it to surfing: The thrill is . . . ​it’s not a dull ­thing. You try to control the situation. But the situation is never ­under control. You are always defying yourself. It can go one way or the other. You want a certain outcome. You are always trying to take decisions that are the right ones. You have to have quick thinking. ­There are l­ ittle t­ hings along the way: “Where ­will I park the car?” The decision can turn your day good or bad for surveillance. You have to be constantly analyzing the environment.

Surveillance operations thus provide an opportunity to break one’s own daily pattern, and more: The thrill moves on two levels. It provides the surveillant with



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a new scenario, with new ­people and new places, ­every day. Even on its own, this point renders surveillance more in­ter­est­ing than desk work. But beyond exposure to the new, surveillance also asks surveillants to become imaginative, to deploy their creative talents. This feat requires assessing how other ­people think in their mundane activities and inferring what motivates them. Assessing ­others provides an opportunity to expand one’s own horizon as one incorporates the ways of ­others into the creative pro­cess. In order to protect the investigation, this freedom to be can only happen in secret. Thrilling as it is, however, and despite the possibilities it offers to expand one’s horizon, by itself surveillance does not necessarily signify a shift from the first sovereign form to the second. Surveillance operations cover the lifespan of an investigation (for intelligence collecting and for evidence collecting), with the information gathered in one operation shaping the methods and objectives of the next. Conceptually, a robust investigation moves through three, often overlapping, steps of surveillance: (1) normalizing the team’s presence in a neighborhood to determine an individual’s patterns over time, (2) identifying a suspect’s contacts and mapping social networks, and (3) obtaining evidence of a crime. A fourth step, of course, would be an arrest (if the prosecutor decides that sufficient evidence has been gathered to secure a criminal conviction in court).

Neighborhood Access

“Blending in” means not pretending to be a local, but rather being relaxed with one’s self in a strange context. In the daily life of a multicultural city, p ­ eople are accustomed to seeing “­others” move through their neighborhoods, shop in each other’s markets, and eat in each other’s restaurants. As Vincent explains, “You must have the confidence that you belong in the situation where the surveillance takes you, even if it is not your natu­ral setting.” Difference, as such, is not a cause for alarm on a mundane level. Much more suspicious is the pretender ­because that person appears to have a hidden objective. Blending in to dif­fer­ent cityscapes carries with it a liberating feeling—­one can move in a social context that exists outside one’s own normal patterns. The team try to keep close connections to immigrant communities by familiarizing themselves with p ­ eople in dif­fer­ent neighborhoods to make their presence banal over time. Cecilia explains the logic, using the example of a Chinese case from several years earlier:

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We have to get close to them, and you know how the Chinese are very closed within. We had to start “living” in [our city’s] Chinatown. We ate Chinese food ­every day. We decorated our cars with ­little Chinese t­hings. We started learning colloquial Chinese phrases. We made friendships with dozens of Chinese ­people . . . ​ranging from in­for­ mants, to shop ­owners, to community leaders . . . ​so we went from having l­ittle knowledge about the real Chinese to having a foot in the door of the community.

As another example, a retired citizen was producing a fraudulent version of an older-­style residence card, a card that allows its holders to enter the country and stay in the Schengen Area. The case started when a voluntary in­for­mant notified the Immigration Ser­vice of the scam, prompting the team to begin a surveillance on the retiree. He produced them in his garage in a small village out of town. He then travelled, usually on Fridays, to his old neighborhood in the city, where he secretly stored them in a side-­street residence. He liked patronizing a small restaurant in the neighborhood, where he used to meet clients for his fraudulent documents. Max prepared at five o­ ’clock the next morning to follow him by car into the city. When Frank picked me up at noon, we drove to the neighborhood and soon found the man sitting at one of the restaurant’s outside ­tables. As we walked by him, Frank pretended to show me the surrounding architecture and the decorations for an upcoming festival, all the while secretly filming the man, who was with a w ­ oman of roughly his age, meeting another gentleman of South Asian descent. He gave the gentleman a package that appeared to be a bundle or box of papers. The ­woman then told the South Asian man the address of a nearby store where he could get “stamps.” Frank did not know what kind of stamps, but we followed the South Asian man to the shop. Max, who had also arrived, kept an eye on the shop door but from a dif­fer­ent vantage point. The man exited the shop and continued around a corner to a bus stop. When he boarded the bus, Frank and I followed in one car and Max in another. He got off the bus several stops further up Miranda Street. Frank asked me to get out and follow the suspect ­because neither he nor Max could leave the cars quickly. After following the man to a bank about two blocks away, I waited for him outside. ­After he exited, he crossed the street, and Max, who had parked somewhere, and I followed him on foot to a small grocery shop, and then up a hill to a clothing store he owned on the first floor of the building where he lived.



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Frank concluded this portion of the surveillance a­ fter a few minutes as the man did not come back out. ­After Frank and I had left to follow the South Asian, Max had asked the owner if he could come back with two o­ thers for lunch. This restaurant is not the type of place that takes reservations, but Max had only wanted to establish a rapport with the staff and normalize the team’s presence at this neighborhood restaurant. So, we went back to the restaurant for lunch. Max positioned himself to watch the man and his wife who ­were still ­there. Frank and Max made sure to strike up conversations with the staff during what turned out to be a two-­hour lunch, long even by the team’s standards. The man and his wife left at about 2 p.m., at which point David and Vincent took up surveillance and followed him by car out of town. Deceiving passersby involves more than just passively appearing “normal” as they go about their circulations; it also requires being actively involved with unsuspecting ­others in the field of operation. “You need a good poker face,” David explains. “You have to be comfortable with lying, and you should never ask questions directly, but only indirectly.” A common example occurs when the team needs to confirm an address of a suspect, accomplice, or victim: “If someone is in Flat A and you need to confirm it or know something about them, then go to Flat D and make up a story: ‘I hear the folks in the other flat are too loud. They are immigrants, ­aren’t they?’ P ­ eople w ­ ill then say a l­ittle about them, and you ­will quickly learn what you need to know.” The same princi­ple of indirectness applies to targets. The team cannot legally (and ­will not in any case) provoke someone into committing a crime. However, they can create a situation in which the target contacts p ­ eople so that connections and networks can be established. This helps the team focus surveillance operations so that useful evidence can be obtained. Frank explains: With the experience we have, we are able to precipitate the cause of events. For instance, if we know that a guy does something, then we have a way of creating a prob­lem [to get him to react to something that ­will give us the information we need]. Or, if we send him an official letter from the immigration office, it w ­ ill put him in touch with someone. We might learn or confirm about the connections he has. Now, we can prove it. So, we can try to bring p ­ eople together and confirm their addresses or the fact that they are connected. This can be useful information.

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This skill cannot be taught in a training course; it must be learned through trial and error. Frank continues: Experience brings that. Our method is being hidden in plain view. You must bring together your natu­ral capacities and combine your life experiences. ­There are ­things you ­can’t learn in the books. You need some confidence. You have many t­ hings that happen that you d­ on’t expect. You have to adapt. You need to use your own experience. You need to see what ­others do. Every­one has dif­fer­ent talents. For example, David, ­because of his life experience and path, he can work more easily in rougher parts of town.

Other surveillance situations provide other challenges. Blending in requires that the surveillant check any impulses that might call too much attention to his outsider status. I learned this lesson through my impulses: David and I walk through a small shopping center adjacent to a series of long, brutalist apartment complexes. We visit a low-­end neighborhood, looking for a Chinese man suspected of participating in a ­human smuggling ring that smuggles indentured Chinese workers. As we walk, a young ­mother slaps her two-­year-­old girl on the nose for misbehaving. I reel back slightly with vis­i­ble disapproval but only to receive my own scolding from David. He reprimands me, not b­ ecause he thinks the ­mother did right but b­ ecause my reaction gives us away as outsiders—­the ­woman’s action fits into this neighborhood (and if it did not, then e­ ither locals or the two police officers standing by the entrance would intervene). If one reacts out of character, David explains, “you half call yourself out as a surveillant. We call this situation a ‘give away,’ having a reaction to something, you call yourself out.” Even David feels like an outsider in this area, but he explains his point in reference to countersurveillance: “The first step is to isolate the surveillant. Then, they exploit the ­things he does to get you to confirm yourself as a surveillant. When y­ ou’re working, you try not to make a stand in a situation like that, and ones even worse. You need to keep your cool. If I thought it was a real prob­lem, then ­there are two cops at the door. I would tell them.”

Contacts and Social Networks

In June and July 2015, three Chinese travellers passed through national border control on their way to Ireland. They had fake Taiwanese passports. Irish border control caught them, to the embarrassment of national border control, and returned them to this country as their incoming flight originated from it. They spent sixty days in a detention center, but they w ­ ere released b­ ecause the



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bureaucracy moved too slowly to return them to their country of nationality. Their case remains open, however. While they ­were in detention John recorded all the data from their cell phones. Upon their release, a Chinese man married to a national picked them up from the center. The five of them went to a fifth-­ floor apartment in a middle-­class neighborhood on the city outskirts. Swedish colleagues asked the team to follow the three men ­because they had earlier arrested one of them carry­ing approximately fifty kilograms of narcotics. The team obliged b­ ecause they thought the case might merge into a stalled investigation of their own. The team spent fifteen days watching the door of the apartment building, during which time two groups of fifteen p ­ eople, all of east Asian appearance, entered the building. Max and Brian could access the lobby ­because Max had successfully videorecorded someone punching in the entry code on the building’s entry phone. When they entered the lobby they saw the mailbox to the apartment in question was unlocked. In it was an envelope, which they took out and opened and discovered the apartment key. Brian immediately left to get it copied and then returned the original to the mailbox. David entered the apartment wearing rubber gloves to search for travel documents, which he easily found. He videorecorded all the passports including name pages, visas, and entry stamps and also all travel documentation such as plane tickets and receipts from travel agencies. The investigation r­ ose in priority given all the information they had now obtained (illegally). The team only saw the main suspect (the man married to the national) enter and exit, even though up to thirty p ­ eople might have been inside. Vincent explained: We think they ­will go to the airport and try to go somewhere. We want to be ­there for that. Also, ­we’ve put a lot of time into this surveillance, so we d­ on’t want to lose the opportunity when they go. ­After fifteen days, we confirmed the link between the person at the airport with the ­people in the apartment. We saw the fake documents. We saw the main suspect bringing food and supplies for the p ­ eople inside.

Other intelligence suggests that this man is only a “lieutenant” in a larger ring that smuggles ­peoples to Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Canada. However, the team has failed to identify a connection between him and the other open investigations on Chinese suspects. Their interest in the case amounts to a ­gamble: Is the time invested in the investigation ­going to generate a return in the form of good evidence? Vincent again:

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It’s a bet. We’ve got a lot: facilitators, safe h ­ ouses, and the network. The case is growing. We want to see a timeline. Of course, we would love to see them board the plane. We ­were betting that they would leave, but they know that border control has tightened, at least according to the newspapers. They might stay longer. But other t­ hings might happen: someone might deliver documents; someone might bring food and supplies.

The team gauges their level of discretion relative to the targets they are watching. In this case, they can afford to be less discreet b­ ecause the Chinese travellers and suspects are much more alien than the team in this neighborhood. Additionally, they are all illegal in the country and are thus reluctant to come outside. Had they been following the Nigerian suspects (see Chapter  4) or the Georgian suspects, then they would have remained a further distance because t­ hese suspects all have ­legal status. The length of this surveillance operation, perhaps the longest in a single location that I witnessed during fieldwork, understandably drew the attention of the neighbors. The police ­were called and checked the team members out as they ­were sitting in their cars watching the door. Max explained to them what they ­were d­ oing ­there. A ­ fter verifying their story, the police left them to their work. Nevertheless, across the fifteen days, the team began to recognize and even integrate into the social patterns of the neighborhood. Each day a f­ amily—­a ­mother, a ­father, and two sons—­pass the hours picking up scrap metal from around the block and hoarding it in a nearby garage. A hairdresser always parks on the corner in green sport vehicle by his salon. Two men always arrive at the tobacco shop just before the owner opens it up at half past eight. A casket retailer sells his wares out of a small garage and loads his goods into clients’ hearses at a rate of about one per hour. An el­derly lady and her adult son who live at one end of the street in a fourth-­floor apartment, walk to the other end to a café for coffee and for lunch. The guy then cleans up the t­ able for the waiter. He appears to be in his forties, with no hope of finding work and living off his ­mother’s pension. The team regularly chats with him as they have been eating lunch in the same café during the surveillance. He gives the impression of enjoying making himself useful at the café, despite not working t­ here, as it gives him a reason to talk to customers. Even as they learned the rhythms of this neighborhood, they never saw how the Chinese mi­grants exited the apartment complex. Other cases drew their attention, and the larger smuggling network remained obscured to them.



Evidence of a Crime

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The ultimate purpose of surveillance is to collect evidence for the prosecutor. Among the team’s proudest accomplishments in this regard involved a major case against the cell of a Georgian criminal network that had been highly active in their part of the country. The cell demonstrated their sophistication in their professionalism, the orga­nizational clarity of their actions, and the mutual re­ spect that the cell members showed to each other. The allure of this cell in the team’s mind grew ­because the larger network was most likely tied into the Rus­sian Vory, a long-­established criminal network that had expanded across Eu­ rope in the 1980s. Many of its top commanders ­were former KGB operatives who had ­either turned against the spy agency for po­liti­cal or personal reasons, or had simply recognized that the earnings in or­ga­nized crime vastly exceeded a government salary. Georgian or­ga­nized crime flourished for several reasons. Among ­others, sixteen thousand police officers w ­ ere dismissed a­ fter the 2003 Rose Revolution, making it even more difficult to deal with soaring crime rates and tempting former police into lucrative lives of crime, where they made fortunes in western Eu­rope and the M ­ iddle East (Shelley 2007: 50–51). Low-­level Georgian suspects in the country are not Vory members themselves, but they pay re­spect to the higher-­level players in the ring, who are members through cash contributions drawn from stolen merchandise. ­These contributions then entitle the lower-­level members to draw support—­legal, financial, or other­wise—­from the ring in the ­future. The organ­ization is like a pyramid. At the bottom are groups of thieves, who report to a vigilante. Several vigilantes across the country and in other EU countries report to a higher-­level operative in Greece, who then reports to an even higher figure in Georgia or Rus­sia. Indeed, the team hit the jackpot in terms of criminal investigations, but, once again, they entered the gray zone to collect their winnings, so to speak. The cell first entered the country on stolen passports detected by the documents and technology specialists in the Immigration Ser­vice. ­These specialists pursued a red flag that appeared when the Georgians’ passports ­were registered at their ­hotel. (All travellers must register passport information at ­hotels according to law.) The team subsequently checked the ­hotel room and found tools for picking locks. When the team arrested them for questioning, the suspects requested a translator for their interviews. The translator himself had been previously caught for receiving stolen goods and had a long history of providing translating

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ser­vices to the Georgian suspects. The team then managed to locate the vigilante’s ­house, but they could not obtain a judge’s warrant to search it on a Sunday. David explained how the team circumvented l­egal procedures through sheer deceit to access the ­house. We arrested the guy but d­ idn’t have anything to hold him, but we c­ ouldn’t just let him go. We slapped him around a ­little bit but it ­didn’t faze him. He could tell we ­didn’t have anything on him. But we saw him ­going out of the h ­ ouse, even though he said he ­doesn’t live t­ here and ­can’t let us in. So, we produced a consent form for him to sign to search the ­house, but told him (through our interpreter) that it was only to search his car. He signed it, then we searched the ­house. In the ­house, we found three or four rooms used to practice picking locks. They had dif­fer­ent types of door locks laid out on ­tables and equipment to pick them. We found test kits that determine if something is silver, gold, diamond, what­ever. We found stolen goods: TVs, computers, watches, gold.

Over the six months ­after the arrests, reports of breaking and entering dropped by 70 ­percent. The vigilante respected the team despite their rough treatment as he was surprised that they did so well against him and his associates. A ­ fter David testified in court against the cell, the vigilante pulled David aside and said, “When I get out of jail, why ­don’t you come work for us?” The judge sentenced him to eight years in prison.

The Risk of Breaking the Law

One after­noon at headquarters, we examined the national ­legal code to detail the crimes they committed and the sentences they risked from their surveillance of the safe ­house holding the smuggled Chinese mi­grants. An impressive list emerged: 1. Violation of mailbox: They opened the mailbox to the Chinese rented apartment and found an envelope with a key to the apartment in it. (max: 3 months) 2. Theft: They opened the envelope in the mailbox and took the key. (2–8 years) 3. Violation of mail: They opened the envelope. (up to 1 year) 4. Illegal entry: They entered the apartment. (up to 3 years) 5. Violation of private property: They messed around the apartment to find the documents and examine them. (up to 3 months)



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6. Abuse of power: They did all of the above without authorization (up to 3 years) 7. Misuse of state property: They used cars and cameras for all of the above (1–3 years) 8. Violation of privacy: They did all the above (1 year) 9. Unauthorized duplication of a key (1 year) 10. Conscious violation of the law by a public servant (up to 2 years) The total maximum sentence if caught and convicted on all of the above is 22 years and 6 months. They laughed at the irony that such a sentence would be much more than any of the indictees would get for smuggling ­humans. But they reasoned that they needed to do it for the good of the investigation. They could not believe their luck in finding the key in the mailbox, but luck f­ avors ­those who take risks, as the saying goes. In any case, in deciding to enter the gray zone, they consider not the number of laws they must break but rather the likelihood of getting caught. Given the l­ egal vulnerability of the suspects, the odds of getting caught in this case ­were low. As Brian explains, “The Chinese or­ga­nizer ­wouldn’t press charges ­because he is ­here in the country illegally. If he was a citizen we would think much differently.” But why does the team make entering the gray zone their prob­lem? The answer is efficiency and fulfilling the mission, as they explain while chuckling about the m ­ atter. Brian again: We understand the irony of it. It is not that it is fun. . . . ​Getting a warrant needs a judge’s authorization, but then we risk the judge saying “no.” If we do get official authorization, then a document is created out of it. That document w ­ ill be shown to the defense counsel if the case goes to court. The defendants ­will then find out our techniques, and we ­couldn’t use them anymore; this is especially true with the Georgians, who are very sophisticated.

Just as they forego dealing with a judge who might not oblige, they also do not inform their bosses—­but for a much dif­fer­ent reason. Frank chuckles again: “They ­don’t want to know how we get information. If they ­don’t turn a blind eye, then we ­can’t get the job done. They would lose their jobs ­because investigations ­don’t get done.” Turning a blind eye is all they do. The team endures no pressure from above to break the law, ­because, according to Brian, “if something goes wrong we would point the fin­ger at them. They ­don’t want

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the responsibility ­either.” Like the tacit agreement between judges and the team on the definition of “security,” the team and their bosses maintain a tacit agreement on the acceptability of lawbreaking u ­ nder certain conditions. In both cases, the team make the judgment call and can reasonably expect that the judge and the bosses w ­ ill accept it. However, we would speak too casually to describe ­these agreements as the “sovereign taking action.” Specifically, a configuration of par­tic­u­lar actors is positioned to enact sovereignty by tacitly legitimizing certain operations outside the scope of law (see also Johnson et al. 2011; van Reekum and Schinkel 2016). The consequences of what happens in the gray zone are the effects of par­tic­u­lar persons strategically located in that social configuration. Again, states ­don’t do t­ hings; ­people do.

Reflections in Surveillance

Surveillance requires the surveillant to step outside of time and space (not by being unseen per se, but by being unrecognized for who one would other­wise pres­ent himself as). While every­one ­else moves, the surveillant is static ­until the target moves, but this is a very short occurrence compared to the amount of time spent waiting. This spatial relationship changes, however, at precisely that point. Shadowing a target involves a mixture of advanced planning, reacting to the street situation, and anticipating the target’s move based on an intuitive sense of their character. The team appear as being a normal part of circulation, and experience the elation of being both inside and outside of normality. Through the irony of being both close to and distant from their targets, the team somewhat resemble the behavioral scientist who gathers data through extended and systemic observation. “Does all of this surveillance give you a better understanding h ­ uman nature?” I ask. David replies, “Yes, I think it does a ­little bit. It’s like asking someone who has observed gorillas if they better understand them. We observe p ­ eople from all dif­fer­ent statuses all the time.” (See also Marx 1988: xx.) They all agree that surveillance requires that they always try to put themselves into “the other guy’s shoes.” They must constantly ask why a suspect does something or what their par­tic­u­lar interests are. Surveillance thus affords the investigator extensive opportunities to learn about the lives of ­others through extended observation, through time spent in unfamiliar neighborhoods, and through learning how ­people engage with each other in the world. ­These experiences alone do not necessarily “enlarge one’s mentality,” to borrow from Kant,



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b­ ecause they can be used for scanning purposes only. Scanning implies distance from an object so that it can be quantified, like observing gorillas in the wild. Yet surveillance still adds to the reservoir of perspectives that one accumulates through life experience. ­These ­will as­suredly enhance the two-­in-­one thought dialogue if the actor decides that a situation calls for an ethical judgment rather than a technical one.

