Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions 0816696292, 9780816696291

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MAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL 2

MAKING THINGS INTERNATIONAL Mark B. Salter, Editor

1. Circuits and Motion 2. Catalysts and Reactions

Making Things International 2 Catalysts and Reactions Mark B. Salter, Editor

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

An earlier version of “Barbed Wire” was published in Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (New York: Routledge, 2015). Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Salter, Mark B., editor. Title: Making things international, 2. Catalysts and reactions / edited by Mark B. Salter. Other titles: Catalysts and reactions Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015044918| ISBN 978-0-8166-9629-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9630-7 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: International relations—Philosophy. | Globalization—Political aspects. | World politics— 21st century. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Services. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization. Classification: LCC JZ1319 .M372 2016 | DDC 327.101—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044918

Contents

Introduction: Making Assemblages International

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Mark B. Salter

Part I. Territorialization The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter 

3

Srdjan Vucetic

Military Manuals

20

Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi

Barbed Wire

32

Alexander D. Barder

Protest Camps

49

Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy

Tent

63

Andreas Folkers and Nadine Marquardt

Benches

79

Emily Lindsay Jackson

Secrets

92

David Grondin and Nisha Shah

Grey

106

Shine Choi

Orange Prison Jumpsuit

122

Elspeth Van Veeren

Flags

137

Rune Saugmann Andersen, Xavier Guillaume, and Juha A. Vuori

Container Scanning Unit

153

Julian Stenmanns

Diplomatic Cable Tobias Wille

166

Part II. Deterritorialization The Yellow Car

181

Debbie Lisle

Smartphone

195

Peter Chambers

Hotlines and International Crisis

216

Claudia Aradau

Cookies

228

Thomas N. Cooke

The Atom

241

Casper Sylvest and Rens van Munster

Asbestos

258

Nicky Gregson

Dirt

274

Mary Manjikian

Shit

285

Sagi Cohen

Burning Cars

299

Helen Arfvidsson

Tear Gas

313

Miguel de Larrinaga

Drones

326

Kyle Grayson

4 x 4s

338

Adam Sandor

Acknowledgments

357

Contributors

359

Introduction Making Assemblages International

Mark B. Salter

The world is made up of things, stuff, objects. Political assemblages can be catalyzed by a host of surprising sparks. Global systems are complex and interdependent, but the well-­worn tools of International Relations seem unsuited to the task of understanding how particular objects, ideas, and people come together to create, dispute, solve, or perhaps cause these political configurations. Inspired from contemporary social and critical thought coming from sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies, this project offers some provocative interventions in the debates about causality, connection, and politics through the notion of assemblage. In the companion volume, Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, we used things, stuff, and objects in motion to capture some of the material dynamics of global politics, and in particular to demonstrate that importance of the material. This volume builds on this conversation, and looks at unique objects that catalyze political assemblages. In tracing the history and development of specific objects, technologies, and tools, we can see not simply the evidence of high-­power interstate politics, but also the politics in all its fine capillaries: on the docks, in the walls, as we text or surf the Web, debated in technical subcommittees, discussed in boardrooms, and decided in engineering labs. As Law argues, “nation states are made by telephone systems, paperwork and geographical triangulations points” (Law 1999, 7). Material connections and the circuits and controversies that they call into being catalyze political stakes that are nonlinear, emergent, and unpredictable. The architecture of the Internet and e-­mail was a by-­product of a military calculus: to enable the transmission of a second strike command to nuclear missile silos after a successful first Soviet strike, the architecture of a communication system that allowed the messages to find a path through a broken or compromised system to their recipient (Ryan 2010). The containerization of the global shipping trade, which has led to a radical reduction in the cost of shipping and indeed provided the efficient material foundation for our current mode of globalization, was the

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result of an entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, who sought profit through rationalization of trucking and shipping in the 1950s (Levinson 2006). Histories of specific technologies, commodities, or objects are very popular: cod, salt, the machine gun, barbed wire, telephone, cables, and so on, but too often concerned only with how these things relate to humans. Bogost makes the claim most provocatively: “We’ve been living in a tiny prison of our own devising, one in which all that concerns us are the fleshy beings that are our kindred and the stuff with which we stuff ourselves. Culture, cuisine, experience, expression, politics, polemic: all existence is drawn through the sieve of humanity, the rich world of things discarded like chaff” (2012, 3). We seek to engage this rich world of things. What we add to these discussions, as political scientists and International Relations (IR) scholars, is a sensitivity toward power, authority, control, and sovereignty. This chapter will introduce the concept of assemblage, particularly in the manner used by Actor-­Network Theory (ANT) that leverages a flat ontology to trace controversies through the connections between things, people, and ideas. To further our discussion in Making Things International 1, we reengage with the critique of sovereignty from this new materialist position. Because some of the contributions in this volume follow discursive objects as well as material objects, we differentiate new materialist analysis of discourse or cultural practices from other critical discourse analyses. Finally, we provide a survey of the interventions in this volume.

Assemblage and Catalysts More and more critical IR scholars are demonstrating interest in new materialism, that is Actor-­Network Theory, Science and Technology Studies more broadly, and vital materialism (see 2013 Millennium special issue on materialism and world politics, 41[3], 2013 International Political Sociology forum in 7[3]; see also Acuto and Curtis 2014; Schouten 2014). Without a minute survey of these distinct fields, this introduction will serve as a brief overview to this approach, and in particular to the role of assemblages within new materialism. This sensitivity toward new scales of analysis, emergent causality, thick description of particular milieus, objects or processes, a flat ontology, and the agential capacity of objects can be derived from two traditions. From Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, there is a philosophical route to new materialism that emphasizes Spinoza and other vitalist thinkers that account for a more dispersed account of causality. In this view, there is a new kind of realism that takes the world as existing independent of human cognition or interpretation.

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“The vital materialist affirms a figure of matter as an active principle, and a universe of this lively materiality that is always in various states of congealment and diffusion, materialities that are active and creative without needing to be experienced or conceived as partaking in divinity or purposiveness,” writes Bennett (2010, 93). This realism is not the stark six principles familiar to IR scholars, but a philosophical stance that the world, even the social world, is “mind-­independent” but not essentialist (Delanda 2006, 1). Thus, vital materialists would accept that there is such a thing as a “market,” but only particular markets, arising in historical and geographical locales with specific practices, resources, and logics. The market is also a perfect object of study for ANT, precisely because “the market is an institution which mixes humans and non-­humans and controls their relations” (Callon 1999, 182). Delanda and Sassen, for example, both trace the evolution of the “national” market, arising from villages, to towns, to cities, to nations. Vital materialists such as Bennett seek to describe political ecologies, in which things, environmental processes, life at all scales, and humans all contribute to particular assemblages, which by their nature have effects greater and less predictable than the sum of their parts. From the other route, work in Science and Technology Studies, and particularly Actor-­Network Theory, with the work from Latour, Law, Callon, Mol, Barad, and others, has focused on the role of human and nonhuman actants in particular assemblages. Latour, for example, sets out a program for a Dingpolitik or thing-­politics: Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words, objects—­taken as so many issues—­bind all of us in ways that map out public space profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of “the political.” It is this space, this hidden geography that we wish to explore. (2005a, 15) In the magisterial Making Things Public, a host of contributors muse on the question of connections between things and democracy. Walters demonstrates the power of this Dingpolitik by looking at how the rubble and residue from drone strikes made claims of responsibility possible (2014). Callon, in a famous example, looks at how preservation debates around the scallops of St. Brieuc Bay must allow for the agency of the scallops themselves, which must interact

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with the wind, the ocean, and the scientists’ efforts to represent, affect, and protect them (1986). By investigating very particular controversies, accidents, incidents, or technologies, these scholars trace how material and political forces intermingle (Law 1987; Law and Mol 2008; Mol 2003). The concern of ANT with science and democracy, responsibility, and accountability is important and engaging (Braun and Whatmore 2010; Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009). However, few engage directly with the international—­as a scale of analysis, which is the strength of IR. Assemblage has become a popular thinking tool in understanding contemporary global politics. Assemblage is both a methodological stance and the expression of a particular form (Acuto and Curtis 2014, 9). As a methodological stance, focused on openness, emergence, and heterogeneity, analysts look for connections—­without prioritizing a particular level of analysis or kind of actor (be it human, nonhuman, or environmental), it is process-­related. Catalysis is emphasized here as a unifying theme, because many of the objects or things in this collection spark controversies or are enrolled in particular assemblages in surprising or nonlinear ways that challenge the models and expectations of IR scholars. Latour argues that the duties of the social scientist mutate accordingly: . . . your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’, that is to try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to assemble. (Latour 2005b, 12) Assemblages then can never be pre-­given or conform to a hypothetical structure. Ong makes a similar kind of argument: “it is not a theory: assemblage is a way of reframing our inquiry, to grasp perhaps critical interacting elements that would help us in analyzing what is happening. We are trying to capture things that are always in the midst of unfolding so the very value, for me, of a global established strategy of enquiry as a concept is that it takes into account contingency and uncertainty in a way perhaps that large theories do not because they have causal determinants in one way or another” (2014, 19). So, as a method, or as a way of thinking, the assemblage is attuned to openness, emergence, and heterogeneity as evidenced by connections that work together, characterized by the modesty of the researcher. x

Mark B. Salter

Assemblages are understood as uncoordinated processes that nevertheless have a concerted effect. With a focus on difference, heterogeneity, and exteriority, assemblages are more likely rhizomatic than arboreal, networked rather than hierarchical. Bueger describes it as “a number of disparate and heterogeneous elements convoked together into a single discernible formation. The concept denotes an understanding of structure which is not confined to a distinct scale (such as local-­global or a micro-­meso-­macro-­scale) nor does it preclude a distinct order” (2014, 60). As a form, Deleuze and Guattari describe the characteristics of the assemblage, which is worth quoting at length: On a first, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorialized side, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. On the one hand, the ship-­machine, the hotel-­machine, the circus-­machine, the castle-­machine, the court-­machine, each with its own intermingled pieces, gears, processes, and bodies contained in one another or bursting out of containment. On the other hand, the regime of signs or of enunciation: each regime with its incorporeal transformations, acts, death sentences and judgments, proceeds, “law.” (Deleuze and Guattari 2008, 97–­98) Necessarily, there is no dominant level of analysis or privileged categorization: in fact, there is a presumed skepticism of large-­scale explanatory categories, such as the state, society, or the international system. In this reading, we are looking for both material and discursive constellations, which are comprised of smaller assemblages and themselves part of larger assemblages. Within the assemblage, Delanda highlights two important tendencies: territorialization and deterritorialization, that is, the tendencies of those assemblages to increase internal homogeneity or to increase heterogeneity and to stabilize or to destabilize, without prejudice that increased heterogeneity might promote stability and vice versa. The presumption for assemblage thinking is that these coalescences are temporary, fleeting, or, in Connolly’s word, “fragile,” and so we must be continually engaged in their processes of stabilization and destabilization, harmony and interference (2013). The notion of assemblage has also been used by actor-­network theorists, such as Law, who describes assemblage as Introduction

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a process of bundling, of assembling, or better or recursive self-­ assembling in which the elements put together are not fixed in shape, do not belong to a larger pre-­given list but are constructed at least in part as they are entangled together. This means that there can be no fixed formula or general rules for determining good and bad bundles. (Law 2004, 42) What is crucial for this kind of analysis is a flat ontology, a kind of naive openness to connection between all kinds of different actors, human and nonhuman—­including objects, ideas, and out-­of-­scale processes such as geological time or subatomic forces. Deleuze and Guattari give a preliminary illustration: Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring as symbiosis of bodies—­a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables: the collective assemblage of enunciation. (Deleuze and Guattari 2008, 98) One of the hallmarks of this modesty is to allow that small things, objects, processes, or ideas might be the catalyst for larger assemblages. As we observed in the Introduction to Making Things International 1, the inherent skepticism of ANT and assemblage thinking to pre-­given scales of analysis should pose an immediate problem for the discipline of International Relations, which takes as its starting point a prioritization of one scale of analysis—­the international—­over others, such as the national or the local. Barry talks about the productive tension between ANT and IR: actor-­network theory poses two immediate challenges for international relations. Firstly, it raises the problem of how to think through the significance of non-­humans, including surveillance devices, pollutants, mineral resources and biological material, and international relations, however the latter is conceived. Secondly, science and technology studies direct us to the critical importance of scientific and technical knowledge to international relations, whether this knowledge is related

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to nuclear and biological weapons, climate change, carbon markets, genetically modified organisms, biodiversity or computer security. (Barry 2013, 420) True, but I would add that it is not only a question about scientific or technical knowledge, but about the knowledge of the international itself, which is structured by philosophy and materiality equally. Knowledge about the international is structured, as Walker argues, by the very disciplinary divide between political thought and international relations, and the idealistic philosophy of even the most realist of IR theories. I would also supplement here that the international structures, as it is structured by, the material on multiple scales. What the field of IR can contribute to ANT and assemblage thinking is a concern with the constitutive nature of sovereignty and the politics that it limits. The primary way of organizing knowledge about the international has been the key concept of sovereignty. Whether understood as a levels-­of-­analysis filter, which defines international relations as that which occurs in the anarchical realm between and among states, or as a way of understanding an authority claim in everyday life, sovereignty is the touchstone of the field of International Relations. Within the broad field of IR and its cognate fields, assemblage has proved itself to be a useful tool. Haggerty and Ericson demonstrate the way that surveillance—­as a mode of late modernity—­comes to cohere a number of different actors, technologies, institutions, and incentives to create an uncoordinated system that nonetheless works together. The observation of things, peoples, and data may be done for commercial, security, or bureaucratic reasons that are entirely different (profit, risk assessment, efficiency, or accountability) and may be malevolent, controlling, or benign (stalkers, tracking, or monitoring), but have the effect of working together to increase the amount of data collected, analyzed, and applied to that individual. They argue that this assemblage operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention. In the process, we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance. (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 606) The surveillant assemblage is coherent only insofar as the component parts work together, and jump across institutional, sector, field, local, and

Introduction

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international boundaries. Without implying a central organizing principle or power, each of these different actors or institutions chose to engage in surveillance as a mechanism of observation, calculation, and intervention, with the effect that individuals and groups are increasingly surveilled. This is one of the primary theoretical and methodological advantages of the assemblage as an analytic organizing device: assemblages are not indebted to previously established categories or levels of analysis. Focusing only the police and security organizations increasing their closed-­circuit television (CCTV) and online surveillance would minimize the use of CCTV by homeowners and shopkeepers or online surveillance by social-­media companies for marketing purposes or parents. In assemblage analysis, one tracks the connections as they arise. De Goede exemplifies this approach in her work Speculative Security. She demonstrates how the financial sectors’ marketing efforts, the “know your customer” regulations set up to track illegal networks such as money laundering and drug cartels, dovetailed with the prosecution of the War on Terror to render all new kinds of transactions and data suspect. The SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) affair involving the capture and analysis of global financial data housed in the United States by a private corporation under the authority of the USA PATRIOT Act in direct contravention of European Union privacy legislation demonstrated that law and authority are not immediately confined by territorial boundaries. Similar to Haggerty and Ericson, de Goede follows the money to understand the multiple paths it takes. The hawalla assemblage of informal money transfers is related to Islamic charities, which intersects with the global banking system seeking to manage money laundering, which connects to the global counterterrorism assemblage. She advocates assemblage thinking: using assemblage, then, renders visible the ways in which the finance-­ security practices studied in this book exceed institutional change and coherent direction. It makes it possible to think about the practices of cultural representation, historically constituted modes of calculation, and novel conjunctions of governmental, business, and technological actors at work. It takes into account diverse actants and spaces: both the risk analysts and the models they build, both the security experts and the imagination they deploy, both the midlevel bureaucrats and the law they exceed. (de Goede 2012, 29) These investigations follow how these components work together, made up of smaller assemblages and institutions, part of larger assemblages and systems.

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One of the most important catalysts for thinking about assemblages in this field has been Sassen’s Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. She demonstrates with concrete examples of the evolution of national markets and the rise of executive power that to really understand the evolution of the contemporary moment we must avoid a statist trap—­even when discussing the evolution of sovereign power as the foundational norm of national and international relations. The evolution of the international capital markets, for example, is grounded in a particular set of local interests and the interplay of technologies and local and global legal regimes, moderated by modes of capital accumulation and the formation of knowledges about risk and profit. Like the others in this research school, Sassen argues for a type of “grounded theory”: Different temporary and spatial orders are shown to be wired into material practices, infrastructures, and institutional framings . . . Research strategies need to address thick environments, multisited localized domains, and small worlds in global systems. Grounded theory helps neutralize state capture of the major historiographies since the 1600s as well as capture by abstractions such as society or economy. (Sassen 2006, 402) Rather than looking at “the global” or “the economy,” Sassen investigates the particular configurations of national territory and extraterritorial exercises of authority, national markets and electronic global capital markets. Her dual focus on the historical and contingent development of the nation as a particular formation of material, legal, and social practices has been very provocative for IR, although she does not engage systematically with sovereignty. As we argued in Making Things International 1, there is an inherent productive tension between the field of International Relations and the methodological openness of assemblage thinking and ANT. Delanda, for example, stops his important analysis of the assemblage at the level of cities and nations (2006). Assemblage thinking in particular would seem to be a poor tool for IR, which already presupposes that international is a serious level of analysis. But, as Lisle argues, rather than displace IR as an enterprise, we should instead ask “what contemporary emergent assemblages are not global? Even work that extrapolates out from the detailed minutiae of a single human/non-­human body encounter ends up sutured into the global realm” (2014, 69). IR scholars are uniquely qualified to inquire as to the nature of globality, and sovereignty plays a crucial role in this story. Surveillance, finance security, and the global capital

Introduction

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market, each of these assemblages both constrains and is constructed by daily, quotidian practices of sovereignty. One of the primary ways that scholars over the past three decades have critiqued the daily, quotidian practices of sovereignty has been through deconstruction and discourse analysis, which the following section engages.

The Material Aspects of Discourse Analysis The primary mode of critical analysis since the 1980s has been discursive, taking a broad understanding of discourse from Derrida and Foucault, focusing on language, culture, and identity in the construction and deconstruction of global and sovereign practices. Important work has underscored the way that meanings are constructed, contested, and concretized in discursive forms—­such as identities, cultures, norms, and ideas. The question of sovereignty, then, becomes a question of the discourse of sovereignty, particularly the way that sovereignty functions as a justification for a set of claims or actions. Even in Foucauldian terms, we understand the ordering of global populations and bodies in terms of the linguistic framing—­citizens and sans-­papiers, focusing on law, regulations, media representations, and narratives. When we look at the architecture of particular discourses, practices, institutions, or installations, there can be a tendency to focus on the deconstruction of meanings rather than on the physical circulation of documents or the medium of communication. The best kinds of these analyses acknowledge that these discourses are not abstract and immaterial, but rather come in very material packages. Ideas are expressed in language, which is printed, posted, broadcast, and read. Culture is written, performed, and received. Ideas are discussed, debated, written down, transmitted, translated into forms, evaluated. Discourse has a material life. While we connect ideas and signifiers together to create post hoc ante a coherent or messy discourse about sovereignty from treaties, UN declarations, diplomatic talk, and day-­to-­day life, these ideas and words circulate in very material ways: as diplomatic cables, as interdepartmental memos, as briefing notes, as newspaper stories, as memes on the Internet, as buildings, as posters, as practices. If we look at the material expressions of discourse, rather than a disembodied discourse, then we reveal other kinds of power at work. Anaïs, for example, looks at the physical properties of documents in the archive, particularly marginalia: in her archival work, she discovers that  as documents travel through the bureaucracy, important decisions are made in pencil in the margins—­significantly changing language, justification, and even definitions

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(2013). Controversies are in the margins of the discourse—­figuratively and literally. Her work, and that of Walters (2014), Paglen (2007, 2009), Paglen and Thompson (2006), and, in this volume, David Grondin and Nisha Shah, look at the role of secrets—­documents, technologies, flights, secret places—­in the creation or obfuscation of politics. Following Latour’s exhortation to unpack the black box of scientific knowledge, we want to unpack the black box of political knowledge, particularly political knowledge about the international. Tobias Wille looks at the evolution of diplomacy in light of the changing nature of communication in his intervention on the cable. Grondin and Shah look at the phenomenology of secrets, and in particular the difficulty of doing research on secret things, which is not simply a classificatory exercise, but one that has very material consequences. To do assemblage work is not to ignore or deprioritize discourse, it is merely to insist that the material and the ideational have equal weight. For example, when Latour and Woolgar discuss the creation of scientific facts, they point precisely to the machines of representation, the devices as complex as a microscope or as simple as a blackboard for recording data, hypotheses, and writing (1986). Similarly, Law looks at the brochure for his object of study, the TSR2 warplane, to indicate that the meaning of that brochure is a multiple document, with different messages for different audiences: “The brochure coordinates different objects, different TSR2s, in part by means of a syntax . . . How then is TSR2 made into a single object, rather than four or five?” (Law 2002, 18). Part of this is accomplished through the grammar and the expressive character of the figures, diagrams, and language. But part is through the brochure as an object itself. One of the important additions and improvements that ANT and new materialism in general can add to critical IR theory’s discourse analysis is a call to study the material manifestations of discourse.

Catalysts and Reactions Catalysts accelerate particular chemical interactions without being consumed by that interaction, and so provide an apt metaphor for this volume. Contributors examine here objects that incite assemblages. The notion of catalysis also reinforces a key shared assumption about assemblages, that cause is emergent. Delanda articulates that “catalysis deeply violates linearity since it implies that different causes can lead to one and the same effect—­as when a switch from one internal state to another is triggered by different stimuli—­and that one and the same cause may produce very different effects, depending on what part of the whole it acts upon—­as when hormones stimulate growth when applied

Introduction

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to the tips of a plant but inhibit it when applied to its roots” rather than adhere to the rule of linear causality, “same cause, same effect” (Delanda 2006, 20). Bennett similarly emphasizes that “causality is more emergent than efficient, more fractal than linear. Instead of an effect obedient to a determinant, one finds circuits in which cause and effect alternate position and redound on each other” (2010, 33). One of the key features of the assemblage is the competing centripetal and centrifugal tendencies that are constantly bringing the components together and drawing them apart. Each assemblage makes available resources for its component parts and also restrains its liberty of action; thus it provides both opportunities and risks (Delanda 2006, 34–­35). These tendencies are described as territorialization and deterritorialization, respectively: the tendency to consolidate and homogenize the separate parts of the assemblage we call territorialization, the tendency to differentiate and disaggregate the assemblage we call deterritorialization. Delanda emphasizes that these twin tendencies are always working, and consequently that assemblages are always in flux, becoming and unbecoming at once. In this volume, we will divide the interventions according to which of these two tendencies the authors highlight, mindful that both processes are always present. The first part will focus on ways that objects illustrate the territorialization or consolidation of certain assemblages; the second part will focus on the ways that objects illuminate the deterritorialization or disaggregation of certain assemblages. The things that are the objects of these interventions are true catalysts, creating particular assemblages or sparking political controversies that exceed the sum of their parts.

Territorialization Srdjan Vucetic examines the F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter program, and can demonstrate the way that multiple forces, partners, and companies are brought together under the largest-­ever government procurement project. The jet fighter brings together different agencies, militaries, diplomatic agreements, commercial interests, and even competing geopolitical interests that generate new resources for profit, risk, and political capital—­while at the same time creating new struggles, debates, and liabilities. Following military infrastructure, Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi build on their work on “utile forms” to engage with the publication of military manuals as a particular concretization of multiple knowledges about the enemy (Ansorge and Barkawi 2014, 3–­24). Alexander D. Barder looks at the history of barbed wire, which makes ranching

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in the American West, trench warfare during the First World War, and concentration camps feasible, efficient, and cost-­effective. Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy trace protest camps across different spaces and times, illustrating how the material and political organization of the camps are intertwined. Andreas Folkers and Nadine Marquardt trace the politics that creates the tent and the politics that is made possible by it. They point to similar forms of home made possible by tent dwellers in refugee camps, protest camps, and holiday camping sites alike. Emily Lindsay Jackson argues that benches share a similar capacity to bring together various forms of life in organizing urban space for consumerism and counterterrorism. As with the commandment to “go shopping” in order to fight the War on Terror, the cities and public spaces are organized through bollards, benches, and fences to increase commerce, to harden soft targets, and to facilitate resilience. David Grondin and Nisha Shah look at how secrets, security, and the state are interpolated: secrets and the capacity to render something a state secret are indicative of the power of the sovereign state to make authoritative claims about knowledge and the circulation of actual documents. Following the theme of state control and censorship, Shine Choi analyzes the representations of North Korea in a number of popular and scholarly works, focusing on photographs and travel descriptions that illustrate the characterization of that dictatorship as grey. Elspeth Van Veeren follows a similar colorful history with the examination of the orange prison jumpsuit, which became an iconic image of the global carceral archipelago exemplified by Guantánamo Bay. The outfit moves across the globe slowly through the American military system, but also gets reappropriated by activists. From particular colors to chromatic representations of nationality, Rune Saugmann Andersen, Xavier Guillaume, and Juha A. Vuori talk about the politics of color, and in particular the creation of the international realm through signaling of flags. Julian Stenmanns charts the way that a very concrete technology—­the container scanning unit—­along with the standards of containerization makes the creation of a global market possible that meets the goals of both circulation and security. In this case, the size of the container and common technologies provide a material foundation for international exchange, which has both dramatically reduced the cost of trade and made this form of globalization possible. Diplomatic communication is a sine qua non of statecraft, and Tobias Wille traces the history of the diplomatic cable to understand the material bases for diplomacy. Before the telegraph, diplomats and their home state could communicate only very slowly, and so diplomacy was a much more individual art, whereas in the time of e-­mail—­as the Wikileaks scandal demonstrates—­diplomacy can be

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much more centralized and homogenized or territorialized. Although there are countervailing tendencies, each of these interventions demonstrates the way that assemblages experience the tendency to territorialize, internally homogenize, and cohere.

Deterritorialization Things can equally illuminate the way that assemblages are also subject to centrifugal acceleration, where the constituent parts come to differentiate and disaggregate. Things can also signal and come to signify complex international meanings. Debbie Lisle tells the story of a decaying yellow Morris Minor in the buffer zone between Greek and Turkish Cyprus. Continually repainted by the UN peacekeeping forces, the yellow car is emblematic of a conception of the international that is precisely transversal and deterritorialized. Similarly, Peter Chambers uses the ubiquitous device of the smartphone to illustrate not only the connection between the ethnic conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where coltan is mined, and the Chinese factories where smartphones are assembled, but also the multiple forms of life that smartphones enable, creating new connections, fragmenting social space and commerce. Claudia Aradau also examines communication lines, but focuses on hotlines as a material infrastructure of the European Union’s concern with migration and human trafficking. Thomas N. Cooke follows another facilitating technology, the HTTP cookie, which provides unexpected opportunities for surveillance and control as well as communication. Casper Sylvest and Rens van Munster take a microscope to the atom, applying directly the notion of Dingpolitik to illuminate what kinds of issues, politics, and technologies are gathered around the atom—­from nuclear weapons to power to medicine. Alternately, Nicky Gregson looks at the governance of asbestos. Mary Manjikian makes a similar argument to Gregson on how the imagery of dirt is imbricated in discourses of identity, development, and otherness. Sagi Cohen connects the ideas of otherness and dirt through an examination of the disposal of human waste on the International Space Station. Helen Arfvidsson uses another sign of waste, the burning car, to unpack the various international relations of the suburbs in Gothenburg, Sweden. She connects urban planning, immigration, industrialization, and globalization to interpret the burning cars as a complex political outcome. Miguel de Larrinaga also engages with the question of urban planning and the control of urban space through his analysis of tear gas, and the development of supposedly non-

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lethal weapons. Finally, to come full circle back to military technologies, Kyle Grayson looks at the complex assemblage required and made possible by unmanned aerial vehicles, drones. In each of these interventions, authors explore a particular object and its connection to the international without philosophical jargon. The aim of this collection is not to present a single or exclusionary prescription of how to do international politics, but rather to demonstrate the multiple ways, methods, politics, and conclusions that object-­oriented analysis can illuminate. In some way, I hope that these two volumes are the opening statements in a long debate about the plural ways to understand the interactions between materials and politics.

References Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis. 2014. “Assemblage Thinking and International Relations.” In Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, eds., Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, 1–­15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anaïs, Seantel. 2013. “Genealogy and Critical Discourse Analysis in Conversation: Texts, Discourse, Critique.” Critical Discourse Studies 10(2): 123–­35. Ansorge, Josef Teboho, and Tarak Barkawi, 2014. “Utile Forms: Power and Knowledge in Small War.” Review of International Studies 40(1): 3–­24. Barry, Andrew. 2010. “The Translation Zone: Between Actor-­Network Theory and International Relation.” Millennium: Journal of International Relations 41(3): 413–­29. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braun, Bruce, and Sarah J. Whatmore, eds. 2010. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bueger, Christian. 2014. “Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules of Thumb.” In Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, eds., Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, 58–­66. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Callon, Michel. 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” In John Law, ed., Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, 196–­223. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. “Actor-­Network Theory—­The Market Test.” In John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. 181–­95. Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Trans. Graham Burchell. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Connolly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-­Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Delanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2008. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum. de Goede, Marieke. 2012. Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. 2000. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51(4): 605–­22. Latour, Bruno. 2005a. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 14–­41. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2005b. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Law, John. 1987. “On the Social Explanation of Technical Change: The Case of Portuguese Maritime Expansion.” Technology and Culture 28: 227–­52. ———. 1999. “After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology.” In John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After, 1–­14. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge. Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 2008. “The Actor Enacted: Cumbria Sheep in 2001.” In C. Knappet and L. Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Towards a Non-­anthropocentric Approach, 57–­77. London: Springer. Levinson, Marc. 2006. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Lisle, Debbie. 2014. “Energizing the International.” In Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, eds., Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, 67–­74. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mol, Annemarie. 2003. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2014. “The Carpenter and the Bricoleur: A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and Aihwa Ong.” In Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, eds., Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, 17–­24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paglen, Trevor. 2008. I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World. Boston: Melville House. ———. 2009. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. Boston: Dunton. Paglen, Trevor, and A. C. Thompson. 2006. Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. New York: Melville House.

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Ryan, Johnny. 2010. A History of the Internet and the Digital Future. London: Reaktion. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Schouten, Peer. 2014. “Security as Controversy: Reassembling Security at Amsterdam Airport.” Security Dialogue 45(1): 23–­42. Walters, William. 2014. “Drone Strikes, Dingpolitik, and Beyond: Furthering the Debate on Materiality and Security.” Security Dialogue 45(2): 101–­18.

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PART I

Territorialization

The F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter Srdjan Vucetic

It is as if we are sitting in a high-­speed train but are unsure that the next railroad switch is correctly set. —­Max Weber

I can’t change where the program’s been. I can only change where it’s going. —­U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, Program Executive Officer for the F-­35 Joint Program Office

How international is the F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)? Prima facie, the answer is “very international.” The promotional materials released by Lockheed Martin, the aircraft’s lead manufacturer, include a string of national flags, either as stylized icons or photographed as hanging in the main hall of Air Force Plant 4 in Fort Worth, Texas, where the aircraft is now being assembled. Multinational collaboration in arms development and production is not new, but rarely does it include nine partners. Governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States have all put millions of dollars toward the development of the F-­35 and have supported one another’s industries in producing the aircraft’s components. Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore are in this club as well, either as, to use the U.S. government argot, security cooperation participants or through the foreign military sales process. To various degrees, companies located in these thirteen countries are all granted industrial participation privileges in the program, but the supply chain is global and it brings together companies located in nonparticipating countries such as China. The expression “prima facie” is apt here because what makes the F-­35 international is a constellation of forces that are far bigger than the standard

3

multinational collaboration structure. To understand these forces, we must first conceive the F-­35 as an assemblage—­a heterogeneous association of human and nonhuman elements that is at once split, processual, emergent, and, crucially from the perspective of this volume, constitutive of the late-­modern international. To explore this proposition, I follow the ontological tenets of Actor-­Network Theory (ANT), and in particular the work of one of its founding fathers, John Law.1 The most relevant for my purpose are his case studies of the TSR2, early Cold War–­­era nuclear-­capable multirole aircraft commissioned and eventually canceled by the UK government.2 Here, Law invites us to think of things such as aircraft not as objects with concrete essences and purposes, but as decentered and fractionally coherent assemblages. Next, things are made up of both organic and inorganic elements in the sense that they come together through discursive, institutional, technological, and material networks at once. And last, things are also actors that can exert force—­hence the term “actor-­network.” Conceptualizing the F-­35 as an assemblage rests on a deeply relational way of understanding the world that is known for being devilishly challenging to enact in “standard” case-­study terms. One option is to forgo the familiar historical or sociological narrative structure and opt for, as Law does in his Aircraft Stories, a less disciplined “logic of the pinboard.”3 I will follow a similar logic here and attempt to map out how F-­35 networks become connected and disconnected to produce a heterogeneous actor capable of producing, inter alia, salaries and pollution, fear and loathing, and theories and policies. What I offer here, of course, are mere snippets rather than outright stories laden with metaphysical and ethnographic reflection as in Law’s case. They are organized in sections titled “Joint,” “Strike,” and “Fighter,” the three words that make up the proper name of the program that led to the F-­35. My goal in each section is twofold: to pin down the key processes of assembly at work without which this object would not be possible, and to illustrate how they interact with, and indeed constitute, some of the most politically consequential international/ global connections today.

Joint Jointness, or jointery, is a conflicted signifier in the military-­political idiom. Joint operations, its best-­known derivative, relates to the idea that wars cannot be fought without interservice cooperation and collaboration (the nearby term “combined operations” refers to strategic, operational, and/or tactical co-­ work among allies). In the U.S. context, jointness evokes an important piece of

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legislation, the 1986 Goldwater-­Nichols Act that codifies the joint war-­fighting ethos while keeping the cultural differences between services intact.4 In U.S. military procurement, jointness goes back at least to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who famously championed systems that could fit the operational requirements of multiple services, the rationale being war-­fighting performance on the cheap. For one, when McNamara forced the U.S. Air Force and the Navy into a joint custody of the TFX, a strike bomber design that subsequently became the F-­111 Aardvark, his blueprint was a basic business school model later made famous by Southwest Airlines and, still later, Ryanair (both operate a standardized fleet of Boeing 737s that enables them to reduce overall maintenance and flight operations costs). In this area, jointness has far fewer supporters among experts, who see it is fraught with risks, not to mention uncertainties, associated with Soviet-­style central planning: “it puts all of the military’s eggs in one basket, stifles creativity and threatens the future for firms.”5 In 1994, Congress merged two separate Department of Defense fighter-­jet projects to create a single aircraft for the three services—­hence Joint Strike Fighter.6 Beyond interservice collaboration, other forms of jointness are at work here: multi-­primary contractor, public–­private, intergovernmental, transgovernmental, and transnational. Preliminary research contracts for the project that eventually became the F-­35 were initially divided among McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, and these companies formed consortia also involving Dassault of France (then partnered with Boeing) and the UK’s BAE (in a strategic threesome with McDonnell Douglas and Northrop Grumman). By the end of 1995, the program was also internationalized at the government-­to-­government level: a joint U.S.–­UK memorandum of understanding was signed, specifying a 90–­10 percent split for co-­funding the aircraft’s demonstration phase. By the time the Lockheed Martin–­led consortium won the contract in 2001, more U.S. allies joined this joint venture, pitching in millions of dollars toward product development. It was at this time that the media dubbed Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as the “arms deal of a century.” By one set of measures, it is two times bigger than the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) (also known as the 2008 U.S. bank bailout), three times bigger than the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, ten times bigger than either the Apollo Project or the International Space Station or the costs of Hurricane Katrina, or one hundred times bigger than the Panama Canal. These comparisons are provisional but hardly outlandish. The Pentagon’s own December 2010 estimate of lifetime operating and sustainment costs for the 2,443 copies of the F-­35 currently on order by the U.S. government

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

5

is $1.45 trillion, which we can then compare to the known price tags, in 2007 dollars, of these six items.7 Officially co-­owned by nine partners, the JSF program is firmly under U.S. control, whereby “U.S.” stands for the relations among the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the U.S.-­headquartered arms producers.8 U.S. interest in coproducing fighter jets internationally is not new. The F-­16, Lockheed Martin’s previous best seller, started off as a coproduction (but not codevelopment) involving four non-­U.S. partners. Subsequent congressional developments, namely, the amendments to the Defense Authorization Acts spearheaded by Senator Sam Nunn, encouraged even more interallied collaboration in defense production. In theory, the rationale is simultaneously strategic and economic: collaboration cements alliance ties, while also helping to offset development costs and increase exports, lowering unit costs overall. This is where politics textbooks help. International collaboration involves trade-­offs that are inherently unhappy and costly to all involved, but what matters most politically is the fact that such arrangements can and do make project cancellation difficult.9 The F-­35 is also known as a high concurrency program, which means that the system is designed to be churned out and tested simultaneously. The United States has relied on this production structure for almost a century, but usually in wartime, when there is an imperative to field game-­changing weapons as soon as possible. McNamara, for example, was a strong believer in concurrent programs, even after most of them went spectacularly sour under his watch at the Pentagon. Several enactments of, and attempts to enact, the so-­called fly-­before-­you-­buy policy have taken place since this time, all short-­lived. This is where politics textbooks help again. Enter concurrency and “production” becomes infinitely harder to defund than “development and testing.” A 2014 independent estimate of the size and geography of the F-­35 constituency in the United States finds that the program is responsible for thirty-­three thousand direct jobs and around sixty thousand indirect ones, nearly two-­thirds of which are in Texas, California, Florida, and Connecticut.10 This means lobbying. In the 2013–­14 election cycle, for example, Lockheed Martin alone made campaign contributions to 386 members of Congress (72 percent), paying special attention to the members of the armed services or defense appropriations committees as well as those in the House F-­35 Caucus.11 Assemblage-­oriented thinking has a tendency to complicate textbook knowledge of politics, and this applies to the idea that the JSF program is a function of mischievous Keynesianism emanating from the Iron Triangle of Congress, the Pentagon, and contractors such as Lockheed Martin.12 Defense policy and arms production themselves emerge via constant interaction be-

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tween human and nonhuman entities that vary in elasticity, durability, and scale. Networks of politics and economy are co-­constitutive here, but the point is that they operate globally and internationally, and in constant conjunction with similarly scaled networks in strategy and security, science and technology, as well as in entertainment and popular culture. Here, technologies and humans mutually constitute each other: the content and contestation of the program’s costs—­operating and sustainment, actual, sunk, flyaway, true, and so on—­are generated via international networks of accountancy that link government auditors to Deloitte and KPMG via the same or similar computer software and estimation techniques. One example of these unusual comings together is a secretive deal in late 1991 between Lockheed Martin and Yakovlev, a Moscow-­based military aircraft manufacturer then desperately fighting to survive the post-­Soviet transition. The so-­called lift plus lift/cruise configuration that the Russians sold to the Americans for $400 million became embedded in the design of the F-­35B.13 Similarly, F-­35 contractors managed to suspend the U.S. government ban on the use of made-­in-­China parts in defense production in order to gain access to cheap but highly specialized rare-­earth magnets without which the warplane cannot operate. As government auditors discovered in a 2014 investigation: “[i]n one case, it would cost $10.8 million and take about 25,000 man-­hours to remove the Chinese-­made magnets and replace them with American ones.”14 Among U.S. friends and allies, the demand for the F-­35 is driven by a number of overlapping forces: the search for profit and survival by national aerospace companies, status seeking by the air forces, and technonationalism; these are articulated as competitiveness, burden sharing, and seamless interoperability.15 For critics, however, the preferred phrases are uncertainty, risk, and opportunity costs. Initially sold as a revolutionary, affordable, and even offset-­ free weapon system, the F-­35 is now a contentious political issue in virtually every partner government owing to a combination of performance shortfalls (now a routinized media performance at a global scale that seizes on regular reports published by think tanks such as the RAND Corporation or government watchdog agencies such as the Government Accountability Office or the Defense Department’s Inspector General in the United States), delays (between five and ten years behind schedule, depending on the benchmarks), and rising costs (about double the original estimate at the time of this writing, although it should be said that Lockheed Martin still insists that the F-­35’s operational and support costs will be about the same as or even lower than those of legacy fighters such as the F-­16). Although most partner countries are cutting down or thinking about

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

7

cutting down their F-­35 orders, outright defections are unlikely because the program is deeply embedded in, and mutually reinforcing with, parallel assemblages such as the global aerospace industry or the NATO alliance.16 One hypothesis holds that this web of relations functions well because constituent actors position themselves not as individuals staking an autonomous claim on strategy, but as constituent nodes in larger business and collective security networks. The governments of F-­35 partner countries like the Netherlands or Australia mobilize public power to support this project not so much as a way of defending their territory against foreign intrusion but as a way of acquiring relevance within the alliance system centered on the United States. Despite ongoing issues with performance benchmarks, costs, and schedule overruns, compounded as they are by an underlying pricing, design, and production structure that gives the U.S. side nearly all decision-­making powers on price and system specifications, the F-­35 nevertheless feels right to non-­American stakeholders.17 National sovereignty issues, sometimes called production asymmetries, are part and parcel of all multinational collaboration in weapons procurement and the F-­35 is no exception. Perhaps the most striking development so far is the refusal of the U.S. side to share computer software codes—­the famed source codes—­and the way this has resulted in a series of empty pullout threats and botched side deals. What is at work here is a mix of hard bargaining and recognition politics. Coproducers, buyers, and would-­be buyers all compete with one another to prove that they are worthy of receiving technological secrets and other special privileges. This arrangement guarantees political horse trading and side deals. In late 2010, the White House offered Israel, officially a low-­tier partner in the program but otherwise a platinum member in the U.S. alliance system, twenty free F-­35s in exchange for a ninety-­day moratorium on settlement activity in the West Bank. In the interpretation of one well-­connected reporter, the attempted bribe spectacularly failed.18 Testing work on the ten-­plus-­million-­line-­long code for the F-­35’s onboard computer is ongoing. This particular task has proven to be extremely challenging, yet it remains vital to effectively integrating the engine, helmet, and 130 other individual subsystems. What is important politically is that the U.S. side remain in full control of the software; according to Lockheed Martin, the system is expected to undergo biannual upgrades, presumably in its Fort Worth facility. The same goes for pilot training and aircrew drills. Most, if not all, classroom, simulator, and flight practice is currently slated to take place at the U.S. Air Force’s Integrated Training Center in Eglin, Florida. States sometimes lease fighter jets instead of buying them, but there are no leasing options for

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the F-­35; instead, it appears that the dealership simply happens to sell both the machine and the licensing in one place, and the buyer agrees never to look under the hood unsupervised. That the U.S. desire to control all F-­35s in the world manifests itself through the principle of sovereign territoriality is odd considering that the Americans have comfortably worked with their allies in dozens of training centers around the world. A government decision to share the burden of training, maintenance, and upgrades with the people of, say, the Royal Air Force base in Croughton would doubtless disappoint a few contractors in Florida and elsewhere, but this type of institutional power does not lie with them. Again, instead of looking at the Iron Triangle, analysis should be redirected to a broader and more diffuse political architecture that reproduces certain locales as more authoritative than others.