The Significance of Secrecy: Personhood in the Field of Sovereign Relations Vincent reasons like a critical theorist when reflecting that “the state is like an entity that no one can define, but every­one recognizes that it exists. . . . ​Now, I ­don’t know how to call it. . . . ​Society gives it an attribute. It’s recognized by society. It’s like common sense. But it is not easy to define.” Since the state is ephemeral as an object yet concrete in its effects, we must examine the role of sovereign agents in making the state real­ity in practice—­that is, in creating the effects of a state. I remind Vincent of an operation in which he and his colleagues defined the state clearly enough for their target group. The team conducted a surprise document check at a hostel where dozens of mi­grants from around the world ­were staying. Yet they ­were only looking for three Roma men suspected of pickpocketing and burglary. To conceal their identities, the team wore ski masks while checking the documents of all residents in the hostel. The three men ­were temporarily detained on the claim that their paperwork needed further examination. However, the a­ ctual reason was to gain access to their cell phones, which w ­ ere secured in a locker during their detention, ostensibly for security reasons. The confiscation provided a win­dow of opportunity to download data without the three ­owners’ knowledge. They returned the phones to the men upon their release a few hours ­later. (I ­will discuss this episode further in Chapter 4.) I asked Vincent, “So, who are you in this case?” “Well,” Vincent continued, “sometimes we are part of what you ­can’t see. Sometimes we are part of what you can see. It [the state] is like an optical illusion or a magic trick.” His point is correct in several ways. The team ­were unseen when they illegally downloaded the data from the phones. Moreover, they w ­ ere both seen and unseen during the document check as they wore ski masks when confronting the immigrants in the guise of the security state. They ­were seen as generic state agents, not as individuals identified by their par­tic­u­lar ­faces. Hence the team’s ski masks did

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something more than hide their identities to prevent a ­later retaliation and display the security state’s strength: they also prevented the appearance of the par­ tic­u­lar agent of the sovereign state. The masks silenced them, at least if they thought that the operation was unethical or had unethical ele­ments to it. The masks suppressed the possibility of disagreement they might have harbored with the specific operation or its larger function. (Perhaps this erasure of the par­tic­u­lar actor explains the medieval custom of the executioner wearing the black hood when conducting his grim task for the sovereign.) In other situations, secrecy also affords the team many advantages that other security and policing roles cannot offer. John explained the difference in comparison to his earlier job as a lead desk investigator. This individual feels constant pressure in writing reports for prosecutors, arranging for phone taps, arranging translators, coordinating with the surveillance team, and helping prosecutors prepare cases. The constant attention to all the moving parts kept him awake at night with worry. He finds surveillance a much more relaxing endeavor. H ­ ere, he says, “our minds are f­ ree.” With this freedom come opportunities to adopt other roles, even if it remains secret to the surrounding world. I get to be many ­things. One day a mailman. Another day a tourist. I have other colleagues who ­can’t do this. They ­can’t give up their police profile. The criminal would spot them right away. We ­don’t look like the police. I might be the only one on the team that does. [John’s hair is kept close-­cropped unlike the other men on the team.] I showed a picture of the team to my wife, and she said, “They all look crazy!”

The thrill of limitless possibilities is the inversion of the experience of uniformed police officers. They “feel the weight of the uniform,” as John puts it. The team sympathize with them ­because they are targets of re­sis­tance and are even occasionally lured into dangerous situations where they are trapped and then attacked. More regularly, ­people have constant demands on them in terms of how they should maintain public safety. The experiences of surveillance and working with in­for­mants locate the team in the gray zone as a normal part of their working hours. In that space, they can ­either work on behalf of the security state or pursue action according to their own ethical judgment. Expanding Horn’s (2011) argument, then, secrecy provides a cover for action that can stabilize the state, allow for its reconstitution on new, ethical terms, and also lead to corruption and vio­lence. To reconstitute per the first sovereign form often involves that which state agents could not publicly



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justify, w ­ hether it is police state terror or corruption. Regarding corruption, Jusionyte’s (2015) research shows state actors among ­others using state cover for personal gain through smuggling along tri-­border area of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. They do not strive for a new sovereign foundation, or mutual appearances in public space, so they hold no interest in ending the secrecy. Yet secrecy also shields that action from premature exposure to the glare of the public eye. It is too destabilizing to reveal itself too soon for fear of backlash. Action in the gray zone of the second sovereign form does not strive for a secret existence in­def­initely, though it could remain trapped in secrecy. At some point, the actors ­will have created—­and ­will have wanted to create—­a public space in which to appear, along with the public space they create among themselves as they take action. Secrecy, in this regard, amounts to “a transition stadium between being and non-­being” (Simmel 1906: 472; see also Debenport 2015: 41–42). To carry Simmel’s logic forward, being requires a public space in which it is recognized and so becomes co-­constituent of that space—­being, space, and appearance are all part of the same current of existence. Hence Brian’s frustration, quoted in the epigraph: “If it is unseen, how can it be cool? Cool is about showing off.” Herzfeld (2009: 156) similarly explains the ­matter as a necessary condition for ­people to make their own decisions about ­whether to conform: The destruction of privacy removes from the individual citizen the responsibility for making in­de­pen­dent decisions as to ­whether to obey or not, ­whether to conform or not, and also destroys the possibility of the minor illegality that sometimes makes life livable. This, in turn, makes the state an uninhabitable space, rather like the modernist dwelling that does not allow its residents the comparable degree of freedom of action and decision-­ making that a modicum of riservatezza [private space] would assure them.

That action necessarily requires the gray zone as the medium of its occurrence, replete with its moral ambiguity. The gray zone is appropriately named ­because it mixes the “white” and the “black” according to the team’s moral cosmology. “The white zone,” explains Brian, “is narrow, but we are expected to swim in that canal.” It is the realm of the ­legal and the moral, the latter referring to the institutionally deep codes of acceptable conduct. The difficulty with the white zone, Brian continues, is that “it imposes limits on you and d­ oesn’t let you do what you need to do for the white zone.” The black zone is the realm of the illegal and the immoral. As Max explains, “The black is where you start a criminal investigation. We ­can’t go ­there, b­ ecause we get paid to go get the ones who

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are ­there already.” David explains that the black zone is “where, if you get caught, no one ­will understand why you took the money or beat the hell out of a guy. If Brian or John saw me do something like that, then they would lose trust in me.” The gray zone is the zone of interpretation and reconstitution, where law and morality is bent to the ­will of ethics and judgment, for better or for worse. What preclude that action from sliding through the gray zone to the black zone are one’s conscience and the importance of the esteem that colleagues maintain in each other’s eyes—in Appiah’s (2010) parlance, “honor.” The “white zone” cannot sustain itself alone, not b­ ecause of a threat from the black zone per se but rather ­because the laws and morals that render the white zone acceptable cannot themselves guarantee its daily reproduction. Some of ­those laws and morals are, ironically, in conflict with the white zone. Moreover, the white zone consists of contesting visions of order, rendering it a churning cauldron of strug­gles. For ­these two reasons, the strug­gles to establish one kind of order over another necessarily mix the gray zone into the white. The white zone’s ultimate violability depends squarely upon the ethical judgment and actions that ­people undertake in the gray zone. For this reason, secrecy itself, a necessary condition for change, is essential to maintaining a legitimate and vis­ib­ le field of h ­ uman relations.

Chapter 4

Sovereign Actions on a Global Stage I used to think the world rotates around the sun, but I know that it rotates around money. It has always been about sex and money. Christie The law and policy are filled with ambiguity. That’s not so amazing. What is amazing is that p ­ eople always find a way to make money out of it. Frank

Circulations, Refugees, and Money On a Monday after­noon, a commercial aircraft carry­ing thirteen Syrian refugees and two officials from the International Organ­ization for Migration (IOM) land at the airport. The Syrians’ ages range from three to about fifty years old. ­Until that week, they had spent a year in a refugee camp in Greece. They pass through the arrivals gate, where three ­people from the national refugee ser­vices administration greet them. Together, t­ hese three individuals lead the group through the airport to a room configured as a small lecture theatre. The Syrians sit scattered among the first three rows and listen, through Arabic translation, to how they ­will live with the temporary refugee status that the state has given them. The state ­will provide them with housing, ­free health care, f­ ree schooling for the children, a stipend, and the right to work ­after they obtain a residency permit. As they listen to the officials, they display an array of emotion, including gratitude, lethargy, ner­vous­ness, and disdain. One adult w ­ oman entertains a three-­year-­ old sitting on the other side of the room by making glances at her then quickly turning her head when the giggling girl makes eye contact. The refugee ser­vice officials call up the adults one at a time to have them sign the paperwork pertaining to their files. For each refugee, an official g­ ently takes hold of their hand to cleanly roll each fingertip on an ink pad before rolling it again on a fingerprint chart. That official w ­ ill l­ater scan their fingerprints and upload them as biometric data into a national database. Greek officials at their earlier camp, or their Frontex counter­parts, most likely also enrolled their fingerprints in the Eurodac database, which ­houses the biometric information of all refugees applying for asylum in the Eu­ro­pean Union. ­Here, we see the strong hand of the security state apparatus in the form of state agents escorting refugees through the controlled airport environment, lecturing them about their new lives in the

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country, and literally holding their hands to take fingerprints. ­These events show the security apparatus at work (Chapter 1), where ­people qua man­ag­ers manage other p ­ eople qua objects through the use of scientific knowledge, institutional forms, and architectural arrangements (Foucault 1980: 194–96). Concomitant to ­these formal procedures are the ways in which ­people—­all ­people—­work the apparatus, to the extent they can, to get what they need. Technocratic pro­cess and individual agency do not contradict each other, ­because agency, unlike action, does not threaten the status quo. ­These Syrian refugees arrived in country ­because the Eu­ro­pean Commission (EC) reached agreements with several member states, ­under a so-­called EU solidarity plan, to pro­cess asylum applications for refugees living in camps in Greece. ­These agreements necessitated the suspension of the EU’s Dublin Regulation, which requires the member state in which a refugee first arrives to pro­cess the application. However, the Greek government argued that the number of applicants grew beyond its capacity. The total number of Syrians alone applying for asylum in the EU increased from 50,000  in 2013 to 123,000 (out of a total of 626,000 ­people from around the world) the following year (IOM 2015: 102). Between 2012 and 2014, only 60,000 ­people entered through Greece (12), whereas 51,000 ­people applied for asylum in 2016 alone (cited in Eu­ro­pean Council on Refugees and Exiles [ECRE] 2018). The EC pays cooperating member states €1,000 per month per refugee for up to six months. The government in turn transfers the money to NGOs, which provide beds for refugees in hostels, along with language classes and job training to foster their integration into national society. As it happens, many Syrian refugees who ­were allocated to the country during 2016 had left for Germany, a move forbidden by their temporary refugee status. However, the NGOs usually took an extra two months to report the missing refugees to the government, which did not appear upset with the slow forthcoming information. The NGOs still collected the EC’s money via the government, while the government continued to please the EC for taking the refugees. As the refugees departed for Germany, more ­were allocated to the country to fill the NGO’s empty beds, who themselves proceeded on to Germany. The German authorities demanded an explanation for the unexpected arrival of t­ hese Syrians. In turn, the director of the Immigration Ser­vice asked the investigative team to get her an answer to deliver to her German counterpart. A ­couple of surveillance runs revealed that several Syrians, who had arrived with earlier groups, go to the main bus station. Brian asked his reliable in­for­mant working at the travel



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agency next to the station (Chapter 3). She notified him that they buy tickets to Germany. The team then observed many more refugees boarding buses that all carried them to dif­fer­ent points in Germany. From a conventional state-­centric perspective, we would marvel at the Syrians manipulating the system to reach greener EU pastures, but we should also recognize the other actors benefitting from their own manipulations of it. The government and several NGOs all succeeded in keeping money flowing into their accounts and in checking off boxes indicating the support they provided to the Syrian refugees. The team could not conclude if a crime had been committed—­there is no law punishing NGOs for being slow to inform the refugee ser­vice of missing refugees, and no evidence of corruption materialized. Furthermore, government ­lawyers disagree as to w ­ hether it is even illegal for ­those holding temporary refugee status to leave the country. However, it would be illegal for them to enter Germany, and if someone is profiting from the movement of t­ hese refugees to Germany, then they are likely committing the crime of ­human smuggling. Surveillance linked a young national ­woman and two men with Arabic names to the Syrian refugees who went missing and ­were ­later found in Germany. ­These three ­people had met the Germany-­bound refugees at the airport in the same way that the NGO workers ­were meeting the new group of Syrians ­today. Brian and David clandestinely photographed ­these workers, waiting outside the lecture hall to see if the three p ­ eople associated with the earlier group of Syrians w ­ ere among them. ­Here, the state’s formal security apparatus coincides with an informal gray zone exploited by ­people capable of shifting back and forth across the dividing line. Networks thrive in this gray zone composed of both state actors and a countless number of persons all trying to find better lives, earn more cash, or score points with the authorities in Brussels. Though, again, no evidence of a crime materialized. This chapter globalizes the context in which the team and their suspects operate. In so ­doing, it shows how the “state”—­with its territorialized imaginary—­ features as one ele­ment in the greater mix that conditions, enables, and constrains the pursuits of the variety of actors involved. The portrait inevitably exposes the limits of the first sovereign form, but the absence of ­those limits does not necessarily result in p ­ eople operating in the second sovereign form. Rather, neoliberal relations come to dominate, with the usual effects of, first, isolating individuals (and thus disempowering them) and, second, normalizing their strug­gle to accumulate capital (in what­ever form—­social, economic, cultural, or

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the like) lest they become ever more marginalized. The accumulation of capital does not empower the individual per se, but, more accurately, helps that person in the strug­gle to survive (G. Feldman 2015: 4). This chapter portrays the patchwork apparatus that states collectively deploy—­often in contradiction to each other—to condition global movements, and the strategies that mi­grants and security agents use to manipulate that apparatus to their advantage. It begins with the basis of the EU’s migration-­security apparatus to show how actors manipulate it in what amounts to a global gray zone. It then introduces Hardt and Negri’s notions of biopower and biopolitics to initially conceptualize sovereign action in that context, from above and below. The chapter then examines three investigative cases: (1) a case of high-­end prostitution in a brothel fronting as a dance club, (2) a case of low-­end prostitution or­ga­nized by a Nigerian trafficking ring, and (3) a case of pickpocketing and prostitution conducted by a Roma crime ring. ­These examples illustrate how the team interface with global networks in order to conceptualize sovereign action on a global stage—­that is, outside the confines of the first sovereign form.

The EU Security-­Migration Apparatus and the Global Gray Zone Like the gray zone associated with the first sovereign form, the global gray zone is the product of a­ ctual social relations in which some actors are structurally positioned to act with impunity (or s­ imple neglect) t­oward ­others. The structural inequalities become apparent as the global North restricts access to its ­labor markets for p ­ eople from the global South, many of whom are displaced as a result of the North’s liberalization of the global economy (Ekholm Friedman and Friedman 2008; Fassin 2011b; Sassen 2014; see also Andreas 2009; Harding 2012; Thomas and Clarke 2013: 310). The astonishing wage disparity between the South and the North makes risky clandestine journeys to the EU worth the effort. The oddity of this situation has been well recognized: the global South holds a large, young, underemployed population, while most of the global North contains an aging population, resulting in holes in their ­labor markets. While ­these complementary demographic profiles would suggest a symbiotic relationship, in effect, they result in contradictory domestic po­liti­cal pressures, which condition the EU’s annual ­labor migration intake. On the one hand, (neo)liberals push the state to relax borders for the sake of ­labor mobility, economic growth, and safety for refugees. In the liberal imagination, we are all citizens of the world, so no one



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should be excluded from safety or prosperity in another country. On the other, (neo)nationalists demand that the state’s citizenry retain their priority over ­others, thereby viewing global citizenship as an oxymoron. The compromise between the liberal and nationalist pressures appears in the form of circular migration programs in which mi­grants are offered seasonal jobs in the EU. Though the programs barely compensate for the overall structural discrepancy, they ­allow mi­grant laborers to return to work the following year if they leave by the time their temporary work visa expires (see G. Feldman 2012: chaps. 2 and 5). This dilemma gives scope to (inter)state security practices already conceptualized in town planning in eighteenth-­century France. As Foucault argues, security as a technocratic practice emerged with the need to lower the town’s gates as part of the broader shift from mercantilism to liberal economics. This shift opened towns to wider trading networks but si­mul­ta­neously created opportunities for beggars, thieves, smugglers, and other “unwanted” ele­ments to arrive along with ­legal commodities. Town planners had to or­ga­nize circulation so that “good” circulation could be distinguished from “bad” circulation (2007: 18). Hence the goal of security is a ­matter not of sealing the border but of regulating the flow of objects—­expected and unexpected—­across it. National economies, like the old town economies, cannot function as islands unto themselves. States’ efforts to curtail clandestine migration exemplify Foucault’s general point: “The general question basically ­will be how to keep a type of criminality, theft [or undocumented migration] for instance, within socially and eco­nom­ically acceptable limits and around an average that ­will be considered as optimal for a given social functioning” (5). Insofar as Bentham’s panopticon—­through which the sovereign authority maintains a constant eye on its bounded domain—­ cannot hold on a global scale, we now have the rise of what Bigo calls the “ban-­ opticon,” in which global security apparatuses “depend on the control of movement more than the control of stocks in a territory” (2006: 44). The EU’s ban-­opticon works through an internal-­external approach that fuses it to countries along its southern and eastern borders. Its internal agenda for common migration policy is outlined in the Stockholm Programme (2009–14) and other affiliated agreements and policy statements elaborated a­ fter the program formally closed. ­These documents address common standards on m ­ atters such as mi­grant detention, information gathering and sharing, border security, and asylum among member states (see Andrijasevic and Walters 2010; Bigo and Guild 2005; Boswell and Geddes 2011; Larner and Walters 2004; Lazaridis and

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Wadia 2015; Walters 2002, 2006; Zaiotti 2011). However, the efforts to regulate migration extend beyond the EU’s external border to incorporate countries in North and Central Africa and the ­Middle East. Designed to stop or at least greatly reduce mi­grant flows into the EU, the Eu­ro­pean Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) involves carrot-­and-­stick diplomacy, in which development aid is tied to strengthening border-­control mea­sures (Bialasiewicz 2012; Kuus 2014). The EU ­will leverage African countries if it decides to apply its resources to that end. The deal might also require a commitment in which Saharan countries agree to receive ­those citizens of theirs whom the EU is preparing to return due to their illegal status. Some countries can apply their own leverage in return. U ­ ntil his 2011 death, Libyan leader Mu’ammar Gaddhafi milked billions of Euros from former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to prevent transit mi­grants in his country from setting sail across the Mediterranean Sea. Tinti and Reitano (2016: 105) ironically note that Gaddhafi was the EU’s “most reliable border guard.” Nevertheless, ­these efforts at managing its external border—­always transpiring in fits, starts, and setbacks—­serve as the mechanisms through which the EU obtains its significance as a coherent po­liti­cal entity. As Follis (2012: 7; see also Wilson and Donnan 2012) aptly puts it, “Borders and border zones are not merely margins of polities, but play a central role in their constitution.” The larger EU migration apparatus (G. Feldman 2012) of which ­these efforts are a core part allows for the circulation of ­people through the EU while screening travellers according to nationalist security concerns. Yet, in separating “good” from “bad,” it creates “governance by exclusion” (Follis 2012: 18). Examples of the increased regulation of mobility include the proliferation of security and policing agencies, the numerous checks and documentary requirements for t­ hose applying for ­legal entry, and the heightened remote sensing of the EU’s frontier space far from its a­ ctual border to push back against clandestine migration. In the latter approach, dangers such as terrorism, drugs, and migration flows are “bundled” and managed as a package remotely through surveillance and drones (Andersson 2016). ­These efforts are often conducted via a client state’s security forces that do the EU’s bidding. Collectively, they amount to what many critical scholars call the “debordering” of the border itself, or the proliferation of EU bordering practices across global space so that unwanted mi­grants are precluded from entering EU territory long before they can ever arrive at the border itself (Bialasiewicz 2012; Collyer and King 2015). The border takes on an uncanny existence of being everywhere at once, both inside and outside the formal exter-