Strike This word is meant to convey the aircraft’s identity as a proper multirole fighter, a machine rigged to conduct both air superiority and strike missions, the latter defined as a tactical attack on a ground or naval target. All three variants of the F-­35 fighter family hold this capability: the conventional A version designed for use by the U.S. Air Force and allied air forces; the Short Take-­Off, Vertical Landing (STOVL) or B variant for the U.S. Marine Corps as well as the UK’s Royal Navy; and the conventional carrier-­based edition for the U.S. Navy, the F-­35C. More important, all three are meant to excel in the so-­called initial blow or first day of attack operations. Air strike, or strike for short, shapes, and is shaped by, the evolving structure of international politics in important ways. Pax Americana, defined in terms of successive hegemonic or hierarchical international and regional orders centered on Washington, can be regarded as a late-­modern, planetary-­ scale assemblage made possible by, among other things, the so-­called global strike. Since the middle years of the twentieth century, warplanes have transformed themselves into multirole, fighter-­bomber machines capable of ever-­ greater lethality and survivability. What makes U.S. strike aircraft especially formidable is the surrounding stuff—­assets such as ballistic and cruise missiles plus countless force enablers such as ground bases, aircraft carrier groups, logistics depots, a large tanker force and aerial refueling know-­how, interlinked information and communication systems, the ability to generate and sustain the use-­of-­airspace deals on relatively short notice, and so on. In theory, the F-­35s flown by the U.S. military and its allies will dramatically enhance this power because they will be able to approach and neutralize

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

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targets while remaining undetected by radar. The rule of the skies was central to all American strategies during the Cold War, and remains central in the post–­Cold War era. But the rule of the skies is co-­constituted with others forms of rule—­in security and economic institutions and practices as well as in cultural and ideological modes and modalities. Assemblage-­oriented thinking indeed recognizes that the F-­35 works not only in relation to other objects in modern warfare, but also in relation to the United States’ exceptional role in international politics, one aspect of which is the so-­called command of the commons.19 High-­accuracy, long-­range air strikes can also be said to cofunction with global financial governance, large-­scale disaster operations, and the rest of the vast infrastructure that centers on the United States and, a Marxist would add, sustains access to capital around the globe. U.S. power may be declining, but there are good reasons why American military strategists talk about the existence of near peers as opposed to peers in the medium term. Even if a future rival power or coalition of powers could somehow match the quality and quantity of the American aerial might, there would likely be no equivalent parity in deployable air bases. This is why the talk of next-­generation aircraft being developed by America’s rivals tends to be overblown. The F-­35 often looks inferior vis-­à-­vis similar weapon systems in speed, range, agility, and weapons, but this point may be moot considering the overall distribution of airpower projection. Airpower has been expanded, in the U.S. context at least, to combine kinetic with space and cyber components.20 Space satellites enable the proper functioning of fighter jets as well as of much of the world economy. As for cyber, the F-­35 has experienced this type of combat already, albeit indirectly. Between 2007 and 2009, the Chinese government and military reportedly carried a series of cyber intrusions into U.S. government computer systems that stole a considerable amount of data on the Lockheed Martin fighter, and some suspect that these attacks have helped China reduce the lead time to developing its own fifth-­generation designs.21 Indeed, a related expansion of the strike assemblage concerns the ways in which America’s two near peers, China and Russia, are putting aside millions toward the development of new long-­range ballistic and cruise missiles, antisatellite weapon systems, passive radars, and other so-­called antiaccess/area-­denial capabilities. The readiness of rival states to expend multiple forms of capital in the hopes of countering U.S. strike effectiveness must be kept in mind when evaluating narrow airpower theory debates, both academic and popular, over whether the F-­35 brings any outstanding or enduring advantages to the battlefield.

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The strike assemblage cofunctions with pilots’ minds and bodies. Assuming it lives up to its potential, the F-­35’s “augmented-­reality” helmet-­mounted display will have the most advanced system for synthesizing and presenting aircraft data. Similar prosthetics have long served to collapse the line between the real and the virtual by generating an information-­filtering real-­time simulation of the plane’s environment, but now they are operating inside the visor of the helmet. The result is the so-­called distributed aperture system—­an assemblage that connects the pilot’s eyes to a network of cameras and sensors that in turn are connected to command and control data-­link systems. The new experience has been variously described as “360-­degree battle-­space awareness,” “almost X-­ray vision,” and “a God’s-­eye view of what’s going on.”22 The F-­35 pilot-­training structure is further contributing to this new experience by aggressively privileging the use of high-­technology simulators over old-­school training in the air and in the classroom. How these innovations will interact with notions and use of “conventional” airpower remains to be seen, but it is certain that the F-­35 assemblage has already enabled new ways of information processing with a potential to change access to reality, including the emergent ways of war fighting. Air-­strike capability enables U.S. airpower materially, but, perhaps more important, it does so socially. It appeals to civilians, leaders, and voters alike who believe that airpower can and does win wars decisively and affordably. U.S. shock and awe air campaigns centered on massive and successive raids against the hapless Arab and Serb forces constitute one of the iconic images of our time. By advancing the notion that political goals can be achieved by the right application of airpower, ideally one that brings no casualties to us and only minimal collateral damage to them, these campaigns, or the way they have been mediated to global audiences, shape popular and policy discourse regarding war even in the age of irregular and asymmetric conflicts. This construction of reality was impossible before sensor fusion and other advances in information processing that enabled high levels of battle-­space awareness in real time. For one, what dramatically changed the risk assessment for low-­altitude, around-­the-­clock and all-­weather strike was a combination of infrared targeting and navigation sensors, beyond-­visual-­range missiles, and precision-­guided munition, plus advanced data-­fusion systems that cut the so-­called kill chain (officially: sensor-­to-­shooter data cycle time) from days and hours to minutes. Without these technologies, U.S. military commanders would not be able to exert virtually constant pressure on enemy forces while minimizing their own vulnerability. Politicians would also be less likely to argue that large-­scale

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strategic goals can be achieved by applying a single medium of warfare. In this sense, the technological transformation of American airpower caused not only a sociopolitical transformation of war, but also of sovereignty. The materiality of the new stealth plane is already changing the infrastructural power of the U.S. state, and in particular of the vast real-­estate and logistical archipelago managed by the Pentagon. Prompted by local government and civil society action in Vermont, plans are now being drawn to help air bases deal with increased noise—­the A version is said to have a takeoff sound level that is several decibels higher than that of the legacy fighters it will replace. The B version, distinguished primarily by its helicopter-­style vertical landing technology, is even more challenging in this regard. The exhaust temperature generated by the engine during landing—­estimated at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (930 degrees Celsius)—­carries a considerable risk of breaking even the toughest airfield concrete matting and in turn damaging the plane itself. Several specially designed aluminum landing pads, each weighing forty tons, have been used in the testing phase, but what remains unclear is whether such an unwieldy prosthetic can also be used in the standard basing infrastructure, let alone as a part of rapid strike capability.23

Fighter This word entered the English language in the interwar period as an evolution from the monikers scout (in the United Kingdom) and pursuit (in the United States) that once referred to particular types of aerial combat machines. The letter “F” in the F-­35 stands for “fighter” and goes back to a classification system introduced in 1948 by the newly established U.S. Air Force. The number is part of a historically irregular U.S. military (tri-­service) sequence and is equivalent to the aircraft’s prototype X number, which was chosen in the late 1990s by the Lockheed Martin–­led consortium that developed the warplane. Lightning II, the F-­35’s other official name, is meant to honor two military machines from the times past: the art deco–­styled, World War II–­era Lockheed P-­38 Lightning and the English Electric (later BAC) Lightning, the world’s first supercruise-­ capable fighter. The global military and aviation community today defines fighters as jet-­ powered aircraft designed and equipped for air-­to-­air and/or air-­to-­ground combat. The hot and cold world wars, the bureaucratic institutionalization of airpower, and developments in aerodynamics, electronics, and other areas of science and technology have all combined to endow this object with a well-­known materiality. In the 2000s, fighters and their components such

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as missiles, sensors, and engines accounted for one-­third of all international arms transfers in volume.24 Today, more than one hundred nation-­states possess fighters, but only eleven produce them through different combinations of public–­private partnerships, which in turn rely on global supply chains so complex that end products routinely contain counterfeit electronic parts.25 The causes behind the rise of the fighter assemblage are multiple and mutually reinforcing, covering tropes like anarchy and military-­industrial complex plus many others. One classic view is that sovereign states interact with a system that is competitive and dynamic. An increase in the state’s military capabilities can thus increase its security, autonomy, and external authority vis-­à-­ vis other nation-­states, but it can also provoke security dilemmas and lead to conflict. The desire for one’s own airpower—­specifically, tactical air attack capability and enhanced deterrence that fighters provide—­chimes with this logic even in the context of international interdependence and the pacifying force of global commerce.26 Another classic systemic view is that fighters have desirable symbolic and normative properties. Low-­income states want them not because of their functionality—­that tactical airpower can be relatively quickly extracted and concentrated or that it can bypass both the land and naval forces of an enemy is irrelevant in many contexts, especially where the basic enabling infrastructure is lacking—­but because world-­level culture affixes this weapon system as an important symbol of the modern state and full membership in the international society.27 The F-­35 is thus part of an assemblage that is at once international and global; in other words, it has broad and deep roots among entities that simultaneously construct, crisscross, and collapse the boundaries among nations. The same goes for the boundaries between the public and the private, the military and the civilian, the fake and the original. One such international-­cum-­global entity is a durable web of relations connecting science, technocrats, bureaucrats, and politics in the context of the Anglo-­American partnership. Three technocratic networks, all loosely institutionalized and self-­identified as renegade, are notable in particular: Skunk Works, the Fighter Mafia, and the Harrier Coalition. The first is an august engineering and technocratic unit within Lockheed Martin that is credited with developing stealth—­the technology of low radar observability developed in the 1970s and now established as the mainstay of the U.S. approach to high-­technology warfare.28 The second one, the Fighter Mafia (aka Lightweight Fighter Mafia), is a group of U.S. Air Force officers and civilian analysts that became keen on transforming U.S. fixed-­wing airpower experience in the wake of the Vietnam War. Pierre Sprey, who began

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his Pentagon career as one of the “whiz kids” in the McNamara era, “half jokingly” reflects on the work of his team: “We were bureaucratic guerrilla warriors, fighting the system and deploying whatever underground means we could use,” including whistleblowing, leaking, and “suborning” members of Congress . . . [today] “we’re a network of subversives trying to cut the defense budget and campaigning against things that don’t work.”29 Historians disagree over the extent to which said bureaucratic guerrillas contributed to the great transformation in American airpower since the 1970s, but there is no question that ideas espoused by this network found considerable institutional expression in the way the United States and its allies fight and prepare for war—­or a specific kind of war that involves regular battles and conventional enemy forces.30 The third network, the Harrier Coalition, has kept alive the STOVL system, the pillar of the F-­35B variant. Transferred to the United States in 1970, when the Marine Corps received a fleet of British-­made Harriers, STOVL has long been subject to technocratic controversy and much hard work had to be put in to make this technology possible in military-­political circles. This coalition has been the most transatlantic of the three: “As members of a heretic minority, the British and American STOVL communities forged strong professional bonds, staging a biennial Powered Lift Conference that alternated between U.K. and U.S. locations.”31 All of these networks are actor-­networks in the sense that they feature humans operating within and among material and discursive relations such as statistics and nonlinear science to make and unmake connections between different fields of political action. Assemblages perspective recognizes that objects always arise out of tensions. Consider Sprey’s words again: in a short interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012, he described the F-­35 as an “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force’s PR spin,” “a turkey,” and “a scam” with a singular purpose of “making money for Lockheed Martin.”32 These views are common in parts of the global epistemic community that constantly shapes and reshapes the F-­35. What is typically at stake are multipronged political-­economic and ideological battles involving questions of, inter alia, national deficit and debt, opportunity costs within declining defense budgets, changing airpower doctrine, foreign policy goals, and the like. Multiple networked performances are at work in this assemblage. The generation discourse is new and is increasingly

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being used in the global aviation community to identify how aircraft performance, technology, and design philosophies evolved over time. For Sprey, this is an illusion created by those with a vested economic interest in military modernization: “fifth generation is a silly, mindless cliché.” Although there is much truth in this claim, what goes on here is a broader process of assembly that involves complicated enactments and rejections of technology by coexisting networks and counternetworks. For example, when a representative of a competitor fighter jet consortium dismisses the generation talk altogether in front of a parliamentary defense committee or when a government auditor’s report notes that fifth generation is undefined and perhaps undefinable, they are both making the same point as Sprey, but their appeals are hobbled from the start by a broader social domain that places a premium on technological innovation and evolution. A national security and defense strategy that specifically calls for the acquisition of next-­generation weapon systems is indeed a classic agenda-­setting move.33 This is the reason Lockheed Martin never tires of describing the F-­35 as “the world’s only fifth-­generation international multirole stealth fighter.”34 There is much truth in this claim, too. Today, there are around ten fifth-­generation fighter aircraft designs in the world, but the majority are mostly conceptual. The one design that is operational and combat-­ready is the Lockheed Martin F-­22 Raptor air-­superiority fighter that has been in service with the U.S. Air Force for a decade. The fact that the F-­22 is nonexportable by U.S. law is helping the F-­35, the Raptor’s multirole cousin, deal with the political uncertainties. Because of ongoing budgetary pressures, the Pentagon’s order for 2,443 F-­35s—­prototypes are always counted separately—­is likely to be scaled back, but the program itself will not be canceled.

Conclusion Assemblages sensibility suggests that objects simultaneously cohere and de-­ cohere. The F-­35 exists inasmuch as it is renegotiated and delimited through a network of heterogeneous elements and relations: the sand that travels from a quarry to become glass in the cockpit, chemicals that are made into surface coatings, pilot minds and bodies and their trained capacities to cofunction with the machine, theories of airpower, and so on. The successful coming together of all these materials, transactions, and relationships is infused with politics, and what I have suggested here is that the F-­35 is deeply implicated in the high-­modern constitution of the international. While its supply chain appears globally unmoored at times, this aircraft marks a site where actors are

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assembled with differential powers. It is a means and mode of directing alliance politics, monopolies on military technology, and understanding of warfare and state sovereignty. More than that, it is a reminder that the politics of globalization does not contradict traditional sovereign authority. What assemblage perspective suggests is that the F-­35 calls for a worldwide scale of analysis that looks for global and international conjunctures in equal measure and the ways in which they empower and delimit each other.

Notes 1. For Law’s take on ANT “origins,” see “After ANT: Complexity, Naming, and Topography,” in John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 1–­14; and for his definition, see John Law, “Actor-­ Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in B. S. Turner, The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 141–­58, at 142. The often subtle differences between assemblage theorizing and ANT are addressed elsewhere in this volume. 2. By my count, on the subject of the TSR2s development, production, and cancellation, Law authored two book manuscripts, one of which was published, as well as five articles or chapters, three in coauthorship with Michel Callon. Here I draw on John Law and Michel Callon, “The Life and Death of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change,” in Wiebe Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 21–­52; and John Law, Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 3. Law, Aircraft Stories, chapter 9. ANT is “grounded in empirical case studies,” and an “empirical version of poststructuralism” (Law, “Actor-­Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” 141, 145). 4. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “What Exactly Is Jointness?” Joint Force Quarterly 16 (1997): 66–­68. 5. Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, and Caitlin Talmadge, US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 137. See also pages 37–­39 and 114–­16 for an institutional history and liberal critique of the “religion of jointness” and the consequent “cartelization of defense policy.” 6. ANT scholars might appreciate the fact that the name of the program is officially written as a proper noun (not “the Joint Strike Fighter”), which is broadly suggestive of an acting subject. 7. For the former, see Andrea Shalal-­Esa, “JSF Lifetime Cost Hits $1.45T: Reuters,” AWIN First, March 29, March 30, 2012: http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx ?id=/article-xml/awx_03_29_2012_p0–442332.xml; for the latter, see Andy Newman, “Comparing Hurricanes: Katrina vs. Sandy,” New York Times, November 28, 2012, A28; Paul Calore, The What It Costs? Web site (not dated): http://www.historicalwhatit costs.com/; and Moira Herbst, “The Bank Bailout Cost US Taxpayers Nothing? Think Again,” Guardian, May 28, 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/ may/28/bank-bailout-cost-taxpayers.

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8. Officially, there are three, possibly four, levels of partnership that at once relate to the amount of cash invested, the amount of technology transfer and subcontracting opportunities available, and the schedule of deliveries. See Srdjan Vucetic and Kim Richard Nossal, eds., “The International Politics of the F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter,” International Journal 68(1) (2012–­13). 9. The Royal Air Force’s Panavia Tornado, for example, survived government cuts in the 1970s primarily because it was a multinational program and because the officials in London did not wish to antagonize their partners in Bonn (Bill Sweetman, Ultimate Fighter: Lockheed Martin F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter [St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004], 20). See also Marc DeVore, “The Arms Collaboration Dilemma: Between Principal-­ Agent Dynamics and Collective Action Problems,” Security Studies 20(4) (2011), and Cédric Laguerre and Marc DeVore, “F-­35: Price and Prejudice,” Defense & Security Analysis 26 (2011). 10. William Hartung, “Promising the Sky: Pork Barrel Politics and the F-­35 Combat Aircraft,” Center for International Policy, January 2014: http://www.ciponline.org/ images/uploads/publications/Hartung_IPR_0114_F-35_Promising_the_Sky_Updated .pdf. 11. The Center for Responsive Politics’s Open Secrets database regularly updates contributions by company political action committees and individual lobbyists. For Lockheed Martin, see http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips .php?id=D000000104&type=P&sort=A&cycle=2014. For the numbers on other F-­35 contractors as well as the F-­35 Caucus, see Hartung, “Promising the Sky.” 12. For a history of this signifier, see Srdjan Vucetic, “The U.S. Military-­Industrial Complex, Part I,” The Disorder of Things, April 17, 2012: http://thedisorderofthings .com/2012/04/17/what-we-talked-about-at-isa-u-s-military-industrial-complex-part-i./. 13. Rakesh Krishnan Simha, “F-­35B: Born in the USSR,” Russia & India Report, June 10, 2013: http://in.rbth.com/blogs/2013/06/07/f-35b_born_in_the_ussr_25935.html. 14. John Shiffman and Andrea Shalal-­Esa, “U.S. Waived Laws to Keep F-­35 on Track with China-­made Parts,” Reuters, January 3, 2014: http://www.reuters.com/ article/2014/01/03/us-lockheed-f-idUSBREA020VA20140103. Retrofits, remedial work, and design changes are part and parcel of concurrent production, with the obvious effect on costs. 15. A third of NATO air forces want to share the same burden: being there on the first day of attack, flying the same fighter as the Americans. See the partner country case studies in Vucetic and Nossal, “The International Politics of the F-­35 Joint Strike Fighter.” 16. At the time of this writing, almost all of these are yet to become actual purchase contracts or officially associated with penalties or incentives. 17. Collaborating feels right, but it can, should, and must be improved—­this is one of the modal responses that emerged from forty-­eight semistructured interviews I conducted between June 2011 and January 2014 on the subject of the F-­35 with industry, government, and think-­tank representatives from partner countries as well as academics and members of the media in Ottawa, Washington, D.C., and at four international air shows. The largest contractors for the F-­35 are the U.S. trio of Lockheed Martin,

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Northrop Grumman, and Pratt & Whitney, plus the transatlantic BAE Systems, but almost one-­third of the product value as well as the majority of companies working on components specific to the F-­35 as opposed general use come from overseas (Hartung, “Promising the Sky,” 4). 18. Thomas Friedman, “Reality Check,” New York Times, December 11, 2010: www .nytimes.com/2010/12/12/opinion/12friedman.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1304518116 –94y7rD5t6aAGb6erAus4JQ. 19. B. R. Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundations of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28 (2003): 5–­46. The strategic documents issued during the presidencies of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all of which can be retrieved from http://history.defense.gov/docs_nss.shtml, clearly commit the United States to protecting the “global commons” or safeguarding the “international economic environment.” Although the meanings of airpower have shifted over time, the basic idea that aerial assets have strategic value has long flourished among American military planners and government officials. See Colin S. Gray, Airpower for Strategic Effect (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press with Air Force Research Institute, 2012): http://aupress.au.af.mil/digital/pdf/book/b_122_ Airpower.pdf. 20. The U.S. Air Force now defines airpower in terms of air, space, and cyber domains, whereby the first domain is primary and the latter two are classified as maneuver or facilitating environments. The global positioning system is an example of a hybrid cyber and space asset that enables contemporary airpower. See John Al. Shaud, Air Force Strategy Study, 2020–­2030 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press, 2011): http://aupress.maxwell.af.mil/digital/pdf/book/AirForceStrategyStudy2010 .pdf. Recall further that deterrence, associated for the past sixty years with the nuclear umbrella, is part of this mix (a nuclear-­weapons-­capable Joint Strike Fighter has been conceptualized). 21. Mark Collins, “F-­35 and the Dragon’s Stealthy Cyber Espionage,” The 3Ds Blog, March 13, 2014: http://cdfai3ds.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/mark-collins-f-35 -and-the-dragons-stealthy-cyber-espionage/. 22. Quoted phrases are from Adam Ciralsky, “Will It Fly?” Vanity Fair, September 16, 2013: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/09/joint-strike-fighter -lockheed-martin. 23. On F-­35 employment options and force structure in crisis situations, see Col. Michael W. Pietrucha, “The Comanche and the Albatross,” Air and Space Power Journal (May–­June 2014): http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/article.asp?id=204, especially, 150–­51. 24. Simon Wezeman, “International Transfers of Combat Aircraft,” SIPRI Fact Sheet (November 2010): http://books.sipri.org/product_info?c_product_id=414. 25. BBC News, “China Fake Parts ‘Used in US Military Equipment,’” May 21, 2012. 26. For relevant recent discussions, see Joao Resende-­Santos, Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 16–­33 and 310–­13, and Stephen G. Brooks, Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Glo-

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balization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 16–­46 and 246–­66. 27. Dana P. Eyre and Mark C. Suchman, “Status, Norms, and the Proliferation of Conventional Weapons: An Institutional Theory Approach,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 79–­ 113. The airplane is itself emblematic of modernity. 28. Bill Sweetman, Lockheed Stealth (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004). The group goes back to the 1940s, and the self-­ascribed alias was meant to signal autonomy, secrecy, and pioneer spirit. Similar renegade teams are credited with furnishing the United States with other game-­changer weapon systems, from the atomic bomb to the Stuxnet virus. 29. Kelly Vlahos, “40 Years of the ‘Fighter Mafia,’” American Conservative, September 20, 2013: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/40-years-of-the -fighter-mafia/. 30. Marshall L. Michel III, “The Revolt of the Majors: How the Air Force Changed after Vietnam,” PhD dissertation, Department of History, Auburn University, 2006; and Jim Cunningham, “Rediscovering Air Superiority: Vietnam, the F-­X, and the ‘Fighter Mafia,’” Air and Space Power Journal (August 2011): http://www.airpower.maxwell .af.mil/airchronicles/cc/jim.html. One of the founding fathers of the Fighter Mafia was John Boyd, arguably one of the most influential strategists of the modern era. See Antoine Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press & Hurst, 2009), chapter 7. Fighter Mafia visions—­swarms of affordable, short-­ranged, and dogfight-­heavy combat aircraft, for example—­failed at the time, but may yet to be resuscitated in the drone era. 31. Sweetman, Ultimate Fighter, 22. Were it not for the Marines and their requirement for an aircraft that can operate from amphibious warfare ships and improvised runways, the STOVL variant of the JSF would probably never have been approved in the first place. The Marines have also been the program’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders: they were planning to declare initial operating capability on their F-­36B already in 2015. The U.S. Air Force is expected to do the same with the F-­35A in 2016, followed by the U.S. Navy and its F-­35C in 2018. 32. Pierre Sprey, CBC Fifth Estate, extended interview: http://www.cbc.ca/player/ Shows/Shows/the+fifth+estate/ID/2308854708/. 33. I am referring to the Canadian F-­35 debates, 2010–­12. For details, see Srdjan Vucetic, ed., “The F-­35: Right for Canada?” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 17(3) (September 2011), and Atushi Tago and Srdjan Vucetic, “The ‘Only’ Choice: Canadian and Japanese F-­35 Decisions Compared,” International Journal 68(1) (2012–­13): 131–­49. 34. Lockheed Martin kept the F-­35 away from the international air-­show circuit until mid-­2014, which was when it could confidently stage a new product release centered on flying as opposed to static display.

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Military Manuals Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi

Violence is hard to control, both in its delivery and in its interpretation. The management of modern organized violence entails the proliferation of standard operating procedures, rules, and regulations. Many little things—­books, pamphlets, and their electronic equivalents—­are produced and distributed to soldiers and officers during training and in the field. These military manuals are used to discipline the behaviors of war-­making institutions into controlled, effective, standardized, legible, and legitimate actions. Many aspects of military manuals are worth close study, such as how they are written, their tendency to plagiarize, their intellectual history, their use and interpretation, as well as the dizzying array of topics they cover. There are manuals for repairing clothes and fighting a counterinsurgency, manuals for flying helicopters and for how to run a court-­martial. The U.S. Army alone has 394 active field manuals—­ranging from FM 1–­0 Human Resources Support to FMI 6–­02.60 Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for the Joint Network Node-­Network. Manuals also have a legal life. Some international treaties mandate that their contracting parties must have laws-­of-­war manuals. The Second Hague Convention of 1899 propounds—­in its first article, no less—­the following requirement: “The High Contracting Parties shall issue instructions to their armed land forces, which shall be in conformity with the ‘Regulations respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land’ annexed to the present convention.”1 The International Committee of the Red Cross recognizes military manuals as a source of customary international humanitarian law, as a “category of practice [that] includes all types of instructions to armed and security forces found in manuals, directives and teaching booklets.”2 In circular fashion, laws-­ of-­war manuals are demanded by international law while also serving as a material foundation for it. Confounding any simple model of cause and effect, manuals and international law stand in a synergistic, mutually constructed relationship. How, then, do these physical texts fit into the international? Are these book-­things, like passports and maps, productive of a particular kind of global

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order?3 Our answer and thesis: Yes and yes again, military manuals are important overlooked artifacts in the world of international practices. Manuals have served crucial, yet understudied, functions in the production and imagination of international security and stability; in the organization and standardization of a global grammar of violence; and in the mediation of bewildering (neo)colonial encounters in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. To grasp these functions we have argued elsewhere that military manuals should be understood as utile forms, media with a standardized layout that make knowledge available for particular purposes: Utile forms are one of the ways in which power can appear to be both centralized and dispersed at the same time. Utile forms connect “everywhere” with central sites of institutional power. In the age of mechanical reproduction, they are vehicles by which centrally held knowledges and practices can be disseminated across staffs, populations, and milieus.4 It is precisely the reproducible thingness of manuals and other utile forms that enables them to play their world-­making role. Many copies can be made, and each one can play its part in regulating action and constituting practices. This essay aims to show that military manuals are not only worth studying for the grand strategist or military historian, but are also a valuable source for the literary theorist, anthropologist, sociologist of knowledge, and student of global politics. We do so by focusing on an issue crucial to the constitution of war as a practice in world politics: the question of who is and who is not a legitimate combatant. Military manuals function as instructions telling soldiers how to make such distinctions. To understand the history of this question, and the various answers offered to it, it is necessary to first consider the characteristics of manuals and then take a hard look at when the first modern laws-­of-­ war manuals for use by troops in the field were written and disseminated, the U.S. Civil War (1861–­65).

Key Characteristics of Military Manuals Throughout more than two millennia, military manuals have demonstrated that literacy is a crucial component to the control of martial organizations. Along with Aelian’s Tactics and Frontinus’s Strategems, the most complete military manual to survive intact from antiquity is Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus’s Epitoma rei militaris (ca. 390 CE). The text provides various practical

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guidelines on how to select recruits and emphasizes the importance of swimming, but was really a political intervention advocating for the reform of the later imperial Roman army. Vegetius writes that security and peace had through “a love of idleness and ease” made the Romans weak, and it was only through the “revival of discipline” that they had previously “recovered their superiority” and could do so again.5 It was not only their discipline that made Roman legionnaires masters of the battlefield, but also their literacy, which enabled them to read orders and manuals.6 After its recovery by Renaissance scholars, early-­modern mercenary captains used Vegetius’s text, as well as various knockoffs of it, to train their troops in drill and battlefield maneuver. From a modern perspective it is easy to grasp how written instructions greatly improve communication and coordination for large groups of combatants. Fixed writing enables information to be reproduced with high fidelity, which is crucial as it passes through many hands. The game of telephone serves as a useful demonstration of how a very few oral reproductions can radically, and hilariously, degrade the quality of verbal communication. A further explanation for why the modern military generates such an abundance of rules is that the primary powers that usually regulate political, social, and economic behavior are often formally excluded. For instance, the modern Western military presents itself as apolitical, removed from the day-­to-­day life of civilian political society. Samuel Huntington pointed out more than fifty years ago that because the behavior of a professional officer “is not regulated by economic means,” a number of positive guides are required to spell “out his responsibilities.”7 Because the private market and formal politics are, in principle, excluded from the military domain, other rules and practices are required for regulation. It is good to bear these two elements in mind—­manuals as reform tools and the utility and necessity of formal instructions for military organizations—­as we consider how military manuals seek to regulate who should be recognized as a fighter. How do military manuals deal with the question of unprivileged belligerents? Unprivileged belligerents are people recognized as fighters, not civilians, but who are not accepted as legitimate fighters. Unlike a privileged belligerent entitled to prisoner-­of-­war status, the unprivileged belligerent can be criminalized and tried, sentenced, and punished (possibly executed) under municipal law. The distinction between the privileged and unprivileged belligerent is therefore, at heart, the distinction between the enemy and the criminal. Unprivileged belligerency represents an ontological and epistemological difficulty for troops in the field. Depending on the conflict, military manuals may require troops to sort persons they meet into a variety of legal categories based on

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their appearance, what they are carrying, how they are organized, and to whom they respond. Military manuals attempt to solve the problem of unprivileged belligerency by offering soldiers concepts that organize their sorting activities. We can think of them as efforts to create a practical taxonomy of persons encountered on the field of battle. The need for a conceptual framework to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate fighters as well as just and unjust uses of force are especially acute in long-­term, low-­intensity conflicts in which soldiers fight among the people, as in counterinsurgency campaigns.8 In this type of conflict—­where each use of force can potentially become a spectacle and the “friction of war” is greatly increased—­it is frequently imperative that violence appear discriminate and proportional. The special tendency of small wars to generate a number of pathological characteristics was described as early as 1874 by Prussian jurist and military manual author Johann Bluntschli: The small war is in its nature more difficult to confine to the laws of war and the ordered battle. It leaves free space for an individual’s spirit of enterprise, caprice, and passion. It thereby easily turns into robbery and nonpermitted violence. The uncertainty it generates in turn creates more animosity, wrath, and revenge in the threatened troops and excites them toward gruesome reprisals.9 Under such demanding circumstances, one remarkable legal, tactical, and evidentiary problem of the administration of war becomes especially prominent: how to decide, determine, and distinguish between who is a legal combatant and who is an unprivileged belligerent. Military manuals have dealt with this recurrent problem by focusing on clothing and the standard of civilization.10

Unprivileged Belligerency in the First Laws-­of-­War Manuals There are two main strategies for arguing that a person should be denied the status of a privileged belligerent—­either the conflict or the person does not meet the threshold requirements for formal war and belligerency. The first strategy is to claim that the conflict is not a war but perhaps a pacification campaign, skirmish, or domestic hunt for criminals; the second is to assert that the person cannot be recognized as a belligerent because he or she has not fulfilled a certain requirement—­maybe is not organized properly, does not carry arms openly, does not wear a uniform, or just is not civilized enough. Historically, the categories of civilized and barbarian were used to establish rough-­and-­ready

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classifications for dealing with the problem of unprivileged belligerency. Soldiers facing off against revolting “natives” in the colonies could rest assured—­ after studying their manuals—­that the people they were fighting did not have to be granted prisoner-­of-­war status or other protections because they were not civilized, even if uniformed in some way. This resulted in the reification of a dual standard: in wars among civilized European states, all of the laws of war were to be applicable and binding, whereas in wars with nonstate and non-­ European peoples, following the laws of war was a matter of choice. Accordingly, barbarism and, in turn, civilization played central organizing roles in the writings of the nineteenth-­century war manual authors and legal scholars Francis Lieber and Bluntschli.11 Lieber and Bluntschli were the first authors of modern laws-­of-­war manuals, and important figures in the development of international law; their writings have gone on to shape international law and manuals up until today. Bluntschli wrote of the second, greatly expanded, edition of his Das moderne Kriegsrecht der zivilisierten Staatenwelt (1874) that its purpose was to “make clear the difference between civilized and barbarian warfare.”12 Lieber described his General Orders 100—­a military manual distributed to Union troops on Lincoln’s orders during the U.S. Civil War—­as “a contribution by the United States to the stock of common civilization” and correctly predicted that it would “be adopted as a basis for similar works by the English, French, and Germans.”13 England, France, and Germany were the countries Lieber recognized as civilized. His internationalism excluded all of Africa and Asia.14 According to Bluntschli, too, it was only in “Asia and especially Africa,” where “civilization had not yet penetrated with force,” that “foreigners were still denied rights,” but this was “not for long.”15 This is the broader intellectual context against which the use of civilization, savages, and barbarians in Lieber’s General Orders 100 should be read. Lieber made use of the core concept of military necessity as it was “understood by modern civilized nations,” which meant “those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war.”16 Here, civilization was conceived as something nations had to live up to. The threat of an atavistic reversion was ever present: “Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.”17 Retaliation, on the other hand, was “acknowledged” by “civilized nations” “as the sternest feature of war” and the only sure means of “securing” oneself against “a reckless enemy” and “barbarous outrage.”18 In the Lieber Code, “men” living in “political, continuous societies, forming organized units, called states or nations,” was a “law and requisite of civilized existence.”19 Most telling, being a citizen of a

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state was itself an indicator of civilization. With such a dispositive principle at hand, it should have been easy to figure out who was a privileged belligerent. Forces not belonging to or fighting for a state were per se uncivilized and uncivilized peoples were per se unprivileged belligerents. But the rich array of terms used to describe irregular fighters in nineteenth-­ and twentieth-­century military manuals suggests that matters were not so simple. Partisans, highway robbers, brigands, pirates, scouts, spies, armed prowlers, war rebels, war traitors, marauders, banditti, jayhawkers, and francs-­ tireurs—­literally, “Frank-­shooters” but referred to as Freischaren (free gatherers) in German—­all appear in the pages of manuals and related articles.20 Indeed, one of the main difficulties the Union army encountered, and to which Lieber sought to respond, was precisely the problem of gradations of unprivileged belligerency: The rebel authorities claim the right to send men, in the garb of peaceful citizens, to waylay and attack our troops, to burn bridges and houses, and to destroy property and persons within our line. They demand that such persons be treated as ordinary belligerents, and that when captured they have extended to them the same rights as other prisoners of war; they also threaten that if such persons be punished as marauders and spies, they will retaliate by executing our prisoners of war in their possession.21 Lieber’s view was that apart from soldiers and “partisans” (whom he understood to be soldiers in uniforms, with commissions, fighting separate from the main body of the army), nobody was eligible to be treated as a prisoner of war.22 “Squads of men, who commit hostilities . . . without commission, without being a part and portion of the organized hostile army, and without sharing continuously in the war,” were to be handled very differently: “such men . . . shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates.”23 The same went for “scouts or single soldiers found lurking,”24 “armed prowlers,”25 “war-­rebels,”26 and “war-­traitors.”27 Bluntschli conceived of unprivileged belligerents in comparable terms: “the states are enemies, not the private persons.”28 For troops to be recognized as privileged belligerents, Bluntschli, inspired by Lieber, claimed that four categories had to be fulfilled:

a) special authorization for each soldier; b) externally recognizable military character of the troops;

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c) organization of troops into soldiers and officers, which are under control of the general staff; d) following of the laws of war by volunteers.29

A similar checklist was used by Bluntschli to decide whether uncivilized troops should be granted prisoner-­of-­war status (civilized officers, disciplined formation, following the laws of war). By establishing a checklist of what constituted the proper belligerent, it became easier to exclude individuals on the grounds that they did not fulfill these requirements. Neither Lieber nor Bluntschli wrote their codes for a war against non-­ European peoples. Their manuals were about civilized war waged by civilized states. This is both curious and suspicious considering the high incidence of colonial conflicts in the latter nineteenth century. Soldiers in a colonial battle could rest assured that different, less stringent, rules existed than on a European battlefield. Their distinction between noncivilized and civilized practices of war was maintained and made especially explicit in the British legal academic Lassa Oppenheim’s 1912 Land Warfare manual, disbursed to troops in the field: It must be emphasized that the rules of International Law apply only to warfare between civilized nations, where both parties understand them and are prepared to carry them out. They do not apply in wars with uncivilized States and tribes, where their place is taken by the discretion of the commander and such rules of justice and humanity as recommend themselves in the particular circumstances of the case.30 The jingoism and racism displayed here should not prevent the recognition that this was a solution to the problem of unprivileged belligerency. The wholesale barring of most people in the world from the rights of belligerency meant that it was easier to sort out who should be granted prisoner-­of-­war status and who should not. However, this solution to the problem of unprivileged belligerency was complicated by, among other things, the practice of hiring non-­European peoples to fight for civilized states.

Racializing Civilization in Military Manuals At this point it is important to note that civilization in the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century military manuals was not an exclusively racial category, and

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that its racial components were frequently contested. Shaped by the politics of the American Civil War, article 57 of General Orders 100 held that “No belligerent has a right to declare that enemies of a certain class, color, or condition, when properly organized as soldiers, will not be treated by him as public enemies.”31 With this move, race was made unavailable as an explicit legal basis for the definition of privileged belligerency. But what if a state sought to conscript uncivilized people—­a common practice among imperial powers? The conscription of noncivilized peoples was, according to Bluntschli, a massive problem for civilized warfare. Because “civilized war” did not tolerate “barbarism,” it could not generally be made with “barbarian tribes.”32 Yet Bluntschli provided a route for permissible use of such “tribes”: as long as they behaved in a civilized manner and followed the laws of war and instructions from civilized officers. He offered a historical illustration: The use of African and Mohammedan Turkos by Napoleon III in the Franco-­Prussian War of 1870 was therefore a relapse from civilized to barbarian war practices, because the majority of these people did not have a proper understanding for the European-­Christian culture, especially for personal and woman’s honor, and the protection of property.33 The Great German General Staff’s 1902 manual Kriegsgebrauch im Landkriege, which had little problem in plagiarizing other passages of Bluntschli wholesale, alters this sentence to express a much harsher idea of what it took to be granted belligerent status. The transplanting of African and Mohammedan Turkos onto a European battlefield in the year 1870 was therefore undoubtedly to be seen as a relapse from the civilized to the barbarian war practices, since these troops did not and could not have any understanding for European-­ Christian culture, for personal and woman’s honor, etc.34 For the German General Staff, Napoleon’s use of “Turkos,” regardless of how they behaved or appeared, became an example of barbarian violence. Such troops, by definition, could never properly understand the European-­Christian culture necessary to fight legitimately. Here the recognition of the enemy as a privileged belligerent was reracialized, and civilization became essentialized, even biological. A line could be traced from this racial basis of privileged belligerency in the German General Staff to the Wehrmacht’s World War II declaration of Soviet soldiers as barbarians outside of the laws of war.

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This racial turn can be contrasted with Oppenheim’s British Land Warfare manual of 1912: Troops formed of coloured individuals belonging to savage tribes and barbarous races should not be employed in a war between civilized states. The enrolling, however, of individuals belonging to civilized coloured races and the employment of whole regiments of disciplined coloured soldiers is not forbidden.35 In these passages from military manuals we see how the concept of civilization was made to serve the desires and interests of countries with large numbers of non-­European troops (such as France and England) to have these troops granted prisoner-­of-­war status, while still being able to deny such status to enemies encountered in colonial confrontations. The military manual that went furthest in racializing privileged belligerency was the German manual of 1902, which also happened to be that of the major European power with the fewest colonial holdings at the time. Overall though, and especially in the Anglo-­American world, sorting by race was not a permissible proxy for privileged and unprivileged belligerents. A military officer and lawyer writing in 1924 explained that it was “The lack of civilization and not the color of captives” that was the “true test as to whether they should be treated as prisoners of war.”36 Civilization could be gained quickly, too. The same officer established that if the troops “recruited among the colonial possessions” were included in “national armies,” then they “should be treated as prisoners of war.”37 “Civilization” was thereby flexible enough to be used to grant belligerent rights to a people when fighting for the colonial power that controlled the territory they lived in and to deny them these same rights when they sought to fight for their national liberation. Quite abruptly, the legal category of “civilization” seemed to disappear from use—­right around the time that war ministries were being rebranded as defense ministries. After World War II, it became more difficult to speak about civilized European warfare with a straight face. Civilization had lost all of its legal functions and only existed as an anemic regulatory ideal by the time it resurfaced in post–­World War II military manuals. However, the British legal academic Hersch Lauterpacht’s 1958 military manual still held very visible traces of the old distinctions: No rule of international law prevents a State from employing and conferring belligerent qualifications upon persons of any race, creed

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or colour who are capable of being subjected to military discipline and who conform in fact to the four requirements of Hague Rules 1. On the other hand belligerents are under a legal duty not to employ persons of barbarous races or savage tribes who do not observe these requirements.38 In this manner, civilization as a solution that military manuals offered to the problem of unprivileged belligerency stayed in the picture, emphasizing that there was no rule per se, but rather that barbarity and savagery could be established through recourse to laws-­of-­war requirements.

Conclusion We have sought to open a small space here for illustrative purposes: one in which these things called manuals distributed by general staffs to their troops for use in the field helped to structure who was a legitimate fighter and what constituted civilization. In so doing, they reified colonial relations and played their part in producing a particular international order, one in which race was both reified and disavowed. What is written in military manuals, and how these objects are distributed and used, matters. Manuals are the material foundations of visions of world order. The crucial point here, as for so many utile forms, is that military manuals have effects irrespective of the truth-­value or normative qualities of the knowledge they contain. They provide an ideological foundation for actions in the world at the same time as they help bring into existence this ideologically imagined world. Understanding that constitutive power in a historical context would go a long way to making sense of our current moment—­one in which Western powers, confronted by catastrophic small wars and enemies consisting exclusively of unprivileged belligerents, have once again turned to military manuals as tools for reform and guides for action.

Notes 1. Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II), July 29, 1899, §1. 2. Jean-­Marie Henckaerts and Louise Doswald-­Beck, eds., Customary International Humanitarian Law, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2:xxiv. 3. Mark B. Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jordan Branch, “Mapping the Sovereign State: Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change,” International Organization 65(1) (2011).

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4. Josef Teboho Ansorge and Tarak Barkawi, “Utile Forms: Power and Knowledge in Small War,” Review of International Studies 40 (2014): 1. 5. Flavius Vegetius Renatus, John Clarke, and Thomas R. Phillips, The Military Institutions of the Romans, Military Classics (Harrisburg, Pa.: Military Service Publishing Company, 1944), 32; book I, chapter 27 of Rei Militaris. 6. Edward E. Best, “The Literate Roman Soldier,” Classical Journal 62(3) (1966). 7. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-­ Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 15. 8. See United States Department of the Army and United States Marine Corps, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3–­24: Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3–­33.5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); United States Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2005 [1940]). See also Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2004). 9. J. C. Bluntschli, Das moderne Kriegsrecht der zivilisierten Staatenwelt, 2d ed. (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1874), §65. 10. Helen Kinsella, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011). 11. John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2012). 12. Bluntschli, Das moderne Kriegsrecht der zivilisierten Staatenwelt, foreword. 13. Letter from Francis Lieber to General H. W. Halleck, May 20, 1863, reprinted in Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed., The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 333–­34. 14. Francis Lieber, Fragments of Political Science on Nationalism and Inter-­Nationalism (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1868), 21. 15. Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Die Bedeutung und die Fortschritte des modernen Völkerrechts, 2d ed. (Berlin: C. G. Lüeritz, 1873), 36. 16. U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), §14. 17. Ibid., §148. 18. Ibid., §27. 19. Ibid., §20. 20. Donald A. Wells, The Laws of Land Warfare (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 107–­11; U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100, §81–­§85; J. E. Edmonds and L. Oppenheim, Land Warfare: An Exposition of the Laws and Usages for the Guidance of Officers of His Majesty’s Army (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1912), §22–­§28. 21. Letter from General H. W. Halleck to Francis Lieber, August 6, 1862, reprinted in Francis Lieber, Guerrilla Parties: Considered with Reference to the Laws and Usages of War (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1862), 3. 22. U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100, §81: “Partisans are soldiers armed and wearing the uniform of their army, but belonging to a corps which acts detached from the main body for the purpose of making inroads into the territory occupied by the enemy. If captured, they are entitled to all the privileges of the prisoner of war.”

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23. Ibid., §82. See also R. R. Baxter, “The First Modern Codification of the Law of War—­Francis Lieber and General Orders No. 100—­(Ii),” International Review of the Red Cross (1961—­1997) 3(26) (1963): 243. 24. U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100, §83. 25. Ibid., §84. 26. Ibid., §85: “War-­rebels are persons within an occupied territory who rise in arms against the occupying or conquering army, or against the authorities established by the same. If captured, they may suffer death, whether they rise singly, in small or large bands, and whether called upon to do so by their own, but expelled, government or not. They are not prisoners of war; nor are they if discovered and secured before their conspiracy has matured to an actual rising or armed violence.” 27. Ibid., §91. 28. “Die Staaten sind die Feinde, nicht die Privaten” (Bluntschli, Das moderne Kriegsrecht des zivilisierten Staatenwelt, 30). 29. Bluntschli, Das moderne Kriegsrecht der zivilisierten Staatenwelt, §65. 30. Edmonds and Oppenheim, Land Warfare, §7. 31. U.S. War Department, General Orders No. 100, §57; emphasis added. 32. Bluntschli, Das moderne Kriegsrecht der zivilisierten Staatenwelt, §53. 33. Ibid.; emphasis added. 34. Generalstabe, Kriegsgebrauch im Landkriege, 10–­11; emphasis added. 35. Edmonds and Oppenheim, Land Warfare, §38. 36. Herbert C. Fooks, Prisoners of War (Federalsburg, Md.: J. W. Stowell Printing Co., 1924), 27. 37. Ibid., 26. 38. Hersch Lauterpacht, The Law of War on Land: Being Part III of the Manual of Military Law (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1958), §106.

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Barbed Wire Alexander D. Barder

There is a tendency in international theory to eschew the histories of material objects and their importance for understanding the evolution of political order. Something like barbed wire appears at first innocuous, a material object designed to segregate space for the benefit of farmers or cattle herders. Yet the interface between barbed wire and the political context of nineteenth-­century imperial crises reveals a much darker history of how the use of this object redefines the contours of governing populations. Examining the history of barbed wire in the imperial context of the nineteenth century reveals a trajectory of experimentation with social control that would become part of a project of dehumanization culminating in the Nazi concentration camp as its fundamental basis of governing. To be sure, the use of barbed wire to enclose the individual survives to this day: Camp X-­R ay in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is another striking example of the use of this object to separate the individual from, as Hannah Arendt would say, a common world of appearance. What is so striking today, however, is the normalization of barbed wire as a passive, but especially malleable, object meant to actively channel human beings: from outright military facilities to police operations in industrialized or developing nations, barbed wire remains a ubiquitous feature of modern existence. In essence, barbed wire crystallizes the materialization of the state of exception architecturally. Yet political and international theorists of the state of exception and, more generally, authoritarian tendencies in modern politics neglect the global histories in which the state of exception intersects with material objects to produce spaces of enclosure and control. The Nazi concentration camp, with its striking images of barbed wire enclosure, certainly symbolizes the pathologies of the twentieth century and the totalitarian violence perpetrated upon the human condition. Auschwitz, in particular, represents an industrial fabrication of corpses on a scale previously unimaginable. Wolfgang Sofsky describes the uniqueness of Nazi Germany’s death machine as “a climactic high point in the negative history of social and modern organization.”1 For Arendt, this commitment to extermination em-

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bodied in the death factories in the East represents “an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.”2 For her, this attack on human diversity was something entirely original in the history of Western politics. It meant in practice the ability to completely control a human being, severing her relationship to the external world. Giorgio Agamben’s work more recently explores the particular novelty of the camp by elaborating on the nexus between the state of exception as a sovereign/juridical instrument designed to exclude human life from the juridical order and the working of the camp as a zone that lies outside the law. For Agamben, the camp represents the moment in modern history that conflates the legal exception and the rule—­where the state of exception is no longer considered an exceptional act of sovereign decision in the face of factual danger, but rather becomes the norm or rule: “The state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself.”3 Furthermore, the camp becomes the “permanent spatial arrangement” of this attempt to completely exclude human life from the juridical order.4 However, what is striking in Agamben’s discussion of the camp is the lack of any sort of investigation into its very materialization and how the camp as an architectural apparatus excludes the human. Agamben does, however, cursorily point to the fact that actual camps emerged within imperial domains beginning with the Spanish in Cuba in 1896 and the British during the Boer War. “What matters here,” Agamben writes, “is that in both cases, a state of emergency linked to a colonial war is extended to an entire civil population.”5 This fact becomes, he continues, “clearer in the Nazi Lager.”6 Yet Agamben never adequately explains the relationship between these two events: the colonial normalization of the state of emergency/exception and this particular ontological structure of the Nazi camp. What remains missing from his theorization of the camp is precisely how this materialization and normalization of the camp emerged in the imperial periphery and how, especially, it later (re)appears within Europe as something entirely novel. What matters most in Agamben’s account are the juridical and political contortions, the ways in which norms and exceptions create and fuse with each other, and that inevitably lead to the modern camp. As a result, he has little to say about the history of the very materialization of the camp itself. How camps architecturally, physically, and practically materialized reveals a significant global history beyond the juridico-­political thresholds that Agamben puts forward and beyond the Eurocentric/Westerncentric confines of

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his narrative. One of the predominant features of concentration camps is the ubiquitous use of barbed wire to physically enclose space. Importantly, the relationship between spatial enclosure and the use of barbed wire has a significant connection with late-­nineteenth-­century world politics and the governance of populations. Examining the history of barbed wire and the materialization of the state of exception in the form of the camp reveals deep connections with nineteenth-­century global imperialism. Barbed wire is entwined with a history of imperial conquest, from its use in mastering the American western frontier through its percolation across the global periphery during periods of imperial crises perpetuated by significant geopolitical transitions. Afterward, barbed wire would, in the early part of the twentieth century during and after the First World War, make its entry into Europe as an essential means of reestablishing order against the flux of stateless populations displaced by the decline and fall of European continental empires. That barbed wire proved to become so instrumental for the materialization of the Nazi Lager as the centerpiece of Nazi Germany’s own project of continental empire building reveals the importance of mapping historical trajectories and conjunctions between material assemblages and global history, between changes in imperial power configurations and local practices. This essay explores the important and neglected connection between the invention and proliferation of barbed wire and the shifting historical context of international politics between the late nineteenth century and the First World War. I show that the case of barbed wire is significant because, first, it radically reconfigures the relationship between movement, space, and control over this period of time; second, because it evolves from a context of American capitalist expansion in the American West to a context of imperial biopolitical management with the proliferation of colonial wars; and third, that barbed wire becomes the defining feature of concentration camp apparatuses across the imperial periphery in order to control populations. Although studies of barbed wire explore certain aspects of these claims, my emphasis is on how the dramatic expansion of the use of barbed wire was tied to changes in international imperial dynamics during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This shifting imperial domination on the part of Britain, France, the United States, and Japan to the detriment of Spain, Russia, Portugal, and the Boers provoked exceptional situations that undermined imperial forms of control over peoples. Barbed wire becomes a key material object for the reassertion of state control during periods of imperial crisis. This experimentation and normalization of the use of barbed wire in various colonial crucibles legitimized its use within Europe to catastrophic effects.

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Barbed Wire and the American Frontier American expansionism and consolidation of the West was made possible by the crucial invention of barbed wire. Invented in the late 1860s by Joseph K. Glidden, barbed wire consisted of multiple barbs of coil with a sharp edge tied together with wire. It was, as Reveil Netz shows, especially cheap to produce, better resistant to the natural elements, and well suited to the purpose of cattle herding and controlling space in the American West.7 By 1901, approximately 130,000 tons of barbed wire was produced by the American Steel and Wire Company, up from 270 tons in 1875.8 As Oliver Razac demonstrates, the dramatic expansion of barbed wire reduced production to such an extent that it enabled a durable and cost-­effective way of closing off large parcels of land. For Walter P. Webb, “it was neither the railroads nor land settlement laws which enabled the farmer to advance beyond the Missouri; it was barbed wire.”9 Barbed wire achieved the important goal of herding cattle by inflicting a form of static “violence, so that it more effectively protected the space it enclosed.”10 “The key,” Netz continues, “to the entire success of this technology was, of course, its ability to stop cows.”11 And this was of primary importance because it effectively allowed greater control over the production of beef. The herding of cattle in the plains of Texas and the Midwest and driving them north to the factory slaughterhouses in Chicago was a crucial factor in the economic success of the American West. Barbed wire thus managed to fundamentally integrate the American western frontier lands into the eastern capitalist economy. As we shall see in the case of the British in South Africa, the use of barbed wire would be applicable not only to the husbandry of animals but also of individuals. It proved enormously helpful in controlling the movement inside a space, but also outside, by essentially reducing human beings to the status of animals. More generally, as Netz argues, understanding the historical evolution of the use of barbed wire forces us to grapple with the environmental history of how animals were subjected to novel mechanisms of control that connect colonization, capitalism, and warfare.

Population Control and Colonial Warfare The significance of the emergence of barbed wire within the crucible of American colonization of the western frontier was that it occurred at a moment when global imperial powers were facing two crucial issues. First, barbed wire would be seen as an important tool for controlling space, and ultimately the movement of a population within specific global imperial spaces.12 Second, the

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spread of barbed wire across the imperial periphery largely occurred as a way of dealing with the dislocations of populations within an evolving context of geopolitical crises that were undermining imperial authority. The late nineteenth century was a crucial period in history when new imperial powers were exerting themselves in various places. It marked a period in which the international system began to fundamentally shift, something that international theorists tend to neglect. We may note, for example, the decline of the Spanish Empire throughout this time as a result of various independence movements in Latin America; the steady decline of the Ottoman and Hapsburg continental empires; the consolidation of Franco-­British imperial dominion in Africa, especially in South Africa by the British against Dutch/ Boer interests; and, by 1905, the Japanese victory against the Russian Empire, ushering in Japanese imperial dominance of the Far East. As Eric Hobsbawm notes, the period roughly from the 1880 to 1914 was characterized by a constant revolutionary instability throughout the global periphery in conjunction with the continuous imperial expansion by new powers. Imperial transitions and the corresponding set of peripheral crises ushered in colonial conflicts that required novel means of suppression. As Hobsbawn observes, “The bourgeois century destabilized its periphery in two main ways: by undermining the old structures of its economies and the balance of its societies, and by destroying the viability of its established political regimes and institutions.”13 Significantly, in 1895 the Spanish Empire was faced with an intractable insurgency on the island of Cuba. General Valeriano Weyler, in an attempt to put down the local insurgency that was being fed by popular support in the countryside, ordered the forcible removal of the eastern population of the island to fortified towns and villages in the west in a policy that was called at the time reconcentración.14 The goal of this policy was primarily to preclude the local population from aiding and abetting the insurgents. Weyler also hoped that it would remove the possibility that locals would see and report Spanish movements, while reducing the effects of rebel propaganda and demoralizing the insurgents by essentially holding hostage their family members.15 Weyler’s policies certainly lacked any concern for the welfare of the population placed in these zones (which were, as Donald Schmidt argues, “nothing more than frontier stockades used by Americans in the American West”).16 The brutality of this policy of reconcentración was not lost on the rest of the world. President William McKinley, in his messages to Congress in 1898 justifying American intervention during the Spanish-­American war, characterized it as “not civilized warfare; it was extermination.”17 In other words, Weyler’s policies revolved around an inherently military logic to suppress the rebellion that involved con-

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centrating and controlling a mass of people, irrespective of whether they constituted a threat or not. However, the unintended consequence of a complete lack of adequate planning for those people who were forced to move resulted in anywhere from three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand deaths as result of disease, hunger, and unsanitary conditions.18 After the United States defeated the Spanish Empire during the Spanish-­ American War, it was also faced with a hostile population, especially in the Philippines. What American officials learned during the Indian wars would prove crucial for the pacification of the Philippines. As Iain Smith and Andreas Stucki argue, “US Officers regarded the Filipinos as [quoting the then secretary of war] ‘by no means civilized’ and in ‘identically the same position as the Indians of our country have been for many years’ [so that] the Filipino insurgency ‘must be subdued in much the same way.’”19 In 1905, for example, Colonel David Baker led a constabulary force to put down a rebellion in the Batangas. “In an area suspected of harboring rebels,” Alfred McCoy observes, “constabulary troops herded residents into concentration camps and unleashed terror to discourage contact with the guerillas.”20 Or, as one general recounted, “We executed a ‘Weyler’ campaign but did it according to military law.”21 Civilian concentration in the Philippines was influenced not only by the preceding events in Cuba and South Africa but especially by the example of Indian reservations and the possibilities of educating and assimilating the local population, even if it meant forcibly removing people into constructed camps. General Weyler’s implementation of the forced reconcentración would have lasting implications for how other colonial powers would manage their civilian populations during such times of irregular war. Emily Hobhouse, the wife of a British parliamentarian, wrote about the practices adopted by the British during the second Boer War between 1899 and 1902. There, she observes, the British, “by the care of Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, adopted the politics of Spain, while ameliorating its methods.”22 Indeed, as Kotek and Rigoulot show, the British press was actively using the example of General Weyler as a positive method of suppressing the Boer rebellion; referring directly to Weyler’s “politics of reconcentration,” one newspaper made the argument that any woman or child who aided the Boer insurgency was deemed an active participant and subject to internment, while adding, “We [the British] have undertaken to conquer the Transvaal, and if we cannot ensure this but for the displacement of the Dutch inhabitants, they must be displaced—­men, women and children.”23 What is also remarkable about the British case is that, in contrast to the Spanish in Cuba, the British made full use of barbed wire as a tool to master space in the Transvaal and, especially, to enclose the camps that the British created. The

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British strategic command realized that barbed wire allowed them to address the fundamental “problem of motion”: “Which side would have the ability to concentrate its power at the place and time to suit its purposes?” (99). The problem during the Boer War was that the British reliance on train transportation made them vulnerable to Boer sabotage. While the Boers were essentially free to move on horseback over large connected spaces, the British could not easily engage Boer insurgents beyond their rail point. As a result, Netz argues, the British high command stumbled upon the idea of setting up a series of “blockhouses,” essentially rectangular huts made out of sheet iron, all along the rail line and connected by telegraph (101). However, whereas the initial impetus for using barbed wire along with these blockhouses was the protection of the railway, the British realized that such a system worked to striate space in a remarkable way: “it was a pure space-­controlling mechanism” (103). For Netz, the British use of barbed wire and blockhouses meant that “the way was now open for imperial powers to extend their control over space across the entire land governed. The modern form of control over space, first tried on the Great Plains over the bodies of cows, now entered human history itself” (106). Barbed wire proved enormously important in the construction of “refugee” or concentration camps for Boer noncombatants. However, determining who was a combatant and who was not was often difficult. In this manner, the segregated apparatus that was the British camps was structured around making sure, as in Cuba, that the local population would not come to the aid of the Boer insurgents. While the Spanish did not take seriously the needs of those interned in its camps, “the British were determined to treat civilians humanely” (195). Hobhouse’s point about ameliorating Spanish methods is important. Initially, these camps were poorly managed; they did not provide adequate food or access to water and medical supplies, as this was not a priority for the British high command under Lord Kitchener. It is estimated that in the initial years, beginning in 1902, approximately 116,000 people were in various camps across South Africa, of whom until the end of the war approximately 28,000 White Boers died along with 14,000 black Africans, who were generally interned in far more miserable conditions.24 Elizabeth van Heyningen has, however, made the point that what is interesting about the concentration camps established by the British is that they became special experimental zones in emergency public health.25 Beginning with Lord Milner, replacing Lord Kitchener, who was responsible for vastly expanding Weyler’s methods, the British “began to see the camps as a means of demonstrating the virtues of British rule to their new Boer subjects.”26 Welfare replaced violence as a tactic of social control, which included the so-­called virtues of British rule mainly in inculcating in Boer

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women techniques for better nursing infants, the importance of clean water, providing better rations, and so on. In other words, the British concentration camp became a sort of micro-­imperial laboratory for what may be understood as a positive form of biopolitics that would restructure Afrikaner society as a whole.27 Naturally, while the British concentration camps attempted to instill in British social experimentation the modernization and urbanization of the Boer population, it left to the side the black African population, who saw little benefit to the British-­run order. Across the northwest and northeast border of South Africa, German imperial authorities put into practice new forms of internment against the rebellious native Nama and Herero populations beginning in 1904. German officials also internalized the lessons of the Spanish and British experience, of interning a significant portion of a population (particularly Nama women and children) under rebellion and the use of barbed wire to demarcate a spatial enclosure. But Germany’s first camp (Konzentrationslager) proved to be novel in that it forced its inhabitants engage in hard labor under extremely harsh conditions. What was discovered in these German camps—­especially in the case of the camp on Shark Island (Haifischinsel)—­was that one could eliminate a significant population through the attrition of hard labor, lack of food, and sanitary conditions. This attrition was something that imperial authorities on the ground desired.28 What is striking in the German case of internment is that it fused the plan of eradicating a certain population from a given territory with the internment of men, women, and children prisoners from the suppression of the revolt. Recall, for example, Lothar von Trotha’s infamous order of 1904: I the great General of the German troops send this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer German subjects. . . . The Herero people must leave the country. If the nation does not do this I will force them with the Groot Rohr [cannon]. Within the German border, every Herero, with or without gun, with or without cattle will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot.29 This order captures a set of important precursors that would become extremely important thirty years later in Germany: the idea that a certain group no longer belongs to a polity, that its juridical status becomes essentially stateless, and that therefore shooting Herero (including women and children) becomes entirely legitimate. The German case reveals a certain concatenation between

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practices of modern military pacification campaigns and the desire to remove a group from a certain territory. In brief, colonial warfare proved to be, as Paul Gilroy argues, a central crucible for the “creative deployment of killing technology in their different confrontations with the world’s uncivilized hordes.”30 If anything, the lesson of the Boer War, for example, was the seamless conjunction between violence—­ the burning of Boer farms—­and the forcible transfer of women and children to concentration camps enclosed by barbed wire. Camps were essential to the maintenance of spatial control of colonial populations. Nonetheless, imperial authorities placed special emphasis on military technology for the violent suppression of local insurgents. The classic example of superior technology was on display during the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan where, with the latest modern weapons including machine guns and artillery, Lord Kitchener (the same Lord Kitchener responsible for the propagation of concentration camps in South Africa) inflicted 23,000 casualties on the rebels, with only 47 British killed and 382 wounded. It was possible with advance technologies of violence to inflict massive casualties against combatants and noncombatants alike. Moreover, as Gilroy himself notes, there was an altogether implicit assumption in many texts published at the time on colonial warfare that prisoners need not be taken; what was of even graver concern, however, was the possibility of being taken prisoner. Gilroy quotes Colonel C. E. Callwell: “in conflict with savages and semi-­civilized opponents, and even with guerillas in a civilized country, there is no such thing as surrender. The fate of the force which sacrifices itself in a small war is in most cases actual destruction.”31 The conjunction between the innovations and applicability of internment and the application of wholesale massacres for the sake of maintaining European hegemony—­ what constituted important aspects of what is part of the “colonial archive”—­ created a novel arrangement or apparatus that would form the basis of Nazi empire building in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. What needs to be better understood is how such a colonial archive happened to become so easily applicable within Europe itself.

Barbed-­Wire Camps Come to Europe Imperial spaces were important areas for experimenting with novel technologies of violence and, as I have shown, apparatuses of material control of space and populations. The experimental results derived from the prosecution of the Boer War, Netz argues, needed a substantial intra-­European crisis in order to become relevant: “To move from experiment to established practice—­to make

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barbed wire settlement a routine phenomenon barbed wire had to first be replicated many times over. For this settlement to become standard, there would have to be a major crisis, calling for the mass-­scale control over populations. Then came World War I.”32 As both Netz and Kotek and Rigoulot note, the First World War was crucial in that it resulted in the problem of controlling masses of enemy soldiers or civilians under occupation. Not until the American Civil War was there a military situation that required the extraordinary accommodation of enemy prisoners of war.33 The extraordinary length of industrialized warfare would create not only the mass concentration of armed forces, but also as a consequence the possibilities of masses of long-­term prisoners of war. Accommodations beyond military barracks had to be implemented to control and surveil such a large number of individuals. The cost-­effectiveness and simplicity of barbed-­wire camps proved enormously appealing: “Surround a school with barbed wire—­and you have a camp.” Or, as Netz quotes a text from 1919 by C. P. Dennett titled Prisoners of the Great War describing the emerging camp form: “enclosures surrounded by barbed wire fence about ten feet high; in some camps a single fence, in others an extra fence about fifty to seventy-­five feet outside the first fence. To be caught in the space between the two fences meant death.”34 But it was not only prisoners of war who could be subjected to interment in temporary camps. Anyone deemed to potentially represent a threat during this period of quasi-­total war needed to be accounted for and subject to state control. In the case of France at the beginning of hostilities, the state declared that all “foreign nationals of enemy powers, along with prostitutes and ex-­convicts of all countries, are liable to be interned starting the first of September 1914.”35 Internment camps cropped up throughout the French countryside. Fifty or so camps were created for the purposes of interning approximately sixty thousand individuals. To be sure, as Kotek and Rigoulot note, camp surveillance was often lax and “It was more the case of a concern to save money that certain camps were surrounded by barbed wire.”36 By the end of the First World War, the very idea of enclosing human beings by barbed wire for extended periods of time appeared quite normal. While the specific crisis of the First World War gave the impetus to adopt the imperial innovation of the camp as a way of controlling enemy troops and potential civilian threats, a new category of individuals for which camp internment would prove particularly useful were the new mass of stateless individuals. It is Arendt’s important contribution to note the connection between this rise in statelessness and the collapse of the European system of states as a result of imperialism. She argues that this continued push for greater imperial expansion over the course of the nineteenth century completely destabilized

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the European Continent itself in that it amplified a set of paradoxes at the heart of the European system of the nation-­state. Because imperialism compelled the creation of novel forms of external rule, new forms of bureaucratic structures, and racial categories of separation, the destruction of this European system paved the way for the adaptation of various imperial technologies, particularly the camp, to be applied in Europe. For Arendt, the contradiction at the heart of Europe revolved around four main issues: the right of self-­determination, the problem of denaturalization, the lack of international enforcement of human rights, and the ability to be outside any juridical order. The explosion of these contradictions after the First World War, Arendt argues, left an immense juridical and political void that would have repercussions for a large set of “minority” populations set adrift after the breakup of continental empires.37 The newly independent states in Eastern Europe were by no means analogous to the French or British nation-­state; they were composed of a mixture of religions and ethnicities that sought ethnic homogeneity beyond state boundaries and who conceived of the state as conjoined with a form of ethnic nationalism.38 This unstable situation provoked the forced dislocations of minorities outside these newly established states. Such minorities would as a result become effectively denaturalized and stateless, living on the margins of other nation-­states in legal purgatory. It also led to the collapse of one of the central norms in European law—­that of asylum—­because of the mass of applications that overwhelmed the state bureaucracy. The surge of statelessness reveals the complete failure of European interstate law to develop solutions to the juridical status of individuals in what was nominally public inter-­state law. Neither assimilation or naturalization, nor repatriation en masse, proved to be an answer to the growing mass of stateless people. The nation-­state, faced with masses of stateless or denaturalized people, abdicated its responsibilities to protect their human rights in favor of maintaining national coherence. The nation-­state, Arendt argues, “transferred the whole matter to the police.”39 This led to the paradoxical situation where the deportation of stateless individuals, itself a sovereign right, was illegal if no other state legally accepted them. Western states were unable to significantly repatriate the stateless population within their territorial borders, resulting in the proliferation of internment camps. The contradictory status of minority populations throughout Europe composed of sovereign nation-­states revealed, as Arendt says, a fateful logic in the minds of state officials: “The representatives of the great nations knew only too well that minorities within nation-­ states must sooner or later be either assimilated or liquidated.”40 This specific logic would underpin Germany’s actions during the 1930s lead-

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ing to the destruction of the European Jews. To be sure, as Timothy Snyder argues, the international context of Hitler’s actions was one in which imperial competition was seen as a life-­and-­death struggle of nations. “Hitler,” Snyder writes, “confronted the two chief inheritances of the British nineteenth century: imperialism as an organizing principle of world politics, and the unbroken power of the British Empire at sea.”41 Because Germany could not (yet) compete militarily with Britain’s naval power to challenge its imperial position across the planet, the only option left for it to pursue was to expand eastward, taking over the western part of the Soviet Union to the Ural Mountains. Lebensraum, in Hitler’s thinking, would prove to be the means for Germany to sustain itself indefinitely in its future imperial wars against Britain and the United States.42 Nazi Germany proceeded then with constructing an array of camps to manage threatening populations as the foundation of a continental empire designed to rival the maritime powers. Prior to the implementation of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler’s general staff and the SS conjured up “Generalplan Ost,” which stipulated that the eastern frontier would become in effect a colonial possession of Germany’s. General Plan East involved the radical Germanization of the eastern frontier through population transfers of Germanic northern Europeans (Volksdeutsche). General Plan East, while calling for the “removal” of a significant portion of the local population, also involved detailed plans for re-­creating idealized Germanized farming communities. At numerous levels, from the bureaucratic management of entire regions to the formation of agricultural communes, the “East” proved to be, in the minds of the SS planners at the time, “a tremendous opportunity to put their theories [of ‘agricultural settlement, racial science and economic geography’] into practice.”43 In other words, German planners conceived of the “East” as a palimpsest, a special form of laboratory, for establishing the radical vision of a pure, seamless, and self-­sufficient racially pure community. This plan initially called for the elimination of between 31 and 45 million people. As Synder describes it: After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. . . . Colonization would make Germany a continental empire fit to rival the Unites States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second

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time as the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.44 The reference here to the genocide of Native Americans in North America is revealing. It demonstrates a certain awareness and knowledge about how certain populations represent threats or roadblocks to the construction of an empire. Indeed, the process of colonization of the American West during the nineteenth century had significant consequences for the materialization of the camp that would figure so prominently in Nazi totalitarian rule. At the same time, during the war with the Soviet Union, Nazi planners conceived of the pacification campaign in the rear of the front in terms of a traditional form of colonial subjugation. As Bloxham observes, the “Barbarossa jurisdiction decree” allowed groups of German soldiers or SS to liquidate men, women, and children in the attempt to pacify a region: The Barbarossa jurisdiction decree was an order straight from the lawless world of colonial warfare . . . there can be no doubting the similarity of ruthless methods and the racist, dehumanized vision of the enemy in colonial “anti-­insurgency” warfare outside Europe.45 Nonetheless, given that German forces were unable to defeat Stalin’s armies completely on the battlefield, such dystopian visions of “transform[ing] eastern Europe into an exterminatory agrarian colony” would have to wait.46 It is here, in the failures of transforming the East into Germany’s own continental colonial possession, that Snyder locates the genesis of Hitler’s Final Solution. Unable to deport Jews to the Ural Mountains, or to such places as Madagascar because of the British navy, Himmler improvised German colonization plans by merging Germany’s war effort into what Alfred Rosenberg called the “biological eradication of Jewry in Europe.”47 The unsystematic murder of Jews in German occupied zones in the East was reorganized into a set of death factories that essentially took over all German war aims. To be sure, the German concentration camp first emerged in November 1933 when, in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire of February 27, the government under Hitler ordered political enemies to be arrested and interned. However, the vast array of camps under SS reorganization in 1936 began to be propped up in 1938 with a new categorization—­“the Volksschädling (pest harmful to the people)”—­of who could be a political enemy to the Reich.48

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Later on, stateless peoples would also find themselves interned in camps not only in Germany but throughout Europe. However, as Sofsky notes, “the outbreak of the war led of a radical caesura.”49 The result of the war was the dramatic expansion of the camp system to include nine major concentration and extermination camps set up in Eastern Europe beginning in 1941. Tracing the emergence of the Nazi camp reveals a concatenation of various justifications, influences, and rationalizations. Importantly, however, the process of continental empire building that Nazi Germany embarked on was predicated on a radicalization of the state’s relation to the human being, as Arendt and Agamben have shown. Yet this relation between state and human, being predicated on the normalization of a general state of exception that captured life, was essentially tied to its materialization (ie., to the construction of various apparatuses of spatial enclosure). Barbed wire proved to be a key component of this materialization: cheap to produce, malleable to create, and profoundly psychological in terms of signifying an individual’s break from humanity (in the sense of being radically separated from the human world outside, but also as a form of dehumanization).

A Global Material Colonial Archive The construction of the German camp system proceeded on the basis of a radical transformation of the means of population control in order to establish a continental colonial empire. Yet this continental empire, with its array of camps, has an important genealogy that lies beyond “Europe” and it reveals significant imbrications with material objects such as barbed wire. Sebastian Conrad argues that a more fruitful way of understanding the imbrications between nineteenth-­century imperialism and the Second World War would be “to think in terms of a shared colonial archive involving ways of behaving, rituals, forms of knowledge and imagination.”50 This colonial archive is constituted by “common knowledge on the treatment, exploitation, and the extermination of ‘sub-­humans’ accumulated by the western powers over the course of colonial history.”51 The Nazi totalitarian goal of world conquest and its stepping stone of colonization in Eastern Europe were not simply the direct product of past German colonial experiences, but rather the coagulation of a diverse set of European imperial histories in which violence against the “colonized” was normalized and repatriated. However, excavating this colonial archive to shed light on the constitution of the present needs to be open to the historical imbrications between material objects such historical “knowledge” and between global peripheries and Europe. Put differently, a material colonial archive

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reveals significant adaptations of material objects that come to be adapted to forms of political, social, and economic control that remain occluded in decidedly Eurocentric and conceptual-­centric analysis. The case of Agamben is paradigmatic: what appears as a series of “thresholds” in the normalization of the state of exception in the form of the camp as an essentially European story should instead be amended to incorporate the manner in which an agricultural technology—­barbed wire—­“traveled” in various imperial contexts and spaces to materially enclose human beings. Examining the history of barbed wire and the materialization of the camp opens up a space to critically elucidate how such material objects are fused with the practice of governance and control till the present.

Notes 1. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 12. 2. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 268–­69. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 168; emphasis in the original. 4. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 38. 5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. 6. Ibid., 167. 7. Reveil Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 27. 8. Oliver Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History (New York: New Press, 2002), 14. 9. Quoted in ibid. 10. Netz, Barbed Wire, 28. 11. Ibid., 30. 12. Ibid., 21–­23. 13. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–­1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1987]), 277. 14. Hence the term that would gain widespread use beginning with the British: “concentration.” 15. Joel Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Le Siècle des camps: Emprisonnement, détention, extermination, cent ans de mal absolu (Paris: Lattès, 2006), 52. 16. Donald E. Schmidt, The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898–­2005 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2005), 34. 17. http://www.h-net.org/~hst203/documents/mckinley.html. To be sure, it should come as no surprise that while using the rhetoric of a “humanitarian” intervention in Cuba, the United States would itself employ the same techniques of concentration

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and colonial warfare. It seems that the line between humanitarian intervention and imperial subjugation in many cases is quite thin. 18. Klaus Muhlhahn, “The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective,” History Compass 8(6) (2010): 545. 19. Iain R. Smith and Andreas Stucki, “The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–­1902),” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39(3) (2011): 419. 20. Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 135. 21. Netz, Barbed Wire, 193. 22. Quoted in Kotek and Rigoulot, Le Siècle des camps, 67. 23. Netz, Barbed Wire, 68. Subsequent references are given in the text. 24. Kotek and Rigoulot, Le Siècle des camps, 70. 25. Elizabeth van Heyningen, “A Tool for Modernisation? The Boer Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1900–­1902,” South African Journal of Science 106(5/6) (2010). 26. Ibid., 1. 27. Ibid., 10. Here I understand the term “biopolitics” in the Foucauldian sense, as it “derive[s] its knowledge from, and define[s] its power’s field of intervention in terms of the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment.” Or, as Foucault explains, “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as a power’s problem” (Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­1976, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 245. 28. Casper Wolf Erichsen, “Forced Labor in the Concentration Camp on Shark Island,” in Genocide in German South-­West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–­1908 and Its Aftermath, ed. Jürgen Zimmerer, Joachim Zeller, and E. J. Neather (London: Merlin Press, 2007), 84–­99. 29. Quoted in Dominik J. Schaller, “From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Bergham Press, 2008), 304. 30. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 20. 31. Ibid., 22. 32. Netz, Barbed Wire, 146. 33. Ibid., 210. 34. Ibid., 150. 35. Kotek and Rigoulot, Le Siècle des camps, 100. 36. Ibid., 103. 37. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 270. 38. Ibid., 231. 39. Ibid., 287.

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40. Ibid., 273. 41. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 156. In the case of Stalin, Snyder states, his “challenge . . . was to defend the homeland of socialism, the Soviet Union, against a world where both imperialism and capitalism persisted” (157). 42. Shelley Baranowski argues that a central aspect of Nazi Germany’s imperialism was autarky: “Lebensraum was intended to solve contemporary obsessions, the perceived overpopulation of Slavs who jeopardized the German food supply, the chronic weakness of agriculture in the ‘Old Reich’, the renovation of Germany’s historically determined right to rule through settlement, and the final decisive triumph over the threat of annihilation by Germany’s enemies, both internal and external” (Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 268). Consider also Himmler’s characterization of global politics: “We are living in an age of economic empires in which the primitive urge to colonization was again manifesting itself. . . . The boom in world economy caused by the economic effects of rearmament could never form the basis of a sound economy over a long period, and the latter was obstructed above all by the economic disturbances resulting from Bolshevism” (quoted in Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 184). 43. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009), 206. 44. Snyder, Bloodlands, 160. 45. Bloxham, The Final Solution, 201. 46. Snyder, Bloodlands, 163. 47. Quoted in ibid., 188. 48. Sofsky, The Order of Terror, 33. 49. Ibid., 34. 50. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003), 165. 51. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History 42(2) (2009): 287.

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Protest Camps Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy

The Occupy movement and urban occupations in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Israel made headlines across the world in 2011, turning “protest camp” into a household phrase. Although it may have seemed that these camps erupted spontaneously, there is a long, transnational history of tents being pitched for political change. While contemporary movements certainly show new styles of protest camping, the tactic of building a public place for protest and dialogue is born from a long tradition of people working together to imagine other possible worlds. Distinct from other forms of social movement practices such as demonstrations or marches, the protest camp is made through acts of collaboration as both a place to live and to engage in political action. Protest camps may be defined as a place-­based social movement strategy that involves both acts of protest and acts of social reproduction needed to sustain daily life.1

The Promiscuous Infrastructures of Protest Camps In this chapter we look at the international history of protest camping, drawing attention to the ways that protest camps have been made across time, movements, and continents. In doing so, we briefly trace some of the genealogies of protest camping, both documenting and thereby creating a history of the protest camp as a distinct organizational and communicative form of politics. In tracing this transnational history, we look at what things travel between and across protest camps, and investigate how infrastructures, from spatial forms of governance to media tents, are made international. In the long lineage of protest camping that we examine here it becomes clear that transnational connections exist between camps across time and space.2 Working out of a collaboration with the Montreal-­based Artivistic collective in the summer of 2011, we adopted and developed the term “promiscuous infrastructures” to try to capture the crooked and messy nature of how the ideas, bodies, objects, and structures that come to make up protest camps

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travel.3 While the word promiscuous carries much negative weight in social and cultural realms, in the biological sciences it is used to mean, as its etymology suggests, “to mix, forward.” The acts of transfer that make protest camps move are contingently local, but also translated and transposed across countries and contexts. Likewise, protest is always entangled in both human and nonhuman worlds. Protest camps make visible all of the architectures and objects required to sustain or socially reproduce the daily life of protest—­from kitchens to showers to media centers. While these objects and environments are always a critical part of what makes social movements work the way they do, like things more broadly they fade into the backdrop, appearing occasionally as props, but rarely as central actors (or actants).

The International Genealogies of Protest Camps For hundreds of years camping, as a form of protest, has brought politics home. The Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-­century England directly inspired protest camps set up in recent decades. Under the leadership of Gerrard Winstanley, they rejected the idea of private land and reclaimed common land to grow crops, protesting what they saw as unjustly high rates set by landlords. This rejection arose from the Diggers’ broader protest against what they saw as a society full of social and wealth inequalities. In their manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, they argued that land was no longer free to all men, but “bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few” who delight in their comforts as if “rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”4 These Diggers were a direct inspiration for the San Francisco Diggers formed in the 1960s who played a large role in setting up People’s Park and spawned the transnational group Food Not Bombs, often found serving food at protest camps. They also inspired the work of women at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s. In 1996 in London, the Pure Genius Campaign squatted unused land in central London to turn it into an agricultural commune, claiming allegiance to the Diggers’ ideals.5 Whereas seventeenth-­century history can show us instances of reclaiming and repurposing public space, history from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries captures the rise of camping as a tactic to create collective and communal environments. Known as “camp meetings,” these took place both in the United Kingdom and on the American frontier and were most commonly associated with Christian movements and Methodists in particular. Camp meetings were essentially large gatherings of worshippers who converged on

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an agreed-­upon location, often a forest or a field, and created an intense yet festive atmosphere in which campers could engage in a form of religious recreation; it was camping with a (higher) purpose Organized camping, Scout movements, and summer camps began to gain popularity in the early 1900s, particularly with the middle classes. In the United States, some camp founders aimed to bring nature and practical outdoors skills to city boys. Others wanted to strengthen religious bonds and generate community virtues. The architectural design of the camp as a miniature village or tribe was often manifested on the tents themselves, emblematized with images of Native American men in headdress.6 Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Woodcraft Indians organization that “emphasized the Indian virtues of honesty and forthrightness, outdoor living, council fires, and Indian dances.” Here everyday material practices of making a communal home were explicitly linked to communal understandings of what makes a virtuous society.7 The founders of organized camping saw a significant connection between the act of living outdoors together and the formation of a community of understanding. Although the content of this understanding varied greatly, the recurrent form points to the organized camp as a unique structural, spatial, and temporal place able to shape the lives of those who work, play, and create within it. Eells writes of the origins of organized camping: “Because the camp was recognized as a powerful influence on behavior and ideological thinking, many religious and political groups turned to it as a means of propagating their special points of view.”8 Combining common interests with communal uses of land, these camps served as precursors to protest camps. The Bonus Army camp and the Hoovervilles both sprang up as a result of and a response to the Great Depression in the United States. Hoovervilles, named after then president Herbert Hoover, were shantytowns that provided basic infrastructures for those who lost their homes and livelihoods to the Depression. Hoovervilles served primarily as basic shelter, offering a place to eat and sleep. Yet, as they grew, some took on street names and even elected a mayor, becoming a type of alternative village. Hoovervilles were often set up in city spaces, such as New York’s Central Park. This representational practice used the material conditions of life in the Great Depression to expose poverty and make it visible to the public. In 1932, the Bonus Army set up camps that combined infrastructural elements of Hoovervilles and military base camps during protests in Washington, D.C. Like early Scout camps, Bonus Army camps were organized into units with hierarchical leadership. These military components became intertwined with the makeshift musical stages and Salvation Army–­run libraries that sustained

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the protesting veterans throughout their months-­long protests demanding payment of promised benefits for their time served in the military. The Bonus Army’s camps directly influenced Resurrection City, the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign shantytown camp on the Washington Mall. It also served as inspiration for a little known precursor to Occupy: the Bloomberg-­ Ville protests of New York City. Purposefully invoking the Hooverville spirit and named after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the June 2011 City Park sleep-­in protests were a reaction to the mayor’s proposed budget cuts and layoffs and combined social-­media use with physical occupation and performative protest. Activist networks and connections forged around Bloomberg-­ Ville, and, in fact, past actions such as the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, played a significant role in shaping the Occupy Wall Street camp that began three months later in the city and subsequently spread around the world. Although these instances form an important part of the lineage of protest camping, it was not until the 1960s that we began to see camps explicitly and intentionally used as a form of protest. Gregory Cowan argues that the act of camping accompanied many of the protests of the 1960s as the spatiality and temporality of the camps’ architectures were well suited to activists’ needs and limited resources.” “The unsettled social conditions of the global student protests of 1968 were reflected in the architectures of protest; temporary, mobile and collaboratively deployed.”9 At the same time that student protests were flaring up around the world, Martin Luther King Jr. was planning what would come to be his last major protest action. From May to June 1968, civil-­rights and antipoverty activists from the recently formed Poor People’s Campaign set up a highly organized tent city that ran along the grassland between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument in the American capital. King himself drew attention to the links between Resurrection City and the Bonus Army protests. Shortly before his death he explained to a radio reporter that the marching caravans of city dwellers would be “patterned after Bonus March back in the 1930s.” 10 King assured listeners: “We will live in some nice houses until we can get our own town built because we gonna take you to Washington.”11 The plans for the city drew on the model of a base camp. Its strategic placement near the Capitol served as a visible act of mass resistance and provided easy access to government buildings for city dwellers’ daily protests. However, unlike the Bonus Marchers camp, Resurrection City was devised primarily as an act of protest. The act of camping served many tactical functions that made American poverty visible to the public by bringing the poor to the government’s front door.