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nal EU border. By expanding the space of state control, debordering also allows for the creation of what Drotbohm and Hasselberg call “deportation corridors” (2015: 553), through which states move illegalized mi­grants transnationally out of their own sovereign spaces (see also Peutz 2006: 218–19). The policies and international agreements that securitize global space for the EU do not dis­appear when they “hit the ground,” even if the prob­lems they define are far more complex than the policy makers ­imagined. Rather, they condition how ­people subvert them or exploit their ambiguities in their strug­gles to reach the EU, thus calling “into question the extant limits of sovereign bound­ aries, powers, and enforcement exercises” (Mountz and Loyd 2013: 175). The results bring forth testimonies to limitless ­human creativity and perseverance, as chronicled in Andersson’s ethnography, Illegality Inc. (2014; see also Ben-­Yehoyada 2015: 184; 2017; Collyer 2007), with re­spect to mi­grant flows from West Africa to the EU, and in Spener’s ethnography, Clandestine Crossings (2009; see also De Leon 2015), with re­spect to undocumented migration from Mexico to Texas. We can add that smuggling rings, in all their va­ri­e­ties, rely on a wide variety of state and nonstate actors whose contributions to the enterprise remain u ­ nder the radar. Dispersed across countries, t­ hese actors include logistical experts, border officials, police officers, financiers, traders, former mi­grants, and many ­others (Tinti and Reitano 2016: 57–65). Perhaps most frustrating for security officials is the frequent use of hawāla financial transactions, which allow money to move between ­people through a series of middlemen without leaving documentary or electronic traces. In direct contrast to an apparatus, which is based on clearly stipulated technical language to which any given technocrat can refer, the hawāla system is embedded in personal relationships built on trust and reputation and thus does not need to be formally codified (68–72). In general, “illicit” (criminal) and “licit” (state agent) networks meet at some point outside the ­legal domain and often merge together outside the formal apparatus (see also Jusionyte 2015). Nordstrom (2007; see also Shelley 2014) demonstrates the point’s centrality to the global economy and the circulation of commodities. The point pertains just as well to t­ hose managing the global circulation of p ­ eople. In Southern countries, particularly African countries, police and other state officials accept bribes from Northern officials to allow them to return mi­grants to their home countries. Max explains that the deal transpires when the home country’s official explains that he is “thirsty and would like a soda.” Once the Northern official pays for the “soda,” the recipient often adds that

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his “friends are thirsty too,” so that the largesse spreads to his colleagues as well. Conversely, Northern officials are also prone to bribes from Southern smugglers, though it seems to be more the exception than rule. The team have conducted investigations on personnel in the Immigration Ser­vice, while other police forces uncovered high-­level bribery during my fieldwork. In the United States, a New York Times (2016) investigation revealed that over two hundred employees at the Department of Homeland Security accepted over fifteen million dollars in bribes between 2006 and 2016 to facilitate the smuggling of drugs and ­humans. The key point h ­ ere is that to grasp how global security apparatuses work as daily practice—­and again, security is a ­matter of conditioning circulations, not preventing them per se—­one must look explic­itly outside the ­legal framework. The question is not primarily about the justness and the enforceability of the law but rather about how security personnel and criminals act in reference to the law. The question of state security cannot be adequately addressed through the analytical prism of the state itself, lest we fall victim to what Agnew (1994; see also Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996; Walker 1992) calls the “territorial trap” and what Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) call “methodological nationalism.” The point parallels Nordstrom’s argument about the global economy: it cannot be understood by focusing narrowly on the formal economy, the only part of the economy for which economists can obtain data (2007: 23–24). Put differently, to understand security (akin to understanding sovereignty), one must understand that the “state,” as a status quo, holds together, and is challenged, in a field of global ­human relations.

The Interface of Biopower and Biopolitics: Conceptualizing Sovereign Action in the Global Gray Zone Strictly speaking, international relations transpire in a lawless zone held together by diplomatic custom. International law issues not from a higher sovereign authority but rather through agreements among nominally equal sovereign states. In such a situation, de facto sovereignty emits from the agent with most leverage—­military, po­liti­cal, or economic—to exempt itself from diplomatic agreements or to write them in terms entirely favorable to itself. Much of ­these sovereign acts occurred u ­ nder the rubric of humanitarian intervention, in which Western liberal agendas are advanced through proactive military operations (Agier 2011; I. Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Pandolfi 2010). Thus a critical study of



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global security practices, as indicators of sovereign action, begins its analy­sis in the gray zone rather than in international ­legal agreements. Hardt and Negri’s analy­sis in Empire (2000) has much to offer in this regard. Their distinction between biopower and biopolitics helps us visualize global sovereign authority and, to a limited extent, the modus operandi of movements that try to constitute alternative spaces. This distinction allows us to pinpoint specific social relations that lead to sovereign action. Following in a post-­ Marxist tradition, they see politics as emanating from the creative potential inherent in the ­human laboring capacity and in the new post-­Fordist forms of ­labor organ­ization. ­These forms are largely horizontal, transnationally networked, and inclusive. They add to this observation that the ever more ingenious ways that capital discovers to exploit ­labor (i.e., biopower) likewise provide ­labor with an ever more power­ful basis to resist capital and to constitute genuinely demo­cratic po­liti­cal spaces (i.e., biopolitics). Biopower materializes through the technocratic logics of capital and of the global security apparatus that sustains it, while biopolitics materializes through the creative potential of organically networked ­people. (I w ­ ill examine Hardt and Negri’s argument more thoroughly in the Conclusion to highlight, and to try to bypass, its limits.) As state security agents, the team are primarily instruments of biopower as they pursue security through the technocratic lens of the apparatus. Conversely, smuggling networks require actions and orga­nizational forms that can be horizontal (though many are not) and evade the apparatus’s regulatory mea­sures. As described in the Introduction, this interface between the team (biopower) and criminal rings (which may exhibit biopolitics) sometimes results in a mirroring effect that similarly occurs in counterinsurgency warfare (in which security actors copy the tactics and orga­nizational modes of the networks they are combatting) (Robben 2010; for a similar argument see Žižek 2002: 37–38). The creativity of the clandestine rings prompts the networked security actors to respond with similar innovations. The image of the biopower-­biopolitics interface helps us visualize the interface between the investigative team and the criminal rings. The team’s place in the larger global gray zone transpires secretly. Neither investigators nor criminal networks can appear as they are when d­ oing their respective work. They must maintain a semblance of normality lest the other side, or any ordinary bystander, properly recognize them (Chapter 3). The investigators cannot be seen to be ­doing investigations, while the criminals cannot be seen to be d­ oing crime. Both sides require secrecy when trying to

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outwit the other. The two sides inevitably meet in the gray zone when pursuing their opposing aims. The investigators must enter it and break laws that would other­wise restrict their ability to gather evidence (Marx 1988: xix). They must commit crime to defeat crime. Similarly, the criminals must (or would ideally like to) recruit associates, working in government, law, or as private individuals, who can facilitate their business enterprise. The best recruits for their purposes are often l­awyers, who can help them move smuggled or trafficked individuals through the ambiguities of l­ egal pro­cesses, or state officials, who can arrange for the procurement of travel documents or obstruct investigative efforts. The chapter now turns to several cases that the team have investigated, to show the interface between the state, represented by the team itself, and the dif­ fer­ent modes in which illegal activity appears in their country. ­These cases include Nigerian rings that traffic in female prostitutes, and a Romanian criminal ring that traffics and smuggles prostitutes, organizes street theft, and manages street beggars. ­These cases draw out where the team enters the gray zone and the conditions that made it desirable for them to do so. The chapter begins with a study of a high-­end dance club that includes a brothel. The club encapsulates the superficial sense of freedom, liberation, and openness that conceals structural in­equality and systemic atomization. It reveals the limits of the territorial state, per the first sovereign form, but also conveys how living in the margins of the global security apparatus that it upholds can still leave p ­ eople vulnerable to exploitation. Evading the law and entering the gray zone do not necessarily enable the second sovereign form.

Christie’s and the Spectacle of Plea­sure Christie’s is the creation of an entrepreneurial ­woman named Christiana. Her work showcases affective ­labor packaged into a spectacle, and the merging of the illicit and the licit along with the l­ egal and the illegal. She runs a middle-­class dance club that fronts as a brothel in a sleepy rural town. Her success occurs in the context of global liberalism understood as the fulfillment of individual wants and desires. As she tells her story, Christie grew up poor, enjoying her first ice cream only at age nine and her first trip to the movies at age seventeen. She carefully explains that “the girls”—­the ­women who work in her nightclub—­are ­doing this work for need, not vanity or greed. Christiana has faced her own challenges—­she had to leave her son with her parents ­while serving a jail sentence for producing fraudulent travel documents. She has been asked on several



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occasions if her establishment ­is actually a brothel. Her reply in one newspaper interview was s­ imple: “I ­don’t sell sex. I sell com­pany. We just tease and play with our customers so that they have a healthy night.” Her appeal to the health of her customers morally legitimizes her business on the claim that it ultimately stabilizes a population by allowing men to vicariously gratify their sexual drives without causing harm to ­others. ­Here, the liberal (qua libidinal) individual is both expressed and secured through marketplace activity. We arrived at the club ­after 9:00 p.m. in total darkness. The small town, about an hour’s drive outside the city, could not be seen from the rural road leading to a gravel parking lot. I hopped out of the car, disoriented ­after the long drive, with Frank, David, and Brian. They removed the Glock pistols from the insides of their ­belts and put them in the trunk. They then placed their badges, issued by the Ministry of the Interior, next to their guns. Rarely do they disarm, normally carry­ ing their weapons and badge at all times. Paramilitaries, drug cartels, po­liti­cal separatist groups, mafias, and the like create phantom states (i.e., they are “illicit” organ­izations that legitimize themselves by conducting statelike functions). In ­those cases, I could understand why t­ hese three investigators of transnational crime, arriving on their own, would not want to enter outlaw turf with sidearms. But the establishment we ­were visiting—­a one-­story sprawling complex—­was controlled by no such outlaw group and posed no threat whatsoever to this sovereign nation-­state and EU member state. We ­were only visiting an upscale dance club and brothel that also functioned as a stalwart part of the town’s economy. We walked ­toward a dark doorway where the silhouette of a large, beefy bouncer appeared in its frame. Opening the door, he pointed us t­ oward a walk-­ through metal detector, the kind one sees at airports. Two other security guards, equipped with wires r­ unning from their ears to the radio transmitter on their ­belts, manned ­either side of the detector. We proceeded through the rectangular frame one by one. As each of us passed, a guard stuck out a jar with a picture of a smiling boy sitting in a wheelchair and holding a basketball. We w ­ ere asked to donate one euro to a local NGO supporting ­children with disabilities. I coughed up my euro and looking quizzically at Brian. He responded, “Yeah, it’s legit. It supports the town’s handicapped kids.” Along with the security firm, Christie’s employs bartenders and a cleaner (who washes towels and sheets and provides custodial ser­vices). Christiana also owns a gym and another bar in town. She raises funds for expensive operations for c­ hildren with disease. She

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supports student clubs and student excursions. Local merchants and taxis appreciate her establishment b­ ecause it is good for business. Without Christie’s, the town would have remained a marginal place in the national economy. Her entrepreneurialism has made it something of global town adapted to the rapidly growing ser­vice economy, which involves ever more private security firms alongside state security and policing agents. ­These sundry security actors ensure an orderly pro­cess of global circulation of ­women and clients so that the commodity of a “healthy night” can be traded at a market price. Christie’s shows the preeminence of humanitarianism as liberal spectacle backed up by extensive, privatized security ser­vices. It resembles other spectacles—­the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, or any other sporting event drawing athletes and paying customers from around the world and presenting a moral message alongside. The essence of ­these spectacles as social phenomena is premised upon commodity exchange: the experience of plea­sure for a market price and provided as affective ­labor (Hardt and Negri: 2000: 289–94; 2004: 108). This form of immaterial ­labor produces not tangible objects but rather plea­sure, sympathy, and care as commodities of experience. Moreover, it transforms the laborer from only the producer of the commodity to both the producer and the commodity itself. Affective ­labor moves a step past the exchange of externalized commodities by having the worker sell her “subjectivity”—an affected personality—to a consumer as a commodified personal experience. The exchange superficially pres­ents itself as a solid relationship. In the meantime, the added value of the commodified experience is retained not by the affective laborer but rather by the one who controls her (in this case, Christiana). Indeed, the affective labor-­power functions as capital whose owner reaps the benefit of its surplus value. Nevertheless, Christiana pres­ents her establishment as a demo­ cratic institution. ­Later that eve­ning, when she fired up the all-­male crowd for the night’s showcase per­for­mance, she loudly and confidently announced that “at Christie’s, every­one is welcome: the rich, the poor, and p ­ eople from all over the world.” Indeed, liberalism ostensibly eradicates bound­aries, letting all ­people fulfill their wishes and desires provided that d­ oing so harms no other. Immediately we enter the club, we come to a large dance floor reverberating with Europop blaring out of the speakers. Off to one side ­were a small set of bleachers, where the ­women sit. Next to the bleachers is a door that they occasionally go through and return. From casing the establishment earlier in the



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year, the team know that the ­women rent rooms ­behind the door, where they take clients who wish to purchase sex. Christiana claims to be unaware of what her dancers do in t­ hose rooms for an impor­tant ­legal purpose: she insists that she rents the rooms; it is the w ­ omen’s’ own business what they do in them. Across the dance floor from the bleachers is the bar, staffed by four men. Proceeding straight across from the dance floor is a lounge separated by curtains of hanging beads that features small, private seating areas. The club’s cleanliness and orderliness, to say nothing of the security guards’ presence, give it an assuring sense of safety. As the male customers accumulate, the interior space, much like a ju­nior high school dance, is divided: the w ­ omen sit on the bleachers, and the men loiter at the bar. Before long, however, the ­women begin to make their way across the dance floor to the bar and start conversations with the men. The w ­ omen appear to range in age from eigh­teen to their mid-­thirties, though one ­woman is likely in her fifties. They hail from around the world: Romania, Ukraine, Brazil, Venezuela, and South Africa. They are dressed in the skimpiest of outfits that faintly suggest a fantasy motif for the male customer: the American cowgirl, the space-­ alien lover, the wild jungle w ­ oman, and so on. They appear as sexualized cartoons, three-­dimensional adaptations for the customers’ one-­dimensional fantasies. The men seem to be equally global in their backgrounds: yuppies, tourists, soldiers from a nearby military base, a group of Nigerians with business interests in the city, and a man of rural background in his early seventies who spends most of the night motionless by the bar. The conversations start when the ­women approach you with a smile and twinkling eyes, or when they “accidentally” brush against you. They ask your name and they tell you theirs. Confident in conversation, they talk about what­ ever the customer wants. Many clients joke with them, chat with them, or put on brave, manly f­aces. If it becomes clear that the customer w ­ ill not buy any of her ser­vices, she mentions to call her back again if he changes his mind. She then circulates among the other customers. I made the m ­ istake of paying for two beers, totaling four euros, with a twenty euro note, which signalled to the ­women that I had cash. The bartender even held up the note and said “twenty” as if to clarify to me that he knew the amount I gave him so that I could expect the correct change. However, he was simultaneously informing the w ­ omen sitting across the dance floor of a potential cash cow.

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Yet, apart from the visual sensationalism, conversations with the w ­ omen are remarkably down to earth and without any air of per­for­mance b­ ehind them. Their stories sound remarkably unfake. One thirty-­year-­old ­woman, with a French ­mother and South African ­father, asks me innocuous questions about my personal life. She then explains that she was divorced five years ago and now takes care of two girls. She hopes to start a spa with the money she is earning. This brief interaction, the least expensive on offer, required me to purchase her a drink for twenty euros. The scale then increases to thirty euros to sit with her in the lounge, forty euros for thirty minutes in the dorm room, fifty euros for an hour, and three hundred for the night. According to the team, the rooms are equipped with sanitizing kits and condoms. At midnight, Christiana begins her signature and well-­choreographed spectacle. She pushes the customers away from the bar. The staff hang three swings from the ceiling. The m ­ usic takes on a heavy, pounding beat, and she begins to warm up the crowd like an emcee. With her headset connected to amplifiers, she talks to dif­fer­ent guys in the crowd, teasing them to the laughter of the ­others. She mainly embarrasses them about their lack of manhood. To David, she taunts, “What ­will you do when you stop sucking that beer ­bottle?” A ­ fter ten minutes, three ­women dressed in the Rococo style of eighteenth-­century France (the cultural origin of the bourgeoisie’s fantasies of frivolous desire) start to swing through the air across the bar t­ oward the crowd as tender, romantic m ­ usic plays. They perform shoddy acrobatics as they swing according to Christiana’s hand signals. They kick their legs up and then spread them wide. Then they leap off the swings and remove their costumes to reveal nothing but white lingerie and a fake white powdered wig, in which they perform an erotic dance. ­After that, Christiana yells, “­We’ll light the place on fire.” She then pours a line of alcohol from one end of the bar to the other and, with a lighter, creates a wall of fire as she calls out: “Christie’s!!!” The crowd cheer.

­Behind the Spectacle of Health and Freedom What is striking about Christiana’s w ­ hole spectacle is the degree of detail and coordination behind it. The irony therefore emerges—an irony indicative of the larger neoliberal context in which this spectacle materializes—­that an erstwhile experience of spontaneity, frivolity, plea­sure, and freedom is enabled by extensive unseen preparations, regulations, and disciplinary mechanisms. Christiana, whom the ­women sometimes call “Auntie,” insists that she takes



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good care of them. She demands that they be “ladies” and not sit around “with their legs open.” They should recognize that they are ­people “of culture and status.” She regulates their diet—­and, as such, their body mass index—­because she prepares all of their meals and purchases all of the food while they stay at her establishment. She advises them on their outfits and trains them how to dance. She even coordinates their interaction with the customers if she sees men spending too much time alone. Again, neoliberalism has not inaugurated an era of less regulation. Rather than overtly regulate p ­ eoples’ activities, bureaucracies implement basic conditions in which ­people conduct themselves as self-­regulating, entrepreneurial subjects, thereby generating the society of apparently “­free” actors (Foucault 2008: 118–21; see also Graeber 2015; Peck and Theodore 2015; Strathern 2000). Therefore, exotic dance clubs are spaces of intense surveillance that nonetheless result in a “healthy” and apparently spontaneous environment, even if they are subject to re­sis­tance (Egan 2004). Christie’s is the embodiment of discreet neoliberal regulation. It is difficult to gauge the extent of the ­women’s appreciation of Christiana’s efforts ­because, like any employee, they might be reluctant to criticize their employer. However, the establishment is a safe place to work in the adult entertainment/prostitution industry. The clientele tend t­ oward the ­middle class. One ­woman explains that she is Roma and uses the money to feed her d­ aughter back at home in Romania. She argues that many w ­ omen do this kind of work. “I have a husband at home, not ­because he is a pimp. He is Roma. He would be arrested if he worked [he would work illegally underground].” Another w ­ oman elaborates further social complications in which she is enmeshed: A ­woman who lives by day lives in monotony. She cleans the ­house, makes lunch, and ­doesn’t even care about her husband. The girls that live by night are the reason marriages end. We just give men what they want: attention. ­Women who live by night are not happy, but neither are ­women who live by day. They [the latter] are fools for letting their husbands disrespect them when they come ­here.

Christiana echoes this point when she argues that “if someone tells me that I exploit ­women, I would say to them that you prob­ably exploit your wife even more.” Indeed, the bound­aries between exploitation and marriage (or marriage-­ like) relationships can be difficult to discern (Brennan 2004). Much exploitation is entirely l­ egal. However, pimping is not, and ­running a brothel qualifies as pimping. State prosecutors charged Christiana with this crime

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in 2008, but she managed to evade conviction, primarily by arguing that the ­women are her clients not her employees. They only rent rooms from her. If she teaches them to dance, then that is so they can have a good time at the bar, where they can meet men if they would like. Christiana argues that she only earns money from selling drinks and renting rooms and that she has no control over what the ­women do in the rooms. Yet she charges rent at an extraordinarily high rate, a rate that the w ­ omen can only pay if they charge customers for sex. In short, even though she profits from other w ­ omen’s work in prostitution, that fact cannot be traced to her through a distinct money trail. As a result, the panel of judges ruled that the prosecution had failed to marshal sufficient evidence against her. This surprising verdict gave credence to the suspicion of local police officers that Christiana had blackmailed one of the prosecutors (with video evidence of his extramarital affair) to weaken the case. Moreover, they suspected that some judges are clients of the ­women working in her club.

Irregular Migration from Africa The upscale end of the prostitution market is more professionalized, and the ­women working clubs such as Christie’s are comparatively more integrated into national society (Monzini 2005: 37). Yet the picture is dif­fer­ent closer to the street. Monzini (24) observes that since the 1980s, the global sex market has under­gone considerable expansion in areas where wealth is concentrated, with upwards of seven billion dollars in annual turnover by 2005. This figure reached ninety-­nine billion in 2013 (International ­Labour Organ­ization 2014). This expansion has specifically led to the growth of low-­sector markets and to the industry’s acquiring a transnational character (33). The result is a market of desire that can be cheaply tailored to male notions of exotic sexuality. In western Eu­rope, that low-­end sector is dominated by w ­ omen from Africa, eastern Eu­rope, and the Balkans (34) but also includes a significant number of w ­ omen from Latin Amer­i­ca. Chinese prostitution has proven the most difficult to quantify ­because much of it is reserved for Chinese clients living or working abroad. In this multiethnic market, foreign ­women make up a substantial percentage of prostitutes: an estimated 30 ­percent in Ireland, 65 ­percent in the Netherlands, 50 ­percent in Germany, 35 ­percent in Denmark, 40 ­percent in Finland, and 60 ­percent in France (Lehti cited in Monzini). As of 2005, 90 ­percent of Vienna’s six thousand prostitutes ­were immigrants, and that number reached 70 ­percent for ­those working in London’s bars and clubs (35).