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Resurrection City was also an experiment in alternative living. The campsite had its own urban planners from a nearby university. Two architecture professors and their students designed the walkways, sanitation routes, and communal spaces for the camp.12 Dozens of volunteers, including social workers, health professionals, and educators, helped set up and run on-­site health-­ care centers and kitchens serving three healthy meals a day, more than many of the city’s residents had in their home lives. While the camp faced a number of challenges in the form of floods, federal officials, and infighting, the protest camp captured the public’s imagination. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, protest camps again spread across the world. Peace camps were pitched on four continents, in an era before the term “globalization” had entered the common lexicon. One of the earliest and largest peace camps was the 1975 occupation of a nuclear power plant in Whyl, Germany. The camp lasted for nine months and ended in a suspension of the building of the nuclear power plant and negotiations between the government and the protest movement. In 1977, American protesters followed suit, occupying Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire, which they called Freebrook. As the antinuclear movement grew in the following years, many of the organizational methods and tactics developed at these early encampments were shared by antinuclear groups around the world. One of the largest of these camps began with a peace walk in September 1981. What started with thirty-­ five walkers to the first nuclear cruise missile storage base at RAF Greenham Common in England swelled within two years to become a global movement of networked antinuclear peace camps. The physical location of these protest camps outside of military bases and weapons manufacturing plants directed media attention toward these issues and put them onto the public agenda. This enabled, or at the very least sustained, public dialogue and political pressure around the issue of nuclear warfare and increasing domestic militarization. Within two years, camps sprang up around military bases, weapons manufacturing plants, and similar military targets across the United Kingdom at sites such as Faslane and Molesworth, as well as in numerous locations in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Australia, South Africa, Japan, and Honduras. In the 1990s, the rise of environmentalism met with the growth of consumerism and suburban landscaping in the form of motorways, megastores, and strip malls. This led to a number of campaigns to save green land and natural habitats from further development. Protest campers took to forests, parks, and trees engaging in direct action to stop land destruction and preserve natural habitats. In the United Kingdom, the first antiroad development

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camp appeared in Twyford Down in 1992, and soon after protest campers were occupying treetops in Newbury, England, and rows of terrace housing set for demolition in East London. The rapid growth of these protest camps led to widespread media coverage. In 1994, the Economist reported, “Protesting about new roads has become that rarest of British phenomena, a truly populist movement drawing supporters from all walks of life.”13 Meanwhile, in Canada a protest camp was set up to protect Clayoquot Sound, an area of rich natural resources inhabited by First Nations people, from legislation that allowed for extensive logging and destruction of the natural habitat. More than twelve thousand people took part in blockades, with hundreds staying at the protest camp on-­site. Perhaps what might be considered a new type of transnational protest camp emerged in the form of convergence spaces in the late 1990s and early 2000s around international summits of elite government officials, military and corporate leaders, such as World Trade Organization (WTO) and G8 meetings. Some of the largest camping spaces of the antiglobalization movement were set up at World Social Forums. The year 2001 gave rise to the Intercontinental Youth Camp in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Started somewhat by accident, Left and student groups worked together to solve a housing crisis as youth protesters were about to descend on the city for the World Social Forum with nowhere to sleep. Drawing inspiration from the Zapatista encuentros and Argentianean piqueteros, the organizational form of the Youth Camp the following year set out to create a “city within a city” complete with its own currency. By 2003, the third camp had grown into a ten-­day affair bringing 23,500 people together from all across the world in a makeshift city made up of self-­managed neighborhoods and including an ecobuilt media center and cultural and workshop spaces.14 These events provided occasions and opportunities for global justice activists to mobilize, as thousands of people would come together to create material infrastructures to form temporary communities. From cooking for thousands to cleaning up after them, protesters camping at the countersummits and World Social Forums of the antiglobalization movement created large-­scale cooperative infrastructures for daily living, decision making, and political organizing. The amount of media attention directed toward both summit delegates and countersummit dissenters often transformed these international meetings into high-­profile media events covered by journalists from around the world. Following the model of convergence camps being set up in the antiglobalization movement and drawing on its own national history of protest camp-

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ing, the HoriZone camp in Stirling against the G8 in Gleneagles was set up in 2005. The camp was open for two weeks, from the end of June until July 11. Hori­Zone provided space for five thousand campers and served as a space to both plan and conduct resistance. Around a thousand activists departed from the camp to take part in blockade-­type actions of the organizing network Dissent!’s July 6 Day of Action. Over time, the Global Justice camps became a ritualistic form of protest and often plans for the camp would begin before the location of a summit was even announced. For example, planning for the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit began in fall 2003. Dissent! Network activists steadily developed the HoriZone EcoVillage for the summit even before the location of the G8 was announced. Alongside these summits two new networks used camps to grow and spread their messages: the No Borders Network working on migrant rights and the Climate Camp. Climate Camp went beyond earlier modes of protest by camping to establish weeklong physically and virtually connected communities composed of different neighborhoods, each with its own meeting space centered on a communal kitchen. Run with solar, wind, and bike power, using gray water systems and ecoloos, Climate Camps served as both a space for protest action and as a living experiment in ecological cooperation. Building on the Gleneagles experience, Climate Camp pitched camp for the first time in 2006 to highlight the urgency of political action to prevent dangerous climate change. The chosen target was the Drax coal-­fired power station in Yorkshire. The camp drew eight hundred activists, enough to make an impression on national media and capture people’s imagination. A year later at Heathrow, camp numbers increased to two thousand for a weeklong protest against airport expansion. The Heathrow camp utilized many of the same organizational practices and architectural methods as both the inaugural 2006 camp and the alter-­globalization summits that came before. The modular design and preplanned infrastructures of these ecocamps made their form easy to adapt and reproduce in different locations. Following years saw more UK climate camps around the country in Kingsnorth (2008), London (2009), and Edinburgh (2010), and further afield in Canada, the United States, Germany, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ghana, Australia, and New Zealand. Tracing the development and transnational reach of climate camps shows how protest moves in both its politically symbolic and material forms. Meanwhile, protest camps could be found in democracy movements around the world. In 2004 in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands took to the streets and in tents to protest the fraudulent outcome of national elections. In 2006, thousands camped in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a protest led by teachers for

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indigenous rights, education, and economic justice. Thailand’s Red Shirts set up camps in 2008 and again in 2010 in a successful attempt to force new elections. Thai protesters in 2010 camped out in the city center for three months and were evicted by police and army units, leaving more than sixty people dead. Protesting the occupation of their country by Morocco, refugees in Western Sahara and Algeria transformed their refugee camps into stages for political organization. By the time Tahrir Square captured international attention in 2011, protest camps already had a long history. Yet the uprising in Egypt, with its mass encampment in Tahrir Square, captured global attention in a way no protest camp had done before. This “Tahrir Moment” turned protest camps into a common phrase for a new generation. Inspired by Tahrir and the May 15 movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street began with an Adbusters’ online and magazine subvertisement that rhetorically asked: “Are you ready for a Tahrir Moment?” and followed with this call: “On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.” The ad capitalized on the affective resonance produced in many who watched the rebellion in Egypt and harnessed this affect, daring its readers in the West to reimagine what was possible. Within days Occupy Wall Street evolved from a modest group of campers in Zuccotti Park to a hub of activity were thousands came together. Protest camps mirroring Occupy’s message, practices, and material form spread to more than 950 cities in eighty countries in less than one month. Since Occupy captured the global imagination in 2011, large protest camps popped up as part of social movement activity in Istanbul, Turkey, and political unrest in Kiev, Ukraine, in 2013. While the geographic location, political claims, and demographic composition of these two protest camps are very different, they share infrastructures of living and governance—­the architectures and practices of meeting spaces, kitchens, and shelter that animate life in a protest camp. In the final section of this essay we offer two examples of how the things of protest camping have been made international. In the first, we look at the movement of governance structures and practices relating to meetings and decision making. In the second, we use the example of the “People’s Mic” to examine how embodied practices can spread virally with the help of digital communication across movements. While the practice of the “People’s Mic” developed in Occupy Wall Street, the interplay or ecology between old and new media forms that come together in its practice as technē, can be found throughout protest camps across time and place. In both of these examples we draw out the importance of infrastructures—­how they mix and travel forward.

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Governance Infrastructures We have described elsewhere governance infrastructures as those mechanisms, procedures, architectures, and settings that are used to run, govern, and organize protest camps.15 In this context, it is important to note that we look here not only at the way decisions are being made procedurally but also at how spaces are deliberately set up to enable and foster certain forms of decision making and organization. The history of protest camping illustrates how ideas, practices, and experiences of campers in different parts of the world traveled and led to new, multiple configurations of alternative forms of governance and decision making. Protest camps were places that allowed for experimentation with new power structures, and in particular in the emancipatory notion of a participatory and radically democratic form of power. For example, after the success of the Greenham Common protest camps, other women’s peace camps emerged across the world, such as the Seneca peace camp. Seneca used a highly developed mode of consensus horizontal decision making (HDM). When Seneca activists decided to visit the Greenham protest camp, however, they were surprised to see that the women in Greenham did not follow the sophisticated horizontal procedures they used. Instead, as visiting activist Starhawk observed: For me, participating in decision-­making with the Greenham Common women brought culture shock. In contrast to our West Coast [U.S.] style of consensus, involving facilitators, agendas, plans, and formal processes, their meetings seemed to have no structure at all. No one facilitated, no agendas were set; everyone spoke whenever she wanted to and said what she thought. Where we valued plans and scenarios, they valued spontaneity, trusting in the energy of the group and the moment. Instead of long discussions about the pros and cons of any given plan, those women who wanted to do it simply went ahead, and those who didn’t, did not participate.16 Experiences from Seneca, in turn, were picked up by feminist activists who took the ideas of HDM to West Germany.17 Rather than simply applying the procedural governance structures of HDM, in the Hunsrueck camp the women mixed procedural practice with spatial practice for governance purposes. The women in the Hunsrueck camps in West Germany created a neighborhood topology where each political grouping (often affinity groups from cities) and different factions had their own area. In contrast to Greenham Common, where

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the structure had emerged somewhat unplanned because of the various gates to the site, in the Hunsrueck camp this was consciously arranged to ease decision making. The decentralization realized in this structure allowed for a more democratic governance practice as decision making remained, whenever possible, with the neighborhood level, where horizontality was easier to achieve than in the larger camp context. The neighborhood topology was a key innovation in how to organize protest camps democratically. In the following decades, traveling activists made this approach to democratic governance international. After the women’s camp in Hunsrueck, neighborhood structures appeared in a modified form in the first no border camps in the late 1990s in Germany. From here the topology moved to the first international No Border camp of Strasbourg in 2002 and on to the anti-­G8 camp in Annemasse in France in 2003. The Word Social Forum Youth Camps in São Paulo, Brazil, also had neighborhood structures, referred to often as barrios. The experience of these camps in turn inspired broad sections of attending British activists, who brought the neighborhood principle back to the UK for the 2005 HoriZone camp, and then into climate camps from 2006 to 2011. From the Bonus Marchers’ military bases, to the post-­1960s Greenham Common–­style spontaneous neighborhoods, to the preplanned barrios and villages of the alter-­globalization and climate justice camps, this form of spatially governed social movement practice was made international.

Communication Infrastructures Protest camps have long been sites of technological innovation, often driven by the need for pragmatic solutions to overcome the physical limitations or obstacles of the physical act of occupation. Moreover, protest camps have rich histories of alternative media and adaption, from photocopying newsletters and setting up camp-­specific micro radio stations, to using a social-­media camp hashtag. Infrastructurally, on-­site media and communications often take the form of distinct tents, marked in recent years by the presence of on-­site generators used to charge the electronic devices that permeate contemporary protest camps. While digital technologies transform social movement activism and protest, the physical realities of camp life make protest camps a unique site from which to consider tensions between analog and digital. In the example we discuss here, which comes from the rise and international spread of Occupy protest camps, we can see the complex media ecologies of today’s international protest camps. The human microphone or People’s Mic was an analog communication tactic that spread virally across the world through multiple digital platforms from social to mainstream media. 58

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The practice was born in the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York, where a city bylaw prohibited the use of amplified sound in public without a permit. Within these constraints and driven by a desire not to give the police further cause to intervene, campers at Zuccotti developed a system wherein a speaker’s words would be repeated by a larger group of people, throughout the space of the encampment, allowing sound to travel through large crowds. At Zuccotti it was the absence of any technological devices beyond the collective power of the human body and voice that marked the uniqueness of this process. Such practices of adaptability to the camp’s environment and legal restrictions can be found in many iterations of protest camping. For example, at Greenham Common in the 1980s in England, women campers would walk the nine-­mile perimeter of their encampment outside the military base to communicate messages, share news, and gather stories. Without a means of wireless communication or roadways between their encampments dotted at gate entrances around the base, women relied on “old-­fashioned” communication techniques. Yet, as this news was gathered together for newsletters, other women would volunteer to document the stories, make initial mimeograph copies, and then use a photocopier to create papers for mass distribution. As technology advances, so does the interplay between traditional and new communication strategies for protest campers. A decade after Greenham Common, campers at the “antiroads” camps resisting the spread of motorways through green spaces had a single mobile phone for emergencies, action announcements, and news reporting. Because these protest camps were often tucked in the woods, and sometimes built in the trees, electricity was not readily available. Most communications would be CBed into a main camp office and then dispatched by mobile phone. The forms of communication that protest campers create and adapt arise out of the interplay between existing tactics, architectures, and environments. This creates possibilities as well as limitations. At Zuccoti Park, using the human mic effectively meant that speech had to be limited to repeatable phrases and, as a result, was cumbersome, slow, and not necessarily conducive to debate. Yet, as others have noted, the tactical and pragmatic innovation was collective, participatory, and provided those present with an embodied experience.18 Although striking in contrast to Occupy’s hyperdigital landscape of laptops and live streaming, the technē of the human mic was not unique to Occupy and was practiced in the 1999 WTO protests of the global justice movement and at least as far back as the nuclear protests of the 1980s.19 That said, the human mic stands as a movement hallmark and doubles as an excellent recent example of how infrastructures and practices travel transnationally. In what some have called a “display of symbolic solidarity” and what can Protest Camps

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equally be seen as an embodied performance of Occupy identity, protest campers free from the confines of bureaucratic bylaws replicated the human mic across the globe.20 Videos have been uploaded to YouTube showing the human mic in action from occupations in Montreal, Canada; Wisconsin, United States; Dublin, Ireland; and Wellington, New Zealand, to name but a few. Of interest is the fact that despite not having the legal restrictions, camps around the world still picked up the human mic practice. At the Occupy Ottawa camp, for example, facilitators purposefully avoided using an amplified sound-­system setup in favor of the human mic. While this decision made it difficult at times to transmit information and debate issues, it allowed Occupiers to enact and embody a practice linked with what it meant to be an “Occupier” regardless of its practical utility and contextual necessity. Protest camps’ communication practices can evolve from a pragmatic solution to a communicative dilemma, into a global practice with a highly affective transnational resonance. It is these kinds of network exchanges that shape the ways new protest camps materialize around the world.

Toward an Infrastructural Analysis Tracing an international genealogy of how protest camps are made across time and place shows that the ways social movements move is not always straightforward or predictable. The impact one camp will have on the world cannot be quantified or measured through resource counting or participant polls alone. Those looking for linearity in processes of protest, like those concerned with only large-­scale structures, often misunderstand or misrecognize the micro-­ structures that facilitate and propagate protest camps as they appear and disappear across cities, countrysides, and continents. Just as forms of decision making travel and change, so too do styles of tents, media practices, and spatial organizations of camp governance. The things that make up protest camps are promiscuous. From cunning to accidental, there is often a chaotic mobility to the organizational dynamics that give life to these camps. By focusing in on things, via an infrastructural approach, we can generate a research method, a tactic for storytelling, a trick to get things talking.21 This infrastructural approach to protest camps’ rich international genealogies allows us to better explore how structures and ideas travel across time and place, becoming adopted and adapted as they mix and move forward. More broadly, giving infrastructures a more central role in reading the rich genealogical histories of protest can open up new questions and lead us in

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new directions. It can help us tell histories of how people not only imagine, but practically make, alternative worlds together.

Notes 1. This definition of a protest camp was developed in our book Protest Camps (London: Zed, 2013). Concepts and case studies introduced in this chapter are discussed at length there. 2. Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-­Century Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 3. Artivistic Promiscuous Infrastructures, research residency at Centre des Arts Actuels Skol, Montreal, June 27–­August 20, 2011. Information available at http://skol .ca/en/programming/promiscuousinfrastructures-artivistic-at-skol/ (accessed May 24, 2013). 4. Christopher Hill, ed., Winstanley: “The Law of Freedom” and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 78. 5. David Featherstone, “Regaining the Inhuman City: The ‘Pure Genius’ Land Occupation,” Soundings 7 (autumn 1997): 45–­60; available at http://www.amielandmel burn.org.uk/collections/soundings/index_frame.htm. 6. Susan Snyder, Past Tents: The Way We Camped (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006). 7. Reynold Carlson, in Eleanor Eells, History of Organized Camping: The First 100 Years (Martinsville, Ind.: American Camp Assocation, 1986), vi. 8. Ibid., 57. 9. Gregory Cowan, “Nomadology in Architecture Ephemerality, Movement, and Collaboration,” MA dissertation, http://gregory.cowan.com/Nomadology. 10. Emory Archives—­SCLC digital collection. 11. Ibid. 12. John Wiebenson, “Planning and Using Resurrection City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35(6) (1969): 405–­11. 13. “The Classless Society,” Economist, February 19, 1994. 14. Rodrigo Nunes, “The Intercontinental Youth Camp as the Unthought of the World Social Forum,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 5(2) (2005): 277–­96. 15. Fabian Frenzel, Anna Feigenbaum, and Patrick McCurdy, “A Research Framework for the Study of Protest Camps,” Sociological Review 62(3) (2013): 457–­74. 16. Starhawk, Truth or Dare (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 187. 17. Christiane Leidinger, “Kontroverse Koalitionen im politischen Laboratorium Camp—­antimilitaristisch-­feministische Bündnisse und Bündisarbeit als kontingente, soziale Prozesse,” Österrereichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 40(3) (2011): 283–­300. 18. Chris Garces, “People’s Mic and ‘Leaderful’ Charisma,” Fieldsights—­Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 14, 2013, http://production.culanth.org /fieldsights/65-people-s-mic-and-leaderful-charisma; Bernard E. Harcourt, “Political Disobedience,” Critical Inquiry 39(1) (2012): 33–­55.

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19. Sasha Costanza-­Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement,” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest 11(3–­4) (2012): 375–­85; Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation,” American Ethnologist 39(2) (2012): 259–­79. 20. See Jenny Pickerill, Kevin Gillan, and Frank Webster, “Scales of Activism: New Media and Transnational Connections in Antiwar Movements,” in Simon Cottle and Libby Lester, eds., Transnational Protests and the Media (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011), 41–­58. 21. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Tent Andreas Folkers and Nadine Marquardt

The tent is a nomadic thing. When folded, it is versatile and ready to move at any time; in its unfolded form, the tent gathers people and materials and creates a transient dwelling. As such, the tent has served both nomadic peoples and important parts of sedentary societies throughout history. But recently the tent has become truly international as a contested political technology and as a thing that shapes the global. In military interventions and in emergency responses by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), tents serve a worldwide humanitarian regime as a standardized item of equipment to provide shelter for the exposed lives of refugees, soldiers, or people affected by natural disasters. The tent is a material element and paradigmatic spatial form of the contemporary ambulant biopolitics of crisis and emergency. At the same time, in the recent waves of social struggle from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, from Rothschild Boulevard to Puerta del Sol, the tent also acts as a mobile resistance technology that challenges inadequate crisis management. The tent is the thing that connects different social movements and transgresses diverse aims and locational specificities; it is both a shared symbol and a shared strategic tool. In this contribution, we propose to follow the tent as a way of understanding how the global is made, to highlight the tent’s relation to world politics, its position in global assemblages of crisis management, and its role in creating networks of resistance. We propose to follow the tent rather than define it, because we are more interested in its trajectory than in its properties. This perspective is inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s notion of following things: “we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories [implying] in part a corrective to the tendency to excessively sociologize transactions in things.”1 Rather than simply placing the tent in the framework of the international, be it global humanitarian interventions or new forms of social struggle, we propose to look at the spaces that are made up by the tent. Drawing on the assumption that things enable and articulate forms of sociality, we discuss the vital qualities realized

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in tent design and follow the tent to those locations where it has recently organized different kinds of social experiment. In the first section, we will meditate on the ontology and topology of the tent. We argue that the tent-­thing has the capacity to make spaces. This capacity cannot be reduced to the uses we make of the tent, but stems from the material elegance of tensile structures that spur unique tent designs and enable the tent’s current internationalization. In the second section, we take a look at the social and architectural history of the tent. This genealogy of the tent will serve as a backdrop to elucidate the significance of contemporary uses of the tent as an element in spatial technologies of exception. In the third section, we follow the tent as an international thing used to manage exceptions—­ranging from events of spectacle to natural, humanitarian, or economic catastrophes—­on a global scale. In recent years, protesters around the world have assembled their resistance to the governing of and through crises in and around tents. We will turn to these springs of protest in 2011 that also globalized the tent as an item of resistance equipment.

Ontology and Topology of the Tent What is a tent, and what is the thingness of it? The tent is first and foremost an ordinary thing. The social needs delegated to tent design are simple ones. Most of the time, a tent gathers people and materials not because it introduces something unfamiliar and critical that creates a public problem but simply by opening up a location for dwelling, a space for profane needs and everyday practices. The tent is so ordinary that it has ceased to be noticed; it is not a “matter of concern” but a matter of habit.2 The tent needs a tent dweller who acquires specific skills in making a home in and with the tent. There is a tent-­habitus as much as the tent itself is a habitat. But this habitus/habitat is not just the property of an individual. Perhaps you don’t want to assemble a tent on your own or sleep in it alone. When the tent is assembled collaboratively and when a campsite is constructed, tents work as operators of collectives and intimate relations. The tent is both a center of gravity and a little world that connects and divides the people who live at the campsite and carry out their daily activities in and around it. Tents not only gather people, they set up places. Tents are spatial things. Once they are set up, they enclose both their inner sphere and their surroundings in a double movement without rigidly decomposing inside and outside. Tents constitute their proximate environment as much as they enclose a more or less cozy inside; they are not simply located at a campsite and occupy a given space but open up the very location every time they are set up.

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The places that tents enclose are ontologically prior to the empty space at the campsite. We need a “wild camping ontology” to understand the tent’s ability to make up spaces; we can find this in Heidegger’s phenomenology of building and dwelling, where he emphasizes the virtue of certain things to “gather locations.”3 To follow the tent does not mean to simply follow an object through space as it travels on preordained paths in and out of different social contexts, but rather to acknowledge the tent as a thing-­in-­motion that has the ability to create spaces. As a thing that creates spaces, the tent must be considered an operational force in its own right. It is not only an international thing or a thing that has been made international recently; it is capable of making the international. The tent not only opens up spaces and assembles its dwellers, it also assembles its own materials, rules of architecture, technological knowledge, and craftsmanship. Tent design embodies transiency, it enables and reflects movement—­not only the movement of people, but of the materials themselves. As a prototype of membrane design, the tent is closely related to the umbrella and the sail, two other things that also incorporate the vital qualities of protection and movement—­or rather: protection through movement—­ allowed for by ephemeral design constructions.4 The tent is able to achieve these qualities through a minimal use of resources; it produces the most with the least. The low weight and flexible behavior of tensile structures and membrane fabrics is what makes the tent light and fragile, but also more practical and resilient to external forces. The tent’s economic use of materials and the construction’s ability to bend in the wind are precisely what constitute its “material elegance.”5 Ease of transport and operation have been the qualities defining tent building from the outset, making the tent one of the most efficient forms of shelter and at the same time a remarkable answer to the need for mobility. This unmatched ability of tent design to quickly open up and rearrange spaces of refuge feeds into the global distribution of tents to the many sites of crisis we are witnessing today. Despite their many differences in appearance, size, and use, tents conform to only a few fundamental types of structures, consisting either of rigid or braced frameworks covered in fabric, tensioned structures with load-­bearing membranes supported by masts, or hybrid structures combining these features.6 Although tent construction types have barely changed for centuries, the development of new technofabrics and innovations in computerized structural engineering now allow for novel form-­finding approaches and have increased the popularity of membrane architecture and design.7 Tent constructions have become ever more lightweight and at the same time more robust and durable.

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Tent aesthetics exhibit possibilities of shape and curvature and a degree of translucency and airiness that are unmatched by any other construction technique. The membrane, in an increasingly sophisticated way, selects what can pass (air, noise) and what has to stay outside (water, mosquitoes). At the same time, it is definitely more permeable than any wall could ever be and therefore more open, without even needing a window. The sound of the world outside can transgress the membrane structures without hindrance.

Tent Genealogy The existential usefulness of tents, the way they serve as shelters and transient dwellings, points to their significance as one of the oldest forms of abode in human history. Archaeological remains of stones and animal bones used as anchorage for nomadic settlements in Siberia date from prehistoric times more than forty thousand years ago. Unlike the cave, the tent is a genuinely human design for dwelling—­the first such design, in fact. As a cultural form of living, the tent and tent symbolism are associated with nomadism. However, the use and spread of tents and the mobile modes of life made possible by them are not restricted to nomadic societies. The art of membrane construction expressed in the tent has had its own historical phases of artistic sophistication and technological advancement in both nomadic and sedentary societies. When we “follow the tent” through history, what comes to the fore is that even within sedentary cultures, important parts of society continued to lead mobile lives made possible by the tent. What following the tent makes visible is that tents do not just perform a designated function within a holistic society or culture. Rather, the tent is a specific sociomaterial technology that operates differently according to the wider social assemblages it is part of. And yet, the tent is not reducible to these assemblages. It can also make up new forms of sociality. The tent moves. It is not supposed to stay in one place. Sooner or later, it crosses a border. As a thing-­in-­motion, the tent has always been part of political projects. Its built-­in tendency to transgress the local has made it an operator of many political projects of de-­and reterritorialization that can be considered processes of internationalization avant la lettre. The military equipment of the ancient Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Romans all included tents.8 Tent genealogy shows that tents have been put to use as a political technology for a long time, but it also shows that tent meanings have changed. From antiquity down to the nineteenth century, tents were used for courtly purposes. Medieval epic poetry praises the tent and documents how tents served as mobile castles for courtly societies during military campaigns, on pilgrimages,

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for tournaments and great assemblies of the princes.9 Tent builders strove for structural elegance and ornamental richness, making tent construction an art form. The sophistication of tent artistry is said to have reached its peak in the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.10 This history of the tent as a thing of beauty and luxury stands in sharp contrast to the current use and understanding of the tent as a makeshift solution to cover basic needs. Together with the industrial revolution, the discharge of labor, and the creation of floating populations in the context of primitive accumulation in Europe, phenomena of mobility, migration, and homelessness became major governmental problems. The spatial (re)fixing of populations advanced as a political project, and was achieved through the “great confinement” as well as through a number of welfare measures.11 To the extent to which sedentarism became a political norm, the tent now represented a form of living that encountered increasing skepticism. The tent’s flexibility and provisional character, the promise of independence emanating from its qualities of lightness, portability, and foldability, became suspect. The tent, a form of dwelling not congealed into property, addresses, and home ownership, did not fit into the modern biopolitical project; it baffled the separate localization of the individual at his or her home and complicated attempts to transform the targets of governmental intervention into countable objects and to register the population’s regularities. The political triumph of confinement and the biopolitical governing of circulations thus brought forth new assessments of the tent and its legitimate uses. Nomadic lifestyles—­in the European context often already an effect of exclusion from mainstream society—­now became the target of additional educational and disciplinary measures, with Traveller communities facing criminalization, containment, and even persecution and genocide, as in the case of the Roma under National Socialism. Some architectural theorists even speak of a “distrust of tents in the West” and argue that this distrust also meant that the substantial history of membrane architecture fell into obscurity.12 For a long time, the discipline even chose to regard the tent as a form of “anti-­architecture” without beauty, answering only to the most basic human needs that do not lend themselves to further aestheticization.13 Only in the second half of the twentieth century did membrane architecture pioneers such as Frei Otto famously reintroduce tent constructions. Authors in the field of architectural theory argue that Otto’s membrane designs were so well received in postwar Germany because National Socialism had rendered the aesthetics of architectural monumentalism deeply suspect. Against this background, Otto’s lightweight constructions provided a

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welcome input in the then prominent search for “democratic aesthetics.” This popularity of tent design persists, even though a “democratic aesthetic” is not necessarily being pursued today. Architects building with membranes now mostly assert that membrane structures are a sustainable and fitting answer to the emerging cultures of mobility. But even today, the art of building with membranes is taught at only a few universities. Architectural theory still wrestles with the question of whether tents can be considered as architecture at all.

Tents as Spatial Technologies of Exception The tent is no longer considered a legitimate form of living, but it has advanced all the more as a temporary space of exception. It is not altogether excluded from modern societies; rather, it serves as a tool to include the excluded. The tent has become a vehicle to organize and contain the unusual, be it as a space of emergency or for more mundane forms of the extraordinary. One of the most popular examples of the tent as an exceptional space of difference is the circus. Everything alien, spectacular, and grotesque is allowed to be at home in the mobile building of the circus, clearly separated from normal space, attracting attention only for a short while and always ready to move on. Throughout modernity, the tent slowly became something for the extra-­ordinary—­a space for the spectacle, for the freak shows of the early culture industry as much as for the more contemporary forms of event-­culture. Camping holidays, a manageable and more or less adventurous break from normalcy realized in designated areas, also proved to be a popular use for tents. In the common habitat of the bourgeois nuclear family, a miniature tent can sometimes be found in the children’s room. In one of his essays on heterotopias, Foucault mentions these children’s tents and suggests that they can be read as spaces of otherness, heterotopias that juxtapose their surroundings.14 They serve as a microcosm, a “small reservoir of imagination” within the modern space of sedentarism.15 But the tent as heterotopia, as a space of the exceptional, is not only a place of dreams and desires, it is also a place of nightmares and despair. As a tool to govern and cope with emergencies, the tent serves in a variety of contexts around the world, from natural disasters to equally catastrophic economic housing crises. It is in this sense that the tent has advanced as a truly global thing, a universal tool of transnational emergency response. Tents appear all around the globe as a form of temporary accommodation in cases of emergency, and as such they embody contemporary strategies to cope with man-­made and natural postdisaster homelessness. These strategies entail both the reflected techniques of global humanitarian regimes and charitable orga-

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nizations and the mundane and improvised strategies of the poor and dispossessed in desperate need of shelter. Since the end of the Cold War, an ambulant biopolitics of intervening in complex humanitarian emergencies has emerged as a major part of international politics. An array of inter-­and transnational organizations such as the United Nations, NGOs, and globally operating military forces take part in this new kind of catastrophe response politics made intelligible by a new “emergency imaginary.”16 In and through this explicitly global form of politics, the tent shapes the global spaces of emergency governance. Because homelessness is such a widespread effect of all kinds of conflict and disaster, the provision of shelter (together with medical aid) has become the most immediate task of relief efforts in postdisaster situations. International organizations have to come up with provisional housing solutions for large numbers of people, and they have to act quickly. People urgently need help immediately after the disaster and cannot wait days or weeks for the aid organizations to arrive. Because it is imperative to respond quickly to emergencies, relief organizations have to be prepared for an array of different situations that nevertheless pose similar technical difficulties. Certain materials and aid devices have to be in the right place at the right time, so that these organizations can react effectively when disaster strikes. Efficient logistics that can increase the speed of interventions are therefore a major concern in humanitarian reasoning.17 One of the most important innovations addressing these problems is a simple device that has its historical origins in military logistical planning: the kit. In global relief organizations, kits are boxes filled with standardized emergency equipment stockpiled at well-­connected logistical nodes. These emergency kits are an important element in the preparedness infrastructures of “vital mobility.”18 Here the tent is not so much an object as a “standing reserve” that can be moved at short notice. The tent as “standing-­reserve no longer stands over against us as object . . . [rather] it is ordered to ensure the possibility of transportation. For this it must be in its whole structure and in every one of its constituent parts, on call for duty, i.e., ready for takeoff.”19 Aside from kits that focus primarily on medical supplies, the “humanitarian kit” is often assembled around the tent.20 One of these tent kits, the ShelterBox, provides an apt example of how tents are being distributed globally and how the tent has become part of the global assemblage of crisis management. Founded in 2000, the ShelterBox organization provides life-­saving equipment in the wake of disasters. The organization, closely connected to the Rotary Club, aims at immediately providing shelter by distributing tool kits during the critical period following a disaster that precedes the rebuilding of proper

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homes. Each ShelterBox contains a ten-­person tent and supporting materials such as blankets and camping stoves. The boxes are centrally stored in the UK and packed without reference to a specific catastrophic event so that they can be transported to places all around the world as quickly as possible. Before being distributed, the generic contents of the box are supplemented with additional equipment depending on the nature and location of the disaster. Since 2000, ShelterBoxes have been distributed to seventy-­five countries in the wake of earthquakes, floods, tropical storms, hurricanes, and landslides, and also in response to industrial accidents and all kinds of political conflicts. Countries receiving aid are not solely located in the global South. Victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, of Italy’s 2012 earthquake, and of Fukushima’s nuclear catastrophe in 2011 also received ShelterBox tents. The funding, production, and distribution of the emergency kit assembles a variety of actors and locations, ranging from industrial producers and international charity organizations, commercial airlines, and national militaries to local groups and individual donors. Donors can track their box to see where it is employed and follow their contribution to the relief of “distant suffering” on the organization’s Web site in real time.21 The ShelterBox infrastructure thus facilitates not only the material economies of relief organizations but also the moral economies of compassion, a crucial element of contemporary “humanitarian reason.”22 The ShelterBox tent can now be seen around the world, often next to other, equally standardized tents of globally operating organizations such as the Red Cross, the United National High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), or the UN. These tents all look quite similar. Often they are white to reflect the sunlight and can only be distinguished by the different organizational brands printed on their walls. But the tent is not only global in the sense that it is distributed around the globe and assembles a variety of international actors along the logistical chain of humanitarian infrastructures. When it is employed in humanitarian interventions, it also discloses a distinctly transnational spatial form. This spatial form organizing the rapid deployment of temporary accommodation for displaced persons in emergency tents is the camp. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben famously argues, the camp is a crucial spatial form of modernity because it figures as the spatial exception to the principle of nationhood.23 As Charlie Hailey remarks, “defining the camp is a central problem of our contemporary moment.”24 The camp has advanced as a characteristic spatial form of the present that epitomizes the crisis of the national state. Refugee camps for the victims of wars, displacement, and genocide, in particular, cannot easily be integrated into the grid of modern national sovereignty. The first large-­scale

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refugee camps emerged during and after World War II to house between six and twelve million displaced persons in Europe. Nowadays there are extraterritorial camps outside the European Union (EU) in Ukraine and in Libya that are designed to prevent refugees from entering Europe, again establishing a strange a-­national territory within nation-­states, governed by supranational organizations such as the EU.25 These camp spaces disclosed by tents not only try to process the exceptional circumstances of catastrophic events but must be considered as spaces of exception in themselves. The tent is a thing that is mobile on an international scale because it is distributed around the globe in cases of emergency, but it is also a thing that contributes to the creation of a global condition as it discloses the trans-­or postnational spaces that provisionally respond to the crisis of national sovereignty. Although the tent is only supposed to function as a short-­term emergency shelter, often this temporary exception turns into a long-­term rule. In the problematizations of product designs for humanitarian kits, this is a well-­ established fact. And even though organizations like ShelterBox understand themselves as short-­term emergency response for the victims of disaster, at the same time they know that people will often have to stay in their tents for a long time, sometimes even years. Product development thus tries to engineer more robust tensile structures and to winterize tents to make them more comfortable and warm enough for longer periods. Although they are distributed as a form of short-­term shelter, tents are often temporary solutions for an indefinite transition toward normalcy. They are part of an interventionist regime that cannot properly address the issues that caused the emergency in the first place. The fact that more often than not, emergency tents turn into a more long-­term form of living clearly highlights the limits of humanitarianism. This governmentality of emergency must be considered a form of biopolitics in its own right, one that stands in contrast to the long-­established biopolitics of (Western) welfare states. Whereas the latter tried to increase the well-­being of a national population, the former is preoccupied with ensuring the mere survival of populations at risk on a global scale. Tents are important for this form of emergency politics because they effectively address the very basic physiological needs of human beings. The governmentality of emergency we see at work today is not a politics of the good life but a “minimal biopolitics.”26 While the paradigmatic spatial form of welfarist biopolitics was the homestead, the emerging spatial form of a biopolitics of precarious lives is the tent. It is thus no coincidence that with the devastation of the politics of home ownership in the United States by the subprime crisis in 2007 and the following years, tents emerged again as a technique to deal with this exceptional

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event. As the economic crisis worsened through 2008 and 2009 with more and more homes foreclosed and people forced out of the housing market, tent cities began to appear in the outskirts of many American cities. The tent cities that sprang up like mushrooms in the wake of the financial crisis show not only how the global financial crisis is also a crisis of housing, but that the tent is not only an emergency technology in the global South but is also employed in the industrialized heartlands. Often these tent cities are referred to as “modern-­ day Hoovervilles,” comparing the contemporary rise of tent encampments to the hundreds of shantytowns that emerged during the Great Depression to give shelter to the homeless and unemployed. Then as now, living in tents and makeshift shacks is a last resort for many who are trying to cope with catastrophic events. The tent is not only part of humanitarian actions carried out by transnational organizations, it also works as an improvised form of self-­ help where all other kinds of public services and infrastructures fail. But either way, whether it is the ShelterBox tents in Turkey and Lebanon giving shelter to thousands of Syrians or the new “Hoovervilles” in American cities inhabited by people with little prospect of reentering the housing market in the near future, tents have become spaces of despair: the loss of a home is also the loss of a whole way of life, a mode of being-­in-­the-­world.