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Migration from Africa is best known from the extensive media reports of boats travelling north from Libya into the Mediterranean Sea. ­These flows contain two sets of p ­ eople, broadly defined. From the southeast and east of Libya, mainly Syrians and Eritreans seek solace from warfare or po­liti­cal persecution (or the heavy-­handed state in the Eritrean case). From the southwest and west, Nigerians, Senegalese, Malians, and ­others seek v­ iable wages to work in the aftermath of economic restructuring programs that have drastically altered local economies. The latter flows have held steady for the better part of fifteen years, while the former have spiked with the crisis in Syria. This spike drastically increased the boat traffic from Libya and ultimately led to Italy’s Mare Nostrum (October 2013–­October 2014) operation. Mare Nostrum responded to the tragedy on October 3, 2013, when three hundred mi­grants drowned ­after their boat capsized close to Italian shores. The humanitarian outcry that followed prompted Italy to adopt a proactive strategy for rescuing mi­grants at sea. Italian naval vessels began patrolling close to Libyan national ­waters to collect mi­grants once the mi­ grants sent out a distress signal. This move saved lives primarily b­ ecause mi­ grants only had to sail some twelve kilo­meters from the Libyan shore to reach international w ­ aters. At that point they could be rescued rather than attempt a transfer to a fishing trawler, which would normally carry them for the remainder of the 160-­kilometer journey. That transfer point poses the greatest risk as it requires an orderly and coordinated movement of scores of ­people from one small vessel to a slightly larger vessel. Rather than provide sturdier vessels, smugglers could put mi­grants on cheaper dinghies and provide them with a GPS device and a satellite phone preprogrammed with the telephone number of the Italian navy, whom the mi­grants ­were told to call ­after four hours. Mare Nostrum led to a surge in demand for trans-­Mediterranean journeys ­because it increased the success rate and lowered the costs. Thus smuggling networks proliferated and professionalized through northern and sub-­Saharan Africa and started to include an increasing number of sophisticated low-­level recruiters to bring in more clients. Even ­after Mare Nostrum’s termination in 2014, replaced by Frontex’s Operation Triton, smuggling rates continued apace but at a higher level of risk as the patrol ships stayed farther from Libyan w ­ aters. The smugglers continued to use the surplus of unsuitable dinghies, which now had to be sailed farther out to sea (Tinti and Reitano 2016: 119–21; see Albahari 2015: 193–95 for a critique of Mare Nostrum). In 2015, a rec­ord number of ­people, reaching 1,255,640, applied for asylum in the EU, more than double the number from 2014 (Eurostat

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2016). The number of deaths increased year on year: 3,283 in 2014; 3,783 in 2015; 5,143 in 2016; and 2,297 from January 1 to July 5, 2017 (IOM 2017). The spike in trans-­Mediterranean crossings is attributable more to the flows from the east and southeast than from West Africa. The bulk of mi­grants hailing from West Africa do not arrive by boat, contrary to the media’s impression. One study found that only 8  ­percent of irregular mi­grants in Spain arrive by sea, most apparently overstaying their visas (UNODC 2011: 9). In Italy, 66 ­percent of irregular mi­grants obtained that status through visa overstay (10). Moreover, West African mi­grants are in a better economic situation than many of their compatriots (De Haas cited in ibid.). In any case, mi­grants pay for the cost of travel from West Africa to Eu­rope through two methods (13–14). One method is a pay-­as-­ you-go system, where mi­grants pay for specific legs of the journey (for descriptions see Albahari 2015; Andersson 2014; G. Feldman 2012: 110–13). This method can extend the journey for years—­money for each subsequent leg must be earned along the way, or the smugglers lack contacts further along the trail. The other method is the “full package” system, in which mi­grants pay a large lump sum to a local handler, who then arranges for contacts along the journey to ­house and transport them. While most mi­grants travel on the pay-­as-­you-go system, b­ ecause it is cheaper, most Nigerian ­women who end up in prostitution in Eu­rope pay for the full package system. The journey begins with them being told, and perhaps believing, that they ­will work as domestic help in Eu­rope. ­These ­women are bought by “madams” (or mamas), often based in Morocco, before moving onto Eu­rope. Madams are Nigerian ­women tied into the trafficking networks. Many of them worked as prostitutes prior to obtaining this higher level of status and income. Ultimately, the mi­grants who get absorbed into the sex trade become victims of trafficking, legally defined, because ­people ­will earn money from their ­labor in Eu­rope, while the crime would only be smuggling if someone earned money only from the fees paid for travel ser­vices. The Nigerian ­women who get trafficked into prostitution incur a debt of several thousand euros, which must be repaid with high interest to the madam, who then reimburses her associates in the transnational ring. As of 2011, an estimated 5,700 West African ­women, mainly Nigerians, entered Eu­rope each year, often by air, which would greatly increase their debt. The majority of t­ hese w ­ omen end up in Italy. A committee of the Nigerian House of Representatives reported that as many as



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ten thousand girls and ­women could be trapped in the sex-­slave trade in Libya and Morocco alone. Many of the ­women and girls in ­these countries and in Eu­ rope hail from Edo State, Nigeria (UNODC 2011: 17).

Sadie and the Nigerian Case

Sadie is serious and straightforward, with a look of sadness in her eyes. She clarifies at the beginning of our first interview that I am not allowed to videorecord anything. When she is not working as a prostitute, Sadie shares a small apartment with a man from Sierra Leone and a w ­ oman from the Ivory Coast with a baby. Sadie’s story is typical of the Nigerian ­women who end up in prostitution in Eu­rope. Though it is tempting to see her as a passive victim of nefarious traffickers, like so many other trafficked/smuggled persons, she has made her decisions through a series of individual situations, each of which prompted a necessary decision reached in light of a larger, vaguer background of high economic uncertainty (see Mahdavi 2011). Now in her late twenties, she began working at an intersection close to the team’s office at the decrepit historic square on Miranda Street next to an auto repair shop. She shares the space with two or three other Nigerian prostitutes. Together they are a fixed part of the daily life at that intersection. Sadie hails from Benin City in the Nigerian state of Edo. In this city, Sadie earns at least fifteen euros per customer; in Edo, at best, she could earn ten euros per day as a cleaner. She might have had better prospects back home if she w ­ ere educated, but the cost of an education was likely too high, and her ­father did not prioritize her ahead of her male siblings. As she explains it, she contacted a man in Edo who knew about employment first in Morocco, then in Spain, with a Nigerian w ­ oman who needed help caring for her baby and herself. The ­woman advanced Sadie the cost of transportation to Morocco. Sadie’s Nigerian handlers bound her in a pact through a voodoo ritual sanctified by a deity represented anthropomorphically as a doll. She agreed to pay back the sum advanced to her to travel to Eu­rope, plus interest. The doll is crafted to induce fear. “You would be afraid of it,” Sadie insisted. “They make the doll with eyes and nose and mouth. Then, they talk, talk, talk, and drink whiskey. When you see it, you are afraid, so I ask God to help me. They did it with me. It’s for them to know that you w ­ ill do what you are supposed to. If you d­ on’t pay, then ­there is a prob­lem. Life is difficult.” Ellis reports that some w ­ omen knowingly accept a fifty-­thousand euro bond to work as prostitutes in Italy. This debt

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­ ill require some five thousand encounters with clients to pay back the bond w and return home much wealthier (Ellis cited in Tinti and Reitano 2016: 52; for a comprehensive description of the Nigerian sex trade, see Ellis 2016: 180–92). Sadie endured an arduous journey to Morocco, but not an unusual one. She travelled first to Togo by bus with six other young w ­ omen. A local contact, called a gidma, told her which bus to take and where to stay. A ­ fter a few days, the gidma instructed them on to a dif­fer­ent bus, bound for Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He likewise gave them instructions about where to stay in that city, so that one of the gidma’s contacts could keep watch over them. They remained in Abidjan for three months in order to avoid the police. Sadie remarked that “girls are not supposed to go on the street. We c­ ouldn’t come out. No phone calls. We leave when the man tells us it is time.” When the time came, they boarded a smaller bus with several more young w ­ omen and men and drove for two weeks from Abidjan to Morocco across the Western Sahara via Mali and Algeria. The gidma negotiated with police at borders and checkpoints and arranged for food along the way (usually bread and bananas). Sadie lived for two years in Morocco working for the mama. However, she was never to be employed as a caretaker. (In fact, the mama had told the same story to the six other w ­ omen that travelled with Sadie out of Nigeria.) The mama explained that she had no money to pay Sadie, so she could not work off her debt through caretaking. Instead, lacking any money to continue to Eu­rope or return to Nigeria, she would have to work as a prostitute. ­After two years, Sadie paid the mama two thousand euros, at which point the mama left. Through contacts Sadie had cultivated in Morocco, she managed to find transport to Spain by ­arranging a similar deal with a mama based in Germany. She boarded a boat for a voyage that would take eight days, despite the short distance compared to her Saharan journey. “Every­body was afraid,” she recalled. Upon arrival in Spain, the police collected the entire group and took them to a camp. Sadie asked for asylum but did not get it. Most likely, the authorities concluded that she was an economic mi­grant, not someone who had endured persecution. She explained that “Nigeria is difficult. I need to help my friends and I have a son.” Due to delays in  concluding her asylum request, she managed to leave Spain, without any ­papers, and travel by bus to this country. Another gidma put her in touch with ­people with whom she could live. About a fifteen-­minute walk from the city’s historic district, the intersection where Sadie works is formed by Miranda Street, home to small businesses and



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cafés, and two side streets leading to residential blocks. ­Those blocks mix el­derly nationals who never moved out of the neighborhood b­ ecause of favorable rent-­ control laws and immigrants from a range of African, South Asian, and east Eu­ro­pean countries. Foot traffic through the intersection is busy with locals as well as tourists, students, and visitors from anywhere in the world. Many of t­ hese ­people stay in the variety of hostels and pensions that dot the urban landscape. Along with them pass uniformed police on foot patrol, drug addicts, and members of the young hi-hop crowd. Sadie might lean against the wall of a building or sit in the plaza, occasionally joking with a mechanic at the auto repair shop while she waits for clients. The foot traffic is good for business. An old side street turns off of Miranda Street and up a small hill. ­After just one block, it meets a pension, run by two el­derly nationals, called Petit Palace. This modest establishment is tucked away in an old building located at the end of the meandering street. A dark interior staircase leads to a locked glass door, where one must ring a bell to have the proprietor unlock the door leading to the lobby. Half of this pension is exclusively used by prostitutes e­ ither working in­de­ pen­dently or for a pimp. Most guests stay in ­these rooms for no more than thirty minutes. The old hardwood floor lobby is nicely kept and tastefully decorated, even with worn furnishings. A cigarette machine and hutch with a mirror and a clock also feature in the lobby. The owner, who by law keeps a registry of all the guests, works b­ ehind a wooden c­ ounter and keeps statues of the Virgin Mary on a shelf. A flat-­screen color TV is fixed high in one corner. A nearby t­able has tourist pamphlets scattered on top. A closet has neatly stacked fresh linens. Two corridors lead to the tiny rooms. One corridor leads to rooms used by nonnationals of many dif­fer­ent backgrounds who are ­either staying in town for short-­ term visits or still looking for longer term accommodation. The other corridor provides rooms used by prostitutes at a rate of five euros for thirty minutes. Sadie takes each client to Petit Palace. She exchanges a greeting and joke with the proprietor as she takes me ­there for our first interview. He gives her a key as I pay him the five-­euro room charge. High up on a corner cabinet sits a witch doll with an exaggeratedly large nose, beady eyes, wrinkled skin, and a fearsome grin. Sadie likens it to a voodoo doll. As we walk past, she quickly points to it as she also smiles to an African ­woman in the lobby who is with an African man. On the staircase, she laughs, slightly embarrassed, and says, “Yes, it [the voodoo doll] is like that.” In one open closet in the lobby corner are stacks of neatly folded towels tended by a cleaning w ­ oman.

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She proceeds down one corridor and is passed by another man with a small suitcase. He appears to be staying at the hostel as a traditional guest, as many ­people still do. Sadie takes her clients down the other corridor and into a small room with an old double bed with sheets, pillows, and blankets. It takes up two thirds of the room. The other one-­third has a low, small sink, a low, small toilet, and two win­dows on adjacent walls. The room has a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and a painting of the Virgin Mary. A vase of fake flowers sits on one end t­ able, which is covered decoratively with lace. Painted white tiles adorn part of the walls. Sadie explains that she does not take Nigerian men, in case she knows their wives, and ­under no circumstances does she allow any videotaping. Some clients are Chinese who own small businesses in the area but live in the suburbs. Casual observations of the intersection also show many nationals, both young professionals and pensioners, who purchase her ser­vices and ­those of the other Nigerian ­women who wait ­there. Their attitudes ­toward her vary widely. Some ask her questions to learn more about her situation and offer sympathy. Some, she explains, “are crazy.” Their ages range from men as old as her ­father to young boys. Sadie is known to the immigration authorities, who have issued a deportation order against her. However, the team put a hold on it, hoping that she would provide them with testimony against several gidmas operating in the city. To get on her good side, they even arranged for her to talk via Skype with her nine-­year-­ old son, whom she has not seen in five years. She has nevertheless refused to help, but the team have still not removed the hold on the order. So, for now, she continues to work in the same place and sends money home to her ­family for school fees and food, although she has told them that she works as a ­house­keeper.

The Local Investigation

Sadie was moved through a Nigerian ring that normally kept the ­women in the country briefly before sending them to Germany. She negotiated with the above-­mentioned mama, living in Germany, that she could stay and have the gidma collect payment from her. The Nigerian ring that operated in the country frustrated the team ­because it worked slowly, and ­because its members ­were only loosely associated with each other. Many of ­those members might not



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even regard themselves as a “ring,” but rather as fellow Nigerians who would occasionally do mutual f­avors as they might be from the same state or share common acquaintances. Other­wise, they would be ­going about their own affairs. Regardless, Nigerian rings are known to operate in specialized, horizontal cells held together through lateral ties (Ellis 2016: 188). This arrangement has proven effective judging by the growth of Nigerian prostitution in Eu­rope. Two separate leads caught the team’s attention and together helped expose a transnational network of h ­ uman trafficking. The first lead involved a Nigerian man, Raul, who appeared as a bureaucratic anomaly: he had claimed asylum, but the local address he gave in his application did not exist. Three team members followed him to where he was actually living. A week of surveillance proved unusually informative. The team witnessed a large number of African men, w ­ omen, and ­children at the same address but only rarely g­ oing outside. This observation suggested that the address functioned as a safe h ­ ouse. (­People transported by human smuggling or trafficking often refrain from walking openly on the streets for fear of being detected without proper documentation.) This situation prompted the desk investigators to examine the asylum claims from Nigerian nationals within the last year to look for patterns. Of par­tic­u­lar interest was the frequent appearance of a local l­ awyer’s name as the applicants’ ­legal repre­sen­ta­tion in country. Normally, this fact would not raise suspicion. However, a large number of his clients w ­ ere young w ­ omen who also dis­appeared from the country. ­After sixty days in a state holding fa­cil­i­ty, juvenile asylum applicants are provided with a living stipend and moved to an open hostel contracted by the Ministry. They can come and go freely at the hostel. Once asylum seekers arrive at the hostel, they often leave for good once the gidma contacts them. Many of the young Nigerian ­women who end up in prostitution in Eu­rope enter in this way. The trafficker’s first goal is simply to get the ­women into the Schengen Area. From ­there, they can be easily moved to the most lucrative location. The frequent disappearance of young ­women from such a hostel, whom this ­lawyer had represented, convinced a judge to issue a warrant for the investigators to tap his phone. The phone taps revealed that the l­awyer was in frequent contact with Raul, plus two other Nigerians, and another man from Ghana. ­These men would tell the ­lawyer the names of the ­women flying to the country and their flight details. The ­lawyer would meet the ­women at the airport, as their ­legal representative, and help them file an asylum claim. The team identified several

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of the dis­appeared ­women loitering at the ramshackle historic square where Sadie works. They photographed four such ­women, who spent most of the day ­there meeting clients from a wide variety of backgrounds and walking with them to Petit Palace. They seemed to match photo­graphs of young Nigerian ­women who had claimed asylum but had gone missing while their cases ­were still pending. John checked the hostel’s registry, which his badge authorizes him to do, and found that the names of the ­women who took men ­there matched the names of the missing asylum claimants. The second lead came as a phone call from a desk investigator to Max eight months l­ater on a drizzly May after­noon. That investigator had just received a call from an official in the city’s national immigration ser­vice center, where noncitizens apply for and pick up travel documents. She had placed an alert on the file of a young w ­ oman called Zelda, who her staff determined had entered the country two years earlier on a Ghanaian passport that falsely indicated her age at seventeen years. They suspected that she was eigh­teen to twenty years old but that she was taking advantage of juvenile status in her asylum application. The young ­woman’s handlers hired the local ­lawyer to take ­legal responsibility for her asylum application with the purpose of slowing the case so that she would be transferred to an open-­door hostel ­after sixty days. Zelda moved to the open-­door hostel, before vanishing from it, l­ ater reappearing in Germany during a sting operation in which police arrested her local handlers. Their arrest resulted in her receiving temporary residence for humanitarian reasons (which is not asylum) in Germany. In March 2014, she then returned to the first country to apply for a residence extension at the immigrant ser­vices center, where her asylum case remained in limbo. (An extension would enable her to travel while the decision remained outstanding.) This was the moment when the desk investigator placed the alert on her file as she would have to reappear at the center to pick up the document when it was ready. Two months ­later, when the young w ­ oman returned, an official at the center called the desk investigator and, without missing a beat, she phoned the team requesting that they follow her. The investigator asked the team not to arrest the w ­ oman for travelling on a false Ghanaian passport, ­because she sought to identify the criminal ring that had facilitated the young ­woman’s movement as well as that of other Nigerian ­women. (The state w ­ ill grant her residency if she becomes a proven trafficking victim.) The team would follow her to identify Raul as one of her contacts in the country.



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To further diagram the network composing this ring, Cecilia created a means of learning more about Raul and some of the young women to increase the efficacy of their surveillance. In a move that required illegally stealing another person’s image, she created a fake Facebook profile of a Nigerian w ­ oman seeking to meet other Nigerians in the country (Chapter 3). To persuade Raul of its legitimacy, she made the avatar hail from Edo, a well-­known source of Nigerian ­women trafficked to Eu­rope, and researched the types of ­women’s names found ­there. She grabbed an image of a w ­ oman, resembling a model, who she convincingly passed off as a local from Edo. Cecilia posted on the profile that “she” was now living in the same city as the suspect. ­After successfully friending Raul, Cecilia gained access to his postings and pictures of him with friends in the country. Two of ­those friends ­were the same men that the ­woman who arrived from Germany had met along with Raul. The team soon spotted the friends on the street and meeting occasionally with ­women who dis­appeared from the holding center. Raul increasingly appeared as a key figure in the local operation. (A panel of judges would convict him and several colleagues of maintaining a “criminal association,” which is the ­legal term for a “criminal ring.”) Pictures from Raul’s Facebook account also gave the team images of the inside of their apartment, which would l­ ater help them prepare the arrest. With the same avatar, Cecilia also “friended” several of the young ­women. This move allowed the team to identify other w ­ omen, some living in dif­fer­ent countries, as missing from open-­ door reception centers and ultimately working in prostitution for a mama living in Germany.

Surveillance on the Nigerian Case

The team needed to determine if any criminal links existed between Raul and Zelda. Two surveillance runs provided evidence of the connection. Zelda arrived at the immigration office at 4 p.m. on a May 2014 after­noon. On the first run, David, Brian, and I sat across the street at an outdoor café to watch for her exit. Frank and John remained in a car parked nearby. The ­woman exited forty minutes ­later and walked t­ oward a bus stop before getting into a taxi. David had left the café several minutes earlier to loiter unassumingly by the front door of the immigration office. When she exited, David photographed her with his cell phone. Her taxi proceeded through the busy streets of the city and then worked its way to the edge of town, where the main bus station is located. The team followed the taxi in two cars, making it easier to follow it in heavy traffic. The short distance

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between the taxi and the two cars posed no threat of identification b­ ecause, as a passenger in the back seat, the ­woman could not look in the rearview mirror. At the bus station, Zelda walked into a travel agency, where she stayed for fifteen minutes. Brian and the team relaxed for a moment b­ ecause Brian’s in­for­ mant t­ here would soon learn where the ­woman intended to travel, so no warrant would be necessary to obtain that information. As the team suspected, but still needed to confirm, the ­woman bought a bus ticket for the journey back to Germany. She was to depart the station at 7:45 a.m. the next day. A ­ fter she left the travel agency, she entered another taxi with our two cars following again to learn of her destination. Frank, John, and Brian rode in one car, and I rode with David in the other. David explained, as we kept up with the taxi, why he thought, but was not yet sure, that the ­woman worked as a prostitute (a fact that was not confirmed ­until the arrest took place in Germany as described above). As he reasoned, “She has a nice slim body, she is Nigerian, and the shoes she is wearing are ­those like prostitutes would wear. They are just sandals with only two leather straps attached to a thin ankle brace. Do you see how they are studded with a shiny metal squares?” He also noted that even though she was wearing jeans, which prostitutes do not wear when they are working, t­ hese sandals w ­ ere prob­ably used on the job. It was suspicious, he thought, that she was wearing them on such a rainy day. “She must not have any other shoes to wear,” David concluded. The w ­ oman rode in the taxi for another fifteen minutes and got out next to a two-­star hostel in town. The surveillance had yielded the destination on the bus ticket for tomorrow, her cell-­phone number (obtained from the travel agent), and the pension where she was staying, and they had photographed her. The next day the team deci­ded to see if Zelda would meet Raul. ­There was no empirical reason to think that she would, only the hunch that Raul was the biggest player in this part of the country for Nigerian ­human trafficking. Shortly ­after lunch, Brian and I waited by a small fruit shop opposite from a hair salon owned by a Nigerian ­woman. The salon also functions as a social venue for the immigrant community. Raul was known to visit the salon in the early after­ noons. At 3:00 p.m., he exited the salon on foot and proceeded down a hill ­toward Miranda Street. Brian and I followed, signalling to John and Vincent to provide support from the car. Raul descended a subway staircase, with Brian and I following along. We saw him talking with another African man near the ticket dispatchers near to where we ­were purchasing ours. Raul walked over to



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Brian, prompting me to won­der if he had discovered, and was now confronting, his surveillant. In fact, he only wished to ask for help in purchasing a ticket. Brian nonchalantly helped, taking the opportunity to ask him where he was ­going, ostensibly to help with the purchase of the ticket. Once the ticket was bought and Raul was at a safe distance, Brian told Vincent, via his cell phone, the final destination. Vincent and John drove t­here immediately; Brian and I stayed with the two men, but on opposite ends of the subway car. Since Brian knew the final destination, he was confident (and correct about) where the men would switch subway lines. They did not need to be too close to them. Surveillance became more difficult when they exited their final stop and began walking down a long, single-­lane street that bent at a gradual ­angle. This configuration makes it easy for ­people to see surveillance if they suspect they are being followed. Moreover, the road led to an immigrant neighborhood where mostly Pakistanis and Indians lived, along with some West Africans. Ten years earlier, it had been home mainly to el­derly nationals, but they now rent out their places to immigrants. The neighborhood’s narrow roads and current demographic profile made inevitable that we would stand out. Raul and his acquaintance eventually walked to an apartment located above an auto repair shop. By this time, David had arrived in a small white van, resembling many such vehicles used for commercial purposes around the city. He parked the van one block from the repair shop, while John parked his vehicle on a dif­fer­ent block. Vincent and Brian remained on foot. They kept our eyes on the shop and the apartment above it to see who would enter and exit. They waited for two hours for something to happen when, in an instant, Vincent saw the two men climb into a pickup and drive away. In a near panic, both David and John sped away to try to catch up with them. A ­ fter twenty minutes of searching in the direction they had driven away, and a flurry of cell phone and radio communication, David spotted the car parked next to an auto parts store. The men soon exited the store, drove their truck back to the auto repair shop, and merely walked back up the exterior staircase and into the apartment. We returned to our earlier locations to keep an eye on the doors again. Three hours passed, and folks in the neighborhood ­were well aware of our presence. Such a prolonged stay in many urban settings c­ auses ­little suspicion. However, in a relatively poor suburb, far from the urban core, t­ hose who do not appear to be locals become suspected as police. John and I endured numerous teases and taunts as we sat in the car, facing the same direction, for hours. John

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regarded it as only local youths having fun at our expense. Per Brian’s earlier hunch, the young ­woman, who had arrived by bus from Germany, walked around the corner and climbed the staircase. The temperature had dropped, and the eve­ning light grew dim, but she wore the same thin-­strapped sandals that David had observed earlier.

The Transnational Connections

The team’s investigation came to focus on four main suspects: three Nigerian men and one national l­ awyer. To gather evidence against the men, the team ultimately conducted sixty surveillances, twelve searches of h ­ ouses and offices, and phone taps, and also gathered testimonies. Frank explained what the overall investigation revealed about the Nigerian operation. Our country is not a final destination but a platform to other countries all over Eu­rope and Rus­sia. Usually one or two ­women come to a mama, but sometimes the mama stays at another country. We have some ladies whose mama is in Germany. They can keep control with the voodoo. But also local guys can keep an eye on them. The girls are given instructions as to where to go; what country and what city. H ­ ere the Nigerian girls come through Ghana. At first, we ­were only interested ­because the German authorities asked us to check on someone they ­were investigating . . . ​who was coming through our airport. A man bought the ticket for her to fly h ­ ere. We thought it would fit into our investigation. We thought that someone would arrive from our investigation. A person with her name boarded the plane from Senegal but without luggage. We ­didn’t find the person with the name the Germans gave us, but she could have gone through the international transit terminal.

As the story continues, two Nigerian ­women and one man proceed to border control and claim they have no documents. They next ask for asylum. As mentioned above, they declare themselves to be minors, which means if their case remains outstanding a­ fter two months, then they can go to an open center to await a decision. From t­ here, they just leave. Frank explains further: The center let us know that the girl from the airport has left and they h ­ aven’t seen her. We had taken pictures. We got contact numbers they had sewn into the seam of their pants. She l­ ater arrived in Germany. The Germans found her and two other missing girls from our center when they busted a Nigerian ring t­ here. So, we confirmed that Ghana was using our airport as a platform. A ­ fter that, we analyzed asylum requests back to 2012



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to see the pattern of how the Nigerians work. We asked Europol to consult member states for names of girls who vanished from our centers. ­There ­were dozens of them, and the ­lawyer from our country was involved with many of ­these cases.

Some young Nigerian w ­ omen from whom they have taken testimonies claimed they met the three suspects in Nigeria as well as in this city. ­These w ­ omen likewise confirmed that two of the suspects would take them from the bus station to a local residence while they waited for paperwork to be pro­cessed. Except in Sadie’s case, they live and work in other Eu­ro­pean countries. Frank again: We did sixty surveillances in this case. We had two meetings in person with German colleagues. ­There was bilateral cooperation with them and also cooperation with Europol. The information from Germany that was valuable was that we learned that we w ­ ere a platform for Germany and other places. We needed help from other countries too. We also needed judiciary cooperation to get information about the girls that w ­ ere held in Spain in protective custody.

The ­lawyer and the three Nigerian men w ­ ere all arrested in early 2016 and charged with h ­ uman trafficking. The prosecution gained convictions on three counts against the three Nigerian suspects, who ­were each sentenced to eight years in prison. The ­lawyer was acquitted by a vote of two to one among the panel of three judges hearing the case. The law against h ­ uman trafficking is divided into three areas. The first area involves the action, or what the suspects actually did to facilitate ­human movement. Generically, ­these actions include bogus job offers, recruitment efforts, giving shelter during transportation, and so on. Specifically, the team obtained evidence of the suspects arranging transportation from the phone taps and from the ­women’s own testimony that the first suspect had called the l­awyer’s office from Ghana before meeting the other suspects based in this country. The second area pertains to the means of their action. How did they manage to move ­these ­women e­ ither against their ­will or ­under false pretenses? The team obtained two crucial pieces of evidence—­the use of voodoo to ensure their compliance to repay their transportation costs, and phone taps confirming the detention, abuse, and rape of one of the ­women. The third area is the objective of their actions, which in this case would be pimping. Phone taps, surveillance, and the ­women’s testimonies, given ­under witness protection, provided sufficient evidence that the suspects ­were collecting the cash the w ­ omen

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earned from prostitution. In addition to trafficking, the three Nigerian men were convicted of criminal association (the ­legal term for crime ring). Again, the ­women’s testimonies w ­ ere crucial. Two of them identified two of the Nigerian men together in both Nigeria and in the country, plus they witnessed exchange of money of that the ­women gave to Raul from their earnings in prostitution. This par­tic­u­lar case resulted in a criminal conviction, a minor success compared to the amount of ­human trafficking throughout the country and the wider EU. Defying the l­egal system proves fairly ­simple if one is willing to take risks. The ability to lie, for example, about the age of a seventeen-­year-­old, so that she may apply for asylum as a minor, creates a pinhole through which the global gray zone threads into the Schengen Area. Once inside, the fraudulent basis of their presence leaves t­ hese young ­women and girls vulnerable to abuse, detention, and deportation.

Irregular Migration from Eastern Eu­rope Transnational prostitution is supplied by increasingly sophisticated criminal rings that move girls and young ­women from East to West. Indeed, the life of a prostitute working in the low-­end of the market involves constant movement and exploitation from rings involving locals and nationals of the countries from where the w ­ omen originate (Monzini 2005: 90). Monzini identifies three sets of zones pertaining to t­ hese movements to the western Eu­ro­pean market. Set A consists of the wealthy Western countries of the Schengen Area, which is the ultimate destination for the w ­ omen as the rings can earn the most money in them. The ­women who make it that far west are usually then circulated around the cities in Set A. Set B consists of eastern Schengen countries (­those admitted to the EU in 2004), Romania and Bulgaria (admitted to the EU in 2007), and the Balkans. The greatest amount of trafficking occurs in Set B as it moves ­women within ­these countries and receives them from Set C. In Set B, the “best” ­women are chosen and groomed to work in Set A. Set C consists of countries in the Caucasus region and in Central Asia, from which ­women may work in Rus­sia or travel westward to Sets A and B (90–91). Through the 1990s, ­these criminal rings professionalized and improved their per­for­mance from the previous de­cade. They have learned to quickly produce high-­quality fraudulent documents and to move w ­ omen legally to their destinations (95). Prior to the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, national police had no experience with the smuggling and trafficking or­ga­nized by transnational networks, particularly in the more brutal forms



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perpetrated by Romanian rings. Now their prob­lem is acquiring the resources necessary to build cases against t­ hese rings that can be successfully prosecuted.

Roma Case

Roma or­ga­nized crime first began to proliferate with changes in the 1980s socialist bloc followed by the opening of the Schengen Area in the 1990s and Romania’s 2007 accession to the EU. Despite the ste­reo­typical image of the Roma as ­people who simply move, their circulation through the EU follows the same logic as any other l­ abor mi­grant or entrepreneur: move to where one has contacts, make use of one’s social networks, and follow the money. Like anyone, Roma pursue their needs, desires, and dreams within the realm of a hyperindividualized and hypercapitalized global society. Roma or­ga­nized crime grates particularly hard on liberal sentiments ­because it involves the unseemly activities of child begging, child thievery, and prostitution of minors, among o­ thers. Yet ­these crimes are perpetrated by members of Eu­rope’s most marginalized ethnic group, searching for income and predictability in highly precarious circumstances. ­Here, I neither examine the structural circumstances conditioning Roma crime nor blame Roma culture for its per­sis­tence. I only examine how the investigative team encounter Roma or­ga­nized crime, as a means to view the interface between the security state and transnational, clandestine networks. Generally, Roma or­ga­nized crime rings operate through a hierarchy of personal relations. At the low end are t­ hose working the street. This work could appear as begging, pickpocketing, burglary, or prostitution. The individuals carry­ing out this work report to a local handler or handlers. ­These handlers, in some cases, monitor their charges from nearby. In other cases, the pickpocket is sufficiently established in the network to need no monitoring. Yet, in other cases, presented below, a teenage girl ­will be left in an isolated location to make herself available for prostitution. She would have no place to go, if she w ­ ere inclined to flee, and would be picked up at the end of the day. The local handlers then arrange for the transfer of money back to the clan’s home location, which in most cases is Romania but can also be Bosnia or Serbia. Stolen commodities are immediately ­either pawned or sold on the black market to obtain their cash value. The Roma ring described ­here mainly conducted begging, pickpocketing, and prostitution. Like many of their cases, the team picked up this case accidentally, while walking down Miranda Street in search of lunch. David noticed a pair of ­women

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sitting on a win­dow ledge and recognized them from a pickpocketing case two years earlier that resulted in their dismissal from the country. Their reappearance raised the suspicion—­and a reasonable one, based on their professional experience—­that ­these two had not returned alone. A few blocks further on, Vincent spotted a third ­woman, in a long, dirty, black frock dress. Her head was covered with a colorful cloth that concealed most of her face. Vincent saw that her shoes w ­ ere relatively expensive and would likely belong to a girl or young ­woman, suggesting that this w ­ oman was not as old as she appeared to the casual onlooker. As we entered a cathedral in an historic district, the young girl normally begging ­there was absent, which the team found curious. She had been replaced by an older man whom they knew as well. The team had planned to show me this cathedral, and as we walked by the man, Brian jokingly asked me to donate a euro to his Roma or­ga­nized crime ring. So I did. The team deci­ded to set up a surveillance up and down the street to gauge the extent of Roma activity in that area. During a week of surveillance, they assembled video images of about fifty men, ­women, boys, and girls ranging from twelve to sixty years old. They observed how ­these Roma interacted with each other and where their interactions took place. It appeared that they ­were renting rooms in four dif­fer­ent locations near the street. The older men spent ­little time on the street, while one middle-­aged ­woman minded two of the ­children. Several men and ­women, all appearing to be in their twenties and thirties, spent most their time walking through the historic district and, as would be confirmed ­later, ­were successful pickpockets. The team also observed one young man, no older than twenty-­one, meet with the sixty-­year-­old on two occasions. The young man, however, did not stay in the city. Rather, he rode in and out on public transit. A l­ater surveillance saw him picked up outside the city by another man of roughly the same age in a silver car. A ­ fter much difficulty, Frank managed to obtain criminal rec­ords from the Romanian embassy, mostly for theft, on ten of the twenty-­five. Separate leads suggested criminal activity that was ­later discovered to be part of the same ring’s activity in the city. Local residents reported sightings of girls living in a low-­end pension, who only spoke Romanian and who came and went at odd hours of the day and night, sometimes with men of a variety of backgrounds. The first major investigative operation, ­after several months of surveillance, was to shut down the city block surrounding the pension in order to conduct a document check of p ­ eople living in that area, citizen and nonciti-



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zen. Police perform t­ hese operations as general sweeps so that the ­actual suspects ­will not feel singled out and consequently flee. To them, it should appear as a routine check. (A dif­fer­ent sweep is described below.) The operation required coordination among fifty police officers drawn from dif­fer­ent agencies of the national government. It needed two live phone taps, to ensure the key suspects w ­ ere in the area at the time of the operation, and surveillance on four pensions within the block. The check led to the identification of one man and two ­women suspected of being street-­level ringleaders. It revealed their addresses and some of the girls’ and young ­women’s addresses in Romania. With the cooperation of the Romanian police, this information led to the phone numbers of the street-­level leaders. The Romanian police also confirmed that a large number of girls and young ­women had left the towns they ­were from and that an increase in wealth, materializing in new cars and homes, among specific men ­there occurred at roughly the same time.

Pickpocketing

A major source of income the Roma, including the ring the team investigated, earn in touristy Eu­ro­pean cities comes from pickpocketing. Adult pickpockets, who usually work in threes, composed of ­either three ­women or two ­women and a man. They dress to blend in with the crowd, usually appearing as middle-­class tourists or professionals. To the untrained eye, they are difficult to detect, but an experienced investigator easily spots them in tourist areas. As I walked with David through the historic district, he suddenly grabbed my arm. “Greg, look over ­there. ­They’re working.” Two ­women strolled casually through the crowd, occasionally gazing at storefront win­dows. “What gave them away?” I asked David. He identified four ­factors: (1) their physical appearance (relatively short, with slightly darker hair and skin); (2) their large shoulder bags (which seemed incongruous with their other­wise stylish clothes); (3) their gait (they walked more slowly and with less focus than every­one ­else); and (4) the way they studied the tourists walking by, particularly the bags they carried. “They are hunters,” David explained. “They are very confident and very skilled to do this with uncovered hands.” (Roma pickpockets often wear a large shawl over the shoulders and arms to cover their hands when unzipping a target’s backpack, but this garment would look out of place on this particularly warm day.) David then shifted his gaze several steps b­ ehind them and spotted the lookout, in this case a man checking for anyone attuned to the goings-­on.

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We followed the trio past a few stores, when the ­women began walking close ­behind a well-­dressed ­couple in their mid-­fifties. The man shouldered a large backpack with an accessible zipper that looked like low-­hanging fruit even to me. The c­ ouple stopped at a crosswalk, allowing one of the ­women to stand right ­behind the man and work the zipper. When the crosswalk signal flashed for the pedestrians to move, the c­ ouple proceeded, with the w ­ oman following and pulling the zipper open. Out spilled a small case onto the sidewalk that could have been a wallet. The man turned quickly around, realizing that someone had been tugging on his backpack. He stared at the Roma w ­ oman, who returned his gaze with poise and innocence. She then pointed down to the sidewalk to show where his case had fallen so that he could pick it up, and exculpate herself as the cause of it falling out. The ­women then walked around a large cathedral, with their lookout a few steps b­ ehind. Just ahead of them was a guide leading a group of fifteen tourists with a closed umbrella so they could all stay together. Such spatial conditions ­favor experienced pickpockets. The road curved around to the right and narrowed by half, which crowded the group together and slowed it down. The ­women moved in, while the lookout, dressed in a suit, scanned in all directions. David and I trailed twenty feet ­behind the lookout. “They are ­going to work,” he predicted. We lost sight of the group as it bent around the curve, with the w ­ omen closing in. However, the scout was close enough to see every­thing, and we next noticed him dart away from the crowd and hail a taxi. He opened the back door and put one foot in while waving the w ­ omen in his direction. They strode swiftly into the back of the cab, followed by the man, who shut the door as the taxi drove away. “They got someone,” David concluded. “How? Did you see it?” I asked. “No, but they fled the area immediately. They do that ­after they steal.” Right then, we walked past a w ­ oman, dumbfounded, humiliated, and embarrassed by the large open compartment in her backpack, and wondering to her fellow tourists if she had just been robbed.