Tents as Spatial Technologies of Resistance The tent is a crucial technology of global governmentality of crisis and emergency, but it also has advanced as a technology of questioning and contesting the very same politics of crisis management. In July 2011, Israeli filmmaker Daphni Leef asked her Facebook friends to bring tents and camp out on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv in order to protest rising rents and the failure of social policies to solve the housing shortage. During July and August, the tent encampments on Rothschild Boulevard grew and finally extended for almost two kilometers. The protests soon became known as of one of Israel’s biggest social justice movements ever. Leef later explained that the idea to use tents as a technology of protest and to put them up in Tel Aviv’s public green space was inspired by what she had read about New York’s Central Park Hooverville during the Great Depression.27 Protesters in Tel Aviv were neither the only nor the first people who pitched tents in city centers that year. From January 2011 on, the Egyptian uprising occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo with an impressive tent city that soon developed its own sophisticated socioeconomic and political infrastructure and withstood all attempts by police and military forces to remove it. Tents were

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erected on the roundabout in the middle of Tahrir Square and on the surrounding pavements. The tent city consisted of unique constructions that included smaller tents suitable for people to stay overnight and larger tent structures for different kinds of joint use: makeshift street clinics, a kindergarten, speakers’ corners, newsstands, and so on. Sun-­shield canopy constructions built of ropes, discarded umbrellas, and plastic canvases gave shelter to all kinds of logistical requirements. Pictures of occupied Tahrir Square soon traveled the world. The tent city lasted for several weeks until the Mubarak administration stepped down and inspired the further spread of upheavals against repressive regimes in other North African states. In May 2011, with the tent occupation of Tahrir Square as background, the Spanish protest movement moved into the public squares of Spain’s major cities with tens of thousands appropriating urban space with tent encampments. In Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, the tent city took over the whole square. Like Tahrir Square’s encampment structures, the Puerta del Sol’s tent city stayed dynamic once established and constantly adjusted its form to the shifting needs of the movement: “Sometimes it took on the dense morphology of a kasbah, while on other occasions it swiftly folded in on itself to make space for big demonstrations.”28 Again, the tent city’s flexibility impressively highlighted the potential of membrane designs to simultaneously answer to the needs of protection and movement, even within one location. By September 2011, when the occupation of Wall Street in New York started, the use of tents to occupy representative metropolitan squares was already an established strategy of struggle, a model of protest traveling the world. Occupy Wall Street relied heavily on the imagery produced by the other occupations earlier in the same year. The initial twitter call to action read “Are you ready for a Tahrir Moment?” A poster calling for participation consisted simply of the request “Bring tent.” But, although pitching tents in Zuccotti Park was a practice informed by the other tent cities that had emerged throughout 2011, it was—­like the other cases—­also a very practical move. Whereas the tent structures in Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, and Rothschild Boulevard had worked as canopies protecting the protesters from the sun, in New York the tents were a practical solution to shelter the protesters from the cold and rainy autumn weather. Tent encampments had been part of social protests before, but 2011 introduced the tent as a fast-­moving resistance technology that linked a diversity of urban movements with different goals and backgrounds to a shared form of expression, connected metropolises throughout the globe, and transgressed national borders and North–­South divides. The ways in which these struggles

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spoke to one another clearly highlighted the potentialities of a global interurban connection. Discussions about what links these new forms of protest have stressed the importance of virtual networks and information technologies. While these technologies are certainly of major importance for the large-­ scale organization of dissent, the physical occupations of city squares also relied heavily on the tent as a political technology. The ephemeral tent cities that emerged in 2011 show that what was mobilized during the protests was not a political idea or program, but a specific organizational form. In a way, the tent also became a protest meme. Tents were frequently used in unusual ways during the occupations. They became projection screens for political demands and were held high like banners during demonstrations. When Occupy Wall Street joined with a Brooklyn community to squat a foreclosed home in December 2011, a tent was hoisted like a flag on the reoccupied building. When Occupy protesters at UC Berkeley were prevented from setting up tents, they attached them to balloons, letting them float through the sky. During the Blockupy demonstrations against European austerity policies in Frankfurt in May 2012, protesters who were prevented from squatting public spaces pitched their tents in trees like bird nests or let them float like little sailing vessels on the river. At the main station, the police searched arriving protesters for tents and confiscated them like weapons. But, unlike the shoe held aloft to show the loss of respect for political elites—­another symbol of protest that quickly traveled from the sites of the Arab Spring into other contexts—­ tents possess a concrete social value in use that cannot be separated from the political expressions they give shelter to. Even if in many instances the tent has risen to the heights of symbolic politics, its basic message has always remained attached to the vital qualities of shelter and movement. Together with the tent cities, an organizational form of protest has emerged that is global and “down to earth” at the same time, making a practice out of visiting the many local network sites of interwoven global economic power. Occupy Wall Street’s tents have brought the crisis back to a major hub from which it spread, even if this was not its only source. Unlike the more nomadic antiglobalization protests of the past few decades, which often migrated from one peripheral and highly protected summit meeting site to the next, the recent protests no longer follow political elites like that. They rather choose to pitch tents in the hearts of global cities and thereby challenge the idea of a “placeless” globalization.29 In a speech at the Occupy camp in New York discussing what it means to claim the public, Judith Butler noted with regard to the Egyptian uprising that “revolution happened because everyone refused to go home.”30 What made it possible for people to persistently claim the public and challenge the authori-

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ties, instead of being forced to go home after demonstrating, is the tent. Tent structures enabled the movements to withstand any temporary disappearance. They provided an intensified around-­the-­clock presence and, as it turned out, a resilient material expression of protest. Tent cities allowed for the establishment of permanence and visibility without institutionalizing the protest movements. The vital qualities of tent design genuinely reflected the calls for social justice as they responded to existential needs and created spaces for living and assembling where all other options had become unaffordable. The 2011 protest movements challenged the limits of representative democracy and subverted the usual divide between public and private. Politics did not take place in the confined space of parliament but in the transitional yet resilient spaces disclosed by the tent. The tent functioned in that way because, as we have argued, it is a spatial thing, a thing that is not just in space as water is in a glass but that makes up or discloses spaces, ways of being-­in-­the-­world and of being political. The tent thus became an important means to disrupt the usual process of political representation as it assembled a public around its woven walls. Seeing the tent in this way allows for an interesting contribution to (or even a slight reorientation of) what Bruno Latour has called “object-­oriented democracy” or Dingpolitik.31 Pointing out the limits and deficiencies of traditional parliaments and the architects’ dream of gathering “the people” under a common dome in iconic buildings such as London’s Westminster Abbey or the Berlin Reichstag, Latour asks: “What would a truly contemporary style of assembly look like?” He goes on to argue “that parliaments are only a few of the machineries of representations among many others, and not necessarily the most relevant or the best equipped.”32 While he aptly depicts the limits of political representation, he does not question the notion of representation in politics per se and instead argues for an extension of the arenas of representation. But, as many commentators have pointed out, what is most remarkable about the new protest movements is their refusal to be represented and to articulate political demands in a traditional fashion. According to Isabell Lorey, the new movements must be considered “non-­representationist forms of democracy.”33 Of course, there are also dangers in this kind of political iconoclasm and the phantasm of democratic immediacy. Occupy’s claim to speak for the 99 percent runs the risk of turning into an all-­too-­Rousseauian critique of political representation in the name of a unified volonté générale. But beyond such unifying claims, which risk reverting to the most naive forms of representation, the protesters performed a way of life that was a unique answer to the politics of exception and dispossession they were protesting against. They enacted a

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nonrepresentationist Dingpolitik that not only produced new public “matters of concern” but also constituted an alternative way of life with objects of use that answer to basic needs.34 The tent served here as a shelter and as a mediator and connector between different people. It enabled new political and social assembleas that did not unify its participants because “a tent,” as Vilém Flusser reminds us, “is a place where people assemble and disperse.”35 Finally, the tent walls were even able to serve as a screen for political demands. This Dingpolitik does not revert to the old materialist realpolitik of taken-­for-­granted facts and undisputed ways of representation. Rather, it shares some of the features of historical materialism in that it—­in its best moments—­establishes what Marx called wirkliche Demokratie, real democracy—­a democracy lived and enacted in the material practices of everyday life rather than being delegated to a separate sphere of social action. Of course, this is not to say that the tent is the new telos of democracy. It is still a minimal infrastructure that, even when reappropriated by protest movements, carries with it the load of a painful history and present of dispossession. The tent is not the end of politics—­but it is a beginning.

Notes 1. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5. 2. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225. 3. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 151. 4. Vilém Flusser, “Shelters, Screens and Tents,” in The Shape of Things (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 55–­57. 5. Manuel DeLanda, “Material Elegance,” Architectural Design 77 (2007): 18. 6. Berthold Burkhardt, “Geschichte des Zeltbaus,” DETAIL. Zeitschrift für Architektur + Baudetail 6 (2000): 964. 7. Andreas Gabriel, “‘. . . noch vieles ist möglich . . .’—­Frei Otto zur Zukunft des Zeltbaus,” DETAIL. Zeitschrift für Architektur + Baudetail 6 (2000): 965. 8. Philip Drew, New Tent Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008), 12. 9. Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 126. 10. Burkhardt, “Geschichte des Zeltbaus,” 964. 11. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Abingdon: Routledge 1989), 35; Robert

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Castel, Die Metamorphosen der sozialen Frage: Eine Chronik der Lohnarbeit (Konstanz: UKV Universitätsverlag, 2000). 12. Drew, New Tent Architecture, 6. 13. Nikolaus Kuhnert and Philipp Oswalt, “Ephemere Architektur,” ARCH+ 107 (2001): 25. 14. Michel Foucault, Die Heterotopien. der utopische Körper (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 2. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Craig Calhoun, “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Order,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41 (2004): 376. 17. Peter Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 75. 18. Ibid., 69. 19. Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York and London: Garland Publishing), 17. 20. Peter Redfield, “Vital Mobility and the Humanitarian Kit,” in Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question, ed. Andrew Lakoff and Steven Collier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 147. 21. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 22. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). 23. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 99. 24. Charlie Hailey, Camps: A Guide to 21st-­Century Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 1. 25. The UNHCR has officially limited the number of people allowed to live in a single refugee camp to twenty thousand, but the actual number of inhabitants often far exceeds this limit. The infamous refugee camp in Goma, Congo, that resulted from the civil war and genocide in Rwanda in 1994 had about a million inhabitants (ibid., 324). 26. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 18. 27. “Mass Protests and Tent Cities Shake Israeli Government,” Irish Times, August 8, 2011. 28. In 2012, the “Acampada en la Puerta del Sol” was nominated as a special category for the European Prize for Urban Public Space, an award that aims to recognize design projects that “defend and recover public space” in European cities: http://www .publicspace.org/en/works/g001-acampada-en-la-puerta-del-sol/prize:2012 (accessed February 10, 2013). 29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (self-­published, 2012), 5. 30. Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” (2011): http:// eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en (accessed February 10, 2013). 31. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public,”

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in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 14. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Isabell Lorey, “Non-­representationist, Presentist Democracy” (2011): http:// eipcp.net/transversal/1011/lorey/en/ (accessed March 3, 2013). 34. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 225. 35. Flusser, “Shelters, Screens and Tents,” 57.

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Benches Emily Lindsay Jackson

The Global War on Terror continues to be waged by things. In our cities and towns, benches defend crowded places from indeterminate terrorist attacks. Made of unyielding concrete or stone, benches force away cars and trucks carrying explosives; promising security by creating distance between crowded places and dangerous humans and nonhumans.1 And while the global terrorism threat remains nebulous and unspecified, these belligerent benches occupy public spaces day after day, year after year. Looking again from the perspective of material politics however, benches are only discriminately warlike. Made of granite stone, smooth, polished quartz crystals of pink, gray, black, and many shades in between, benches attract certain people to global terrorism’s front line. Providing a pleasant place to support tired feet during a day’s shopping or to wait for friends before an evening’s dining and socializing, benches maintain the privileged circulations of global urbanism. Benches show how things are profoundly agential in global politics. Humans can shape this agency: law-­enforcement officers, bureaucrats, and urban designers devise ways of blast-­proofing materiality so that benches might repel attack by international terrorists. Here, things constitute the realm of “hot politics,” drawing, even commanding, the attention of scholars and publics.2 Benches provoke discussion and debate, between security experts, politicians, and publics. Or they serve humans, claiming to counter terrorist attack twenty-­ four hours a day, seven days a week. Things are also hot politics when they fail, surprising or frustrating the humans who consider themselves their masters. The attacks on September 11, 2001, showed material politics at its most devastating and far-­reaching. Airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon set off a chain reaction that largely overwhelmed and outpaced the human capacity for reflection. The agency of things exceeded human control and, in the effort to catch up the very structure of global politics, changed in a matter of weeks. But benches’ forces at crowded places create other, hidden realities. Enticing the mobilities of shoppers and diners while protecting from terrorist attack,

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benches also force away vulnerable people. Benches so attractive as a brief pause between pleasant tasks are also angular and unwelcoming to homeless people, who relied on them as respite from lives beset by multiple vulnerabilities. This illustrates an important point often neglected when academics and publics are dazzled by things’ hot politics. Benches do more than convey meaning about who is and is not welcome in contemporary urban spaces. They force these boundaries—­between rich and poor, the mobile and the constrained—­ into people’s lives in ways that are physical, violent, and thus profoundly political. As with any force, so with the force of things: the weakest are the least able to resist. So, global security things must also be made to answer as “quiet politics.”3 Quiet because this is the politics we fail to hear, because those who can speak, the most marginalized people in global society, are silenced. Attuning to things’ quiet politics, away from the noisy, obnoxious rhetoric of politicians and bureaucrats, reveals how they engage with but also override international borders. Gregson argues that things “draw on long distance associations to draw boundaries.”4 As counterterror agents, benches protect the neoliberalization of the globe, as well as its polities. Benches call for a deeper understanding of “the shape, scale, and site of a materialist politics.”5 This chapter tells the story of benches’ forces in global neoliberal securitization. It begins with an account of things attuned to their global agency: in particular, the complexity and indeterminacy of this agency, but also how it is so easily turned to reinforce familiar economic and political interests and divides. The rest of the intervention uses this conceptualization to follow the multiple boundaries materialized by benches as they fight for a conflict-­free neoliberal globe. It concludes by suggesting that these insights about the global force of things should be used to order everyday realities more justly.

The Global Force of Security Things Things are forceful in security politics. Claudia Aradau argues that national infrastructures, like crowded places, became a new, critical front in the Global War on Terror through a process of materialization: human and nonhuman agencies “intra-­acting” to create a post-­9/11 world fraught with threats and insecurities.6 National infrastructure things—­power plants, hospitals, and communications and transport networks—­provide physical targets for terrorists. But their importance in the War on Terror relies not on any intrinsic properties of vulnerability but on their intra-­actions with security experts, law-­enforcement officers, politicians, and bureaucrats and their multiple,

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changing agendas. In other words, it is through intra-­action that the meanings and matter of security governance are realized. A hospital that twenty or even fifteen years ago would have been unconnected to national security (except when used to treat its victims) is materialized as a global terrorism front. Its meaning changes and so does its matter. The introduction of security measures to hospitals (benches and bollards to prevent car bombings and video surveillance cameras to capture footage of criminal behavior) changes the very materiality—­the “what is”—­of a hospital. Perhaps the most important change in hospitals as a global terrorism concern is the negative impacts on the people who use them; and typically the more vulnerable you are, the more you will suffer. These changes can be surprising, if not entirely unforeseen. Disabled and elderly people must surmount new traffic management measures, navigating greater distances. Video surveillance, as numerous studies have confirmed, disproportionately focuses on racialized minorities (making it an important case study of intra-­action itself).7 As hospitals rematerialize as threatened, insecure spaces, populations that are already heavily policed in urban and/or residential spaces find themselves further targeted, impacting their ability to access and receive important health services. This demonstrates another key aspect of intra-­action. By “reconfiguring the world and redrawing borders between what ‘matters’ and what doesn’t,” human and nonhuman intra-­actions are “intimately entwined with power relations” (Aradau 2010, 500). Security things therefore matter to scholars and publics because they have “both enabling and constraining effects” (ibid., 492): they have exclusionary force, unequal impacts, and political consequences. Intra-­action also applies to what we think of as the meanings and matter of globalization. Global biosecurity concerns, no less than those of critical infrastructure security, emerge from human and nonhuman or “more-­than-­human” intra-­actions (Braun and Whatmore 2010, x). Highly pathogenic avian influenzas (HPAIs) such as H5N1 materialize as deadly diseases capable of spreading to (and creating immense insecurities for) human populations through the intra-­actions of DNA, viruses, birds, laboratories, and World Health Organization (WHO) policies (Hinchcliffe and Bingham 2008). But, unlike the infrastructures that Aradau discusses, the intra-­actions of biosecurity are not spatially bound to the nation-­state. HPAIs develop, mutate, and infect humans and nonhumans through vectors that are global in reach and highly complex and indeterminate in nature. In response to HPAIs’ troubling intra-­actions, global governance bodies such as the WHO promote a simplistic, comfortable narrative. Flu viruses

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emerge in the nonsecure animal husbandry and slaughter regimes of the global South practiced by the poorest populations. Then wild birds carry them to the global North where they intra-­act with domestic birds, allowing the viruses to mutate and cross over into healthy (secure) humans and nonhumans. The WHO’s stance has important consequences. It pathologizes and criminalizes small animal husbandry in favor of large-­scale, globalized commercial farming. It (re)produces divisions between “us” in the global North with the means—­ educational, financial, and bureaucratic—­to clean farming practices and “them” in the global South who are unsanitary and dangerous. It reconfigures highly complex and indeterminate human and more-­than-­human intra-­actions into a familiar neoliberal ordering of the world. What we think of as “global” insecurities, whether of terrorism or biomatters, materialize and become reality as a result of things’ exclusionary, physical, and violent force, not just intra-­action in and of itself. The global force of things demands new ways of thinking about what Gregson terms in this volume “the site of the political.”8 Cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza show clearly the limits of human agency in security governance. Scientists and bureaucrats do not have the last say in how, where, or when HPAI will materialize into viral forms deadly for animals and/or humans. Thus, the traditional hierarchy whereby humans assumed control of their more-­than-­human worlds is transformed, as agency—­the power and capacity to act upon something else—­shifts to a different register. Without dominant human agency as a foundation, the traditional containers of representational liberal democratic politics—­the citizen-­subject, the nation-­state, and the inter-­national—­come under serious pressure. Security things not only impact upon global politics, they constitute what we think of as the global. Furthermore, their constraining and enabling effects are too easily ordered by political elites into familiar patterns of inequality and powerlessness that yet remain, like HPAIs, always in potential.

The Global Force of Benches Benches fight the Global War on Terror by aiming to protect crowded places from terrorist attack. Their vulnerability was vividly reinforced for governments by bombings on downtown Boston’s affluent Boylston Street on April 15, 2013, in which three people died and more than two hundred were wounded. The bombings had a global audience, coming as they did at the close of the city’s marathon, one of six World Marathon Majors attracting competitors and spectators from across the globe, although the attacks would have had global impact anyway. The United States is the remaining superpower and 82

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leads the War on Terror. In attempting to counter attacks like the one on Boylston Street, governments have traditionally focused their efforts on predicting who future terrorists are and where they will strike and how—­in other words, by governing human agency. Although human behavior is unpredictable—­as that of terrorists is to government—­it is nonetheless assumed to follow a rational subject’s willed agency, and therefore to display certain characteristics or general laws that can be regulated. But the 9/11 attacks, among other crises of global neoliberalization, have caused a loss of faith in prediction, spurring a shift to preemptive security.9 Thus it should not be surprising that things have reemerged as important (counter)terror agents. In a terrorist attack, explosive materials are transmuted by ignition into large quantities of gas termed the “blast wave”: pressurized, fast moving, and at high temperatures, this typically causes the most casualties and fatalities, from lung blast damage and thermal burns to eardrum rupture.10 As the blast wave accelerates from the explosion site it shatters windows, roofs, and walls, which in turn can collapse buildings, or parts thereof, causing crush injuries. The blast wave is made more deadly still if the bomb contains materials other than explosives. The Boston bombers, brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, packed their two rucksack-­borne improvised explosive devices (IEDs) with nails and metal pieces.11 These materials, propelled by the blast wave at high speeds close to the ground where the rucksacks sat, were responsible for extensive lower body damage to victims. Increasingly, governments rely on benches to protect crowded places from such explosive, destructive intra-­actions. Made from stone, granite, or blast-­ reinforced concrete and anchored into the ground, benches populate crowded places as “perimeter protection”: forming a “barrier line” and “hard stop” for “penetrative attack” (Home Office 2012, 35, 26, 28, 26). Through their positioning relative to one another, neither too close nor too far apart, benches force trucks and cars bearing explosive materials away from the barrier line while other things and people considered nonthreatening are unaffected. Benches also create a “blast stand-­off distance” between crowded places and vehicle-­ born IEDs, attenuating the force of direct impact; the alternative—­“blast hardening” the architectures of crowded places—­is substantially more costly (ibid., 26). As perimeter protectors for crowded places, benches find themselves in company with a range of other blast-­reinforced things known as “structural elements”: flower planters, earthworks, walls, balustrades, cycle racks, lamp columns, bus shelters, and information boards (ibid., 28). Benches and other seemingly mundane street things are appointed counterterror agents by the professional security classes—­the police, the military, and security experts—­as well as built environment professionals: designers, Benches

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architects, and urban planners. The result of these intra-­actions is the militarization of public spaces in ongoing and uncertain ways. Also uncertain is the usefulness of benches as counterterror agents. In an explosion, it is not possible to determine the extent to which people and things will be destroyed. As perimeter protectors of crowded places, benches can lessen the force of explosive material agencies. But they offer no protection against person-­borne IEDs: either those detonated remotely as in the Boston bombings or suicide bombings. Despite the growing emphasis placed on them by their human collaborators, benches and other structural elements can only partially protect crowded places from terrorist attack. Bombings’ explosive material forces easily surpass both human control and benches’ capacity to materialize security in urban spaces. But the latter’s quieter agencies in such sites reveal other successes. As barrier lines, benches nonetheless allow a more positive, welcome kind of movement termed “accessibility” by the UK government: The ability of people to move round an area and to reach places and facilities, including elderly and disabled people, those with young children and those encumbered with luggage or shopping. (Ibid., 51) The accessibility of crowded places denotes how the “good circulations” of the elderly, disabled, parents, children, travelers, and shoppers are sifted out from the “bad circulations” of terrorists and dangerous things.12 Benches may therefore appear inanimate and mundane and be largely ineffective in repelling IEDs, but they carry out an important regulatory function. They enact the distinct, destructive sovereignties of preemptive security, which claim uncertain futures that must, “however probabilistically unlikely—­be mapped and acted upon as possibilities” (Amoore 2013, 1). In situ twenty-­four hours a day, seven days a week, benches face the seemingly endless array of terrorist attack possibilities, but within this array remain nested specific sovereign decisions. First, regarding a safe “here” and a dangerous “there,” familiar as the philosophical bedrock of the global war on terror, as well as the WHO’s biosecurity policy already discussed: the difficulty in controlling “there” is used mainly by Western governments to justify intensified security measures “here,” within their national borders. Of course, “here” is not and will never be safe, while security measures are deeply uneven, disproportionately targeting Muslims and other visible minorities. The notion of dangerous others is intimately folded into, second, decisions

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regarding who and what is undesirable in urban public spaces. According to Amoore, preemptive security “act[s] upon emergent and fractionated subjects yet to come fully into view” (ibid., 156). Benches evince the certainty that parents, children, the elderly and disabled, travelers, and shoppers be granted accessibility—­a decision of crowded places policy makers at the heart of the British government. Beyond these users, however, are dangerous others who find themselves enmeshed with the low probability/high consequence logics of preemption. As preemptive security agents in the global war on terror, benches act at local and national levels, as well as at what is traditionally thought of as “the global scale.” Their force can be quiet or hot, banal but also incredibly important to understand. Indeed, they emerge as a fulcrum between what Matthew Sparke terms the little “g” globalization of increasing connections and the big “G” globalization of neoliberalization and its narratives of inexorable free-­ market forces (Sparke 2013). Understanding benches in this way speaks to Gregson’s call for a uniquely global understanding of material politics. Humans have always been easy targets in terrorist attacks and other forms of political and state violence. But the Boston bombings, like the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, have been made to tell a different story of vulnerability. The Boston Marathon is extremely lucrative for the city and metropolitan region, attracting many thousands of competitors and spectators from across the world and generating approximately $137 million in revenue through sponsorship deals and increased consumer spending.13 The “accessibility” of crowded places refers to their lack of defense in a traditional military sense, but it also conveys a heightened awareness of their importance to the global economy, which is unfortunately separate from a sensitivity to human casualties. First and foremost, crowded places are businesses and services used by publics perhaps many times per day. The barrier lines that benches materialize between safe and dangerous people reinforce neoliberal orderings that promote the interests of the world’s most powerful countries and elites. While benches bring the Global War on Terror into daily life and everyone is affected, the poorest and most marginalized are disproportionately impacted both in Western societies and in the global South. The boundaries enforced by benches at crowded places between safe and hostile, attractive and undesirable, may seem trivial until we remember that the very same divisions appear in the treatment of asylum seekers and migrants and in military action in Afghanistan. At the same time, the boundaries between politics and economics are shifting. The charges against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by the Massachusetts District Court criminalize “conspiring to use

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explosive materials . . . and maliciously damaging and destroying by means of an explosion” property as well as persons (Wall Street Journal 2013). Through intra-­action with U.S. law and its setting out in official documents such as this federal charge sheet, the indeterminate agencies of terrorist attack are ordered into an attack on the United States’ place in the global economy; for the bombing damaged and destroyed not just the local property of “the Boston Marathon, private businesses in Eastern Massachusetts, and the City of Boston,” but “property used in foreign and interstate commerce” (ibid.). In the Global War on Terror, benches protect the economic and commercial activities of crowded places. The latter materialized as things of national security governance only in the last decade or so. The UK’s National Counter-­ Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) was created in 2002, tasked with bulwarking national assets considered highly attractive targets for international terrorists, including crowded places and national infrastructures. The creation of NaCTSO, a national body for securing targets in the globalized economy, reflects an unprecedented form of global ordering, whereby national security is now directed to neoliberalization.14 Thus benches cannot simply repeat the militarized aesthetic of previous incarnations of barrier lines.15 As agents of the global economy, benches are more likely to be made of granite—­polished, smooth quartz crystals of pink, gray, and black—­than naked concrete or steel painted gunmetal green. The UK government insists that the structural elements of counterterrorism be “positive features” that “achieve a welcoming, attractive, comfortable and safer environment” (Home Office 2012, 9, 31). Intra-­actions of built environment professionals—­designers, architects, and urban planners—­and their urban design principles materialize benches as fit-­for-­purpose counterterror agents that are aesthetically pleasing, welcoming, and attractive. Benches and the other structural elements of the Global War on Terror thus become the “street furniture” materializing the “streetscapes” of twenty-­first-­century global cities (ibid., 10, 3). It is no coincidence that the material forces of crowded places are also those of contemporary urbanism. In an age of neoliberal globalization, cities have assumed a pivotal role in the international exchange of capital and services. Securing cities has become crucial to national governments and global firms keen to attract investment and turn a profit. In particular, global urbanism relies on the success of regeneration projects: new consumption spaces bringing together shopping, restaurants, offices, cultural facilities, and even housing—­or, to understand these spaces another way, “whole new complexes of recreation, consumption, production, and pleasure” (Smith 2002, 443). These

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new “local” neoliberal landscapes in turn depend on a mutually reinforcing process of rebranding areas as safe and well managed, to “attract[ing] investors, middle class shoppers and visitors” (Raco 2003, 1869). Benches push forward such agendas by creating the impression of safe and attractive urban spaces: their most useful agencies actively entice certain kinds of intra-­actions. Tired shoppers put their bags of purchases on benches or rest their feet, and through intra-­acting with benches reemerge refreshed and ready for more. Diners and cinemagoers can pass the time pleasantly waiting for friends to arrive. Commentators have long noted that the relationships between benches and the different users of urban spaces tell a quiet but important story about social marginalization. Attractive, aesthetically pleasing benches welcome people, but if they are also circular or angular, or divided into sections by guardrails, they physically foreclose intra-­actions with some of society’s most vulnerable people: the homeless.16 In other words, benches welcome in highly discriminate ways, reminding scholars that when discussing human and more-­than-­ human intra-­actions, the former are not a homogeneous group—­the thinking, active other to passive things. Material agency is a force, and, as with all forces, those who are weaker or more vulnerable will be less able to resist. As agents of the global economy as well as of counterterrorism, benches force another kind of political story: the exclusion of certain groups in the interests of “sanitizing space,” including teenagers, visible minorities, and the homeless (Raco 2003, 1869). Compared to the domiciled, homeless people suffer disproportionately from severe physical health conditions, including weaker immune systems, digestive problems, and skin complaints. Their physical vulnerability also makes them more likely to be the victims of crime. These characteristics are even more significant for homeless youth, who typically make up between 10 and 20 percent of the homeless population. Their intra-­actions with benches produce a kind of comfort and safety—­or at least respite from the harsh physical realities of living on the streets—­that remain unwelcome to global urbanism’s human and more-­than-­human forces. But the intra-­actions of street objects and vulnerable people are also clandestine, irregular, and thus difficult to control. Benches create a problem: inhabiting open urban places day after day, they appear good for counterterrorism but they also exert a power of enticement that largely exceeds human control. Smooth, shiny, granite benches create ordered, pleasant, crowded places in which it is enjoyable to shop, dine, and spend leisure time. But they are also hard and angular, prohibiting sitting or lying down for extended periods of time. Benches do not simply constitute or communicate meanings that

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marginalized people and their manifold vulnerabilities are unwelcome and irrelevant in the attractive spaces of urban regeneration. They are a physical force that makes it so. They are a force of sanitization and exclusion repelling marginalized people from urban spaces, and in so doing dividing the global rich from the global poor as successfully as many other “human-­directed” measures. This force is biopolitical: benches have “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1998, 138).

Conclusion This chapter has explored benches’ forces in global security politics. Benches have agency: the power and capacity to act upon someone or something else, and by intra-­acting with the agencies of humans and other things, benches force realities that constrain some and enable others. Intra-­action also applies to what we think of as the meanings and matter of globalization. This intervention outlined a conceptual tool for thinking about things’ forces in the contemporary global realities of counterterrorism and neoliberalization. It insists that uneven, unequal global orderings materialize from the exclusionary, physical, and violent force of things, rather than simply from their entanglement with human agencies per se. Benches’ forces tell multiple, disturbing stories about global security politics. Benches figure prominently in imaginaries spread by security experts, law-­enforcement officers, politicians, and bureaucrats about a new and effective defensive line in the Global War on Terror. They claim that things, “structural elements” built into the urban environment, have the power to secure crowded places preemptively, to repel terrorist attacks all day, every day. Yet, the material capacities of blast-­proof benches are outdone by those of explosive materials, which are uneven, complex, and indeterminate. Benches cannot provide security for crowded places, but in materializing divisions between safe and dangerous circulations, they do (re)produce insecurities for those people who already find themselves targets of suspicion in the Global War on Terror. But if benches are poor counterterror agents, at least by being made of smooth, shiny granite they are aesthetically pleasing, they enjoy success attracting shoppers and diners to designated urban spaces. When we listen to their quiet material politics, benches reveal a major shift in security governance toward the protection of the global economy in tandem with global populations. In particular, benches are at the frontier of urban regeneration and, as such, as with their counterterror duties, they force the exclusions and inequalities of global orderings into daily life.

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Benches therefore have many forces and functions in the neoliberal global order: waging war; regulating urban spaces; protecting the global economy; repelling vulnerable people. They channel into everyday lived realities the violences happening in the name of a global war on terror and a global economy that are both too big to fail. So, how can we use these insights about the global force of quiet, mundane things such as benches to order this everyday reality more justly?

Notes 1. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, crowded places were positioned as a major security concern for Western governments and publics. The UK’s 2013 National Risk Register states that “crowded places by their nature are easily accessible and offer the prospect for an impact beyond the loss of life alone” (Cabinet Office 2013, 43). Likewise, the U.S. government considers as national security events attacks against “a concentration of people [or] critical commercial [facilities]” that cause “at least one fatality or injury” (Department of Homeland Security 2011, 3). Crowded places can include visitor attractions; bars, pubs, and clubs; shopping and commercial centers; cinemas and theaters; education and health services; places of worship; major events; stadia and arenas; and hotels and restaurants. See the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office’s Web site: http://www.nactso.gov.uk/crowded-places (accessed June 16, 2014). 2. Nicky Gregson terms material agencies “hot politics” when things are implicated in politics going “radically or catastrophically wrong” (2011, 140). 3. While material agencies easily command attention as hot politics, Gregson advocates responsiveness to the “quieter sense of material politics,” which is “ongoing” rather than explosive, and “located in corporeality, embodiment and temporality” (ibid.). 4. This is a central claim of Gregson’s material politics of globalization approach (ibid., 139). 5. From Gregson’s essay “Asbestos” in this volume. 6. Aradau relies on Karen Barad’s conceptualization of intra-­action: “an open-­ ended practice involving dynamic entanglements of humans and non-­humans, through which these acquire their specific boundaries and properties . . . Objects do not pre-­ exist but are constituted through intra-­action between different material-­discursive practices” (Aradau 2010, 498, 499). 7. Norris and Armstrong (1999) provide a thorough discussion of the politics of video surveillance. 8. From Gregson’s essay “Asbestos” in this volume. 9. See, for example, Aradau and van Munster 2011. 10. Throughout policy and guideline documents, the UK government considers material agencies central to both the destructiveness of terrorist attacks and the successful protection of crowded places. See, for example, Home Office 2012. 11. Limited details about the Boston bombings and the suspected bombers were

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made public on April 21, 2013, in a U.S. District Court criminal complaint (available through the Wall Street Journal 2013). The charge sheet narrates the brothers’ journey along the crowded sidewalks of Boylston Street on Monday, April 15, 2013. At 2:42 p.m., Tamerlan, twenty-­six, disappears from the view of surveillance cameras (when he is assumed to have planted the first bomb close to the race finish line), while Dzhokhar, nineteen, remains “calmly” among the throng in front of the Forum Restaurant. Here he is witnessed placing a rucksack at his feet, which contained a pressure cooker packed with low-­grade explosives (a mixture of ammonium nitrate and gunpowder from fireworks), nails, and air-­gun pellets. Less than ten minutes later, both IEDs had been detonated by means of remote-­control devices, like those used to control toy cars. 12. In other words, benches act as what Michel Foucault termed “an apparatus of security” (2007, 36). Advanced capitalist governance depends on the creation and maintenance of security apparatuses that “allow circulations to take place, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement” (65). 13. As the local newspaper the Metrowest Daily News reported on April 11, 2012, the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau estimated that that year’s marathon would generate approximately $137 million through visitor spending and corporate sponsorship. 14. For more on the development of NaCTSO and this shift in national security, see Jackson 2012. 15. For example, Belfast’s counterterror “ring of steel” is infamous for its intrusive, heavily militarized presence (Coaffee 2004). 16. For example, Mike Davis’s (1992) well-­known analysis of Los Angeles’s bomb-­ proof and bum-­proof bench:

References Amoore, Louise. 2013. The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security beyond Probability. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Aradau, Claudia. 2010. “Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection.” Security Dialogue 41(5): 491–­514. Aradau, Claudia, and Rens van Munster. 2011. Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. London and New York: Routledge. Braun, Bruce, and Sarah Whatmore. 2010. “The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction.” In Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, ix–­xl. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cabinet Office. 2013. National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies. London: H.M. Government. Coaffee, Jon. 2004. “Rings of Steel, Rings of Concrete, and Rings of Confidence: Designing Out Terrorism in Central London pre-­and post-­September 11th.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28(1): 201–­11. Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage.

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Department of Homeland Security. 2011. Strategic National Risk Assessment. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Inspector General. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality: I. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–­78. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregson, Nicky. 2011. “Performativity, Corporeality, and the Politics of Ship Disposal.” Journal of Cultural Economy 4(2): 137–­56. Hinchcliffe, Steve, and Nick Bingham. 2008. “Securing Life: The Emerging Practices of Biosecurity.” Environment and Planning A 40(7): 1534–­51. Home Office. 2012. Protecting Crowded Places: Design and Technical Issues. London: H.M. Government. Jackson, Emily Lindsay. 2012. “Broadening National Security and Protecting Crowded Places: Performing the United Kingdom’s War on Terror 2007–­2010.” PhD dissertation, Durham University. Norris, Clive, and Gary Armstrong. 1999. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. Oxford and New York: Berg. Raco, Mike. 2003. “Remaking Place and Securitising Space: Urban Regeneration and the Strategies, Tactics, and Practices of Policing in the UK.” Urban Studies 40(9): 1869–­87. Smith, Neil. 2002. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34(3): 427–­50. Sparke, Matthew. 2013. Introducing Globalization—­Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell. Wall Street Journal. 2013. “Criminal Complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev”: http:// online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324235304578438930168800650.html (accessed August 9, 2013).

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Secrets David Grondin and Nisha Shah

Best known for vanquishing the Gorgon Medusa, Perseus, demigod son of Zeus, provides a story that is partly about the significance of empowering objects. Perseus is the hero, no doubt. But devising Medusa’s death was no easy feat, one for which Perseus needed a lot of equipment. Among his inventory, the most well known are the mirrored shield, the winged sandals, the adamantine sword, and, of course, once the deed was done, the special pouch for carrying the still potent cargo of Medusa’s head. If, in his quest for invulnerability, the myth of Perseus tells us a tale about security, surely his gear gets some of the glory. More than something people do, Perseus’s voyage and feat indicate that security is something people do with various things—­shields, sandals, swords, and sacks. These celebrated tools, however, were not sufficient for Perseus to accomplish his feat. Having killed Medusa, Perseus still faced the threat of her equally frightful sisters—­the immortals Sthenno and Euryale, who sought to avenge her death. As Gorgons who could fly, the challenge was one of escaping their swift pursuit while avoiding their petrifying gaze. Winged sandals might help, but it would be better to pass these adversaries undetected. Less glorified in Perseus’s arsenal, and often dismissed, is the helmet of darkness (the Helm of Hades)—­an invisibility cap—­that enabled Perseus’s safe getaway. With its attention to armaments, the myth of Perseus evokes the influence of the “new materialist” turn in the study of international security.1 Although security quintessentially involves existential questions about life and death (of individuals, communities, and their ways of life), attention is being directed to how objects can also act as agents of security: if security is exercised with and even requires the use of specific kinds of things—­guns, bombs, even plastic bags—­the form and function of objects used link to and reinforce the goals of security in any given context.2 People might act with things, but things make people act in particular ways.3 Simply put, material factors do not merely constrain, they can be constitutive and therefore generative of political life. As this volume argues, Latour’s notion of Dingpolitik has been influential

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in this account of more-­than-­human actors.4 Drawing on the etymological link between “thing” and the German Ding, a “thing,” Latour contends, is both an issue of concern, around which dialogue and debate occur (an object of knowledge), and an object more commonly understood as an article that can be physically seen and touched. Objects of security therefore manifest not simply as “material variables” that determine the “balance of power” (such as weapons, territory, and troop strength), or tools that are simply epiphenomenal to the norms and discourses that define ways of life to be protected.5 Rather, the objects by which security is procured are material apparatuses that both protect and shape the goals of a given polity. In fact, in some circumstances, as the examples of critical infrastructure and weapons arsenals reflect, objects may be so operationally and symbolically valuable that they themselves become objects to be defended. Defined as things that can be seen and touched, this reconsideration of objects as “political matter” aims to expand the roster of viable political actors by better representing objects.6 As Jane Bennett evocatively states, this requires a political act that “[disrupts] in such a way as to challenge radically what people can ‘see.’” The result is that matter is more visible as a participant in the conduct of political life: “[Nonhumans] can startle and provoke a gestalt shift in perception . . . We see how an animal, plant, mineral or artifacts can sometimes catalyze a public.”7 However, if greater visibility is required to recognize the role of objects in security practices and policies, the myth of Perseus raises a dilemma. Perseus’s final escape with the Helm of Hades suggests that at times secrecy is essential to security. Secrecy, of course, has an unequivocal security function beyond Perseus, particularly in the modern state. Security is often formulated in closed circles and protected as classified information. Security and its objects therefore are not always on display—­in some cases, the effectiveness of objects of security hinges on being used in concealed, even covert and surreptitious, ways. In other words, contrary to the effort to make objects more visible, when secrecy matters, objects of security might be deliberately invisible. As an allegory of security, then, the myth of Perseus is salient not for what we see but for what goes unseen. This is not a statement about secrecy and its logic of concealment. Instead, it is about how secret things go unnoticed. There is an assumption in prevailing accounts of political matter that equates political visibility with physical sight: objects are visible—­and therefore can be politically represented—­when they literally can be seen. As a result, the gear we glorify—­shields, sandals, swords, and sacks—­are objects we can see. But the routine neglect of the Helm of Hades suggests that secret things are not

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just overlooked, they may even be precluded in a more materialist account of political life. However, if secrets manifest materially only when they are invisible, how do they come to matter in international life?

The Thing about Secrecy and Secrecy about Things Following Latour’s definition of things as objects of knowledge and material objects, secrets appear to be difficult things. Operative as “hidden pieces of information,” secrets counter the impetus of democratic life, which encourages greater transparency.8 Recent controversies, particularly around the revelation of the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM program, and before that with practices of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror and the WikiLeaks scandal, are evidence of an aversion to secrecy in democratic polities.9 If secrecy is an issue around which public dialogue occurs, the focus is often on how secrecy is an abuse of political power, something that is an anathema and a blight on the body politic.10 Moreover, if a thing is also a concrete object that can be seen and touched, with the goal of remaining concealed and unknown, secrecy seems to involve an antimateriality: secrets fail the materiality test by having a palpable political function only when they are imperceptible. Secrecy, however, has not been completely admonished in political life. Although it would be remiss to suggest that secrecy is completely benign, when secrecy has been a source of scandal, popular debate and dissension have usually centered on excessive secrecy: “there are legitimate secrets to be kept. But there is no agreement on which ones or how many.”11 It is no secret that states keep secrets. State security in fact appears to function on a system of open secrecy, whereby the contents of secrets are unknown but secrecy itself is uncontested. Some level of secrecy is therefore appropriate, even considered to be vitally important. Nowhere is this sanction of secrecy more evident than in the realm of security. Ensuring the security of the state can in many ways be understood as the modus operandi of international politics, determining circumstances of how states relate to one another: under which conditions will states choose the path of conflict or make the promise of cooperation? Within this security effort, secrecy has had a paramount function: specifically, isolating information crucial to the state’s survival either by learning more about enemies or protecting against adversaries who might use certain types of information to launch an attack. The salience of secrecy in this context can be traced to the influence of the Roman concept of arcana imperii (secrets of the emperor’s house) in the early

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political theory of the modern state.12 Articulated as a “prudent code of conduct,” investing in secrecy was considered essential to security, and thus one of the state’s legitimate functions.13 The continuing influence of this dictum can be seen in the way the state has evolved with a distinctive “machinery” of security, comprised of security and intelligence services, espionage activities, classification procedures, and even covert operations.14 Embedded in the state’s standard operating procedures, the prudence of secrecy relates not only to its authorization as one of the state’s legitimate roles, but to the specification of secrecy as a desired objective of state power, linked to its responsibility for defense. Put another way, secrets become a thing in the way they become a desired object of state knowledge. The question, however, still remains of how secrets, as desired information, link to objects more conventionally understood as physical artifacts and devices—­and, through this become objects themselves. The arcanum cited above not only involved a set of practices and procedures, it literally referred to a box protecting information required for the defense of the community.15 If secrets by definition hide, the arcanum relates to how military tactics, tools, and timelines are concealed. To the degree that arcanum protects this kind of information, it demonstrates how secrecy emerges and is inscribed through a material infrastructure. More than knowledge that is withheld, the arcanum evidences how objects enable and embed the objective of secrecy in state security practices. Secrecy matters as a thing, therefore, in the way that it takes shape: (1) as a goal that is vital to the survival of the state, (2) as a collection of operational procedures, and (3) as an object. Understanding the significance of secrets as things of international politics therefore requires exploring how secrecy is cultivated and condoned in international life through the means by which secrets are created and circulated.

Know Thy Enemy: An Epistemology of Invisibility If things relate to a political function that is interlinked with a material framework, there is still the question of how we know that a thing is a secret. The question emerges because of an epistemological quandary. Knowledge of objects is based on epistemology of sight: what we see is what we know (and what we know is what we can see).16 Attending to political impact of materiality, as James A. Knapp puts it, “confirms the power of reference: we can see it.”17 Producing knowledge and information about the social, cultural, and political force of matter, in other words, involves “[taking] a good look.”18 Given its

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intelligence function (as the moniker “intelligence agencies” suggests), secrecy also involves a process of observation, which is most obvious in how activities associated with spying and surveillance produce knowledge of a political and military nature. But, although secrecy is concerned with intelligence, secrecy is information that is valuable precisely because it has been “removed from sight.”19 Secrets thus challenge the “visualist” epistemological premise of knowledge: what is known, in short, should not be seen. In other words, secrets are not knowable. Indeed, in order to be secrets, they should not be knowable. The problem with incorporating secrets in a more materialist approach to politics therefore appears to be that whereas a strict definition of objects relies on information collected through open processes, acquiring secrets is a closed operation. Unlike the greater accessibility that implies a logic of sight, access to secrecy is “restricted access”—­both in the literal sense of being physically visible and in the sense that information is often available only to a select few (for instance, those who have special security clearances that give them access to classified information). The broader implication is that secrets complicate the ability to recognize how objects can count as political actors and thus to appreciate the generative force of things in international life. In general, making things more politically visible requires overcoming a limited notion of agency that restricts political action to human beings based on their unique capacity for speech.20 By showing that objects too can mobilize courses of action that enable and reinforce various political and cultural norms, the ontology of political life can be enlarged to include objects.21 Developing a political theory not on the power of speech, but of sight, thus makes objects visible by discerning their capacity to shape and reinforce not just the practice of politics; equally, it draws attention to how objects influences overarching normative structures. An epistemology of sight therefore precipitates knowledge that furnishes this more abundant ontology by expanding the understanding of the material conditions of being. But if secrecy garners intelligence and produces knowledge with the express purpose of remaining hidden, even unknown, secrets do not enhance recognition of all the things involved in politics, particularly those essential for state protection. In remaining hidden, secrecy commits a sin equivalent to anthropomorphism. It keeps from view the full panoply of actors involved in political life. If “seeing” objects—­that is, seeing in ways that recognize objects as political actors—­can enhance understandings how power is distributed and exercised with and through things, secrecy prevents this knowledge. Secrecy’s antimateriality therefore has a more inimical political function because it keeps “thing-­power” under wraps.22

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Missing in this criticism is an appreciation of what Horn labels the difference between an “epistemology of science” and an “epistemology of enmity.”23 Whereas openness and scrutiny are valued in the more general production of knowledge, when it comes to secrecy, information is developed and deployed with a defensive objective related to the modern state’s survival. Relating to and resulting from the international “security dilemma” and its general atmosphere of war (or at least being prepared for it), the art of war at times involves, as Sun Tzu put it, the deceptive use of information (hence the label “secret intelligence”).24 This is not to say that masses of information are not collected around battle plans, weapons stores, and espionage activities, but rather that this information becomes manifest in objects that enable secrecy by allowing intelligence services to keep their store of knowledge unknown, both with respect to what they know about enemy forces and in terms of what they want to prevent enemy forces from knowing. Knowledge of objects of secrecy, and in turn objects that produce knowledge about adversaries, inscribe enmity through the practices by which the knowledge associated with them remains concealed.25 Instead of an epistemology that makes things visible, the atmosphere of enmity relies on insight that is gained when information can be “sealed” (as the legacy of the arcanum suggests). The epistemology of enmity is thus an epistemology of invisibility. Knowing the enemy not only requires being invisible (information acquired through stealth). It also requires that acquired knowledge remain invisible, and therefore out of sight. Limiting the definition and recognition objects to a particular notion of “visible” observation therefore excludes a potent set of other things—­specifically, secret things that have an important place in the modern state’s security apparatus.

Being Unseen Secrets challenge a notion of political matter that relies on “physicality and tangibility, as if the only meaningful relations are those between entities that can be seen, smelled, or felt.” 26 However, by questioning this assumption, attention to secret things is not meant to undermine the materiality of political life; to reiterate, the legacy of the arcanum suggests that secrecy is both a code of practice and a set of concrete tools. Attention to secret things therefore calls for an approach that does not question the viability of political matter but attends to its variability. The basis for such an approach can be found in the work of Karen Barad.27 Challenging the presumed givenness of objects, ones that exist distinct from

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and can be observed by human beings, it questions the claim that materiality is recognized by how “we can see it” or by “taking a good look.” Barad contends that people and things are not pre-­given and naturally discrete entities. Instead, they emerge as distinct from each other as various grids of intelligibility are imposed on the world, which separate diverse phenomena in particular ways. Extrapolating on the debate between whether light is a wave or a particle, she contends that the apparatuses, sets of practices and devices, by which objects are observed do not have untainted access to the world—­they are calibrated in ways that determine what counts as object. In sum, apparatuses entail agencies of observation: they do not reflect the material world but bring it into being in exemplary fashion.28 The world might be comprised of diverse phenomena but they become knowable as particular kinds of entities and not others. Specific kinds of objects emerge and become visible, therefore, not because they can be seen but because they are seen in particular ways. As different apparatuses impose different grids of intelligibility, certain kinds of objects are privileged, whereas others are marginalized, if they are even recognized as objects in the first place. This suggests that secrets are difficult objects not because they are hidden but because the grids of intelligibility deployed within prevailing approaches to political matter preclude the existence of objects that emerge through practices and tools by which they remain unseen. For those interested in making objects visible, observation allows for a political theory that “sees” how objects play a role in how political power is exercised. Observation that is of a secret nature, however, involves a logic of being unseen—­confidentiality, for instance, ranks high both for keeping knowledge of the state’s defensive apparatus out of reach of enemy forces and for keeping the state’s knowledge of enemies’ war arsenal unknown. The consequence of the first is a series of objects that are visible, seen—­open to being “looked at.” In the second, a series of objects that remain concealed become politically important; in fact, absent this concealment, they would not be objects able to perform a security function. In the first, secrets, even when they operate with a materiality, would not be classified as objects. In the second, visible objects would be in a domain that is devoid of secrecy. Observation is key in both sets of practices, but it is far from straightforward. Based on their different epistemologies of observation, they generate dramatically different accounts of what counts as an object of security. Barad’s emphasis on agencies of observation might be taken to imply that objects must be seen to exist. But to the extent that she considers what kinds of objects are prioritized (and not) in a given setting, she opens up a space for evaluating processes by which other kinds of observation practices can produce

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objects precisely at the moment when they become less visible, when they are observed only to be unseen. Along these lines, rather than restricting secrets from the realm of objects because they are invisible, it is necessary to determine how apparatuses that involve agencies of unobservability might be present in state security practices, which can produce secrets as a specific kind of thing. Put differently, attention can be directed to particular dynamics of un-­seeing embedded in state security practices that result in a set of objects whose secrecy becomes their signature security function.

Disappearing Act(or)s In light of the importance of information in the intelligence functions performed by secrecy, two particular objects have come to signify that material embodiment of secrets in the modern state: documents and data. The first relates to the confidentiality and integrity of information about state security tactics, and the second to communications. Outlining their respective agencies of unobservability—­through classification (documents) and encryption (data)—­the brief vignettes of invisibility provided below demonstrate how objects of secrecy are incorporated, rather than marginalized, in political life. If intelligence is procured and directed against the enemy, they become politically conspicuous agents of secrecy—­secret agents—­precisely because they appear to be unknown. Considered together, they provide insight into the political status and significance of objects that appear when they disappear.

Document Classification and the Official Secret Regime Documents link to national security by producing pieces of paper that detail security tactics; protecting them from widespread circulation is, as the UK government states, “vital to the safe and effective delivery of public services.”29 Generally falling within the realm of official secrets, protecting such documents is about ensuring the confidentiality of military plans, communications from diplomatic negotiations, espionage activities, and intelligence sources.30 Classified information, as “classified” indicates, refers to a category of information produced by an organizational scheme. In the United States, this scheme is issued as a presidential directive, usually updated with each change in administration. In the United Kingdom, the scheme is part of statutory law, outlined as the Official Secrets Act. Based on a coding system that establishes the value of the information, and thus of the document itself, as a secret is determined by its importance

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to national security, documents become more salient as secrets as they move up a secrecy gradient. In the United Kingdom, documents go from Top Secret to Secret to Confidential to Restricted and then to Protect. In the United States, Top Secret is the most exclusive category, followed by Secret and Confidential. If classification produces secrets, materiality comes to secrecy as classification works by transforming pieces of paper literally into the matter involved in ensuring security. The agency of unobservability here involves making information and knowledge obscure. Implying that something is unclear, the lack of clarity enacted through classification infers the sense of obscurity through practices that conceal—­either information that enemies could find valuable or information that the state has acquired about its adversaries. Obscurity in this way creates documents as objects of security, as classification not only indicates how documents materialize into secrets, as they become classified and thus accessible to smaller and smaller groups of people who are “cleared” to view their contents. Moreover, it also illustrates how secrets materialize as documents, because pieces of paper are how secrets manifest. Documents do not just hold secrets; being classified, they become the secrets themselves. The normative effect here is somewhat counterintuitive. In the general study of classification schemes (everything from phone books to scientific taxonomy), scholars have been keen to note how classifying phenomena has marginalizing consequences: some items become knowable and visible, while those that do not meet the criteria in play are excluded.31 By contrast, in the official secrecy regime, classification becomes a legitimate government procedure and policy precisely through the exclusion of various documents from the public domain. In other words, the production of classified documents is how secrets are created, how they are actualized and institutionalized, and thereby how they are valued and implemented as part of the legitimate state entrusted with the responsibility to protect its citizenry. Perhaps somewhat ironically, classification schemes in democratic countries are published as part of the public domain, falling within the realm of open secrecy. It seems difficult to deem documents secrets and therefore invisible. However, classification in and of itself is not intended to deny that governments make and keep secrets. The problem that classification is intended to solve is to prevent unauthorized disclosure of documents that do become classified. Documents materially construed as secrets remain salient when they can be protected and therefore remain relatively inaccessible as objects of security. Unauthorized disclosure—­the unmaking of secrets by bringing visibility

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to classified information—­in many countries is punishable as a criminal offence (as evidenced by both Bradley Manning in the WikiLeaks affair and, more recently, Edward Snowden in the communication of the U.S. PRISM program). Of course, secrets do not persist indefinitely. Aside from being “leaked,” (in democratic countries) they usually expire—­they are declassified (usually within a window of twenty-­five to thirty years). This reflects the general sense, as Javier Lezaun argues, that “nothing material stays the same long enough to guarantee an unalterable social order.”32 Security objectives can change, and the necessity to classify some documents to ensure national security is not always necessary in another context.

Data Encryption and the Critical Infrastructure Protection Within security and secrecy policies, data has become prominent in relation to critical infrastructure protection. With the integration of utility, emergency response, and financial systems, among others, through communication technologies key concerns have been raised with regard to the vulnerability of information infrastructures.33 Unlike other infrastructures, such as the city bombings during World War II, the fear is not principally of a physical attack on communications systems. Designed with a distributed and decentralized structure, information communications systems are intended to withstand the possibility of this kind of destruction. The issue, however, articulated as concerns about cyberattacks, is the threat to the reliable transport of data in the system.34 The overarching concern is the ability to maintain “confidence that data will travel to its destination without disruption.”35 Concerns about data integrity are certainly not new. So long as message interception has been a concern, military and political leaders have sought different ways to protect the transport of communications.36 Given the possibility of interception, there has been a long-­standing practice of encryption to make communications indecipherable to enemies who might capture them, and even try to alter them. Encryption techniques have, of course, changed dramatically over time, especially in light of a growing electronically networked environment.37 The core function of using codes to make messages incomprehensible (except to those who have the translation key), however, remains the same: to ensure the authenticity of message data by preventing interception and modification. Data, in other words, has long been an object of security, as its reliable transport ensures the functionality of communications, whether diplomatic, military, or, in the case of critical infrastructure, of vital systems for public safety, health, and transport. Challenged by governments as a breach of state

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security, the WikiLeaks scandal was an example of the integrity of data in all three realms being compromised. The agency of unobservability involved in encryption cultivates a kind of occult power by inculcating esoteric knowledge in the form of (hopefully) an unbreakable code. As the focus of protection, data becomes the object of security, but an object that is salient when the cover of a code allows it to disappear in the sense of being indecipherable. Ensuring the reliability of infrastructure, then, rests in the way that encryption makes the data enigmatic. By becoming difficult to capture or potentially modify, encryption allows data to materialize as a form of secrecy both in the message it carries and in the system of ciphers used to protect it. Secrets in turn materialize as data, not only is the encryption key invisible, but in the data itself, which becomes inaccessible to snoops—­both government and criminal alike. That data has a normative purpose that embeds secrecy within the modern state not just as an issue of critical concern, but as a key feature of the ideal state that rests in the way that, even with its big parts, infrastructure is designed with and evokes certain objectives: in the cyber realm, information infrastructures have been a political order built on “free speech and association, privacy and the free flow of information.”38 Disappearing data—­that is, secured (not lost) data—­is therefore essential to preserving those objectives. To the degree that various concerns are being raised about democratic governments’ use of national security to justify broader surveillance programs that target their own citizens, data security might increasingly be disrupting and challenging state security practices. Against efforts by governments to capture more and more civilian data, whether of foreigners or of citizens, encryption is being developed on private and personal networks.

Apparently Absent Matter Showing that secrets exist in concrete form, with tangible consequences, secrets muddle what can conventionally be understood as an object with political status. Documents and data are two examples of how international life becomes materially palpable precisely at the moment when it is imperceptible. As things through which secrecy is enabled and embedded in security practices and policies, they demonstrate that secrets are valuable information whose value for state security is bolstered as it takes the form of tangible objects. Appreciating the materialities of the international—­its constitutive things—­ thus requires attention to a broader class of objects, one that includes things that are physically trenchant when they are hidden or unobservable. Reflecting

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on secret things, in short, provides insight into how materialities manifest in ways that are apparent even when they are visibly absent.

Notes 1. Peter Adey and Ben Anderson, “Anticipating Emergencies,” Security Dialogue 43(2) (2012): 99–­117; Seantal Anaïs, “Ethical Interventions: Non-­Lethal Weapons and the Governance of Insecurity,” Security Dialogue 42(6) (2011): 537–­52; Claudia Aradau, “Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection,” Security Dialogue 41(5) (2010): 491–­514; Martin Coward, “Against Anthropocentrism: The Destruction of the Built Environment as a Distinct Form of Political Violence,” Review of International Studies 32(3) (2006): 419–­37; Nadine Voelkner, “Managing Pathogenic Circulation: Human Security and the Migrant Health Assemblage in Thailand,” Security Dialogue 42(3) (2011): 240. 2. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 1997). 3. Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5(2) (2002): 243–­63. 4. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 4–­31. See also Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Bruce Braun and Sarah. J. Whatmore, eds., Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 5. Kenneth N. Waltz, A Theory of International Politics (New York: Addison-­Wesley, 1979); Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 6. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter; Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, “Materials and Devices of the Public,” Economy and Society 40(4) (2011): 489–­509; Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 16. 7. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 106–­7. 8. Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” Theory, Culture, and Society 28(7–­8) (2011): 109. 9. “PRISM” refers to the Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management program. 10. Simone Chambers, “Behind Closed Doors: Publicity, Secrecy, and the Quality of Deliberation,” Journal of Political Philosophy 12(4) (2004): 389–­410. 11. Philip Melanson, Secrecy Wars: National Security, Privacy, and the Public’s Right to Know (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2001), 5–­6. He goes on to say that “[t]here is a consensus for holding information on such matters as the locations of nuclear missiles, the identities of undercover drug-­enforcement agents, or commercial processes. . . . More typically, however, the definition of legitimate secrecy is a subject of ideological debate and clashing priorities (national security versus the public’s right to know).”

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12. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 104. 13. Ibid., 111. 14. In the U.S. case, see Daniel N. Hoffman, Governmental Secrecy and the Founding Fathers: A Study in Constitutional Controls (Contributions in Legal Studies) (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981). In the British case, see Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also Cabinet Office and National Security and Intelligence, UK National Intelligence Machinery (London: Crown Copyright, 2010). 15. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 108. 16. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 17. James A. Knapp, “‘Ocular Proof’: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response,” Poetics Today 24(4) (2003): 701. 18. Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14(1) (2007): 1. 19. Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy,” 115. 20. This emphasis on human agency is the result of assumptions in political theory in which only speaking subjects are considered to have the capacity to engage and change political goals and outcomes. Not only are certain kinds of people excluded (such as Aristotle’s prohibition on allowing slaves and women to participate in the agora), but things, which do not speak, are considered to exist outside of politics. Hence the view that the domestic sphere and the economy are distinct from the political sphere. See Jane Bennett, “In Parliament with Things,” in Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2005), 133–­48. Different notions of agency that extend beyond human action have been developed in a variety of concepts, such as “actants” (see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999]), “intra-­ action” (see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007]), and “assemblages” (see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]). 21. Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, “Materials and Devices of the Public,” Economy and Society 40(4) (2011): 489–­509. 22. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32(3) (2004): 348–­49. 23. Eva Horn, “Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence,” trans. Sara Ogger, Grey Room 11 (spring 2003): 60. 24. Ibid., 61; Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. Dallas Galvin, trans. Lionel Giles (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003 [1910]), part XI: “The Nine Situations,” #37, 50. 25. On “inscription devices,” see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 64–­70. 26. Severin Fowles, “People without Things,” in An Anthropology of Absence, ed. Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Soerensen (New York: Springer, 2010), 25. 27. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of

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How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3) (2003): 801–­9; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 28. See also Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2007), 17–­54. 29. Cabinet Office, HMG Security Policy Framework, Version 8 (London: Crown Copyright, 2012), 20. 30. Official secrets have been defined as “official information of any kind which has not been officially released” (Moran, Classifed, x). 31. Susan Leigh Star, “Infrastructure and Ethnographic Practice,” Scandinavian Journal of Information Studies 14(2) (2002): 107–­22. 32. Javier Lezaun, “The Pragmatic Sanction of Materials: Notes for an Ethnography of Legal Substances,” Journal of Law and Society 39(1) (2012): 37. 33. Mason Rice, Jonathan Butts, and Sujeet Shenoi, “A Signaling Framework to Deter Aggression in Cyberspace,” International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection 4(2) (2011): 57–­65. 34. The UK government has perhaps expressed it most explicitly: its primary concern is that critical infrastructures are vulnerable to adversaries “who want to harm us by compromising or damaging our critical data” (Cabinet Office, United Kingdom Cybersecurity Strategy: Protecting and Promoting the UK in a Digital World [London: Crown Copyright, 2011], 7). Likewise, the U.S. government states its primary objective as “confidence that data will travel to its destination without disruption” (White House, International Strategy for Cyberspace: Prosperity, Security, and Openness in a Networked World [Washington, D.C.: White House, 2011], 3). 35. White House, International Strategy for Cyberspace, 148. 36. Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography (New York: Doubleday, 1999); Horn, “Knowing the Enemy,” 58–­85. 37. Lorna Sharpe, “Unmasking Secrecy [Security Schemes],” IEE Review 49(3) (2003): 46–­48. 38. See Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 185–­225; Nisha Shah, “The Internet as Evocative Infrastructure,” in Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, ed. Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 186–­90; White House, International Strategy for Cyberspace.

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Grey Shine Choi

Grey is never simply just grey but grey from a particular vantage point, through particular intersubjective articulations, and embedded in a particular network of desires, interests, and actions. Grey is not just our symbolic construction, that is, a product of our meaning-­making practices, but it is also not simply just what is. Let me follow how Victor Cha, a North Korea expert and former adviser to the George W. Bush administration, opens his latest book The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Present. Cha begins his book with an extended narrative of his personal experience in North Korea, and this intimate, personal voice of narration colors his book, which seems to target a popular as well as an academic readership. Cha writes in his introduction, “We passed over barren and gray field as the Gulfstream VI touched down on the empty runway of the airport. As the plane taxied on the tarmac, there was no flight traffic to be seen. No baggage carts or fuel trucks shuttling about” (Cha 2012, 1). Upon disembarking from the safe haven of a White House high-­security plane, he goes on to take note of what else is missing around him: “no street sounds,” “no car horns,” “no birds,” “no Blackberry service,” and “no global cell service” (ibid., 1, 4). Almost the same sentiment and phrasing about nothingness are expressed by a Reuter’s photographer about his first glimpse of the North Korean landscape: “a bleak and gray landscape covered in snow, dotted with run-­down dilapidated buildings, the occasional car (usually an early 80’s model Mercedes), horse-­drawn carts, and many many weary-­looking people” (Gray 2008). Dilapidated, empty, weary—­these are all negatives that focus on what is not there and the idea of “lack” in the landscape and the people one encounters. Another reporter goes further: “Gray. You have not seen many shades of gray until you have seen Pyongyang. . . . The grayness extends everywhere, from the clothes people wear, to the noodles they eat, to the dull tone of people’s eyes” (Goldstein 2010). The idea expressed by Victor Cha and others is that North Korea is a land of grey, where greyness symbolizes emptiness, nothingness, and indistinctness. In a longer, more sustained engagement such as Cha’s, it becomes clearer how

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grey landscape marks out the place and situation of North Korea for action, correction, and revitalization by a constellation of agents and resources outside this site. I return to this point later. Firsthand accounts also imbue these symbols with sensations, with what emptiness feels, looks, sounds like, and how it affects us physically and bodily. They point to how we sense something is wrong: it feels drab, cold, dead, muted, sad, or even eerie. We don’t just see emptiness, we feel it through our bodily senses wherein sight is but one of several. Sensation (as well as experience) leads us to the realm of immediacy, a realm of ungraspable realities that are at the same time so immediately there that they escape language, symbols, and representation. While many might find firsthand accounts of grey North Korea potent descriptives because they are proximate to the immediate, I would also stress that immediacy disperses what can be accounted for that requires some rethinking of how firsthand accounts and sensations gain expression. Where does the recognition that our opinions color how we see a place like North Korea take us? Because color here is not just a metaphor, I am also asking, where does taking color seriously lead us in thinking about the international? More specifically, how does the color grey, which features prominently in coloring our view and experiences of North Korea, mediate our entanglements with, and our transformation through, North Korea? How might the color grey shed light (or darkness) on the capacities of our involvements and entanglements with North Korea to bring about political transformation? Parenthetically, I borrow Rey Chow’s articulation of the term “entanglement” as a multidimensional and contradictory “relativization of agency” that is a “derangement in the organization of knowledge caused by unprecedented adjacency and comparability or parity” (Chow 2012, 10, 11). Chow shows how entanglement that recognizes the contingency and relational complexity of agency is a better conceptual language in contemporary cultures and societies than compartmentalized and compartmentalizing categories of origination and causation such as author, actor, intention, and motives.1 Before delving into color as more than a metaphor, I want to briefly unpack why my interest in the international becomes a focus on North Korea. I believe North Korea crucially composes the international as an object-­subject of international politics. North Korea is both an object of international community (as a failed state, a security threat, an object of fascination for international actions, curiosities, and projects) and a subject that attempts to shape not only its own subject position but also that of the international community as a legitimate member of the international. North Korea, however, occupies a subject position of international politics that cannot escape the powerful network

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of actors, ideas, and desires that seek to objectify it. In making this point about North Korea’s subject-­object position, I am highlighting an argument made by many that international politics is better understood as a matter of intercultural relations. From this perspective, North Korea is interesting as a specific site of international politics where the failures of intercultural encounters abound. This reformulation produces many effects. For one, rather than see the hermitic, mysterious nature of North Korea as an attribute that the state and place called North Korea possess, we can register what North Korea seems to be—­inaccessible, ingenuous, secretive, paranoid, manipulative, and bizarre—­as an effect of reiterated intercultural encounters. In other words, North Korea is not a problem of failed state in geopolitically important location but a problem of failed intercultural encounters that strategic thinking and mode of encounter produce. To be clear, I am not claiming that we create North Korea, but in stressing the encounter, recognize that differently positioned subjects associated with North Korea crucially mediate these encounters. More prominent North Korean mediators are those claiming a position of authority and expertise as government officials, Communist Party members, “as North Koreans.” In short, at any given time, North Korea is an object (of outside observation and action) and a subject that seeks to repeal this object position. What needs attention are not the causes and solutions to the problem inside North Korea but the practice of the art of failure in intercultural encounters, that is, materializing the art of accepting failures of access, genuine exchanges, equality, trust, and good intentions. I don’t think there is a way out of these failures of encounters—­no amount of access, trust-­building exercise, or genuine exchanges will solve the problems of difference and how our (common)senses mislead. This object-­creating mode of intercultural encounters also finds expression in relation to other parts of the world, for instance, in Susanna Trnka’s study of contemporary memories of communist Czechoslovakia, where her informant recollects this space that is no longer here as “the gray zone” where she “saw sad faces, darkness, nothing shining” but the outside world (Austria) as “the world in color—­lights, neon, [peoples’] faces bright” (Milena, in Trnka 2012, 49). Here, communist spaces in contemporary accounts become associated with the color grey that locates them to a historical past—­except that North Korea is not a postcommunist and postsocialist space but is presently communist and socialist. The link, then, between North Korea (an anachronistic present) and places like Czechoslovakia (a historical past) is that narratives of lack and absence are constructed through the mobilization of symbols like the color grey.

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We see through grey a deployment of the idea of pastness (history) to stagnate meaning about realities presently under construction, negotiation, and unfolding. At the same time, a place like North Korea becomes another object-­ thing to amplify nothingness. It joins things that express emotional states of boredom, sadness, melancholia, or unpleasantness in forms, for example, of gray overcast weather, gray lifeless office, and gray prospects signaling doom, if not an unchanging dull routine, that are generally and ubiquitously around us.2 But grey can be understood as a color of failure that helps register the effects and workings of the art of failure. In other words, rather than approach the visible North Korea from a perspective preoccupied with what is lacking in North Korea (i.e., color, life, the living), the grey landscape can be alternatively encountered that refuses the prevailing hierarchic, evaluative, and disciplining terms that many engagements with places like North Korea take. Significant, then, is how the color grey is also associated, less negatively, with neutrality, a midway, and an intermediary that are all terms impregnated with ambiguity. For instance, we say something falls in a grey area when a decision, an action, or a turn of events is neither right nor wrong. An area is grey if some issue or event falls somewhere in between and our opinions about it feel murky, unstable, undecided, and undecidable, however baseless these unsettled and unsettling feelings might be. To say that grey areas denote a midway or intermediary is to refuse to see indecision, murkiness, and lack of firm grounding only in a negative light, but to also see ambiguity in negativity. Midway does not mean compromise or lack of determination but is a position where “extremes lose their power and all directions are (still) possible” (Trinh 2011, 70). Nevertheless, what remains is how the color grey is particularly associated with what is not colorful and is thought to be a color that does not exhibit a true, essential, or primary character of color. In other words, while color as a physical trait is associated with vibrancy—­for instance, John Gage writes in a way that assumes that color is important for the vibrancy of landscape that it makes visible—­grey is one of those colors that are relegated as secondary and lacking the essence that defines colors, i.e., what makes colors so vital in our pictorial world (Gage 1993, 9). Grey, then, is the noncolor(ful) that allows the construction of the color(ful).

Color Is Not a Symbol Lest I mislead, color is not just a symbol—­a reiterative construction for our meaning making—­but it also has its own properties, intentions, and processes

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that surpass human meaning-­making practices. Trinh Minh-­ha, a filmmaker, a teacher of filmmaking, and an academic notes how color is material in that it takes form through the material interaction of elements, for instance, of Kodak films in reaction with the African heat, which produces an “unnatural” reddish hue (Trinh 2006, 52–­53). This redness is an accidental product of Kodak films interacting with heat that is then used to open her film Naked Spaces to “invite the viewer to come into the film differently” through what the color does (ibid., 52). Given that we often believe what we see, there is an important intervention to be made that highlights the subjective, corporeal, and material dimensions of visuality and entanglements that result in the case of North Korea.3 Moreover, color acts as a medium through which light takes shape. Trinh asks, “how is one to conceive of lighting when it is not simply used to fill in a space to make things legible, to hierarchize and to dramatize according to psychological realism?” (Trinh 2006, 52). I ask a similar question about international photographic encounters with North Korea and what they are doing with color. I want to explore how greyness can be conceived when it is experienced not as a tool to make things legible, to hierarchize, and dramatize for our ends and from our perspective, but as a medium to allow us to experience in-­betweeness so closely constrained by our needs and desires. I want to explore greyness “as it is formed by the differing qualities of darkness and by the receptive properties of things (texture, tone, movement, reflective potential) in relation to their surrounding” (ibid., 52–­53). Color is a material medium that can open up a new dimension of entanglement between North Korea and the international that attends to the affective and aesthetic issues in entanglement, encounters, and involvement with North Korea. Color nudges us to attend to the aesthetic dimensions of international politics involving North Korea, that is, dimensions associated with the inevitable gaps between representation and the represented (see Bleiker 2001, 511). Aesthetics is not merely an issue of symbols, signs, and representations but also sensation, perception, and feeling. Moreover, I stress how vision is a corporeal experience just like other senses, and thus it is worth exploring how this opens out and brings in broader and messier physical dimensions of international/intercultural politics, including the task of transformation of the prevailing hierarchies and our understanding of alternatives.4 As mentioned in the beginning, many visitors to North Korea simply equate the greyness of the North Korean landscape with emptiness and read it as a symbolic marker of lack, for instance, in vitality, life, and presences. This is a hierarchical and monocultural way of relating to North Korea that draws mainly upon—­despite finite other possibilities—­one’s own culture to organize the encounter that

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privileges the self. These reductive engagements with North Korea tell us more about our mode of encounter than about North Korea itself. The numerous photographic encounters between North Korea and the international largely resemble the textual descriptions quoted earlier. I turn to photographs because visual politics through the medium of photography crucially mediates cases made about North Korean human rights, security, and failed state problems.5 Illustrative is Shin, Dong-­hyuk’s mediation as a North Korean defector who has received much international publicity since Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West (2012). Textual testimony of Shin’s life in a North Korean labor camp remains the main object of serious international engagement in, for instance, the 2014 report commissioned by UN Human Rights Council and the international media attention in Shin that Harden’s book generated. I would, however, argue that Shin’s visual mediation to make his testimonial travel is also an important dimension of what catapulted him to a status on a par with the international icon, Kang Chol-­hwan, the author of Aquariums of Pyongyang and now the director of the high-­profile North Korean Strategy Center based in Seoul.6 Shin Dong-­hyuk’s visual mediation, takes numerous forms: use of satellite images of the labor camps in his talks; rolling up his trousers and shirt to show his mangled body parts as visual evidence of North Korean state violence; being photographed with his book in key backdrops (e.g., outside the UN office in North Korea), and so on.7 Photography is important because it is, together with textual narratives, the other main medium of mediation not only in the sense that photographs of scars and campsites serve as evidence in his testimonies but also that photography itself constitutes a testimonial event, which is then circulated in (digitized) reproduction. Photographic images of Shin serve as documents that attempt to capture for posterior use the act of speaking out against and bearing witness to atrocities. Increasingly, in a pervasive sense, the posterior life of an event comes (only?) with the photographic encounter. Relatedly, photographic greyness matters because photography occupies a particularly privileged relationship to thingness—­the idea that the image contains a thing “[t]hat-­has-­been” and that we are seeing “literally an emanation of the referent” (Barthes 1993, 80). Images made by camera are experienced as immediate and objective documents “[c]laiming only to put facts first directly or vicariously through the report of ‘first hand experience’” (Tagg 1988, 8). Camera images move us in particularly emotional and possessive ways because of this archival, documentary function and role of producing “factual” images even when we know the image has been framed, cropped, or even Photoshopped. Put differently, we capture something with our cameras because we

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want to possess and retain something about or in relation to what we are experiencing, which feels always to be passing and losing its full presence. As viewers, we see something captured by camera and we feel as if we are seeing the raw deal because the camera had to be there, in person, to produce this image-­ document. In the so-­called age of digital (manipulation of) images, we appreciate the “real,” the “original,” the “authentic” in contradistinction to images that were cropped, recolored, or Photoshopped. Significant in the thingness of the photography is how object-­things, including humans in their objectified forms, are the main ingredients through which the pictures speak. Consider any set of photographs of North Korea, or, more specifically, of Pyongyang, that gets taken as a stand-­in for North Korea; what is Pyongyang? What composes the place? In photobooks that in their titles alone purport to be about Pyongyang, North Korea, such as Charlie Crane’s Welcome to Pyongyang and Philippe Chancel’s North Korea, it is many big and small things: Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Monument, Monument to the Party Foundation, Juche Tower, Rungna Bridge, bicycles, chairs, tables, beds, paintings, hotel clocks, the Kim lapel pins, industrial machineries, humans walking, sitting, standing in the street, women in traditional Korean dress, the local state-­issued guides (minders), on-­site guides, children, and then some more women. Humans, places, art, machineries, and everyday objects alike appear in appropriated forms for our viewing. They are objects in the sense that these various people, places, and objects alike are taken beyond their particular contexts—­the here and now of the moment the photograph was made—­and framed and produced primarily to be seen, appreciated, or done something about by those in positions to see these images. In becoming objects for viewing, they appeal to our sensibilities, cultural references, and concerns. I am not necessarily pointing to how being pictured or appropriated for spectatorship makes humans, places, and things inanimate, stagnant, or passive (objectified)—­sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I am more broadly pointing to the inescapable subject/object, viewer/on-­view hierarchy that establishes the thingness of photographs, that is, what we value as original, authentic, and real. Authenticity of photography comes from the object-­position of things, from being on view that gives posterior social relations access to the event pictured. I am of the position that this politics of authenticity through photography is dangerous for how it constrains communication and sustains hierarchies, but danger feeds fascination and fascination cannot simply be prohibited and safely disciplined through our normative watchful eyes. Rather than repress or prescribe, my question is, how do these object-­things that compose grey Pyongyang/North Korea an-

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imate photography in a way that registers the possibility of transforming the hierarchy of spectatorship? An interesting photographic encounter to consider in light of this question is Welcome to Pyongyang (2007), a photobook coproduced by the photographer Charlie Crane, tour operator Nick Bonner of Koryo Tours, and individuals under the banner of the North Korean state-­run tourism agency Korean International Travel Company (KITC). When I first saw Welcome to Pyongyang, I was surprised by how small it was. I had expected the book to be larger, partly from having seen some of the photographic images online, but also because many ambitious photobooks are oversized. This book was the size of a regular text-­ based hardback. Oversized illustrated books often lead readers to lose themselves in the images, but Welcome to Pyongyang draws attention to the captions, which are written by KITC and usually appear in the upper left corner of the adjacent page to the image. The photographs of North Korea/Pyongyang are largely indistinguishable from the numerous professional and amateur photographs of North Korea/Pyongyang in international circulation. In all these pictures of North Korea, Pyongyang’s landscape is grey: its plazas and streets are sparsely populated, portraits of Pyongyang citizens quiet if not somewhat quirky, and its halls and rooms Spartan and empty. For instance, it shares much with the pictures independently taken and arranged by Phillipe Chancel in his (oversized) photobook North Korea, where the photographs deploy similar compositions (wide angle, full view), subject matter (woman, architecture), and tone (grey). Both use various techniques available in photobooks not only in the framing of reality in the images but in the arrangements of images, layout, and uses of texts. However, Welcome to Pyongyang animates our photographic encounter differently despite the image, through its play with the texts that accompany them provided by KITC. I am not referring to the contents of KITC’s text (meant to tell us about North Korean society) but to the effect of reading the text (which in many ways is another version of state rhetoric) and the image together. Take the first photograph from Welcome to Pyongyang: we see a woman in a pink traditional Korean dress standing in front of a blue crane. Two objects are foregrounded against a nondescript background: the woman and the crane. I put the woman in the object category because in the act of being photographed, she is an object of our viewing and her image is taken for this purpose. The colors and the smiling figure of a woman draw us in—­how pretty! how refreshing!—­ when set in the backdrop of the quietness and stillness in the image and the grey landscape in the more somber portraits that precede and succeed this image. The woman in pink under the protective arc (arm) of the blue crane

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plays on the dichotomy of femininity (warm, pink, female)/masculinity (hard, cold, blue machinery) that does most of the color work.8 She colorfully symbolizes, through the process of becoming an object, the humanity that must be protected. This story of salvation mediated by colors gains complication when the image is contextualized for what it is: an image in a photobook that can be commented by people. Accompanying this image is this caption: All the parts of this electronically controlled hydraulic excavator are made in my country. Yong Ran works here at the Three Revolutions Exhibition, which demonstrates the advances of our country in the fields of ideology, technology, and culture. As our country is 80 percent mountainous, its strong machinery is important to help the people in construction and agricultural projects. Mrs Yong says she cannot actually drive the excavator but she does know what the controls are for. (KITC in Crane 2007, n.p.) There is a dissonance, even a clunkiness that no amount of editing, repositioning, and rephrasing of the texts can remove. When the image and text are put in relation to each other, we perceive a cultural disjuncture from the image–­text composition. The photographic images containing objects can be read to fit into existing narratives of North Korea/Pyongyang as grey, lacking in vitality, and, at times, quirky and humorous. The texts provided through KITC, on the other hand, either sound upbeat, trying to compensate for the solemnity of the images, or they fall flat like a helpful official announcement, well intentioned but annoying at best and sinister at worst. What comes across in Welcome to Pyongyang is the sense that something got lost in this intercultural encounter between image and text, between the photographer and the North Korean tourist agents, between the various experiences of the different producers and what has been produced in collaboration. Together, there is something amiss between North Korea and the international audience that the product seeks to engage. Our opinions color our view and how we receive information and explanations.

No-­thingness Is an Issue of Translation I want to argue that the failure of translation suggested above is useful because it registers the intercultural dimensions of encountering and engaging with places like North Korea. Failure of resonance and uneasiness in the circulation of meaning is an art form sorely undervalued in international contexts, which,

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Charlie Crane, Welcome to Pyongyang.

as an extreme case, North Korea helps to highlight. I also think it is important to simultaneously register the intercultural dimensions of the color grey and how colors matter in international/intercultural politics. Trinh writes that grey space is “the intervening area between inside and outside and a realm where both the interior and the exterior merge” (Trinh 2011, 72). She goes on to link grey space with grey time through the concept of senuhim, an “undone interval”

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of pause in the art of Noh drama that designates the moment of suspended action and of “no mind” (ibid., 72).9 Through the architect and theorist Kisho Kurokawa, a particular hue of grey, Rikyu grey, is explained as a “colorless color of numerous hues that collide, neutralize, and hence cancel each other out” (ibid.). It is an in-­between color that creates a third space, a space that cancels each other out, creates a void, a no-­thing. This nonspace is an always-­there space of interval that goes unnoticed because we tend to pay attention mostly to the event, that is, what is visibly present. It is a space of infinite possibilities, a spacing where we can ultimately say we simply do not know and thus become invigorated, engaged, and entangled by and with it. Japanese cultural sources are significant here not only for what they tell us about grey that Western art theory cannot (a statement with its own politics) but also for how they make the location of our explorations and intercultural nature of our conundrum pronounced. Question marks, a questioning pose, an inquiry that accepts that what we can ultimately say with any certainty is “I don’t know,” help us stay with the process of becoming and pay greater attention to moments of “becoming-­ no-­thing” (ibid., 71). The hyphen in no-­thing is particularly important in the intercultural encounter between North Korea and the international where greyness is mobilized to denote no-­thingness without the hyphen. The hyphen makes all the difference here for it takes us to realms of no-­knowledge, no-­ thing, not-­quite-­not-­yet known, turning predicates into something else that takes us to an elsewhere. Staying with hyphens, moreover, reminds us that elsewhere and something else are else’s within here, within the terms that we already have and thus of this world. Hyphens accentuate the presence of the old, the elements that compose things, and the necessity of suspended lines that connect them. The ethical implication of this awareness is as vast as we want it to be. A starting point might be that there is no outside, no uncontaminated newness or some other deeper source we can reach in responding to recurring political international problems and tensions. Ethical inquiries can be broadened out to consider not only the intercultural dimensions of politics and the international but the composition, assemblage, and connections (i.e., the hyphenated nature and hyphens) of interculturality that come into view. In particular, the color grey cuts through and makes perceptible how undone intervals (i.e., uncertainty, ambiguity, contingency, and multiplicity) are also dark and debilitating as well as vibrant, enchanted, and vital. Many, most notably Jane Bennett, Doreen Massey, and William Connolly, have written eloquently about vibrant and enchanting transformative entanglements;

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however, the dark nature of transformation has been undertheorized in the materialist turns in various disciplines.10 We are encountering dark transformations in our encounters with, dwellings on, and perambulations of the international led by grey. Translated in the case of North Korea, this is to say that there are problems in North Korea of marginalization, oppression, and suffering, and there is death of something or a lessening of life in North Korea that, as concerned outsiders, we want to do something about. The point is that transforming this darkness in North Korea through human-­rights framework, international engagement, and reform of North Korea’s archaic political and economic systems is also itself dark. As Trinh put it, “The journey to the west is, no doubt, the journey toward the future, through dark transformations” (Trinh 2011, 74). What is more, North Korea today is also a product of its state-­ led transformation from the ruins of the Korean War in 1953 that is crucially a product of its journey to the West that sought to redefine what “West,” “future,” and “modernity” meant. Its juche self-­reliance doctrine, communist party leadership structure, and public economic system are part of North Korea’s self-­transformative journey for a better future that interrupts the journey’s destination. I am here pointing to how the problem of darkness in North Korea is a hue created by a journey that demands transformation of the self and the environment it seeks belonging to (the West). Dark transformations are boundary events as they are courses of change toward no-­things, events “situated right at that edge of the many twos, where thinking is acting of and on both sides” (Trinh 2006, 207). They are simultaneously endings and beginnings, actions and nonactions, and change and stasis wherein what is beginning and ending, who is the prime mover and who is secondary, and where change begins are all variously indistinguishable. As noted earlier, the relationship between text and image in Welcome to Pyongyang and the gap that image–­text pairing opens up is grey; they are points and moments of multiple meanings and simultaneous possibilities that lie in between inside and outside, something and nothing, and darkness and light that merge together, making indistinguishable where one ends and the other begins. These in-­betweens cannot be represented, that is, captured in stills, images, words, or stories we tell ourselves. In-­betweenness in the case of North Korea—­ and Trinh gestures to how this is a broader intercultural case—­involves dark transformations toward no-­thing and spaces to ultimately say I don’t know. In-­betweenness is about letting nonknowingness fundamentally structure our encounters with North Korea. Again, grey space and time are nonrepresentational. They are not visible or perceptible to our senses in their object-­form but lie in between, in their no-­thingness.