The Sweep

At 6:45 a.m. the team meets with another police force. They are supporting colleagues who ­will check documents at a hostel commonly used by nonnationals travelling to the country (briefly discussed in Chapter 3). Police forces periodically and legally conduct such sweeps. They routinely find p ­ eople without proper documents or whose names are flagged in EU databases. In real­ity, they are



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investigating just the three p ­ eople who might be connected to the Roma ring. They take care not to single them out lest they scare them out of the country. They pretend to conduct a routine travel document check of all guests. The team do not normally assist with t­ hese operations, b­ ecause ­people whom they might be investigating ­later might remember their ­faces. However, they are occasionally called to assist if other forces are unavailable. When we arrive, the team conceal their ­faces with ski masks. Brian tucks his shirt ­behind the gun fixed on his b­ elt to show the gravity of the operation. Eight police inspectors enter the building just as two ­women of apparently North African background are walking out, each tugging a small suitcase. Confused and indignant, one looks at the other and says in plain En­glish, “What the fuck?” The officers ascend the staircase to the hostel’s suites. At each floor, ­there is a door on ­either side that leads to a small lobby, with suites on ­either side. The officers bang loudly on the doors to the lobbies. Legally, they cannot enter the suites. Instead, they ask the guests, mostly from West Africa, South Asia, and Romania, to come out and show their papers. They can check documents to determine p ­ eoples’ status in the country. If status cannot be demonstrated, then they can assume their illegality even if they are citizens. All documents presented are cross-­checked against a database at headquarters accessed by phone. However, any document indicating Romanian nationality is also photographed. A team member is always posted on the split-­level staircase so that he can see anyone who comes from the floors above and below. The hostel’s residents calmly watch the spectacle as they wait to pres­ent their documents. They show ­every intention of carry­ing on with their daily business despite this assault on their dignity. One man even ascends the staircase from the common kitchen with a tray of five cups of coffee so that he and ­others can complete their morning ritual. The team also stay very calm and laid back. Brian leans casually against a wall to avoid provoking a ner­vous reaction. Another man, adorned only in a bath towel, stands in a doorway, watching us. He asks Brian for the time, who coolly answers, “8 a.m.” He seems to be trying to domesticate the police, to bring them into his ordinary world. He just stares, often at me, demonstrating his right to observe and to judge the spectacle. When John checks and photo­graphs his documents, which indicate Romanian nationality, the man also pres­ents his ­lawyer’s business card. Brian asks him to put on some clothes as the team wishes to bring him in for further questioning. The man signals that he does not understand, so Brian

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mimes the act of putting on a shirt. He still looks confused, then in En­glish Brian says casually, “You come with us.” The man points to himself, looking confused. Brian nods calmly. The man gets dressed and sits on a stair near the team u­ ntil it is time to leave. He wears a light blue button-­down short-­sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals, and carries a large b­ ottle of w ­ ater. He takes a swig from the ­bottle before tossing it up half a flight of stairs to a friend. As Brian takes him to the van, he says, “I ­don’t sell drugs; I only take wallets!” Police are legally permitted to detain anyone for up to six hours to establish their identity. During this time, Max w ­ ill rely on a common trick to determine this man’s social networks: He has the security guard tell the detainees that their phones are not allowed in the building for security reasons. Instead, the phones must be placed in a storage locker. While the detainees are questioned elsewhere in the building, Max collects the phones, downloads the data on them, and returns them to the locker before the detainees are released. He has copied all the phone’s digital content: its vari­ous identification numbers and all of its communication events like calls, emails, text messages, video files (including pornographic ones), photo­graphs, and so on. He then generates cluster diagrams to show the qualities of this man’s social connections. This information points the investigation in the right direction. Back in the hostel lobby, the man­ag­ers show David and Brian a suitcase owned by someone who had left it on checkout. David opens the suitcase, which he admits is prob­ably illegal, and finds a picklock designed to open circular-­barreled locks. He puts it in his pocket and zips the suitcase shut. I had been waiting near the front door when a Romanian man walks down the stairs. His muscular arms are covered in tattoos, making him appear much more threatening than the slight-­framed pickpocket whom the team had already detained. ­Later, Brian explains that he was prob­ably someone impor­tant, but they ­didn’t want to scare him away by detaining him. He w ­ ill be investigated more thoroughly if he stays in the country. Brian surmised his importance through his comportment: he was quiet, unflustered, and stone-­faced. He appeared as someone to whom ­others must report, as someone around whom o­ thers rotate. ­After the operation, we reconvene at the café across the street from the office. David is playing with the picklock to see how it works. He asks me what I think about the morning’s work. I elaborate that it was a Kafkaesque experience: “You have state police investigators who have endured massive pay cuts and



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loss of benefits who are investigating marginalized mi­grant groups who themselves must become criminals just to make ends meets. Each side acts respectfully to the other. The exploited are trying to control the marginalized in the name of a state that has dismissed both groups. It’s enough to make someone left-­wing.” David responds, “Yes, it is. Prob­ably I am! But what can I do? That’s why I admire ­these ­people. They do what they want. They are more ­free than me. I am a slave to the t­ hings I have, but they are not.” How suggestive that an officer of the law of a liberal democracy would argue that ­those whom he ­will soon arrest, ­people who live on the very margins of that democracy, live more freely than himself.

Rural Prostitution

Like many transnational rings, Roma rings circulate p ­ eople, including young ­women (some underage) employed as prostitutes, through dif­fer­ent places. ­These movements complicate police investigative efforts and prevent attachments that might form between a prostitute and a client. Vincent explained: We know they are highly mobile. We are making a map of where they are and see how they move around e­ very few months. We have a ­couple of cases in dif­fer­ent parts of the country, and often the same p ­ eople are involved. Local police talked to the girl we w ­ ill watch ­today. She told them she been in this country for two or three weeks. She said she ­didn’t know where she is in this country. She d­ idn’t identify who ­handles her.

Vincent showed me images of her, her documents, and of opened condom packages next to a log in the woods. The girl does not have a phone or a ­house key. Each day her controller, who is also her husband, drops her off and picks her up at a fork in two sleepy rural roads. She refused protection in a safe h ­ ouse even though she would have had no obligation to cooperate with the police. Vincent, Brian, and I arrive at about 2 p.m. in a surveillance van, where we could watch her lean against a tree waiting for clients. They usually arrive by car, though one old man travelled by bike, and she takes them about a hundred yards down an obscure dirt path. By 6 p.m. she has taken five clients. David estimates that this young w ­ oman ­will take ten clients per day for twenty euros each. She therefore earns two hundred euros per day. David speculates that the forty euros she ­will get to keep from that sum far exceeds what she could earn in Romania. He surmises that she prob­ably hails from a poor village offering few opportunities, which pushed her into this work already back home.

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At 6 p.m., she walks a short while down a road, then turns onto a dif­fer­ent road that leads up a hill. ­After a thirty-­minute wait, an old, gray four-­door car stops with two men and one other ­woman already in it. She hops into the vacant seat next to the w ­ oman in back. The team follow the car through this sparsely populated rural area in three of their own vehicles. Thirty minutes l­ ater the car parks at a shopping center, and all four passengers get out. Vincent and David follow them on foot. Brian returns with Max, who videorec­ords them walking in front of the stores. The four young adults merely buy some ­house­hold items and ice cream. The man driving the car spends much of the time at the shopping center showing the w ­ oman affection: holding her hand, kissing her, and keeping his arm around her. At 8:30 p.m., they return to their car and pull out of the parking lot. Busy traffic causes us to lose them, so a mad dash at high speed through the countryside begins. Forty-­five minutes l­ater, we find them again, and the surveillance resumes. We follow them down narrow, hilly roads past an expanse of farms. We eventually drive past a dozen young men kicking around a soccer ball next to a string of dilapidated farm­houses. One of them is the car driver we have been following. He has just parked nearby. Subsequent investigative work indicates that the young man, age twenty, is the ­woman’s husband and that while she works, he goes fishing with the other man. The men playing soccer and their families live in ­those old, decrepit farm buildings during the planting and harvesting seasons. They arrive from Romania to do the agricultural work and also to receive Roma ­women to manage as prostitutes. Each of t­ hese two men controls at least one w ­ oman, possibly more. Of the 200 euros the girl we observed likely earned, he w ­ ill keep 160 euros. This amounts to 800 euros a week (five working days), 3,200 euros per month, and 38,400 euros a year (68,000 CAD). This man ­will not keep the 38,000 euros himself; rather, he ­will send most of it to Romania, to relations of higher status.

Conviction

Ultimately, the ability to conduct the arrest came from evidence of prostitution managed by a Roma ringleader in the city, just a few blocks from the team’s headquarters. As it turned out, he had three ­people working for him, while he himself reported back to Romania: The first of his deputies managed the pickpockets in the city; another managed the burglars (this was the muscular tattooed man from the hostel); and a third managed two prostitutes in the rural



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areas north of the city (which was the twenty-­year-­old man). The coordinator likewise managed three prostitutes. ­These three girls (all u ­ nder eigh­teen years) lived in a hostel in an old residential neighborhood. Locals tipped off the police as the girls, always seen together, appeared anxious and could not speak any of the national language. Surveillance established that they ­were working as prostitutes, which itself is not illegal, but likely they w ­ ere reporting to the coordinator who would then be pimping, which is an illegal activity. This situation prompted the lead investigator to request a judge’s warrant to tap his phone as it might provide the final necessary evidence. The prosecutor who led the case needed two types of evidence to prove ­human trafficking in a court of law: identification of the recruitment method to indicate force or coercion; and identification of the activity that falls u ­ nder the ­legal category of trafficking (i.e., forcing someone to, and profiting from, pimping, forced ­labor, begging, stealing, ­etc.). Observations from surveillance, phone taps, and victims’ and clients’ testimonies provided evidence for all three lines. Medical examinations revealed bruises on the victims’ bodies, testifying to abuse from the ringleader and violent sexual activity. The phone taps revealed how the coordinator would manage the operation with his relatives: how the girls ­were to be treated; when they should eat; how much they should charge their clients; and how they ­were to display themselves on the street. The taps also recorded the girls complaining of having to take between fifteen and thirty customers per day. The team also observed physical abuse of the girls on the street near the pension where they w ­ ere living. Other evidence included proof of money transfers to Romania, a large amount of cash in their ­house, and corroborative evidence from the Romanian police. The h ­ ouse also contained several bats used to beat the girls, something confirmed by the girl’s testimony and also that of neighbors’ who had heard their screams. Clients w ­ ere also subpoenaed to state that they paid for sex, which is not a crime. Their testimony provided further evidence of prostitution controlled by the ring. Supporting pimping, however, does constitute criminal activity, which led to the arrest of one of the pension ­owners. He charged five euros per visit for a room, on top of the standard price, and provided condoms as part of the fee. (The owner of Petit Palace did not provide any material supporting sexual activity. He conducted his business as he would for any guest.) Surveillance recorded the coordinator beating members of rival gangs and claiming their prostitutes for his own operation. The ringleader is now serving a fourteen-­year sentence.

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Global Sovereignty, Global Action The interaction between the security state and the clandestine criminal rings illustrates Hardt and Negri’s biopower-­biopolitics distinction and, to some extent, even shows the two sides of that distinction operate as mirror images of each other. Both sides have expanded their activities exponentially since the 1990s: security forces seeing ever more deeply into ­peoples’ personal lives and incorporating increasing amounts of geographic space into their purview, while increasingly professionalized, transnational criminal organ­izations meet a growing demand for smuggling ser­vices and for the ser­vices of prostitution through trafficking. The mirroring of biopower and biopolitics appears similarly in related security practices, testifying to the generalizability of this form of social relations. Robben (2010) explains that social mimesis “designates the pro­cess in which rivalries arise between individuals and groups sharing the same goals of action. The approximation of individuals to each other, their becoming similar, ­favors the development of equivalent valuations and equivalent perceptual modes, assessments, and aspirations, while at the same time the rivals sharpen their sense of self-­determination in regard to each other” (Gebauer and Wulf cited in Robben 2010: 141; see also Grassiani 2013; 2015). Robben examines mimesis at work in the US military’s counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. Though the move ultimately failed, US troops a­ dopted the insurgents’ modus operandi by breaking into smaller, more flexible units, organ­izing themselves horizontally, blending in with the local population, and relying on swarming and other insurgent tactics. Moreover, the respective identities of the insurgents and the military became sharply defined in Manichaean ­oppositions of good and evil. As in the biopower-­biopolitical dichotomy, the insurgents take the initiative while the military responds in a like manner to counteract the insurgents’ advantage. The team’s investigative tactics comprise several ele­ments that mimic the United States’s counterinsurgency strategy (such as the use of Facebook profiles, the appearances as normal passengers on subways, and the loosely coordinated movements used in surveillance operations) but also some ele­ments that differ. Most significant is that Manichaeanism does not accompany the mimesis that characterizes the team’s and the criminal rings’ interaction. The team see the humanness of their suspects. They readily understand why suspects end up in the situations they are in and often why the resulting constraints lead them to live outside the law. Their exposure to the “other” is arguably much greater



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than that of the US soldiers in counterinsurgency operations. That exposure opens up the possibility of acting through the second sovereign form. However, it can only do so among ­people or­ga­nized horizontally and able to exercise their own judgments and actions. Individual soldiers may well have the same attunement to t­ hose whom they are assigned to kill. However, acting ultimately with vertical, bureaucratic authority clearly ­behind them, ­those soldiers remain too dependent upon a higher authority to push for any alternative joint action and are often left with a crisis of conscience (see Caffrey 2010; Nelson 2010). I ­will further discuss the significance of this difference in the Conclusion. For now, I only want to establish it as a marker for showing the limits of Hardt and Negri’s understanding of biopo­liti­cal action, which they see as the prerogative of the “Multitude” in contrast to “Empire.” All the actors in the above investigations strug­gle to assert themselves and to achieve what they need. Their successes—­some modest, some g­ rand—­attest to the weakness of the traditional state to define its own sovereign space. However, they also show their inability to jointly act and establish themselves through the second sovereign form, despite their creativity and doggedness in surviving in a difficult world. From that standpoint, we cannot make a compelling argument that the biopolitics of the Multitude, especially in the form of trafficking and smuggling, is somehow liberating in its strug­gles against Empire. On the one hand, p ­ eople (traffickers and the trafficked) strive to find more secure livelihoods; on the other, ­people are held in exploitative circumstances by ­those criminal rings as much as by Empire, per Hardt and Negri’s own reasoning. Thus what it means to challenge Empire requires greater explication in order to conceptualize a genuinely alternative sovereign form. We can ask how this Multitude, exercising biopolitics, would differ from Empire, exercising biopower, should it ever be able to establish its own sovereign space. A clearer view of who the Multitude actually is and what exactly distinguishes it from Empire w ­ ill achieve much in illuminating how the potentiality of the second sovereign form resides within daily life.

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Conclusion

Alternatives Within The Appearance of the Second Sovereign Form Despite the First

A state can never succeed very far in attempting to force ­people to speak as the sovereign power commands, since ­people’s opinions are so vari­ous and so contradictory. For not even the most consummate statesmen, let alone the common ­people, possess the gift of silence. Benedict Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise

The Team ­Under Austerity “A piece of paper, not money,” David remarked about the special commendation he received from the Minister of the Interior for his exceptional ser­vice. He would have received merit pay before the austerity mea­sures responding to the 2008 financial crisis. All bonuses (such as Christmas bonuses and other per­for­ mance bonuses) had been cut for the Ministry of Interior’s rank and file, but not for se­nior officials. Austerity mea­sures have also taken their toll in the form of tax hikes, pay cuts, and loss of benefits. David’s net salary had been reduced from 1,800 euros per month to 1,400 euros. This new figure signifies a mere 300 euro increase on his very first “real” job as a military recruit fifteen years ago. ­After mortgage, utilities, groceries, and day care, he falls 200 euro in the hole if his wife cannot find contract work as an interior designer. He then must seek help from his ­father, who works, post-­retirement, as a fish ­wholesaler. In this financial context, secondment to Frontex operations—­the EU’s external border-­ control agency—­becomes eco­nom­ically attractive. The Immigration Ser­vice pays a daily allowance to any of its employees who participate in them. John and Vincent have netted about two thousand euros each from three-­month tours. This money helps to cover one-­time ­family costs such as down payments on a car or home renovations to keep up with the births of new ­children. When the money gets tight, other stresses arise at home. Max complained about having to conduct a Friday night surveillance operation ­because of a se­nior official’s po­liti­cal interest in the case. He lamented, “I want to see my kid this weekend for a change.” In another case, the team had spent a week of long nights investigating the Roma ring that had trafficked teenage girls for prostitution (Chapters 2 and 4). Upon returning home at midnight on the Friday, Brian complained, “My wife ­didn’t even want to kiss me. She thought I had just been 179

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out drinking beer.” I ask Brian and Vincent, “Is it fair that you all have to work so many hours for less pay?” Vincent replies that “every­body in the ser­vice gets the same money, but they ­don’t do this.” As ever, “they” refers to passport control officers and desk investigators. Unlike t­ hese employees working predictable schedules, the undercover team remain on call 24-7; and they do not receive overtime pay. Brian adds, “We d­ on’t have time to be resentful.” The work of an undercover investigator keeps the team and their families on the financial and emotional edge as they strug­gle to remain inside the vanishing ­middle class. This observation raises the question of w ­ hether the team is e­ ither part of the “system,” and benefits from it, or is marginalized and exploited by it. Do they exert biopower or biopolitics, to utilize Hardt and Negri’s terms from Chapter 4? Are they with Empire or Multitude, or both? ­These questions are tricky. We might be tempted into thinking that the team, despite working for the security apparatus, identify with the billions of other ­people also positioned on the losing side of capital, thus working hard to avoid downward mobility. David’s professed affinity with the Roma burglars might signify as much (Chapter 4). Such affinities with ­others, however, is neither the reason the team maintain their commitment to an egalitarian organ­ ization nor their first motivation to enter the gray zone. Put differently, empathy alone does not push ­people to strug­gle. Furthermore, ­simple material deprivation might push someone to fight for equality, but equality in the first sovereign form does not grant the freedom of appearance to the par­tic­ul­ar subject. Such equality only facilitates biological-­cum-­social reproduction. In any case, material concerns, real as they are, do not seem to be the team’s biggest worry, which is maintaining a distinction between themselves and their colleagues working in desk investigation and passport control. What they primarily fear is the monotony and circularity of passively following technical, l­egal, and bureaucratic protocol. To begin answering the question of w ­ hether the team reinforce the security apparatus (or Empire or the “system”) or ­whether they strug­gle to carve out an alternative sovereign space within it, recall the key theoretical points from the Introduction about gray zones: they blur the moral and ­legal bound­aries between actors; they spread throughout the fabric of society via networks between actors struggling over a status quo; and, if associated with vertical organ­ization, they both atomize populations and discourage the deployment of ­peoples’ capacities for thought, judgment, and action. None of ­these points means that gray zones



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must necessarily become spaces of unmitigated cruelty or neglect. Rather, t­ hese points lead us to the conclusion that the ethical stances that p ­ eople assume in a gray zone are inextricably linked to the orga­nizational form that they bring into it from normal order. Thus I ­will draw out in philosophical terms what I have argued in empirical terms throughout the book: that the team strug­gle in the gray zone to constitute an alternative sovereign space of which they are a constituent part, and not merely the sovereign’s technicians equipped with police authority. That space may or may not resonate with the larger security apparatus in which they are situated. The point is that the alternative sovereign space derives from their own thinking, judging, and acting, and so po­liti­cal space becomes the embodiment of ­those who jointly constitute it. Despite their potential for generating horrific effects, gray zones also provide a chance to start anew, freed from constraints that cannot address unpre­ce­dented situations. They become spaces of action, per Eva Horn’s (2011) argument, where we can instantiate ourselves through action. Such action leads not to any utopia or zone of moral perfection but rather to a space where p ­ eople can strive for a coexistence that resonates with their own sense of self. This thrill of being is what motivates the team to act in the gray zone associated with the second sovereign form.

The Logic of Empire and the Empire of Logic To draw out this point, let us first examine how alternative forms of sovereign action have been conceptualized in order to grasp their possibilities and their limits. This exercise w ­ ill show how the second sovereign form, as conceived in this book, enhances our understanding of being and po­liti­cal action. While the idea of the nation-­state as an impermeable container has long been critiqued (Agnew 1994; Appadurai 1996; Hannerz 1996), sovereignty in a globalized world has been insufficiently examined beyond institutional approaches. ­These approaches consider how power­ful states manipulate international organ­izations to their advantage or how capital relies upon states for the accumulation of global wealth. However, they assume the objective existence of states and institutions rather than ask how ­these entities precipitate out of empirical social relations. Hardt and Negri’s work signifies a major exception to this point. Their analyses of sovereignty, re­sis­tance, and action in the post-­Cold War and post-­ Fordist eras garnered tremendous attention in the early 2000s. Few can doubt the productively provocative contributions that Empire, Multitude, and Com­ monwealth brought to the critical social sciences, even if their ideas encountered

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much pushback. Anthropologists gave their work a tepid reception at best and rarely incorporated their ideas into the discipline’s analytical frames. This decision most likely pertains to the absence of a standard ethnographic approach in their work. However, their goal was never to describe specific sovereign practices per se; rather, it was to explain the empirical conditions that enable contemporary global power and alternatives to it. Though their analy­sis is mainly conceptual, the motivation to their work are real historical events. They are not primarily theorists, but rather use theory to explain, in general form, the strug­gles defining this historically particular moment. This fact allows us to bring their analy­sis into conversation with ethnographic research as anthropologists generally practice it. In this vein, Michel Agier’s (2011; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 2016) work also takes an impor­tant step forward in ethnographically studying globalized conditions of daily life. With re­spect to refugee camps, his methodological approach illuminates how a global field of relations enables the variety of camps that appear in dif­fer­ent geographic locations. In his own words, he investigates “the formation of a global mechanism that [he refers] to ­here as humanitarian government” (5). Other anthropologists have certainly taken critical approaches to humanitarian government (Fassin 2011a; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010a; I. Feldman and Ticktin 2010). However, Agier fully frames it as both an ethnographically accessible and globally phenomenal object, which precipitates out of ­actual ­human relations. He argues not that camps are identical in dif­fer­ent places around the world but only that globally ubiquitous mechanisms for organ­izing camps generate ­family resemblances among them. In his own words: Besides, it is the specific property of the camps that they exist, not identically, but according to the same under­lying princi­ples in many parts of the planet at the same point in time. They are thus constitutive of a real­ity that goes beyond the local existence of each par­tic­u­lar one, and that is developing as a global real­ity. Each camp is born as a local or national “solution,” but also as part of a global mechanism. Each camp, in this re­spect, shares in the beginning of the history of the world as a world. (65)

Agier thus ­frees ethnography from the particularities of places, while still assessing what marks par­tic­u­lar places as globally significant.1 Global ethnography 1. Agier implicitly criticizes Hardt and Negri’s view of Empire through a comparison to futuristic films positing a s­ imple, single government that rules the world (243–244 fn. 3). This interpretation—­which Hardt and Negri occasionally and inadvertently invite—­does



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asks us not to describe the globe as such but rather to define the general conditions that enable the reproduction of a par­tic­u­lar kind of global order, with its sundry variations and re­sis­tances to them. Similarly, the task in this book has been to delineate the general conditions for two distinct sovereign forms that seem to be globally ubiquitous, even though the first form so readily marginalizes the second. Hardt and Negri’s work takes on a similar task through the lenses of Empire (biopower) and Multitude (biopolitics). Their work pushes into this book’s under­lying philosophical questions about sovereignty as a mode of being in the con­temporary world. However, despite providing numerous examples of alternative sovereign actions, they refrain from explicating what fundamentally happens when ­people constitute such alternatives. The reason for working with Hardt and Negri’s argument is that they make extensive use of Spinoza, who perhaps more than any other phi­los­o­pher guides progressive and radical analyses of po­liti­cal action and direct democracy. My explication of their argument involves a critique of Spinoza that w ­ ill highlight the area of alternative sovereign action that still remains insufficiently explored by Hardt and Negri among o­ thers, namely that of link between thinking, judgment, and action discussed in the Introduction. Hardt and Negri’s approach starts with a distinction between Empire and Multitude as the two countervailing forces driving history forward. They contrast Empire to nineteenth-­century imperialism, which was a globalized form of sovereignty anchored in and expanded out from the traditional Eu­ro­pean nation-­ state into the colonies. Taking over in the twilight of the modern state, Empire is a “decentered and deterritorialized apparatus of rule” that incrementally absorbs all territorial space and the plurality of ­peoples and hierarchies in it (2000: xii–­xiii). While no nation-­state leads or controls Empire, its constitution is ultimately rooted in the American proj­ect that began in the late eigh­teenth ­century. That proj­ect saw a social order developed out of existing networks, which ­people themselves created, and managed through a government system of checks and balances (161). (“Constitution” carries two meanings: the structure of social relations in the United States and the founding document that not capture the subtlety of their larger analy­sis. As Hardt and Negri locate Empire in the logic of rule, then a single government is not necessary for Empire’s proliferation, which they demonstrate throughout their argument. Thus I see more compatibility between Agier’s and Hardt and Negri’s work then Agier would perhaps acknowledge.