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Doing No-­thing Following grey North Korea in international circulation makes the spaces in between representation and the represented more pronounced. It broadens how we think about alternative modes of encounter, spaces, and ways of doing international politics that might allow us to bring in an aesthetically attuned range of sources, spaces, and thinkings. Grey North Korea, then, is better understood as space and identity always under construction and reconstruction. Many have advocated for a more fluid, contingent, relational, and processual understandings of space and identity (see, for example, Massey 2005; Bender and Winer 2001; Andrews and Roberts 2012; Trinh 1989). Following the color grey in international politics reaffirms these insights but goes further to gesture to what is involved in fundamentally restructuring and redesigning the international. It needs greater attention to the entanglements that makes the agency of the specific empirical Other—­not just any Other but multiple, specific Others such as North Korea—­more pronounced. This is a grey area, but perhaps that is the point. Making international specific is important because it makes our interventions specific. Specifically located and empirically grounded efforts to make things international should function as pulling in, and putting in tension, the wide array of knowledge production and pronouncements about a specific geopolitical case. For instance, my argument about grey North Korea seeks to cut through the ping-­pong–­like debate about whether the engagement policies toward North Korea are useful or useless, whether North Korea is manipulating or genuine, and whether ordinary North Koreans believe and support the regime or not. The issue here is not an either-­or case of cooperation or containment and North Korea muddling through or reforming. It is an effort to instigate engagements that are more embracing of greyness, no-­thingness, and even doing no-­thing. Hyphens make all the difference in intercultural contexts and contacts.

Notes 1. This formulation resonates with the new materialism literature in its methodology that seeks to understand change and agency in the contemporary world through theorizing assemblage, creativity, events, and things. For diversity of approaches, see the Millennium special issue 2013, though sorely missing from this collection is an explicit discussion of how this literature relates to resonant developments in postcolonial and feminist theories.

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2. See discussions of these associations with the color grey, for instance, in Trinh 2011, 60–­61; Birren 1955, 93; Anderson 2004; Trmka 2012, 48–­50. 3. David Shim makes this point that seeing is believing in his book Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is Believing (2013). 4. Corporeality of vision is an expression from Maurice Merleau-­Ponty in Wylie 2007, 28. 5. See Shim’s argument in Visual Politics and North Korea (2013). I also explore this in my book Re-­imagining (Problems like) North Korea: Interrogating Problems and Alternatives (Choi 2014). 6. For more information on the center’s activities and mission, go to its English-­ language official Web site, http://nksc.co.kr/english/index.php. Interesting to note is the difference in content in the English and Korean versions of this Web site, which is common in many Korean–­English Web sites. 7. These various news sources are used for the photo inserts in these articles. Especially illustrative is the article in Mirror (Palmer 2013); also European Parliament 2010; Ryall 2012; Dahlstrom 2013. 8. Thanks to Xavier Guillaume for pointing this out to me. A lot more can be said about the implications of this reading of the composition, for instance, what readings of this blue crane are possible? Is the paternalistic composition of the woman that of a threatening North Korea or something else? 9. Noh is a classical Japanese drama that has become closely associated with Zen Buddhism that, unlike much of Western theater, emphasizes becoming and transformation in the actor rather than the actor’s representation, that is, the actor’s interpretation and expression of drama. See Coldiron 2004; Quinn 2005. 10. An exception is Ben Anderson (2004) and his discussion of boredom and disenchantment. In queer theory, see Halberstam (2011) discuss failure and passivity.

References Anderson, Ben. 2004. “Time-­Stilled Space-­Slowed: How Boredom Matters.” Geoforum 35: 739–­54. Andrews, Hazel, and Les Roberts, eds. 2012. Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience, and Spaces In-­between. London and New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1993. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Benders, Barbara, and Margot Winer, eds. 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place. Oxford and New York: Berg. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modernity: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———­. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Birren, Faber. 1955. New Horizons in Color. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation. Bleiker, Roland. 2001. “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30(3): 509–­33.

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Cha, Victor. 2012. The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future. New York: HarperCollins. Chancel, Philippe. 2006. North Korea. Texts by Michel Poivert and Jonathan Fenby. London: Thames and Hudson. Choi, Shine. 2014. Re-­imagining (Problems like) North Korea: Problems and Alternatives. London: Routledge. Chow, Rey. 2012. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Chris Boot. N.d. New Book Press Release for Welcome to Pyongyang. Coldiron, Margaret. 2004. Trance and Transformation of the Actor in Japanese Noh and Balinese Masked Dance-­Drama. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press. Connolly, William. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Crane, Chris. 2007. Welcome to Pyongyang. London: Chris Boot. Dahlstrom, Richard. 2013. “Shin Dong-­hyuk: Lessons about Radical Gospel Freedom from Camp 14.” Patheos, June 3, available at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rich arddahlstrom/2013/06/03/shin-dong-hyuk-lessons-about-radical-gospel-freedom -from-camp-14/ (accessed June 13, 2014). European Parliament. 2010. “Grim Reality of North Korea’s Assault on Human Rights.” April 12, available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-// EP//TEXT+IM-PRESS+20100409STO72385+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (accessed June 13, 2014). Gage, John. 1993. Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Singapore: Thames and Hudson. Goldstein, Michael. 2010. “A Holiday in North Korea.” Utopian, December 7, available at http://www.the-utopian.org/post/2134387953/a-holiday-in-north-korea (accessed February 27, 2013). Gray, David. 2008. “Perceptions of North Korea.” Photographer Blog, February 29, available at http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2008/02/29/perceptions-of -north-korea/ (accessed February 27, 2013). Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Harden, Blaine. 2012. Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. New York: Viking. Koryo Tours. N.d. Koryo Tours. Available at http://koryogroup.com (accessed August 13, 2013). Lisle, Debbie. 2006. Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 1990. [Untitled] Review of Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality, and Feminism by T. Minh-­ha Trinh. SubStance 19(2/3), (62/63): 213–­16. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 2013. Special issue, 4(3). Palmer, Alun. 2013. “‘I Was So Brainwashed in North Korea Death Camp I Betrayed My Family’: Survivor’s Shocking Story.” Mirror, April 6, available at http://www.mirror

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.co.uk/news/world-news/north-korea-death-camp-survivor-1814554 (accessed June 13, 2014). Quinn, Shelley Fenno. 2005. Developing Zeami: The Noh Actor’s Attunement in Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rapaport, Herman. 1995. “Deconstruction’s Other: Trinh T. Minh-­Ha and Jacques Derrida.” Diacritics 25(2): 98–­113. Ryall, Julian. 2012. “30 North Korean Officials Involved in South Talks Die ‘in Traffic Accidents.’” Telegraph, May 25, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news /worldnews/asia/northkorea/9289608/30-North-Korean-officials-involved-in -South-talks-die-in-traffic-accidents.html (accessed June 13, 2014). Shim, David. 2013. Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is Believing. London: Routledge. Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Trinh T. Minh-­ha. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006. Digital Film Event. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Elsewhere within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism, and the Boundary Event. Oxon: Routledge. Trnka, Susanna. 2012. “When the World Went Color: Emotions, Sense, and Spaces in Contemporary Accounts of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution.” Emotion, Space, and Society 5: 45–­51. Wylie, John. 2007. Landscape. London: Routledge.

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Orange Prison Jumpsuit Elspeth Van Veeren

Bodies, body parts, and objects most closely associated with bodies are “maps of power and identity.”1 They are the very matter, the “stuff,” of our subjectivities. Clothing, like bodies, becomes particularly connected to subject positions within a discourse, consciously and unconsciously. As material culture theorists Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller suggest, clothing makes meaning as it connects with the bodies that wear it. We enter into specific relations with these things and their practices: the particular drape of a shawl, the fold of a cuff, the hairstyle we adopt.2 These objects, and the practices associated with them, are filled with meanings and therefore can be read as texts as they materialize and fix, performatively, subject positions. Uniforms in particular are one extreme form of this type of subject fashioning (alongside nakedness, scarification, or even weaponization of the body). Uniforms by their very definition facilitate a flattening of identities. They are a form of totalizing practice, rather than individualizing, intended so that differences within a group or category are minimized and even erased.3 But as a unique subset of uniforms, prison uniforms do particular work. When individuals are inducted into a prison, prison uniforms are not only a method of control, a rite of passage, a labeling, and a sorting—­other identities are literally and figuratively stripped from the body—­but are also productive of the category and concept of criminal, and a discourse that connects prisons and prison practices to ideas about security and justice. Within this discourse, the orange prison jumpsuit especially has become a visual synecdoche for criminality and prison as a logical response. Within the U.S. penitentiary system the orange prison jumpsuit remains in widespread use—­whether for short-­term inmates or maximum-­security prisoners and death-­row inmates (the “worst of the worst”). It is also one of the key cultural reference points for prison, appearing in countless popular cultural sites, from television shows such as Orange Is the New Black to Lego police play sets. But on January 11, 2002, the orange prison jumpsuit developed a new

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transnational political life and helped produce a new set of identities, categories, practices, and logics. As it was held up at the pre-­arrival press conference at Guantánamo on January 11; as Global War on Terror detainees dressed in orange were delivered to Camp X-­R ay later that day after a twenty-­two-­hour flight blindfolded and shackled; and as images of their arrival circulated internationally, not only were their bodies controlled, but also their identities were remade and a collective group re-­formed: the identity and category of superterrorist and illegal enemy combatant emerged and attached to the bodies of those twenty men and the seven hundred and fifty-­nine that followed. What emerged in the United States in the 1990s as prison wear, a set of practices, and a symbol associated with criminality and prison evolved into a mark of a terrorist and Guantánamo detainee. But, as it reappeared on the bodies of men held at the detention and interrogation facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantánamo, it also reemerged as an international icon of protest and spread globally as the core of a new international protest movement. In its latest form, the orange prison jumpsuit is a thing that makes the international. Through its ability to assemble, circulate, and symbolize easily, the orange prison jumpsuit captures the multiple meanings of Guantánamo, the Global War on Terror, and the role of the United States in the world. It did not follow these controversies and debates, but it helped to produce and popularize them. The orange prison jumpsuit and its political life can therefore tell us about the categorizing, boundary making, and networked dimensions of power in the international. By following the orange prison jumpsuit as it materialized in different sites and sights we can see the work this object did in the constitution of subjectivities and common sense around Guantánamo and security. What might otherwise seem a very everyday and inconsequential “thing,” a piece of clothing, can instead be seen as a part of a web of practices and ideas about what makes the United States and the world secure. Tracing its political life, what Arjun Appadurai referred to as its “social life,” we can understand different aspects, the extent and distribution of power operating locally, nationally, transnationally, and internationally.4 We see how security develops with and through things like the orange prison jumpsuit and how these things are constituent parts of the “margins, silences and bottom rungs” of high politics of U.S. security.5 The orange prison jumpsuit’s capacity to assemble with other objects (in particular, bodies), its capacity to become a marker or symbol within a discourse, to act as a site of encounters and resistance practices, and finally its capacity to circulate and be appropriated, helped to materialize competing security discourses.

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Prison Uniforms and Power In her study of prison dress, Dress behind Bars, Juliet Ash charts the evolution of prison clothing, its initial connection to prison reform movements, and the subsequent ways in which uniforms were used to discipline and punish prisoners, in part through shame and humiliation.6 In the process, she argues, uniforms enabled the reinvention of the concepts and categories of criminal and criminality. As she documents, alongside schools and hospitals (similar total institutions), prisons adopted uniforms in the early nineteenth century. U.S. prison inmates were first clothed in two-­toned clown-­type clothing, soon replaced by the familiar uniform of broad black and white stripes that was cheap to manufacture, distinctive enough to facilitate recapture, but also humiliating to wear in the eyes of the public.7 Out of this system emerged the orange prison jumpsuit (and its lightweight and more commonly used version, orange scrubs). While many U.S. prisoners today are permitted to wear clothing that more closely resembles streetwear such as denim shirts and jeans or gym wear, the orange prison uniform remains widely in use in jails and prisons, at the local, state, and federal levels. It is a suit designed not only for its hard-­wearing, uniform effect, but also for its high visibility and usefulness for distinguishing different groups inside the wire, as much as for those outside the wire looking in. Like uniforms more generally, prison uniforms are therefore invested with power in several ways: (1), as designed to be worn, they enable a mapping to take place between bodies and subjects, allowing for quick (mis)identifications; (2), their deindividualizing or flattening effect facilitates the dominance of one marker of identity over others, including ones that mark gender, race, or class identities; (3), they facilitate a hierarchical ordering and regulation of those positioned as inside the category and those outside—­guard uniforms versus detainee uniforms, for example; (4), they become sites of contestation: the uniform, how it is worn, not worn, altered, or used can become part of a larger battle for power as they are used to control and to resist; and (5), they circulate easily: a uniform can be transported or reproduced around the globe quickly and in multiple spaces and iterations. Uniforms are therefore invested with power in their capacity to act to reproduce categories, as durable traces, as weapons, and as icons.

The Jumpsuit as Category First, within the context of the prison, prisoner uniforms are connected to a set of practices that cut an individual off from the world while also acting like

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levers, inserting “the prisoner into the machinery of incarceration as an identical and interchangeable component.”8 As with prison architecture and prison restraints, prison uniforms serve both a control and a textualization function. Prisoners lose control not only over what they wear, what size it is (usually much too large), when it is washed (perhaps once a week and rarely is the same item returned), but also often what it, and therefore their bodies, signify. Within Guantánamo, therefore, through the orange prison jumpsuit individual detainees were subsumed into a larger collective group through its anonymizing and flattening function. Differences between detainees were erased in favor of an identity as “Guantánamo detainee.” The differences and highly relevant contrasts between Al-­Qaeda and the Taliban, cooks, drivers, and so-­ called masterminds, a wealthy Saudi and an Afghan tailor, farmers and journalists, fathers, brothers, and sons were conflated along with the circumstances of their capture (some were captured “on the battlefield,” some thousands of miles from it). Even guards were caught up by this categorization power. Specialist Sean Baker of the 438th Military Police Unit, a veteran of the first Gulf War, while stationed at Guantánamo in January 2003, was severely beaten while wearing an orange jumpsuit. Ordered to wear the suit and play the role of a detainee while taking part in a training exercise, Baker was (mis)identified as a detainee and receive a life-­threatening brain injury as he resisted. Despite having an American accent, direct pleas, choking, and repeatedly using the code word red to stop the exercise, it wasn’t until the orange jumpsuit was torn, revealing military battledress underneath, that Baker was identified and taken to hospital.9 But in addition to flattening, shifting, or substituting an individual identity, the prison uniform also produces the category of criminal and terrorist. As Claire Anderson suggests in Legible Bodies, a study of colonial prison practices, processes of “individualization and categorization are inextricably intertwined.”10 While the uniform marks individual bodies as prisoners, it also materializes the collective social group of a prisoner type that is distinct, discrete, and discontinuous from those outside it, rather than as part of a continuum and connected to other contexts and identities. The “paradox of identificatory techniques is that the individual is always made part of a collective group.”11 Uniforms make both individuals and collectives. The orange prison uniform therefore categorizes those who wear it, identifying those who wear it and connecting them to one another and to a specific interpretation of the events of 9/11, constituting a particular collective. To guards, they became “orange meat” and “carrots” (in “the Garden,” aka Camp X-­R ay).12 To the U.S. administration, they became among “the most dangerous,

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best-­trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”13 And to some detainees, the orange prison jumpsuit symbolized ongoing injustice and their own noncompliance with the forces that brought them there.

The Jumpsuit as Trace Second, through these suits, detainees were connected to the practices and procedures of the U.S. prison system. These suits were chosen because they were “typical dangerous prison attire.”14 As objects familiar from U.S. prison culture, these suits act as the “design equivalent to a continuous state of red-­ alert,” visually emphasizing the danger posed by crime regardless of proof of culpability.15 Within the U.S. cultural context, orange prison uniforms do work by shifting the signified, guilt, from one material signifier, the convicted criminal body, to another, the detainee. This connection between orange and guilt is recognized within the U.S. justice system. Under U.S. law, individuals held in custody but appearing in court have the right to apply to wear civilian clothes and appear without shackles, as the suggestion of such practices might prejudice a jury or the public.16 While detainees were denied the protections (however limited they may be at times) of due process within the American justice system, marking them with the orange prison uniforms—­alongside other prison practices used at Guantánamo—­helped to render “terrorists” and the Global War on Terror not only visible and categorizable, but also understandable. The choice of this prison uniform communicated detainees’ guilt. The uniforms were also part of a discourse that denied them the identity and rights associated with a framing and identity as prisoners of war. Under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war (POWs) are not required to wear uniforms except their own and cannot be clothed in humiliating items or marked with a system of clothing based on inmates’ behavior.17 Instead, the suits connected detainees to the U.S. “culture of punishment.”18 Denied the rights of POWs and the safeguards of the U.S. criminal justice system, detainees were nevertheless connected through sets of practices, objects, and spaces associated with the wider U.S. carceral state and its spectacle. But in addition to its symbolic power, the orange prison jumpsuit reflected the importation of a number of practices from the U.S. civilian prison system. For example, in keeping with U.S. prison practices, the orange prison jumpsuit enabled the introduction of a system of detainee classification. Within the first year, orange was reserved for the most resistant, noncooperative, and noncompliant detainees. More compliant and cooperative detainees, in contrast, were required to wear tan-­and-­white uniforms. This meant that the suit and

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its connection to this classification system could be showcased as evidence of the transformative impact of the site, as detainees could potentially move up levels and obtain greater privileges, as they would in civilian prisons. These compliant detainees were then housed in less restrictive facilities and made more visible for touring visitors.19 The orange prison jumpsuit is also an indication of how Guantánamo was built on the extensive and expanding involvement of private companies in Americas prisons. Initially manufactured in Mexico and then purchased by the Department of Defense from the Bob Barker Company (“America’s Leading Detention Supplier of Correctional Clothing”), it is but a small part of an extensive and growing web of connections between Guantánamo, the U.S. penitentiary system, and the private prison industry.20 Alongside the suits, Guantánamo was and is made possible by the revolving door of military reservists who work both as guards at Guantánamo and within the prison sector (private and public), the know-­how of private architectural firms that specialize in prison building, the private companies that manufacture and distribute restraints, force-­feeding chairs and closed-­circuit televisions, companies such as Sodexo that are experts in providing food for prisons and military bases (and universities), or even those that arrange the recruiting and contracts for the Third Country Nationals that continue to service the U.S. Naval Base Guantánamo more broadly. In short, the orange prison jumpsuit carried with it the power of the U.S. prison-­industrial complex through the webs of production and significance in which the uniform was already enmeshed. Through its connection to the U.S. prison system, the orange prison jumpsuit reflected a faith in a know-­how and set of practices of the world’s “prison nation” as well as being “a visible embodiment of punishment.”21 These uniforms helped produce security through the evidence of institutional control, the production of the category of superterrorist, and as part of a wider culture of punishment. So, while we can make sense of Guantánamo as the manifestation of a discourse of militarized exceptionalism, as an exceptional response to an exceptional threat, and as the product of a policy of creating a space “outside the law,” through the orange prison jumpsuit we can see a different security narrative at play in the constitution of Guantánamo: the narrative of prison as delivering security. By emerging not only out of U.S. military and CIA history, but also out of the U.S. prison and wider carceral system, Guantánamo is something unexceptional. Guantánamo’s material practices, as told through the orange prison jumpsuit, place it in alignment with current U.S. prison practices where what is normal is often exceptional brutality and where the justifications, extent, and practice of detention in the Global War on Terror is connected to the growing

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logic of imprisonment as a way to manage threat and risk.22 Instead of seeing Guantánamo as a military phenomenon, the orange prison jumpsuit is suggestive of how Guantánamo can be understood as connected to prison practices operating across the United States. It is a “durable trace” of this discourse that helped to make both detainees and superterorists.23

The Jumpsuit as Weapon In late 2007, WikiLeaks published the JTF Guantánamo Standard Operations Procedures (SOPs) from 2003 and 2004. Included in both versions, within the almost 250 pages of regulations and bureaucratic forms, were the rules governing the orange prison jumpsuit (sometimes classified as “linen” and “uniforms”). The SOPs provided specific guidance on the acceptable and unacceptable set of practices associated with this object: •In-­processing

of detainees involved cutting away of old uniforms and the issuing of the orange suit (top and bottom) alongside other identity markers such as serial number; •Linen was exchanged, forcibly if necessary, once a week; •Linen, if washed in the cell and hung to dry, could not be hung to obstruct windows, and had to be removed once dry; •Detainees were required to wear their orange uniform while outside the cell though the top could be removed inside and when in the exercise yard; •Clean and dirty items were inspected for damage by guards with each item documented on a special form (form CD-­S333); •If detainees refused to exchange their jumpsuit, if it was damaged, modified, or if it was missing or hidden, it was noted in form CD-­S334 and in the Detainee Information Management System (DIMS); and •If uniforms were found modified or damaged intentionally (guards were instructed to judge intention), detainees were punished with a category 1 punishment (loss of “comfort items” such as extra towels or toilet paper) or a category 2 punishment (removal to a lower level cell block or even segregation in the SHU, the solitary housing unit also known as solitary confinement).

The Guantánamo standard operating procedures, when read alongside the accounts of detainees, their lawyers, and former guards, therefore offer a hint at how the orange prison jumpsuit and the practices associated with it fac-

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tored into the battle over Guantánamo. It provides an indication of how the object was a weapon. Detainees did not passively accept their categorization as unlawful enemy combatants and terrorists, but challenged their detention, in some cases daily. This resistance was sometimes quiet and almost invisible (writing poetry or playing tricks on the guards) and sometimes violent and disruptive (dirty protests, hunger striking, and rioting). Often factoring into this resistance and counterresistance strategies was the orange prison jumpsuit. It became a site of contestation used by guards and detainees alike to control, to resist, and to counterresist detention. It was used to assert authority and to challenge it. For example, Ahmed Errachidi initiated a shirt-­tearing protest (or, in the words of the Guantánamo SOP, intentional “damage to government property”) throughout Guantánamo. In the spirit of the Blanket Protests at Long Kesh/ Maze prison in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, any shirts issued to detainees were torn during the two-­week protest. Conversely, Sami al-­Laithi refused to relinquish the orange suit for a white one when he was confirmed innocent (or “no longer an enemy combatant”) in a Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2006 but denied release. Binyam Mohamed, when facing a military commission the same year, refused to wear civilian clothing as stipulated by the tribunal rules (part of a series of practices designed to construct the tribunal as legal). Denied permission to wear his orange prison jumpsuit in court, he chose instead to wear a shirt dyed prisoner orange that was obtained by his lawyers. Claiming that he had already been judged, Mohamed sought to provide journalists with a spectacle and contest the legitimacy of the military commission system, and therefore the legitimacy of Guantánamo.24 The wearing and the removal of the orange prison jumpsuit were an important feature of the battle over Guantánamo. Apparent trivial objects, such as the orange prison jumpsuit, along with items such as water bottles, a few squares of toilet paper, a shower flip-­flop, a food tray, a bar of soap—­the only items a detainee may have had access to—­ therefore provide new opportunities, develop new meanings, and take on “a charge of defiance” within spaces like Guantánamo where power is constantly contested.25 In that sense again, Guantánamo was no exception. Eric Santner calls these opportunities and meanings “secretions,” institutional practices that also produce internal contradictions.26 The routines and disciplinary work that prisons like Guantánamo do result in “more trouble the tighter their hold [such that] the prison tends to secrete the very things it most tries to eliminate.”27 These “secretions,” which include but are not limited to extreme uses bodies, bodily fluids, and everyday objects such as the orange prison jumpsuit, were

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used by detainees to contest and do battle over their conditions of confinement, over the legitimacy of Guantánamo, the U.S. military, and the War on Terror more broadly. As the U.S. military exerted more and more control over detainees in order to extract “actionnable intelligence” and counterresistance, the more prone detainees were to resist by using “basic” items like the orange prison jumpsuit in inventive and extreme ways. The power invested in Guantánamo was therefore a power fought over and contested through practices associated with objects like the orange prison jumpsuit: who wore the suit, when and how, and how else it was used became a battle within the wider struggle to define Guantánamo and its meaning in the Global War on Terror. The orange prison jumpsuit was an object with and through which power was contested.

The Jumpsuit as Icon Finally, the same characteristics that made the orange prison jumpsuit popular first as prison wear and then as a cultural symbol for occasions such as Halloween—­hard-­wearing, highly visible, and cheap to manufacture and

Guantánamo Bay prisoner by Banksy, Islington, 2005. Photograph by Eadmundo, 2005, CC BY-­SA 2.0.

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Witness Against Torture detainees march from the White House to the U.S. Supreme Court, Washington, D.C., 2012. Photograph by Justin Norman, CC BY-­NC-­SA 2.0.

distribute—­also meant that the suit could circulate quickly and easily. From Guantánamo, for example, the suit moved through official channels to Iraq, appearing in the infamous Abu Ghraib series of photographs, but also to Afghanistan in January 2006 where it was used at Pul-­i-­Charkhi prison (provoking a riot in the process). At the same time, the suit began to appear on prisoners held by groups opposed to the United States and its policies. It was seen clothing hostages such as Nick Berg, a contractor beheaded in Iraq in 2004, and Bob Levinson, held in Iranian custody (unofficially) as a suspected CIA agent. But on a much larger scale, and almost immediately following Guantánamo’s (re)opening in 2002, the orange prison jumpsuit was appropriated by activists and artists opposed to Guantánamo. Terry Hicks, father of David Hicks, traveled from Australia to the United States in July 2003 to protest the detention of his son at Guantánamo. Rather than making his way to Washington to petition officials, Terry Hicks headed to New York City, donned an orange jumpsuit, and locked himself in a cage on Broadway. That same year, the Ultimate Holding Company (UHC) Art Collective of Manchester produced and populated a life-­size replica of Camp X-­R ay with orange-­clad detainees. In September 2006, guerrilla artist Banksy placed a life-­size replica of a detainee

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in an orange jumpsuit and hood inside the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland in California. And every year, on the anniversary of the arrival of the first set of detainees to Guantánamo, January 11, protesters gather outside the White House and outside U.S. embassies around the world in orange jumpsuits. The orange prison jumpsuit evolved into a ready-­made, highly visible, and inexpensive means to contest Guantánamo and U.S. policies. The distinctive orange color itself became part of campaigns to close Guantánamo as it was reworked into campaign buttons, T-­shirts, flyers, even lingerie (search online for Vivienne Westwood’s “Fair Trial My Arse” underwear). As one activist described it, “the orange jumpsuit was a way, a very simple way, of bringing a part of the world that people chose not to look at, would not choose to look at and make them have to look at it. . . . it seemed obvious that if you can buy a suit for £15 from B & Q and look like you’re from Guantánamo Bay and you’re making up a black hood for £2, it makes a very strong, powerful image that everyone is going to connect with . . . it’s inescapable, it’s simple and you can carry six of them round in the back of your car.”28 The orange prison jumpsuit, first an important synecdoche for prison, became an important synecdoche for Guantánamo and its controversial policies. But often appearing alongside the orange prison jumpsuit were a set of important additional items: wire mesh fences, military uniforms, waterboarding, and stress positions that helped to shift its interpretation from one associated with the U.S. prison system and terrorist in the Global War on Terror to torture victim. Orange-­suited figures were often mock-­waterboarded or force-­fed. In particular, the orange prison jumpsuit was most often articulated with the black hood from Abu Ghraib, bringing these two scandals together in one figure. The result has been the constitution of a new international “icon of outrage,” the Guantánamo Icon, which has remained a powerful symbol for those critical of U.S. policies.29 It is this Icon that has subsequently been located in very public and symbolically rich spaces (outside the U.S. Supreme Court or U.S. embassies) and in very everyday ones (such as the Brighton Pier or at Disneyworld). Increasingly, the Guantánamo Icon is appearing in connection with protesting U.S. policies toward Iran, torture by Turkish authorities, Spanish policies toward ETA, NATO expansion, and cartoon controversies, as well as appearing as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Even those supporting Guantánamo use the orange prison jumpsuit as visual shorthand: U.S. talk-­show host Rush Limbaugh used the Guantánamo Icon in his critique of the facility as being too soft on terrorists; a former detainee returning home to Britain was greeted by an effigy labeled “Tipton Taliban” dressed in orange outside his door. Nevertheless, whether describing Guantánamo as a resort-­style Club Gitmo that held 132

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hardened terrorists in the lap of luxury or a torture camp where innocent men were subjected to daily degrading treatment, the visual shorthand of an orange prison jumpsuit with black hood reappeared. In other words, the orange prison jumpsuit as an icon became an intertextual and intervisual reference point—­used in a host of other visual media to symbolize, alternatively, terrorists, torture, detention, U.S. administrations’ policies, and injustice.30 A trail of orange prison jumpsuits and Guantánamo Icons made their way around the globe uniting protests, people, spaces, and ideas. In response to these protests and their recirculation of the Guantánamo Icon, U.S. officials tried to take control of the public image of U.S. military detention and did so in part through control of the orange prison jumpsuit at Guantánamo. Orange-­dressed bodies were banished to the inside and less visible part of the site to prevent the production and circulation of more photographs while the uniforms appeared only in their disembodied forms as part of tours of Guantánamo.31 On March 16, 2006, responding to the ongoing criticisms of Guantánamo and its continued representation as Camp X-­R ay and the orange prison jumpsuit, John B. Bellinger III, Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State, argued that we have gone along making many changes in Guantanamo that simply have not been noticed. Very few people wear orange jump suits anymore, and yet that is the image that is being left with people all around the world, that everybody in Guantanamo is wearing an orange jump suit, kept in solitary, and wheeled off on gurneys to be interrogated or tortured. . . . the United States has had a very difficult [time] trying to correct these misimpressions.32 Despite the U.S. administration’s attempt to control the visual representation of the site and the narrative of the Global War on Terror and Guantánamo as “safe, humane, legal, transparent,” Guantánamo activists and artists continued to use the Guantánamo Icon. These performances helped to contest the official construction of Guantánamo, transforming its meaning and producing instead a common sense in which military detention, the U.S. military, and the U.S. state were engaged in torture. The orange prison jumpsuit was therefore at the heart of attempts to challenge the legitimacy of the global war on terror and the authority of the U.S. administration. The image of the orange-­clad Guantánamo detainee became visual shorthand, a visual metaphor, for a tortured rather than a terrorist subject position, and through its iconic status became a central feature of the dissenting discourse that sought to delegitimize Guantánamo despite the suit’s first being used to support it. The Guantánamo Orange Prison Jumpsuit

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Icon and its counternarrative made possible the continued associations between U.S. military detention, Guantánamo, Camp X-­R ay, and torture.

The Power of Things As category, through trace, as a weapon or as an icon, objects and their practices are used to construct, assign, contest, and communicate meanings. Objects like the orange prison jumpsuit work as symbols and inscribe meaning onto bodies, and in so doing, help to create categories and boundaries. As they move through social and political landscapes, they are the site of encounters, control, and resistance, and they are connected with processes of meaning making through circulation, (re)appropriation, reassembly, and reiterations. As such, the orange prison jumpsuit played a key role in the setup of Guantánamo and in the subsequent battles fought inside and outside the wire over the legitimacy of the site, of torture, and of the wider Global War on Terror. The orange prison jumpsuit both facilitated Guantánamo’s existence and longevity and enabled its greatest challenge, an international resistance campaign constructed around the Guantánamo Icon symbol of protest. As Olivier Razac argues with respect to everyday and insignificant-­seeming objects: “The instruments which serve authority best are those which expend the smallest amount of energy possible to produce the effects of control and domination.”33 As an object, the orange jumpsuit, though small and everyday, nevertheless played a part in defining and shaping the debate over Guantánamo and continues to do so, whether as part of the system of discipline, through its addition and removal, its disappearance and reappearance, or its use as a tool of resistance both inside and outside the wire. The way we understand and interact with the world is through objects like the orange prison jumpsuit, along with the language, ideas, spaces, and bodies with which these objects come into contact. To study these objects offers insight into the operations of power. Following the orange prison jumpsuit, its curious political life, and how it makes meaning is therefore an instructive way of understanding how materiality helps to produce and transform meaning. The orange prison jumpsuit is a thing that makes the international.

Notes 1. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 222. 2. Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller, eds., Clothing as Material Culture (Oxford:

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Berg, 2005). See also Joanne Entwhistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), and Ian Woodward, Understanding Material Culture (London: Sage, 2007). 3. Jennifer Craik, “The Cultural Politics of the Uniform,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 7(2) (2003): 127–­47; Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Nathan Joseph and Nicholas Alex, “The Uniform: A Sociological Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 77(4) (1972): 719–­30. 4. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 5. Cynthia Enloe, “Margins, Silences, and Bottom Rungs: How to Overcome the Underestimation of Power in the Study of International Relations,” in Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186–­202. 6. Juliet Ash, Dress behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 157. 9. Nicholas Kristoff, “Beating Specialist Baker,” New York Times, June 5, 2004, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/05/opinion/beating-specialist-baker .html, accessed 14 July 2014. 10. Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 4n11. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Moazzam Begg with Victoria Brittain, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back (London: Free Press Books, 2006), 206; Montgomery Granger (@mjgranger1), Tweet (June 29, 2013). 13. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, in Gerry J. Gilmore, “Rumsfeld Visits, Thanks U.S. Troops at Camp X-­R ay in Cuba,” American Forces Press Service, January 27, 2002, available at http://www.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=43817 (accessed July 9, 2014). 14. Carole Rosenberg, personal correspondence, March 6, 2013; emphasis added. 15. Trevor Boddy, “Architecture Emblematic: Hardened Sites and Soft Symbols,” in Michael Sorkin, ed., Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State (London: Routledge, 2009), 301. 16. Saul M. Kassin and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, The American Jury on Trial: Psychological Perspectives (New York: Hemisphere, 1988), 102. 17. Geneva Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Article 27, Part III, Section II, Chapter II: Quarters, food and clothing of prisoners of war, August 12, 1949. 18. Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 19. Elspeth Van Veeren, “Captured by the Camera’s Eye: Guantánamo and the

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Shifting Frame of Detention in the Global War on Terror,” Review of International Studies 37(4) (2011): 1721–­49; Elspeth Van Veeren, “Materialising U.S. Security: Guantánamo’s Object Lessons and Concrete Messages,” International Political Sociology 8(1) (2014): 20–­42. 20. Avery F. Gordon, “Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror,” Race & Class 48(1) (2006): 42–­59. 21. Ash, Dress behind Bars, 155–­57. 22. Avery Gordon, “The United States Military Prison: The Normalcy of Exceptional Brutality,” in Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch, eds., The Violence of Incarceration (London: Routledge, 2009). 23. I borrow the concept of “durable trace” from William Walters, “The Power of Inscription: Beyond Social Construction and Deconstruction in European Integration Studies,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 31(1) (2002): 91. On “trace,” see Jacques Derrida,  Of Grammatology, trans.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 24. Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 101. 25. For discussions of resistance in prisons, see Lorna A. Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Mary Bosworth and Eamonn Carrabine, “Reassessing Resistance: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Prison,” Punishment & Society 3(4) (2001): 501–­15. 26. Eric Santner in Rhodes, Total Confinement, 240n8. 27. Ibid., 29. 28. Martin Nicholls, interviewed by the author, Brighton, July 31, 2013. 29. David D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998). 30. This reappropriation was not without problems. Although it can be suggested that the anti-­Guantánamo narrative tied to the orange prison jumpsuit contributed to efforts to close Guantánamo, the icon produces a politics of its own that is also open to critique. Specifically, by operating within the same logic as the original series of images, the Guantánamo Icon produces some of the same troubling politics: namely, a reinscription of boundaries between subjectivities, a dehumanizing and depersonalizing of the Guantánamo figure, as well as an icon that remains unfixed and used as successfully by those supporting torture and Guantánamo. 31. Van Veeren, “Captured by the Camera’s Eye”; Van Veeren, “Materialising U.S. Security.” 32. John B. Bellinger III, “Digital Video Press Conference with John B. Bellinger III, Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State,” United States Department of State, March 13, 2006, available at http://germany.usembassy.gov/germany/bellinger_dvc.html (accessed July 7, 2007). 33. Olivier Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History, trans. Jonathan Knight (New York: New Press, 2002), x.

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Flags Rune Saugmann Andersen, Xavier Guillaume, and Juha A. Vuori

Do you have a flag? —­Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill

Flags are an obvious object to think about the international. Flags have already been analyzed in regard to nationalism and national identities, but we make the case here that flags are a fruitful thing through which one can provide an analytics of the international and its permutations too (Hylland Eriksen and Jenkins 2007a; Billig 1995). One way to make things international is to make them appear internationally, to represent assemblies among assemblies; a flag, then, is a way to visualize collective entities and to make them appear among other collective entities as abstract symbols (Gamboni 2005, 162). Flags can represent collectives as symbolic effigies, as a flag is both an “emblematic picture” and a “symbolic object” that has specific codes and rituals attached to it (Pastoureau 2005, 78). Flags have come to represent states, international organizations, social and political movements (the Green revolution, the Communist International, and so on), and even nongovernmental or paragovernmental actors (privateers, filibusters, and mercenaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), but also are increasingly extended toward national and local entities: for example, sports teams or corporations (via jerseys, insignias, logos, or even the body of individuals) make themselves international through the use of flags and/or the colors of the national flag (think of Ikea, for instance). Flags easily extend their symbolism through their colors and color combinations and thus, in contrast to other national insignia such as the coat of arms or the national anthem, are implicated even in our most quotidian experience of the international. Beyond a symbol of a collective, a flag is a window into the genealogy of the international. The modern flag is a European invention that participated in the development of the modern, international state system. As this system has endured, flags have also become representative of the longue durée of the modern

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international state system and the stability and endurance of its boundaries and conventions. Countries rarely change their flags outside of major reasons such as the end of an empire (like the USSR) or defeat in a war (ibid., 83). The participation in this system as a state, or rather as a legitimate collective in the eyes of other legitimate states, is partly determined by the development, possession, and recognition of a flag. Flags thus open up a specific material analytics of a certain international culture and epoch. Indeed, in terms of Dingpolitik, a flag can be viewed as a Ding, a thing that unites and divides, a thing around which assemblies gather out of a common concern (Latour 2005, 14). For example, assemblies can gather to burn the flag, to raise it, to march with or against it, or to rally around it; the Orange parades in Northern Ireland naturally come to mind (see Bryan 2000). A flag can itself also be the uniting or dividing concern at an assembly. Furthermore, flags can represent that which is represented at the assembly. Flags can represent assemblies too. A flag is basically some kind of fabric that is attached to a shaft. As a noun, though, the word flag derives from the old Norse or Saxon verb flakka/fflakken, which means to flutter or flap (Weitman 1973, 336).1 Yet, flapping is not what commonsensically is taken to characterize a flag today. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a flag as “A piece of cloth or stuff (usually bunting), varying in size, colour, and device, but most frequently oblong or square, attached by one edge to a staff or to a halyard, used as a standard, ensign or signal, and also for decoration or display.”2 Such a definition emphasizes the signaling use as the feature that defines a flag, rather than its ability to flap. A flag is thus both a material object and something else: it is a colorful thing, and it is something that means. More precisely, any specific flag is produced by its colors: they fix its parameters through design, colors’ pigmentation, coloration, luminosity, and so on. Colors as the defining feature of a flag allow it to escape the flapping piece of cloth and appear in print, on screens, or in the color combinations of practically any object. All things display color but few things are as dependent on them for being what they are. For example, while a red Ferrari is iconic to Ferrari cars, a black, white, or yellow Ferrari ultimately remains a Ferrari car, and the same goes for most objects. A red flag, however, is not the same thing as a white or a black flag, in the sense that it does not exert an effect on assemblies in the same way precisely because it does not possess the same color. Yet, despite its centrality, coloration is not an objective dimension of a flag. What the color red might represent in a flag, or even the meaning of the red flag, will differ from culture to culture, from country to country, and from

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epoch to epoch (see Guillaume, Andersen, and Vuori 2015). For instance, the color red, which is now clearly associated with danger, has only possessed this connotation since the eighteenth century and the meaning of the red flag as a revolutionary flag only crystallized in the nineteenth century (Pastoureau and Simonnet 2005, 38–­39). And while the color red is now primarily associated in Western countries with danger, or passion, it is can also be associated with luck or purity in Asia. Red is a color found in Chinese weddings, for instance, whereas white is dominant in the West; or rather, it should be noted that in Europe white wedding dresses only became the norm, instead of red or black, in the nineteenth century. Colors are therefore what we can term a material semiotic resource: both material and intersubjective. Colors as a material semiotic resource are thus paramount in making up the materiality of a flag: the colors of the flag are those elements that define and shape another (semiotic relationality); different kinds of actors can be represented by a flag (heterogeneity), and material stuff is what makes something a token of a flag (materiality) (Law 2009, 146). Flags are not only a combination of colors, they are also cloth, flagpole, design, shape, and so on. But when the intersection of flags and the international is interrogated, it becomes apparent that even if the general flag designs of national flags (e.g., shape, dimensions) have important international dimensions, neither these nor flagpoles represent a specific flag in isolation. The color combination, on the other hand, does so irrespective of whether it is dyed on cloth, drawn on paper, or appears on a computer screen. Conversely, without its colors, a flag would just be a piece of cloth or paper, neither emblematic and able to carry a broad range of symbolic meanings nor to take part in a complex system of differentiation. You simply cannot paint a colorless flag on your face. Indeed, it is the color(s) of a flag that allow it to extend its reach, to “be transposed to alien contexts,” to become materialized in all sorts of things (Hylland Eriksen 2007, 7). Such features make it possible for flags to enter daily life, not only of the movement, group, or state it symbolizes, but of myriads of individuals, corporations, and associations that may or may not have a direct connection to what a particular flag represents. Flags form a system of objects that are made sense of through colors and are a crucial part of the material practices that generate the international. By taking the system of flags as a system of signification, we can use semiotic thought to analyze the role of flags and their colors in making the international. To study flags as a network of colorful material semiotic objects allows us to also examine the sociological phenomenon of nations and the international.