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asserts how laws can be formulated, executed, and judged.) Absent a transcendent sovereign, Hardt and Negri contend that the United States began as a po­ liti­cal proj­ect of the immanence of the Multitude (161–62). ­Things changed by the late nineteenth ­century, when the country reached its territorial limits on ­either coast. It was no longer a space of open frontiers that could accommodate the restless proliferation of networked activity. It began to enclose upon itself. Capital accumulated in the hands of a few magnates, who encouraged the rise of the police state to keep l­abor in check and pressure the government to pass business-­friendly legislation. Now territorially bound like any other Eu­ro­pean nation-­state, the United States began its own imperial phase, beginning in the Pacific and the Ca­rib­bean Sea basin (172–78). The US pre­ce­dent for the global rule of Empire combines the proliferation of networked, deterritorialized capital accumulation with the expansion of military-­cum-­humanitarian government. Hardt and Negri shrewdly insist that while the sovereign authority of the traditional nation-­state continues its decline, for lack of control over its economic, social, and cultural borders, sovereignty in the twenty-­first ­century has not. In keeping with its pre­ce­dent, sovereignty now coheres through globally networked institutions, agencies, and practices (“organisms,” as they call them) that govern economic and social production and exchange, united “­under a single logic of rule” (xi–­xii). Empire and traditional state sovereignty are notably dif­fer­ent—­the former induces order through p ­ eoples’ organic activities, while the latter commands from above. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri correctly identify Empire’s sovereign power with logic—­that is, a hegemonic logic. They are clearly not making a rationalist argument in the Cartesian sense, but rather are pinpointing the historical conditions that elevate socially constructed logics for worldly understanding to unquestionable statuses. Despite the differences between Empire and traditional nation-­state sovereignty, such abstract logics govern both entities as the logic of capital accumulation sustains the former and the logic of maintaining equilibrium within the state’s territorial domain sustains the latter. Neither of t­ hese entities has any need for the thinking of the par­tic­u­lar subject but only their cognitive skills to reason their way to the highest profit margin or the most effective administrative-­cum-­security mea­sures. Abstract logic transcends the par­tic­u­lar person b­ ecause all persons perform cognitive skills alike. The result is a dehumanizing effect that calls forth our intellectual energies, linking t­ hose energies into globally networked activity, while denying the par­ tic­u­lar perspectives that distinguish one person from the next.



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Who is the “Multitude”? The Prob­lem of Immanence and the Site of the Strug­gle Hardt and Negri’s articulation of Empire is compelling enough. More problematic is their articulation of Multitude, but ­these prob­lems lie deep in the term’s philosophical under­pinnings. They trace the term “Multitude” to seventeenth-­ century ­England, where writers, phi­los­op ­ hers, and scientists make frequent use of it as the foil against which edifying monarchical states begin to take shape. In that era, the Multitude referred to the poor. However, the poor ­were defined not by their lack of material resources but rather by their inability to play a constituent po­liti­cal role due to their lack of property. Multitude could thus include anyone from peasants to artisans to traders, and to anyone lacking a landed estate. Finding them a threat, nuisance, and bother, emergent bourgeois republics began protecting individual property ­owners, who are in competition with each other, and their collective class interests, which held together this intra-­competitive group, against the remainder of society, identified as the “Multitude.” That remainder formed a heterogeneous mass composed of ­those excluded from formal power but necessarily included as instruments in the machine of social reproduction (2009: 39–40). Unlike Empire, Multitude is a genuinely pluralistic entity that Empire needs to appropriate lest it threaten Empire with its unlimited creative potential. The weakness in this description of the Multitude begins to show when Hardt and Negri (2009: 45) characterize its conflict with Empire as the “strug­gle between t­ hose who have no part in the management of the common and t­ hose who control it.” If the Multitude win their strug­gle and gain a part in the management of the common, then it remains unclear why their promotion to the role of man­ag­er begets their po­liti­cal freedom, or their being as such. Empire is effected through managerial logics of resource optimization: social reproduction and sovereign reproduction for their own sakes. Property owner­ship certainly gives one subject leverage over another, but being in the stronger power position simply means that I can reproduce Empire to my own advantage. It does not mean that I have found freedom, as it ­were, or a space of appearance where my being is instantiated through speech and action per the second sovereign form. The cap­it­ al­ist is also an isolated, dependent variable on the larger socioeconomic system. Hence, Marx (1909: 295) makes clear that “­free competition brings out the inherent laws of cap­it­ al­ist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over e­ very individual cap­i­tal­ist.”

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Indeed, mass technocratic society instrumentalizes expert management ­because man­ag­ers (and the experts they rely on) are restricted to making technical judgments rather than ethical-­cum-­political judgments. (Hence Foucault sees social reproduction occurring through power-­knowledge rather than power-­reflective thought.) Moreover, recall that the Multitude had been instruments of social reproduction since the term originates in the seventeenth ­century. Again, our particularity is effected through ethical judgment and the actions that follow. Empire includes the Multitude as nothing other than functionaries, bureaucrats, and technocrats up and down the social hierarchy. It instrumentalizes everyone it touches regardless of whether they own property. Social reproduction is merely that: the circularity and redundancy of recreating what is already pres­ent, even if one expands the status quo through capital accumulation. This result is precisely how Empire flourishes in a world of apparent diversity (Hardt and Negri 2000: 153). It can eviscerate difference—­that is, reduce it to a semblance of diversity that lacks substance—­and harness the Multitude to the singular logic of instrumentalization. Villa (2012: 98, italics original) correctly argues that “only by working against the subsuming logic of modern economic life and the ‘total society’ can one begin to recover the idea (and practice) of an authentically public realm that provides a space for the speech and action of diverse equals.” More abstractly, but no less to the point, Žižek (2002: 10–11) sees the phenomenon of virtual real­ity r­ unning through the fabric of global liberal society in which real­ity is avoided in all situations, including how the West experienced the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center: On ­today’s market, we find a ­whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . . ​And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the con­temporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, that is, as politics without politics, up to t­oday’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness . . . ? Virtual Real­ity simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance. . . . ​What happens at the end of this pro­cess of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience “real real­ity” itself as a virtual entity. For the ­great majority of the public, the WTC explosions ­were events on the TV screen, and when we watched the oft-­repeated shot of frightened ­people r­unning ­towards the camera ahead of the g­ iant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower, was not



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the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe movies . . . ?

So far, then, we see how the Empire/Multitude distinction describes a strug­ gle of global reach and how Empire appropriates Multitude. Yet we do not have a clarification of why this strug­gle should take place at all. Why would the Multitude fight to simply become the functionaries of Empire’s technocracy? Why would Brian, David, and their teammates be so energized by the lack of supervision that street work offers them and be equally concerned with conducting themselves honorably in such situations? Why would they exert so much effort to distinguish themselves from passport control officers? Why would they adorn their office in pictures parodying the “cult of Frank”? Put differently, and drawing once more on the Syrian refugee quoted in the epigraph for the Introduction, why would they even ask Shakespeare’s question “to be or not to be”? Why not ask the immediate question “to eat or not to eat?” . . . ​­Because that is not the (key) question. ­These matters take us to the ­matter of “immanence,” which deeply informs both Hardt and Negri’s argument as well as the anthropological work on ordinary ethics (Chapter 2). Hardt and Negri (2000: 373) turgidly define “immanence” “as the absence of ­every external limit from the trajectories of the action of the Multitude, and immanence is tied only, in its affirmations and destructions, to regimes of possibility that constitute its formation and development.” The term is counterposed against “transcendence,” which reduces h ­ uman action to ­either deviations from or fulfillments of a higher, eternal way of being. Immanence radically insists that what is already exists in the world as both its own natu­ral entity and its own potentiality. Hence, rather than divide Nature, Man, and God into three separate realms, as was customary in Western theology and po­liti­cal philosophy up ­until the seventeenth c­ entury, immanence collapses all three into humanity as a plurality and as a natu­ral entity uncircumscribed by a Divine realm. Thus any appeal to transcendent authority is invalid, and immanence should become “an anarchic basis of philosophy” through which the revolutionary spirit can be claimed (91–92). As a m ­ atter of practice, then, immanence involves the creation of moral codes and judgments derived from the lived experiences of actors themselves rather than transcendent premise, be it God, Nature, or the State. This creative action draws the team to the second sovereign form.

188 Conclusion

Spinoza’s ideas on immanence deeply influence con­temporary critical thinking on po­liti­cal action. A critique of it shows us what the intellectual trajectory he inspires can and cannot achieve. He conveys immanence through the concept of conatus, which refers to a subject’s inherent strug­gle to live according to its own emotional disposition or temperament, or, in a word, nature (1992: 108–9 [part III, props. 6–8]). Nature, however, has two dimensions that can be roughly explained as the essence of the object (natura naturans) and the pro­cess of the object’s becoming (natura naturata) (51–52 [part I, prop. 29, scholium]). Cona­ tus is existence and essence, which unite in both the strug­gle to become and the strug­gle to be. The two necessarily coexist, thereby yielding an unstable pres­ ent. If not, then becoming would be an agentless teleological pro­cess with the end preprogrammed into the beginning (as the proverbial oak tree is preprogrammed into the acorn). Being would be tantamount to a living death ­because our unchanging lives would have us solely attending, animal-­like, to the circular demands of our bodies’ metabolism; t­ here would be no becoming ahead of us, ­because we could not escape the circle. In contrast, the insecure and unstable pres­ent results from the fact that our strug­gles—­both to be and to become—­create tensions in the status quo and in the par­tic­u­lar subject itself. ­These tensions transpire within the web of ­human relations (e.g., the state/status quo), which both oppresses us and enables our lives. That insecurity results from the fact that being implies the pres­ent and becoming implies the ­future. In my view, contra Spinoza, the contradictory co-­presence of ­these two temporal locations renders history contingent and open to unpredictable outcomes as our respective conati push us forward. This contingency pertains to the fact that what I ­will become is open to countless potentialities inherent in the pres­ent (Humphrey 2008: 363). Crucially, I have taken ­great liberty with Spinoza’s argument by interpreting the tension between being and becoming as indicative of a historically contingent world. Spinoza rejected contingency with the proposition that “nothing in nature is contingent, but all t­ hings are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way” (51 [part I, prop. 20]). Correspondingly, he rejected the notion of a f­ree w ­ ill, reasoning that “men are deceived in thinking themselves ­free, a belief that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the ­causes by which they are determined. Therefore the idea of their freedom is simply the ignorance of the



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cause of their actions. As to their saying that ­human actions depend on the ­will, ­these are mere words without a corresponding idea” (86 [part II, prop. 35, scholium]). To my mind, for ­these and other reasons, Spinoza offers limited promise in explaining sovereign action, though many leading theorists push hard on his philosophy to do so (along with Hardt and Negri, see Balibar 2008, Deleuze 1988, and Negri 2013). A full explication Spinoza’s wider thought exceeds this book’s purpose, however. ­Here, I only wish to show how he well captures the composition of the unstable pres­ent, but still requires a richer explanation of how the par­tic­u­lar subject negotiates that instability, as per below. Hardt and Negri likewise make no evolutionary or teleological argument about the emergence of the Multitude. They see key historical moments that have lent themselves to it, particularly between the late medieval era and the Re­nais­sance. The initial observer of the Multitude is Dun Scotus, who reasons that “­every entity has a singular essence,” implying a distinction from a Divine realm. Dante Alighieri follows that such an essence amounts to “the drive to actualize ‘totam potentiam intellectus possibilis’—­all the power of the pos­si­ble intellect.” ­These pre­ce­dents lead to the realization that the full power of knowledge and creation lies not exclusively in a transcendent god, but rather in the ­human mind as a Divine machine. With proper use of this machine, humanity constantly enriches itself and becomes, drawing on Bovillus, “humanity squared” (all cited in Hardt and Negri 2000: 70–72). This squaring of humanity signifies that ­human beings possess the capacity to expand their knowledge and horizons exponentially. A Multitude of ­human beings far exceeds their mere numerical sum. Their power of creation is tantamount to God’s limitless own. Hence the early modern philosophers-­cum-­scientists, such as Bacon and Galileo, amalgamated the ­human and the Divine. Bacon argued that Nature can be reworked for ­human needs, while Galileo insisted that the certainty of the ­human intellect, particularly with re­spect to geometry and arithmetic, “equals divine knowledge.” This confidence carried over into the po­liti­cal sphere, with Marsilius positing that “the power of the Republic and the power of its laws derives not from superior princi­ples but from the assembly of citizens,” and ultimately with Spinoza merging the “horizon of immanence with the horizon of the demo­cratic po­liti­cal order” (73). H ­ ere, the crucial idea—­sadly foreign to us t­ oday—is that politics is action itself and is tantamount to our being in a world, or, in Spinoza’s terminology, to the realization of our conatus. Spinoza brilliantly inspired this

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interpretative frame through his articulation of how God, Divine creation, and humanity all reside on a plane of immanence that materializes through the ­human command of reason (qua the faculty of cognition). The reader can be forgiven for being both enthused by Hardt and Negri’s optimism and puzzled by their neglect of the horrors that ­people have unleashed when acting on the plane of immanence. Both reactions are merited. The limitation of their analy­sis is certainly not their optimism, but their lack of explanation of why both possibilities are forever pres­ent. One won­ders why the “Multitude” cannot become Hannah Arendt’s (1968: 107) “mob” composed of the “residue of all classes,” which resents society and government and searches for the first available “­great leader” to act directly in the social field, often with horrific results. Hardt and Negri’s formulation is limited by their undeveloped explication of how the subject’s mind—­through which it decides on its pre­sen­ ta­tion of self to ­others—­relates to what they call biopolitics (Chapter 4), or the strug­gles of the Multitude to establish sovereign space on its own terms. It results from the same lack of development in the intellectual trajectory on ethics and the mind that begins with Spinoza. He sees “true ideas” as derived through the mind’s command of abstract reason, which guides us ethically in the world (1992: 88–92 [part II, props. 41–43]). Right reason aligns us with our respective conati so that we live according to our own disposition. Reason transpires in two ways: (1) by adequately reasoning our way to them from the properties of t­ hings; and (2) through intuition, by which he means mathematical logic itself, logic in the abstract, which is f­ ree from any contingency. We know we have found a true idea when it withstands the force of reason, ­because our minds are extensions of God’s substance (i.e., minds are made as God intended them to be made). In brief, the mind is reduced to any organ that performs logical, cognitive operations. As logic is pure in its reasoning, the fact that ­humans have that capacity signifies the merger of the divine with the mundane: the presence of God on earth through ­human use of right reason (G. Feldman 2017). Despite its intent, this reduction of the mind to cognition perpetuates the prob­lem in Western po­liti­cal philosophy, though in a subtler way, that understands politics and action as the management of populations through perfect reason. This prob­lem extends back to Plato’s philosopher-­king, who could deduce good governance from the Divine forms obtained outside the cave of mortal existence (Arendt 2005: 93–96; Hardt and Negri 2000: 78–83). Even the concept of immanence, which seeks to locate sovereignty in lived experience rather



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than in a transcendent realm, does not fully escape this prob­lem, ­because it relies on the ­human capacity for abstract reason. Abstract reason through hegemonic social logics is transcendence in effect. However, as described throughout this book, the mind is equipped with an additional faculty through which it thinks; more specifically, it splits into two voices and engages itself in a dialogue about how to live in the world in such a way that the subject can live in agreement with itself (Chapter 1; G. Feldman 2015: 55–61). The faculty of thinking is qualitatively dif­fer­ent from the faculty of cognition b­ ecause it relates the subject to the messy, empirical world. In contrast, the faculty of cognition requires only itself to spin endlessly around abstract prob­lems of logic, located nowhere except in the emptiness of ­mental space. We can conduct endless geometric proofs, but this does not change the fact that a perfect triangle exists nowhere on Earth. To ruminate for too long on pure logic, therefore, removes us from the empirical world in contrast to thinking, which is inherently tied to it. Yet m ­ atters of pure logic can do g­ reat damage when imposed directly upon the impure world. Hardt and Negri do not enter the territory of the mind, so they neither recognize the crucial role of thinking in generating action nor appreciate the horrors that result from our failure to think (Arendt 1971, 2006b). This limit to their analy­sis precludes them from fully explaining how the Multitude arrives at action and establishes an alternative sovereign order, even though they convincingly explain how capitalism, as a mode of social control, fuses order onto the plane of immanence (Hardt and Negri 2000: 326). Indeed, the logics of Empire are technocratic, like the logics of capitalism. However, the necessary subsequent step in their analy­sis does not occur. They cannot explain how the subject as a par­tic­u­lar entity strug­gles for a constituent worldly presence, thus blurring the distinction between Empire and Multitude. Lacking a distinction between thinking and cognition, they likewise lose clarity in such terms as “singularity” and “collective” to describe the immanent action that subjects ­will allegedly take. Does “singularity” mean that one entity is distinct from ­others of the same kind? In this case, no two p ­ eople’s life experiences would be the same, so their combination offers unpredictable outcomes from their joint action. Or, does singularity mean that one entity signifies the essence of a larger collective? If so, then one specimen is an identical copy of other specimens of the same species, rendering all specimens replaceable and limited by the essence of their species. The notion of ­human plurality, so central to the undeveloped concept of the Multitude, means nothing po­liti­cally if “singularity” is not identified

192 Conclusion

with the first of ­those two meanings. If identified with the second, the plurality transforms back into homogeneity, all specimens are at most variations on a theme, and the prob­lem of transcendence returns by seeing p ­ eople in generic terms only. Lacking a connection between the subject’s internal existence and the world to which that subject is inextricably tied, we cannot an answer to the question of why we should strug­gle at all. However, the site of the proverbial strug­gle resides in the faculty of thought, where the subject works out a new stance in the world in reference to the alternative standpoints that ­others pres­ent (G. Feldman 2015: 69–72). That two-­in-­one thought dialogue is the strug­gle to settle one’s conscience. Yet thinking is not enough. The “plane of immanence” can only appear when thinking subjects encounter each other, deliberate on unpre­ce­dented situations, and jointly act to reconstitute the space between them. The effects of the action, however, w ­ ill always be less than the potential number of actions that ­were considered in each subject’s thought dialogue and in the deliberations among the actors themselves: the potential for what could be is always greater than what actually transpires in the world. Thus potentiality and immanence are not one and the same ­thing. Hardt and Negri do not seek this result, but they are left with it by ignoring the faculty of thinking in explaining the Multitude in action. Any kind of po­liti­cal order or action premised upon cognition alone ­will void the subjects of their personhood and generate the first sovereign form and Empire along with it. Again, if the Multitude succeeds in becoming the man­ag­ers of Empire, then they become Empire itself. To be sure, Balibar highlights that Spinoza, in his Theological-­Political Trea­ tise, fully recognizes that each individual possesses an irreducible “complexion,” from which we can infer possesses a standpoint distinct from all o­ thers (2008: 29–31). The state must then accommodate and adjust to this plurality for the sake of its own security. Conversely, ­there can be no secure state—­and hence no secure individual—­unless sovereignty is generated out of the plurality of persons inhabiting its domain. In Balibar’s words (31), “Envisaged from a non-­formal perspective, sovereignty as it actually exists turns out to be a continuous pro­cess of collective production in which individual powers are ‘transferred’ to the public authority and ideological fluctuations are stabilised.” As it stands, this point is hardly controversial. However, it accounts neither for the state-­cum-­capital’s routine appropriation of ­people’s talents and strug­gles nor for the susceptibility of the ­people to transform into a mob, per Arendt’s analy­sis



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discussed earlier. Balibar’s read on Spinoza, like Hardt and Negri’s, needs to explain how the strug­gle manifests itself in the subject in order to explain how that strug­gle ­will manifest itself in actions pertaining to the first or second sovereign forms. The prob­lem again stems from the limitations of Spinoza’s own articulation of the faculties of the mind. The point of drawing out the dual capacities of the mind is central to understand how p ­ eople strug­gle to affect themselves in the world and how the con­ temporary status quo works resolutely against it. Hardt and Negri take us as far as pos­si­ble given the intellectual trajectory they follow. We owe it to Hannah Arendt, whose reworking of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (specifically the “First Part: The Critique of Aesthetical Judgment”) uncovered Kant’s “unwritten po­liti­ cal philosophy” (Beiner 1992: 142). Though her interpretation of the Critique of Judgment never fully came together due to her death, she clearly links the faculty of thinking to a po­liti­cal community that acts on the basis of par­tic­u­lar judgments rather than abstract princi­ples (see Arendt 1978, 1992; see G. Feldman 2015 for a full explication). Like anyone e­ lse struggling to be, living through co­ natus, the team members exist in a field of h ­ uman relations. They conduct internal debate with themselves about that field. Then they debate with each other about how to conduct themselves in it so they can live with themselves when they are alone. Or, as Edward, a former team member put, so he can sleep with his “head on the pillow” (Feldman 2016: 510). They compare ­legal requirements against their own ethical judgment. They seek not just material security, but a constituent presence that pushes history in a direction that they, as par­tic­u­lar persons, decide it should go. To put their stamp on history, and the polity, and so affect themselves as their own par­tic­u­lar subjects, they must act on their assessments of the field of relations in which they are suspended.

The Second Sovereign Form: Why Strug­gle at All? The team’s entry point into the gray zone, and so the second sovereign form, is enabled by their lack of street supervision. On the street no one sees what they do. They can disguise their actions from the law and the Immigration Ser­vice through report writing. Clever ­lawyers can question the reports with cross-­ examination, but the team can prepare themselves in advance for such tactics. The shifting use of “evidence” and “intelligence” lets them avoiding having to cover up illegal maneuvers in the reports. Intelligence need not be included in the reports, only evidence. In any case, the ultimate protection is a tacit agreement

194 Conclusion

with judges that national security cannot be compromised. As long as the team show competence in their methods in court, judges w ­ ill not challenge their concealing the identities of key in­for­mants or question how they found certain leads in the investigation. The broader point h ­ ere is that gray zones emerge not only in cases where the state formally suspends the law but also in situations where actors of any kind have no accountability to the law. ­These two statements are similar but not identical. A state of emergency, in which the law is suspended, requires a declaration by a sovereign executive such as a president, prime minister, dictator, or the like. The executive then takes what­ever actions it sees fit to restore equilibrium. However, the lack of accountability to the law occurs whenever the law’s powers of surveillance are ­either limited in their reach or willfully ignored. Formally, the law remains intact. ­These situations are common occurrences throughout the world. For this reason, we must think of the gray zone as a normal, ordinary occurrence that appears in relatively weaker or more robust forms. The term “state of exception” need not suggest only a circumscribed camp outside of ­legal order, though it most intensely manifests in one as Agamben’s (1998) permanent exception. Rather, it can identify situations in which law and moral code ­will not necessarily preclude p ­ eople from undertaking exceptional acts. In short, it underpins the organ­ization of modern space projected into the population itself through a range of techniques resulting in what Agamben describes as “dislocating localizations” (cited in Minca 2007: 83; see also Hönig 2014). With respect to his discipline, Minca (95) asks the core question: Can geography help theorise a politics that does not need to except bare life [homo sacer] . . . ?” To rephrase it for the generalist: Can we imagine a politics that is premised upon persons as par­ tic­u­lar beings rather than as generic ones? The answer must examine the conditions that facilitate ­people deploying their capacities for thought, judgment, and joint action. Such opportunities are rare, but, insofar as we come to life with t­ hose opportunities, ­people are inclined to pursue them. This inclination explains the team’s efforts to retain their peculiar location in the Interior Ministry’s bureaucracy and to cultivate their identity as carefully as they do. To explain, we must forego notions of the valiant individual who blazes a path ­toward justice in spite of all obstacles, or of the singularly evil soul bent on harming ­others. Yet we must also not overemphasize the character who quietly manipulates bureaucracies b­ ehind the scenes for the sake of ­doing good for o­ thers. (For example, Brian and David in the “humanitarian



Alternatives Within 195

corridor” [Chapter 1] did not exemplify the second sovereign form, but only manipulated the first by suspending the rules of who can be admitted to the Schengen Area.) Instead, we must ask how ­people are or­ga­nized when they move into the gray zone to see how their personhood may or may not appear in the associated sovereign action. The orga­nizational form conditions how the subject can appear before ­others, and thus how that subject effects itself po­liti­cally. Vertical arrangement are inherently anti-­democratic even if they require equality to maintain their legitimacy (Introduction). They are anti-­democratic ­because they demand that every­one down the ranks follow ­orders. They also command ­those at the top ­because their legitimacy depends upon their allegiance to the logic. The actors stratified in its hierarchy do not play constituent and equal roles in defining its purposes and objectives on the basis of consensus from their respective standpoints. Ultimately, their creative input is limited to serving the logic of the sovereign state or of capital accumulation, specifically by making their operations run more efficiently. (Again, verticality takes hold when abstract logic dominates ­because it subordinates the par­tic­u­lar subject even when it has them acting in horizontal arrangements.) Yet all subjects are equal, insofar as they all receive the same treatment, conditions, benefits, and opportunities, at least theoretically. Equality in a vertical arrangement is understood as a m ­ atter of recognizing each subject as the same entity. If all are the same, then no one should receive special treatment. Yet to homogenize p ­ eople is to create abstractions out of them and so no one in par­tic­u­lar remains. In Heidegger’s (2010: 124) seminal formulation, “Every­one is the other, and no one is himself.” If someone receives preferential treatment, then the legitimacy of the w ­ hole organ­ization is called into question and risks destabilization. The team rarely missed a chance to spotlight t­ hese condescending features of verticality. Their frequent disparagement of their colleagues’ monotonous work in border control was matched with their resentment ­toward se­nior management, which kept its bonus pay despite austerity mea­sures. The vertical and the horizontal orga­nizational arrangements correspond to the first and the second sovereign forms respectively. Strictly speaking, sovereignty amounts to foundational acts of constitution that are unpre­ce­dented in time and thus unconstrained by preexisting law or moral code. They are new beginnings par excellence. As such, they signify the thrill and joy of being, an experience revealing the potential to begin anew with ­others in ways that no one

196 Conclusion

thought was pos­si­ble (Arendt 2006c: 110; G. Feldman 2015: 95–105; Graeber 2002: 72). As much as history might repeat itself, it is certainly loaded with events and new directions that no one anticipated. The capacity to begin anew makes history contingent rather than cyclical or teleological. This capacity derives from Spinoza’s tension between being and becoming, which necessarily results in unpredictable outcomes and so renders history contingent. Without that tension, then, no action would take place, despite ­there being an abundance of activity. Yet such actions so often prove a threat to the status quo, thus it must initially remain concealed. Our liberal aversion to state secrecy draws from the modern sentiment that since all are equal (as the same entity), then all must have an equal chance to better their lives. State secrets, then, are seen as shields that conceal ­either the unequal advantage of a few or the modes in which the state intrudes into our lives. However, secrecy also protects fragile new initiatives from the glare of the public eye ­until they are capable of withstanding the scrutiny, fair or not, that they w ­ ill receive. Hence Simmel (1906: 462) sees secrecy positively, explaining it as the “fruitful depth of relationships which, ­behind ­every revelation, implies the still unrevealed. . . . ​Secrecy in this this sense . . . ​is one of the greatest accomplishments of humanity.” Secrecy allows the new to germinate before it enters public space. Secrecy’s protection can only remain for so long, however. To be denied (or to deny one’s self) public appearance is to lose a phenomenal existence, as one who inhabits the world with ­others. That mutual recognition is how we jointly distinguish and effect ourselves. Brian’s comment about secrecy could not be more fitting, despite its egotistical formulation: “Secrecy is not that alluring. It ­doesn’t make the work cool. If it is unseen, how can it be cool? Cool is about showing off.” The team themselves never fully enter a public space properly speaking, though they constitute a highly circumscribed one among themselves. A key reason for their agreeing to my presence was surely their desire to enlarge their public space, even if anonymously. Is the team part of Empire or Multitude? The answer is both, but they strug­ gle to effect themselves as the Multitude through the gray zone associated with the second sovereign form. They strug­gle to create a space of appearance within Empire’s globalized sovereign space, which systemically denies their appearance as par­tic­u­lar subjects. This strug­gle is hardly unique to the team—it can be witnessed in po­liti­cal movements around the globe. This desire for appearance cannot be adequately explained as egotism, or as the mere projection of one’s persona into the public light. Recall that the public space is not a cordoned-­off



Alternatives Within 197

zone into which the subject is granted or denied entry. It is a field in which the subjects who compose it grant each other recognition, thus rendering each other’s phenomenal existence. The first sovereign form isolates and disempowers us as par­tic­ul­ ar subjects even if we cooperate with o­ thers as generic ones. To be isolated is not to be geo­graph­i­cally sequestered but rather “to be deprived of the capacity to act” (Arendt 1998: 188). The second sovereign form empowers actors through their examination of each other’s standpoints—­i.e., thinking—to decide how they should engage ­those ­others in public space. This dynamic suggests more than ­simple open-­mindedness. Rather, it conveys phenomenologically that if one actor fails to consider the particularity, and so the difference, of the other, then both lose recognition as beings in a world of their own par­tic­u­ lar creation. If one ­were to treat the other as less than a par­tic­u­lar being, then one would have to live with one’s self as an agent of dehumanization. The two-­ in-­one thought dialogue might not come to a peaceful close, leaving the conscience irritated. In any event, that agent would shrink the scope of the world s/he inhabits by denying the other’s existence as one before whom to appear, thus creating the possibility of living monotonously in a mere echo chamber of like-­minded ­people. Again, ­human plurality renders ethics and action potentially immanent ­because each thinking person occupies a dif­fer­ent standpoint, rendering the possibilities for joint action innumerable. For immanence to be actualized, however, it must express the particularity of subjects acting in concert to (re)constitute a status quo that allows them to live in agreement with themselves and honorably in each other’s eyes. The second sovereign form depends upon t­ hese conditions, while the first denies it. Ultimately, the question of what the state is, which is inseparable from the question of what sovereignty is, links directly to the question of why we strug­gle. The status quo both oppresses us as par­tic­u­lar subjects and grants us the only opportunity we have to appear as ­those subjects. Our strug­gle to be and to become, in a word conatus, transpires in fields of relations that are or­ga­nized in reference to ­either of the two sovereign forms. Or­ga­nized vertically, the first denies appearance through atomization but nevertheless appropriates our powers of production (creative production or laboring production). As such, we cannot actualize our virtue in the Aristotelian sense or our honor in the Appiahan sense for lack of o­ thers through whom we gain appearance. Or­ga­nized horizontally, the second sovereign form would achieve this effect as it does for the investigative team. We strug­gle ­because we cannot

198 Conclusion

bear a life in isolation that denies our appearance in the world. Once we answer Shakespeare’s question—to be or not to be?—in the affirmative, then we must pursue a course of action to instantiate our being. Like the investigative team, that action must be a joint endeavor so that a sovereign space emerges through which each of the actors can be through mutual recognition of each other. This mutualism grants a worldly real­ity to all ­those involved. The Syrian refugee explained this point to us in his full answer to Shakespeare’s question. He replied not with the liberal “I w ­ ill be” but rather, nodding to his fellow travellers, with the phenomenal “We w ­ ill be.”

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Index

Action, 1–3, 6, 7–12, 16–17, 20–22, 30, 33, 38–39, 56, 71, 80, 132, 190, 193; vis-à-vis Empire, 145, 177, 183, 191–193; global, 140, 144–145, 176–177, 187; secrecy, 107–109, 117, 120, 134–136. See also Second sovereign form affective labor, 146, 148 Agamben, Giorgio, 18–19, 29, 71, 194 Agency, 6, 36. See also First sovereign form Apparatus, 4, 14, 16, 26, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45–46, 49, 57–58, 137–140, 141–146, 180, 181, 183 Appearance, 7, 15, 38, 72; space of appearance, 42, 59, 67, 68, 82, 104, 134–135, 180, 185, 196–198 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 38, 73, 104–105, 136, 197 Arendt, Hannah, 3, 9–12, 39, 44–45, 68, 190, 193 Augustine, 10–11 Austerity, team under, 66, 95, 121, 179–181, 195 Avatars, 118–120, 161

Desk investigators, 2, 5, 47, 50, 51–53, 54, 65, 66, 75, 95, 97, 98–99, 105, 117, 121, 134, 159, 160, 180

Balibar, Etienne, 24, 81, 189, 192–193 Being. See First sovereign form; Second sovereign form Biopower/biopolitics, 29, 39, 140, 144–146, 176–177, 180, 183

Georgia, 34; Georgians in team investigations, 63, 65, 68, 74, 81, 113, 128, 129–131 Gidma, 156, 158, 159

Camp, concentration, 19, 23–25, 26, 37, 194; refugee, 137–138, 156, 182 China, 34, 35, 36, 95, 104, 122; Chinese in team investigations, 27, 37, 47, 55, 61, 73, 77, 111, 113, 123–124, 126–128, 130–131, 152, 158 Christie, 137, 146–152 Class, 22, 28, 62, 99, 107–108, 127, 146, 151, 169, 180, 185, 190 Cognition, 13–14, 190–192, 193 Coup d’état, 18 Deportation, 27–28, 83–84, 143, 158, 166

Empire, 5, 46, 145, 177, 180, 181–184, 185–187, 191–192, 196 Ethics, extra/ordinary, 16, 38, 66, 92–95, 187. See also Immanence Ethnography, 6, 17, 31, 182 First sovereign form, 3–4, 5, 6, 66, 69, 104, 108, 134, 139, 140, 146, 192; agency, 14, 42–44; current literature, 26–30; dispositions in, 83–85; equality, 13–14, 180, 195; gray zone, 17–22, 22–25, 63; Hobbes and early modern state, 44–45; verticality, 22–25, 30, 42, 72, 82, 84, 195, 197; violence, 72, 74–77, 80–81 Foucault, Michel, 18, 26, 29, 45, 46, 138, 141, 186

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. See Biopower/ biopolitics; Empire; Multitude Hierarchy, 5, 24, 32, 33, 42, 47, 67, 87, 105, 167, 183, 186, 195. See also Verticality Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 20, 44–45, 70 Homo sacer, 18–19, 29, 63, 194 Honor. See Second sovereign form Horizontality, 5, 145, 159, 176, 195. See also Second sovereign form Identity, team, 95–98; “cult of Frank,” 101–103 Immanence, 39, 94, 184, 185, 187–192, 197 Informants, 36, 38, 55, 56, 77–78, 79, 108, 109–120, 134, 138, 162, 194

213

214 Index Judgment, 38, 65, 66, 68, 80, 94, 102, 105, 108, 177, 180, 183, 187, 193; ethical, 4, 5, 14, 16, 21, 26, 54, 57, 67, 72, 104, 108, 118, 120, 133–134, 136, 186; technical, 13, 14, 16, 46, 186 Kafka, Franz, 2, 172 Lager. See Camp, concentration Levi, Primo, 22–25, 73, 82–84 Leviathan. See Hobbes, Thomas Liberalism, 15, 26, 29, 34, 57, 68, 82, 105, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 167, 173, 186, 196, 198 Louis XIV, 7, 11 Madams. See Mamas Mamas, 96, 154, 156, 158, 161, 164 Miranda street, 35–37, 112, 121, 124, 155–157, 162, 167 Multitude, 177, 180, 181, 183–184, 185–187, 189–192, 196 Narrative, 42, 53–57; evidence, 55–56; intelligence, 53, 55–56, 193; truth, 53–57 Nazism, 19, 21, 23, 25, 73, 83 Neoliberalism, 45, 139, 150, 151 Nigeria, 34; Nigerians in team investigations, 36, 39, 52, 61, 77, 96, 118–119, 128, 140, 146, 155–166 Particularity. See Second sovereign form Passport control officers, 2, 3–5, 13–14, 50, 65, 180, 187 Personhood, 2, 7, 9, 13, 37, 67, 69, 71–73, 80–81, 93, 133, 192, 195 Petit Palace, 157, 160, 175 Plurality, 3–4, 7–10, 15, 19, 21, 22, 39, 59, 103, 183, 187, 191–192, 197 Policy/police, 30–34 Raison d’état, 18, 45, 66 Romania, 34, 77–79, 103, 146, 149, 151, 166; Roma in team investigations, 167–175 Rumkowski, Chaim, 82–84

Sadie, 155–158, 160, 165 Scanning, 66, 100, 121, 133 Schengen Area, 35, 65, 124, 159, 166, 167, 195 Schmitt, Carl, 19–22, 27, 56, 71 Second sovereign form, 3–4, 6, 7, 19, 37, 38, 39, 46, 66, 92–93, 94, 177, 183; action, 7–8, 14–15, 17, 19, 43–44, 45, 53, 58–59, 66–69, 72–73, 79–80, 82, 92–95, 104–105, 134, 177, 180, 181, 183, 185–187, 194–195, 197–198; conditions of, 31, 58–65, 69; dispositions in, 85–92; equality, 14–15, 59, 64, 67, 79–80, 104; gray zone, 25, 29, 30, 146; honor and conviction, 57, 65, 69, 70, 104–105; horizontality, 5, 42, 57, 69, 88, 104, 177, 195, 197; secrecy, 108, 123, 135, 139; team social organization in, 58–61; violence, 72, 73–80, 81–82 Secrecy. See Second sovereign form Security. See Apparatus Sovereignty, 5, 6, 26–30, 39, 140, 145; critique of literature on, 7–12; new beginnings, 8, 11, 12, 19, 195–196. See also First sovereign form; Second sovereign form Spectacle. See Christie Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict), 39, 179, 183, 192–193; conatus, 188–189; reason, 190 State of exception, 8–9, 11–12, 18–20, 28–29, 56, 69, 71, 73, 93, 108, 194 Surveillance, stages of, 120–130; give away, 126; risk of lawbreaking, 130–132; technology in, 121–122 Syrian refugees, 1, 2, 15, 137–139, 153, 187, 198 Technocracy/technocratic, 5, 13, 19, 21, 42, 44, 46, 57, 108, 118, 138, 141, 143, 145, 186, 187 Thinking, 14, 16, 31, 37–38, 45, 62, 64, 67, 68–69, 80, 82, 84–85, 93–95, 181, 183, 184, 191–193, 197 Two-in-one thought dialogue, 14–16, 21, 72, 133. See also Thinking Verticality, 5, 32, 34, 69, 177, 180, 195 Violence, 72–74. See also First sovereign form; Second sovereign form

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

ADVISORY BOARD

Laura Bear Donald Brenneis Janine Wedel Dvora Yanow SERIES DESCRIPTION:

The Anthropology of Policy series promotes innovative methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of policy. The series challenges the assumption that policy is a top-­down, linear, and rational pro­cess, and a field of study primarily for policy professionals. Books in the series analyze the contradictory nature and effects of policy, including the intricate ways in which ­people engage with policy, the meanings it holds for dif­fer­ent local, regional, national, and internationally based actors, and the complex relationships and social worlds that it produces. —­—­— Law Mart: Justice, Access, and For-­Profit Law Schools Riaz Tejani 2017 One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health Susanna Trnka 2017 The Orderly Entrepreneur: Youth, Education, and Governance in Rwanda Catherine A. Honeyman 2016 Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth Reva Jaffe-­Walter 2016 Fragile Elite: The Dilemmas of China’s Top University Students Susanne Bregnbaek 2016

Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River Laura Bear 2015 Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia Winifred Tate 2015