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We claim in this chapter that flags cannot be understood without their colors, which constitute more than an optical or a physiological phenomenon: to adorn a flag produces meaning and, in performative terms, flags are used to do things. After having made this point, we then examine potential analytics about/of the international through colors and flags from a genealogical viewpoint, and with a focus on the everydayness of the international as experienced through flags.

Colors as Semiotic Materiality Color is not a purely optical or physiological phenomenon. Human visual experiences are inextricably intertwined with cultural, social, and emotional dimensions (Arnkil 2008, 15). When we examine what color is and, more important for our purpose, what color means, it is thus important to distinguish between the physical reasons for color and the forms by which humans experience color. For example, from a purely physiological perspective, there are at least fifteen different physical reasons for the appearance of color, which range from the atomic level to the optical effects of light. The forms of color are furthermore confounded by the fact that the same physiological red can also mean several things depending on cultural, historical, and social circumstances, as was illustrated above by the history of the red flag (Pastoureau 2005, 79–­81, 86–­87). A social analytics based on colors concentrates on the ways colors are used symbolically. This color use is not only contextual to a specific culture, or society; it also evolves through time. Colors “foremost are conventions, tags, social codes. Their primary function is to distinguish, to classify, to associate, to oppose, to hierarchise” (Pastoureau and Simonnet 2005, 112). Colors are therefore central in any system of signification and in flags precisely participate in the classification and hierarchization of individuals, groups, ideas, values, and so on into specific symbolic categories, such as the international (Barthes 1973; Guillaume 2007). Colors are an important feature of many objects that render themselves to analysis of what the international is. A Humvee sporting a brilliant yellow color tells a different story from a Humvee in desert camouflage, even though both stories are about international political economy, civil–­military relations, and questions of automobility. At the same time, the color of a material object may enable its use for certain purposes and impede for others: colors act and are used to do things. Furthermore, colors themselves are often considered a material thing such as pigments or paint that often possess a material feature as a surface. Certain

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aspects of color relate to material features of objects and surfaces, and color is often taken as an inseparable feature of objects, surfaces, and spaces. It appears as attached to objects, to be on top of them, or to radiate from them. The features of objects and how we relate to them are greatly influenced by their color, and conversely, color can alter the visual properties of a material. The function of color in a national flag is to differentiate a particular state, so the signification of color cannot be ambiguous. For example, red can mean danger but it can also mean passion, while black can be a telluric sign linked to hell but it can also mean temperance and humility (Pastoureau and Simmonet 2005, 33, 95). Such ambiguity cannot be allowed in a strong system of signification such as the international system of flags. The range of colors that are used in national flags is actually very limited (Weitman 1973, 341). The system of national flags has very formalized and limited systems of syntagms (or units that form meanings in relation to each other) for obvious reasons: their units must be unambiguously and immediately legible from afar. The super-­signs of national flags and color schemes allow for quick recognition and decoding, and have a strong collective character (Kiefer 1970). Another important feature of flags is that they do not merely relay information, but they can be used to do things, in a similar manner as language can be used to commit speech acts. For example, to place a flag somewhere can be the material manifestation of a declaration of ownership. Similarly, flags can be used to surrender, identify, or draw attention. This takes place even in metaphoric terms. For example, persons of interest can be “flagged” at airport identity checks. That flags can have such uses means that they belong to what Rancière calls a system of visibility (2011, 99). While Barthes emphasized systems of signification that produce meaning through syntagmatic relations between their units, systems of visibility are a part of aesthetic regimes that modulate what is seen and said and also what is done and what can be done. Flags produce a prior distribution of the sensible within fields of life, that is, the modes of articulation between forms of action, production, perception, and thought (Rancière 2008). Such regimes work to form a common sense of the international: like other images with a strong collective character, a flag “is an element in a system that creates a certain sense of reality, a certain common sense” (Rancière 2011, 102). The system of national flags forms a community of sensible data: shared visibility, modes of perception, and conferred meanings. Concomitantly, it binds individuals or groups together into “a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data,

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shared ways of perceiving, being affected and imparting meaning” (ibid.). Such common senses construct different realities, and thereby also different ways of constituting the visible at the international level.

Flagging the International We now turn to three arguments about the constitution of the international through “the cunning use of flags” (Izzard 1999). First, we explore a genealogy of flags. The examination of flags provides a material history of the development and diffusion of the Western conception of the international as a specific embodiment of formally equal sovereign states. We then move on to examine flags as a material representation of the international in everyday life. Flags are things that enable individuals to grasp, interact with, and enact an abstract and distant international. Colors are adorned or waved, thus enacting the international, but it is also possible to do something to them or with them such as demonstrate with, burn, trample, carry, or die for them. Finally, flags can tell a story of the commodification of what a certain hegemonic understanding of the international is: national colors are used commercially and national colors adorn a range of products. Flags can be consumed in a commercial sense too. At the same time, they are part of a contestation and challenge of that calcified meaning through their ability to carry alternative forms of mobilization and identification than the state; this is so because flags—­of social and political movements, sport teams, and so on—­are transfigured through a multitude of commodity (jerseys, memorabilia, insignia, and so on) that in themselves become the things through which the international is (un)made. Flags can be considered “condensed symbols” that have become the identity and boundary makers par excellence of modern European states—­that emerged in the sixteenth century with the centralization of taxation and warring (Tilly 1992)—­and, more particularly, of modern European nation-­states that emerged in the late eighteenth century with the development of national ideologies (Elgenius 2007, 22; Hylland Eriksen 2007, 3). Modern nation-­states have tried to avoid the potential ambiguity that arises from a flag’s ability to possess multiple potential meanings because there are several meanings attached to their hues depending on time and contexts (Hylland Ericksen 2007, 5, 7). In effect, the emergence of modern flags was intimately, yet not exclusively, linked to military developments, warring, and seafaring, which necessitated the settlement of specific declinations of what a flag looked like in order for flags to become part of the material practice that would enact an increasingly international world. Moreover, the use of color and heraldic design in flags also

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participated in the constitution of an elaborate system of signification that corresponds to the system of states founded in the same period. In her quantitative comparative study of flags, Weitman notes as an outstanding feature of flags “their very codability, i.e. their amenity to content analysis” (1973, 341). Modern nation-­states’ flags are already coded: they operate according to a relatively strict set of rules that govern both color use and design, which—­unsurprisingly—­makes the coding process easy. The flag is highly disciplined and designed to be unambiguous, easy to decipher. The combination of colors is highly skewed, with only seven color combinations accounting for sixty percent of the world’s flags (ibid.). These limitations are far from accidental, but testify to both the discipline of a system of signification that goes beyond individual nation-­states and the overwhelming systematic character of the things that come to define it. While all flags are different, “the vast majority of nation-­states [conform] to standard patterns of flag-­design and composition,” thus highlighting the domination of the European past in the definition of the norms of what it is to be a state in the international society (ibid., 338). Indeed, a national flag is not just about its primary symbolism of a nation-­ state. It is a testimony to membership in a highly disciplined club, that of states, and governed by distinct codes from other flags. Such a membership regulates their interactions, including symbolic interactions, to suit common norms, not just individual ends. When subnational entities adopt a flag that conforms to this system of signification, it is thus at once a call for independence or autonomy (from the state it differentiates itself from) and for inclusion (in the community of disciplined members that recognize each other). This has been illustrated, for instance, in the case of Aceh when the provincial authorities decided to use the flag of the former Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) as the provincial flag. The Indonesian government first rejected the flag because it basically suggested that the province was seditious, thus claiming to be on par with the Indonesian state (Parlina 2013). Indeed, the question of which kind of flag some subnational entity is allowed to adopt is not without significance: as Pastoureau notes, “A flag does not exist by itself but participates in an international system of emblematic images,” it is a function of other flags to which it answers to by picking up some colors, designs, or emblems, or rejecting them (Pastoureau 2005, 80–­83). The mutually recognized possession of a flag is thus an important marker of belonging, as the dispute over the flag of the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) also attests (Tziampiris 2012). How flags have been considered vital for inclusion in the system of states is

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pointedly presented by British comedian Eddie Izzard in a monologue where he explains the ability of Western countries to “build up empire and [steal] countries . . . with the cunning use of flags.” By asking the question “Do you have a flag?” European colonizers justified their territorial pretensions, to the dismay of the local population, by equating the lack of a modern European flag with the lack of being a country, that is, a sovereign nation-­state (Izzard 1999). In a similar vein, Latour criticizes “cheap relativism” as equating the nation: “let everyone gather under their own flag, and if they have no flag, let them hang themselves!” (Latour 2005, 35). This rule “that I [i.e., European countries] just made up” actually is quite revealing about the creation of the international state system, as the influence of the West in “the development and then diffusion of vexillary repertoires that have had an official and international role in diplomacy and commerce” demonstrates (Pastoureau 2005, 78). To take but the example of the different significations that have been attached to the development of the Indian flag, one can witness an evolution “from a sign of socialist internationalist revolution [in the early 1900s] to a sign of the people-­nation [in the 1920s and 1930s] and, [in the immediate postcolonial period], to a sign of sovereign nation-­ statehood” (Roy 2006, 509). The later version of the Indian flag, which became the official design of the Indian state’s flag, was seen by Nehru as a “sign of arrival—­the end of the anticolonial movement with the transfer of power to a sovereign Indian state” (ibid., 510). The flag, as an internationally necessary object to be a state, acted as a Ding on Nehru and others because they felt the need to conform to certain conventions and norms about nation-­statehood that are not written out anywhere but are in the flag as such. In other words, participation in this international heraldic system was not only seen as a marker of what encapsulated Indian nationhood to the minds of key figures of Indian independence and nationalism, but also a marker of India’s belonging, as a sovereign nation-­state, to a larger system of representation and signification, the international state system, and to its codes. Tellingly, Nehru imposed the adoption of the symbol of the Aśoka chakra (wheel of life) as a sign of India’s internationalist nationalism over Gandhi’s charkha (spinning wheel), which was present in the version of the flag of the 1920s and 1930s, partly on the ground “of aesthetics and international standards of heraldic design” (ibid., 511). In Nehru’s view, the preservation of the tricolor design was a marker of India’s resolve to retain its universalist or internationalist promise, a direct reference to the tricolor flags in Europe, which for the most part emerged and were seen as symbols of revolutions or political upheavals against oppressors (Elgenius 2007).

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The question of whether or not a nation has a flag is vital: not only are there no flagless states in the international state system, but flags are fully part of diplomatic practices that are constitutive of this system and are even regulated by conventions or diplomatic customs (see, for instance, Feltham 2004, 8, 31, 33–­34, 49, 53). To a certain extent, then, an internationally recognized national territorial entity exists through its flag that is adorned on the embassy or on the official car. The only territories to be regulated and recognized by the international state system without having a flag to embody this recognized status are those that are considered to be international: the seas, and Antarctica.3 And when in these zones of indistinction, traveling objects are required to identify themselves by a flag. Flags differ here from many other national symbols, such as national anthems or animals. For example, the national anthems of Finland and Estonia have the same melody, yet these two countries could not have the same flag. Other symbols of the state tend also to be less stable than its flag. For example, the People’s Republic of China has varied in having the great panda and the red-­crowned crane—­and even the Chinese dragon—­as a national animal. National flags are different in this regard. Like states and their sovereign territories, flags have to be distinct, and a state cannot have several national flags. Such unique and stable markers of difference are important for making the international. Flags are thus not only functional markers to distinguish between ships, armies, or individuals, they materialize diffuse values, identities and communities that are cognized and felt through them (Castoriadis 1975, 132). These values, identities, and communities constitute not only nation-­states but also the international, and allow humans the ability to touch such abstract and social creations. This genealogical linkage between flags and the modern state system is evident from the ways in which flags can also serve as a countermemory to the hegemonic codification they represent and bring into material form. A good example here is how the “Mohawk Warrior flag” became an international symbol of resistance to oppression during a territorial dispute between the Canadian government and the Kanienkehaka people in 1990. The flag was originally designed in the 1970s as the “Unity flag” by a Kanienkehaka philosopher and activist, Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (Doxtater 2010). The flag was made in order to represent the social order, perhaps even the international system, between different indigenous Iroquois nations that existed before the arrival of European powers and settlers. The development and adoption of an indigenous flag, such as the Mohawk Warrior flag, is part of a strategy to “mimic [in Homi K. Bhabha’s sense] the colonizing society by attempting to use things like the concepts of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘nations’ to get back to what is believed to be

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authentic Kanienkehaka classifications and ways of living and doing things” (ibid., 106). The flag, which portrays an indigenous face in profile in a red background with the yellow rays of the sun, reclaims an image that has tended to be commercialized (ibid., 114). In using the codes of the international heraldry of the modern nation-­state system, the flag enables First Nations communities to make certain claims about their legitimacy as a nation, in the nation-­state sense, which they could not attain otherwise in this system. The flag is thus a thing that invokes specific forms of formal and symbolic recognition, as a nation-­state in a specific international system, and the mimicry through this thing is as telling as its conscious adoption presented in the case of India discussed earlier. By virtue of its imbrication with the international, a flag can also be an agent in resistance against the national. For example, when Danish film director Lars von Trier was included in a Danish right-­wing government’s “cultural canon” of national artworks in 2006, von Trier responded by releasing a do-­it-­ yourself video for cultivating the nation to resist the nationalizing of culture. The video shows von Trier cutting the white cross from Dannebrog (the Danish flag) and sewing the flag back together, now as a monochrome red flag. During the act, the score music shifts from the Danish royal anthem to the tones of the socialist anthem “The Internationale.” Von Trier’s performance plays upon the codes of international flag design, using these to easily enable the transformation of a national flag into an international one. The characteristically unambiguous colors in national flags play a role in extending the reach of the flag and its signification into the quotidian life of (national) citizens or those who adhere to its signification. This comes about by signaling such adherence and belonging to the imagined community invoked by the flag. By showing how the seemingly unambiguous Dannebrog hides the socialist standard of the red flag, the video seeks to disrupt such easy identification and signification. Indeed, by perverting the colors of the Danish national flag, von Trier suggests the shallowness and fragility of the homogeneous Danish identity as imagined by the government. As we have shown, flags thus open up new ways of studying the international in a genealogical fashion from the perspective of things. Whether one thinks of war, seafaring, commerce, diplomacy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and so on, flags are things that resonate with a material analytics of the vectors by which norms are disciplined and spread, meanings and identities imposed and shared, or forms of governmentality diffused. Furthermore, like Patoreau, we can ask: What are the “zone[s] of extension and the period[s]” we can assign to flags as a “specific emblematic formula”? (Pastoureau 2005, 79).

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As the cases of the Indian or the Mohawk Warrior flags have shown, an important question that needs to be addressed is that of understanding why and how states, political regimes, or different collectives are exporting, adopting, and/or mimicking this specific heraldic emblematic system.

Internationalizing the Everyday The international is also something that is lived in everyday experiences, most particularly through the constant confrontations with markers of nation-­ states through the semiotic system of signification within which they are given a reality. In that respect, it is interesting to note how the meaning of the concept of “flagging” has evolved from something flapping to something that is repeatedly highlighted (such as the nation). Michael Billig’s thesis of “banal nationalism” extends beyond such obvious symbolic objects as flags and national insignia to encompass less obvious forms of invoking the nation, yet still uses the metaphor of flagging for this constant invocation (1995, 93). Flags are present in places beyond their obvious place on the facade of buildings or at nationalist spectacles, such as military parades and sports contests; they are invoked in countless more or less obvious ways: Symbolic object, emblematic picture, personified allegory, both signal and memory, present, past and future, the flag undergoes all forms of ritual manipulations specific to signs that are too strong, to signs that exponentially transcend their message and function. The flag lives and dies, it resurrects, it mourns, it is hurt, one re-­sews it, one deploys it, one salutes it, one embraces it, one lies on it, one dies in it, then one folds it, stores it, makes it prisoner, sanctifies it, forgets it. (Pastoureau 2005, 84) As we argued earlier, colors are necessary for a flag to be a meaningful thing as a thing. Yet, the flag as a thing is in turn what makes other things something that is not open to contention, or, on the contrary, something that is. An example is coffins, and the bodies therein. The coffins of French, British, or U.S. soldiers coming back from Mali, Afghanistan, or Iraq are covered by their respective national flags. The use of the national flag to cover such coffins is an imposition of meaning about the thing within—­the body of the dead solider—­ and a reminder that this body is an extension of the state. Even when pictures of the coffin and the body are forbidden, as was the case of U.S. coffins coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan until recently, the flag still adorns it even when

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it is not to be publicly seen. For the body of these soldiers to become something meaningful (the question then being for whom?), it is covered with a flag; the flag takes the body beyond its sheer corporeality to make it a meaningful and national object (rather than something else, such as sacrifice or revolution, for example). Acts such as wearing the flag, being adorned by it, painting it on your face, trampling on it, burning it, or raising it make the national and concomitantly the international a haptic experience; through such acts, the international is not only an abstract relation between nation-­states but becomes something that produces touch sensations with accompanied visual or even auditory stimuli—­such as the flapping sound of a flag. The national and the international are materialized. Indeed, a flag is a symbolic and physical representation of the state on a variety of material documents, whether guides, maps, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and so on, or in a variety of practices such as wearing a national jersey, marching with a flag in specific contexts, burning it, and so on (ibid., 78). Such contexts are given their internationality, and at the same time are constituting the latter: what makes the flag is not its fabric, but the semiotic code. Yet, such codes require a material manifestation in order for a certain object to become an actant of a flag. Flags materialize the international and the contentions about its meaning; flags can erase or exalt corpses, making the latter a locus of semiotic struggle.4 Yet, in many countries, flag desecration is a serious crime. For example, in the United States, such acts have many times led to charges and legal disputes involving the Supreme Court, where it has become a site for contestation in regard to freedom of speech considerations. In these examples, flag desecration can be understood materially, as the flag, as a thing, is what unites and separates; a flag is a thing of public concern. The desecration of a flag can also form assemblies. The international is here materialized by flags, as their desecration is the desecration of an abstract and imagined entity such as a state. The reminding that happens with “flagging” is, in Billig’s thesis, “not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on a public building” (1995, 8). Yet, a flag extends far beyond official buildings or settings, and beyond its incarnation as a flag. This sets it apart from other official symbols of a nation-­state, such as a coat of arms, that share many features with the flag. The extension of a flag is apparent, first, in how the prevalent colors or color combinations of a national flag permeate the nation and invoke both nationality and belonging in less specific terms. Moreover, through color, a flag can be

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materialized in many forms, such as in national teams’ jerseys, various insignias, or even on human faces via makeup. Color connects the signaling of belonging to the wider use of flags beyond the nation-­state. The use of corporate flags, for example, has become widespread with the spread of branding, which has influenced businesses, institutions, and nations alike. Corporate colors are a prominent way of signaling national belonging, as when the flag of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea fuses national identity with brand identity and thereby appropriates the connotations of Sweden as a nation. In the words of the company’s Web site: “It’s no accident that the Ikea logo is blue and yellow. These are the colors of the Swedish flag” (Ikea 2013). The different avatars of the flag also transform it into an object of commerce in specific contexts (Hylland Eriksen and Jenkins, 2007a, xiii). A significant example is the Union Jack, and its contrast to some other European national flags. The Union Jack, unlike, say, the French or German flags, possesses a strong international marketability for specific products—­cars, T-­shirts, boots, socks, and so on (Hylland Eriksen 2007, 9). In no respect does this mean that every single individual wearing the Union Jack’s colors is a Briton, let alone a British nationalist. The Union Jack is here associated with a specific period of pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and can still connote certain popular values of that period when British pop had a global impact. Beyond such values, however, the Union Jack is, in this context, simply a trademark, a marker of commerciability. A flag can be an object of consumption. The consumability and ubiquity of flags have made them interesting to commercial interests. Most corporations have, as in the Ikea example, appropriated the idea of flagging and the associated idea of being present in a banal way in people’s everyday lives. The spread of flags and flagging from states and its institutions to all kinds of businesses and organizations testifies to their desire to be unambiguously recognized and to permeate society. States, however, have early on regulated the use of their heraldic emblems, and thus their flags, and forbidden their use as trademarks since the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1883, a convention that was reaffirmed in 1993 by the European Union Council Regulation No. 40/94 on the Community trademark. These legal dispositions have been rarely invoked, however, until the late 1990s and have been appreciated differently by national courts. This opens up a venue to reflect about the consumption and commercialization of flags and related avatars. What are the states, political regimes, and so on that export their emblematic systems? Who is consuming them? Is it part of a conscious form of branding? How are these phenomena related to forms of contestation of the international or to forms of commodification?

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Flags as International Semiotic Materiality In this chapter we have examined colors and flags as semiotic materiality in order to see how they shape not only social interactions in the international, but the international itself. Flags are both an emblematic picture and a symbolic object that have specific codes and rituals attached to them and have come to materially represent states, international organizations, social and political movements, nongovernmental or paragovernmental actors, even in our most quotidian experience of the international. Flags are also a window into the genealogy of the international and its everyday uses and materializations, through jerseys, memorabilia, and so on, that use the colors of flags as marketing tools. Flags are also representative of the longue durée of the international state system and the stability and endurance of its modern boundaries. As a European modern sign of sovereignty, flags thus open up a specific material analytics of a certain international culture and epoch. Flags, then, are things that unite and divide people, both nationally and internationally; flags are objects of concern and objects that focus assemblies, but at the same time they are things that make the international. The flag, which both instantiates and depends on this semiotic system, becomes a representative of this system of signification as well as a representative of a specific (sub)state or community. This also means that flags, things done with flags, and critique or resistance involving flags all speak to both the system of signification and the community represented in a concrete flag.

Notes 1. etymonline.com (accessed August 8, 2013). 2. “flag, n. 1,” OED online, June 2013, Oxford University Press: http://www.oed .com/view/Entry/70889?rskey=0xrtVG&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed July 5, 2013). 3. The Antarctic Treaty Organization adopted a flag for Antarctica in 2002, yet it is not internationally recognized as signaling the territory, and interestingly does not conform to the codes of national flags. 4. We thank Mike Shapiro for his input about this dimension.

References Arnkil, Harald. 2008. Värit havaintojen maailmassa. Helsinki: Helsinki University of Art and Design. Barthes, Roland. 1973 [1964]. Elements of Semiology. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang.

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Bhabha, Homi K. 2008 [1994]. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE Publications. Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition, and Control. London: Pluto Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1975. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Doxtater, Kahente (Horn-­Miller). 2010. “From Paintings to Power.” Socialist Studies: The Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 6(1): 96–­124. Elgenius, Gabriella. 2007. “The Origin of European National Flags.” In Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Richard Jenkins, eds., Flag, Nation, and Symbolism in Europe and America, 14–­30. London: Routledge. Feltham, Ralph G. 2004. Diplomatic Handbook. 8th ed. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers. Gamboni, Dario. 2005. “Composing the Body Politic. Composite Images and Political Representation, 1651–­2004.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibei, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 162–­95. Cambridge: MIT Press. Guillaume, Xavier. 2007. “Unveiling the ‘International’: Process, Identity, and Alterity.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35(3): 741–­59. Guillaume, Xavier, Rune S. Andersen, and Juha A. Vuori. 2015. “Chromatology of Security: Introducing Colours to Visual Security Studies.” Security Dialogue 46(5): 440–­57. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas. 2007. “Some Questions about Flags.” In Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Richard Jenkins, eds., Flag, Nation, and Symbolism in Europe and America, 1–­13. London: Routledge. Hylland Eriksen, Thomas, and Richard Jenkins, eds. 2007a. Flag, Nation, and Symbolism in Europe and America. London: Routledge. ———. 2007b. “Preface.” In Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Richard Jenkins, eds., Flag, Nation, and Symbolism in Europe and America, xiii–­xiv. London: Routledge. Ikea. 2013. “Swedish Heritage,” http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/the_ikea _way/swedish_heritage/index.html (accessed July 5, 2013). Izzard, Eddie. 1999. Dress to Kill. Ella Communications Ltd. 115 min. Kiefer, Georg K. 1970. Zur Semiotisierung der Umwelt: Eine examplarische Erörterung der sekundaren Architektur. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart. Latour, Bruno. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 14–­43. Cambridge: MIT Press. Law, John. 2009. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In Bryan S. Turner, ed., The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 141–­58. Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell. Parlina, Ina. May 1, 2013. “Aceh’s Controversial Flag Is Legal, Constitutional Court Chief Says.” Jakarta Post, available at http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/05/01 /aceh-s-controversial-flag-legal-constitutional-court-chief-says.html (accessed July 6, 2013). Pastoureau. Michel. 2005. Les couleurs de notre temps. Paris: Christinne Bonneton Éditeur. ———. 2010. Les couleurs de nos souvenirs. Paris: Seuil.

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Pastoureau, Michel, and Dominique Simonnet. 2005. Le petit livre des couleurs. Paris: Éditions du Panama. Rancière, Jacques. 2008 [2000]. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. ———. 2011 [2008]. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. G. Elliott. London and New York: Verso. Roy, Srirupa. 2006. “‘A Symbol of Freedom’: The Indian Flag and the Transformation of Nationalism, 1906–­2002.” Journal of South Asian Studies 65(3): 495–­527. Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–­1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tziampiris, Aristotle. 2012. “The Macedonian Name Dispute and European Union Accession.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 12(1): 153–­71. Weitman, Sasha R. 1973. “National Flags: A Sociological Overview.” Semiotica 8(4): 328–­67.

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Container Scanning Unit Julian Stenmanns

Pictures of stacked containers aboard cargo ships often illustrate news on positive economic development. Especially in times of economic crisis, their movement seems to herald longed-­for economic recovery. This circuit of standardized shipping containers is one of the most unquestioned iconographic fundaments of a world in motion. However, it evokes a systemic vulnerability, as experts on border management assert. The container as a vehicle allows systematically for unauthorized access into or clandestine movement within the circuits of international trade. Yet, the project of securing trade networks by opening and verifying the contents of containers is a time-­intensive, laborious task and disturbs the rhythm, pace, and velocity of the circuitous assembled economy, thus turning control into a threat to national security and world trade. Against this background, seaports have become critical, strategic, and paradigmatic sites. Interruption and stasis in one node is said to lead to interruption and stasis in adjacent nodes. Therefore, any interruption—­whether through customs or border agencies on the one hand, or through pilfering, smuggling, or terrorist activities on the other hand—­becomes a matter of economic disconnection from the international system and is calculated as a security risk. To allow for smooth, seamless, and secure international cargo circulations, nonintrusive technologies are deployed as examination practices within global conduits. Building on object-­oriented fieldwork at an X-­ray shipping container scanning unit in Tema Port, Ghana, this chapter scrutinizes the device that makes these objects durably mobile, pristine, and secure. By enabling standardized shipping containers to stay self-­contained and barred, scanners can be seen as technopolitical arrangements bridging the gaps between demands of national security, practices of sovereignty, and globalized production networks. I argue that container scanners are things that essentially enable geoeconomic calculations of space and contribute to the integrity, intelligibility, and mobility of containers in international trade connections. In doing so,

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their thing-­power facilitates the immutability of mobiles over long distances and puts the international into motion.

Opening Tins, Boxes, and Containers The standardized design of a container only allows for a likewise standardized intrusion.1 Unpacking a container in order to make it legible is a labor-­and cost-­intensive logistical, metrological, and bureaucratic process and involves the employment of a whole set of workers, spreadsheets, signatures, materials, and machines. The breaking of a container seal initiates a bureaucratic process, involving the attendance of port security officers, the verification of the seal number on a multiplicity of standard forms, and a resealing of the container after physical examination. And, above all, physical examination usually involves a high degree of space—­a rather scarce thing within the boundaries of busy and often congested port areas. The volume of a twenty-­foot shipping container, 1,360 cubic feet, easily multiplies, when its contents are brought to light. Once the extended intermodal assembly line, from factories to markets, fails to work, a process of disassembling, sorting, ordering, stapling, and ripping commences. Each detail of the containerized shipment has to be numbered, sacks have to be opened, weighed, and counted. The physical integrity of the empty container has to be examined—­does it have new mastics, screws, or even a raised floor? Moreover, even mundane cargo items such as a cardboard box with tinned tomatoes become complex cases for cargo inspectors and Customs. Do the tins contain processed vegetables or compressed herbal cannabis? Until 2000, Tema Port, Ghana, was a typical case in that the very process of verifying the integrity of a shipment led to the disappearance of parts of the consignment. Considering this act of haptic engagement with cargo, Brenda Chalfin speaks of a “sensual proximity” when “objects [are] given a public and material presence.”2 Material presence and haptic, bodily engagement—­the exercise of stop-­and-­search—­hence bears the possibility for interference with a shipment. It may breach the purity of the enclosed box and its load as it entails the potential of contaminating the pristine load: Let’s assume you are an importer, you produce Paracetamol. And let’s assume this one is suspected and has to go to physical examination. Can you imagine [bringing] all this down in bags? There will be men walking on them; they will be sweating on them and all things like that.3

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Physical examination is a cumbersome process of de-­and recoupling the container from its spatiotemporal trajectory. Against this backdrop, it is not devious that physical examination is problematized by development economics and customs and border agencies. Infrastructural connectivity and efficient transport are said to “open access to new markets and opportunities,” allowing the integration into global markets, and “thereby fostering export-­led economic growth, essential to alleviate poverty on a significant scale.”4 Based on this rationale, the project of national security in Ghana has been reimagined through the prism of border management in the past decade. Management in this instance refers to a specific art of government—­that is, “facilitating the movement of legal persons and goods to enable the country to benefit from the open relationship with the rest of the world and at the same time preventing the situations that threaten the security of the state.”5 In this vein, the laborious task of keeping things legible and mobile has increasingly become a technologistical project of extending the margins of marketization and facilitating “good” circulation. The question is thus not so much how shipping containers are made international, but rather how they are made durable within international circuits.6 In order to avoid controversies—­that is, to get around the opening of opaque and uncanny tins, boxes, and containers—­new market devices are deployed on maritime borders to render these objects diaphanous. With backing of these devices, “you only break and bring it down when you suspect something.”7

Nonintrusive Technologies in Ghana In 1995, the Ghanaian Ministry of Trade and Industry initiated the Ghana Trade and Investment Gateway Project. With a World Bank Group funding of U.S. $50 million, Ghana started to restructure its business environment in order “to attract a critical mass of export oriented investors.”8 This was accompanied by investments in and subsequent market-­oriented reforms of the transport and logistics sector. In the preceding period, it was not uncommon that inspections took up to six weeks until consignments were released by Customs from the port, because of a physical examination rate of nearly 100 percent.9 In order to reduce this rate, the Ghanaian government awarded a contract to the Swiss company Cotecna to build an X-­ray container scanning unit in 2000. This large arrangement of concrete and the latest and most sophisticated technology was, at that time, one of the first scanners worldwide. It drew attention to a wide range of Customs authorities, from the United Kingdom to Israel, and was said to establish “Ghana as a new global stopping place.”10

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In Tema Port, the container scanning unit is run by Gateway Service Limited (GSL), a public-­private consortium, owned for the most by Cotecna. GSL runs so called nonintrusive checks on shipping containers with its X-­ray scanning unit. Long before containers were problematized as potential vehicles for terrorist activities, the role of the scanner was considered in the first place in terms of additional revenue for the Ghanaian government and other stakeholders involved in GSL. Second, and not less important, it was regarded as an active conduit, which would allow pushing the very material frontier of capitalism a bit further into the growing West African markets by sanitizing the congested port environment.11 Before a consignment arrives in Ghana, its shipment is screened and assessed via a Computerized Risk Management System (CRMS) in order to classify its risk level. GSL’s calculation of risk is based on automated statistical, econometrical tools, which include, among others, historical data, commercial intelligence, relevant documentation on the shipment, and information on the country of origin, the shipper, the seller, and so on.12 The standard procedure runs generally as follows: Through an ample system, CRMS assigns levels of Customs intervention to containers. Shipments classified as “low risk” (green channel) are usually not subjected to any examination—­even so, there is a 5 percent random control rate of green channel shipments. “Medium risk” shipments (yellow channel) are meant to be scanned in their entirety. The last risk category, “high risk” (red channel), is still subjected to full physical examination.13 The capacity of the scanner allows scanning about twenty containers per hour. After a truck has entered the scanner, the X-­rays penetrate the container’s steel and reveal the density and spatial allocation of the loaded goods. Following this, joined computer software produces a radiographic image of the container in doubt. This image is forwarded to the screen of an authorized analyst who then is able to select different parameters in a CargoVision tool in order to visualize the various densities and allocations of a shipment. If he interprets anything as suspicious, all relevant data is brought to a Customs officer, who then decides whether the distant other is to be stopped and opened, or not. The arrangement of the X-­ray scanner and CRMS can be read as an attempt to establish nonintrusion as a practice that facilitates the idea of purifying and ordering container handling on several levels. By reducing the rate of physical examination, the scanner has, first, produced a new choreography of things, helping to decongest the port and tremendously reducing cargo clearance and vessel turnaround time. Second, it has generated additional revenue, through

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the discovery of discrepancy concerning declared imports and the preventive, deterrent effect of the scanner. Third, it has led to less demand of equipment by rendering the use of high stackers (for bringing containers to physical examination points) unnecessary. And finally, it has reduced intrusions such as stealing, smuggling, and pilfering.14 Because of the container’s intermodal characteristics, there is no need to reopen it again on its travel. Once goods are placed in a container, the scanning unit allows them to remain in place and in strict time—­safe, secure, and pristine. Therefore, one of the main modes of operation of the scanning unit is that it “transports meaning or force without transforming.”15 The scanner, seen as an intermediary, objectifies containers by performing verification and makes this information durable over space and time.

Interconnectivity and the State of Emergency An incident that took place more than five thousand miles away from the Ghanaian coastline, however, brought tremendous changes to the maritime economy of Ghana and most of the world’s seaports. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. authorities temporarily halted traffic in major American seaports. The effect of this precautionary measure becomes evident by the sheer fact that 95 percent of U.S.-­bound trade moves through seaports.16 Moreover, branches and firms on a global scale are increasingly dependent on circular cross-­border trade, whether for imports or exports. Globalized production networks, therefore, rely on seamless commodity circulation and are fairly affected even by slight delays. Consequently, interruptions, ranging from mundane breakdowns to strikes or official border closures, are now perceived as crippling events that endanger the circuits of the stuff the global economy is built on, as I will outline in what follows. Circuits are prone to failure. There is constant decay in the world of shipping. Nonetheless, the core principle of logistics is exactly centered on rendering space and time legible and calculable. Seen through this lens, the very incidents that might lead to a deceleration or loss of control at a port thus become interchangeable in the sphere of logistics, as one transport economist indicated: “Although the 10-­day closure of U.S. West Coast ports in 2002 was due to the lockout of dockworkers by the ports, this same closure could have been due to terrorist attacks.”17 Subsequent to the attacks, the individualized threat of terrorism was transformed into a generalized threat of disruption. In this context, the ability to keep ports of entry open became central to “national economic survival” and

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thereby gave birth to a different raison d’état.18 Motivated by the aphorism “disconnectedness defines danger,” the spaces of distribution and economic exchange became paradigmatic for a specific problem: a closed port, seaway, or border corridor for means of preventing attacks becomes in a geoeconomic framing of security itself a threat to the logics of networked economies and the international system.19 In this context, containers can be thought of as the critical mediators in “a fluctuating web of connections between metropolitan regions and exploitable peripheries.”20 According to the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD), they are “to world trade what the circulatory system is to the body.”21 Based on this intimacy, their instability and general openness have multiplied the geostrategic referencing on spaces of economic interconnectivity. Failure in one node is said to affect the whole circulatory system. This potent problematization has given rise to the technopolitical field of Supply Chain Security. Securing supply chains involves both containing and facilitating circulations and connections. The challenge, therefore, is to move beyond the antagonistic logics: going beyond the fortification of national borders or the openness of “the market,” logisticians are asked to provide solutions that allow for the efficient and, at the same time, safe and secure disposition of things within wider circuits of cargo circulation.

Securing the Circuits of Stuff In late 2010, the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank, took up this rationale of interconnectivity in a report on the West African maritime domain. Discussing the challenges of ensuring “the safe, secure, and efficient flow of vessels, cargo, and people bound to or from the United States,” the Atlantic Council proclaims a spatiotemporal vision of interconnection: West African ports, harbors, and shipping lanes are important components of the highly integrated global maritime transportation linked to U.S. and allied ports and traffic flows. While the region’s waters are a major transit route for international commerce, they are plied by a host of criminal actors engaged in operations, including illicit oil tankers, drug runners, armed robbers, illicit waste dumpers, and pirates.22 What is at stake here is that cargo security in West African ports becomes equivalent to global cargo security, because insecurity at one junction “can directly affect security across the international network.”23 Therefore, insecurity in this context becomes less a national problem than a pestering “global is-

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sue.”24 A Terminal Security Officer at Tema described this shift vividly by referring to groups such as al-­Qaeda: Even though Osama bin Laden is dead, somebody else is there to continue. And that person is trying to work all means to breach the security. . . . He sees, ah Tema is loose, so why not, let me start from Tema and see where else I can penetrate the security system and beat the U.S. security system.25 Aside from these popular geopolitical versions of the War on Terror, a Terminal Operations Manager pointed toward the role of more mundane, quotidian impediments to global flows: Ports are seen as the heart of the economy or the gateway to that economy. . . . When things move fast, it keeps costs also down. Industries get their raw materials of whatever they produce. But if the port becomes a bottleneck, the economy will be hurt. Because the industries must function, business must function. Trade must move on. But if the gateway is a bottleneck, it means that things will not flow in and out. . . . So, industries will slow down, things will slow down, the economy will slow down. Exports going out will slow down. It breaks the economy.26 As one junction within the multitudinous system of relations, nonintrusive inspection technology became, in turn, a cipher for the securitization and maintenance of international cargo circuits against the backdrop of rising time constraints and the fear of illicitly loaded containers. In this vein, in 2005 the World Customs Organization (WCO) adopted the SAFE Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade and “heralded the beginning of a new approach to the end-­to-­end management of goods moving across borders.”27 Subsequently, Customs became a frontline border agency, with the delicate agenda of both ensuring the circulation of boxes and securing the geopolitical state. Thus, the very formation of Customs had to change in order to cope with the schizophrenic role of stopping and conceding, and gradually heavy emphasis was laid on nonintrusive inspection devices as outlined by the WCO: Non-­intrusive inspection equipment and radiation detection equipment should be available and used for conducting inspections, where available and in accordance with risk assessment. This equipment is

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necessary to inspect high-­risk cargo and/or transport conveyances quickly, without disrupting the flow of legitimate trade.28 Cotecna, the main stakeholder in the Ghanaian scanner consortium, responded quickly to this guideline. Its risk management services were reframed as comprehensively assisting authorities in complying with WCO’s SAFE Framework of Standards.29 Moreover, apart from calculation and econometrical modeling, the computerized risk management system became connected to international intelligence spheres along with national security authorities and other foreign intelligence services: As I speak with you right now, Customs now have [brought] in certain containers—­so that is a national security, certain containers that are really not meant to be scanned, but based upon information gotten from CIA, Narco [Narcotics Control Board Ghana], National Security, whatever it be, they bring it and we scan it for them. So the risk, the tendency—­there is a mechanism in place, whereby, based upon intelligence or information that is flowing, whatever, irrespective of your container, whatever it might be, [it] will be scanned.30 The scanner was considered an important device to speed up the congested port of Tema in the first place. Therefore, it was not necessarily situated within that “given historical moment” in the Foucauldian sense, which would initiate an interlinked response to an “urgent need.”31 However, as I outline in what follows, its role has changed rather quickly in the past decade. Physical examination can be read as an act during which things temporarily grind to a halt. This holdup has become a security risk for the operational workings of ports, logistics firms, and hence the global economy. As idle containers, wrested from their iconographic representation, can produce cascade effects that block adjacent and distant nodes, they can also brake global circulation. Nonintrusive technologies, in turn, allow the constant distribution and circulation of shipping containers. A technological device, as Martin Müller has argued with regard to debates in critical geopolitics, “functions not only as a passive conduit of human intentions, but co-­produces geopolitical action.”32 Thus, it “shape[s] what we can see and not see, know and not know, and enable[s] ordering processes in the first place.”33 By enabling the container to stay self-­contained and mobile, the scanner can be seen as an agent who, in turn, essentially enables geoeconomic calculations—­“crucial to the ongoing transformation of political geography.”34 As long as the scanner is at work, the stan-

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dardized container stays durable as a legible mediator. In doing so, a scanner ensures the circulation of both cargo and knowledge by providing an objectifying image. Its X-­rays bear the power to complement itinerancy and truth. From there, the scanner puts a world, or the international, into motion, rather than slowing it down. But my point is that disposing things at a distance relies on more than one single device. Rather, it “depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces.”35 Following this argument, the task is then to reassemble the scanner’s embedment into the arrangements and associations of port and cargo security.

Ground Adhesion, Circulations, and the International The scanning unit in Tema Port is fixed and permanent, yet at the same time in constant exchange with manifold other forces. The area accommodates the six million electron volts X-­ray scanner by Smith Detection. It is enclosed by a structure of concrete walls that shield the X-­ray radiation. Adjacent to this are offices for site maintenance personal, for analysts that control the scan process and interpret the produced images as well as for Customs and Port Authority employees. In contrast to the invisible radiation, the whole structure is of impressive size. In this setting, it was not surprising when the Scanner Manager gazed at the site and explained: “This technology has come to stay.”36 With its task and location, the scanner represents one bottleneck in the port security scheme. In order to channel the flows of container trucks through the scanner, a new entry and exit scheme had to be implemented in the port. This, in turn, with hindsight eased the implementation of another maritime post-­9/11 security initiative, the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS), which was implemented by the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2004. Against the background of the problematized state of interconnection, the code defines a heterogeneous set of measurements, ranging from quite extensive security schemes to rather mundane safety regulations (such as the wearing of hard hats or seatbelt requirements). The most visible element of the code is a system of access control, which generally implies the large-­scale fencing and walling of code compliant ports. “We need to ensure the check-­in and check-­out, so that every person on the terminal is accounted for,” a Terminal Manager in Tema explained.37 Container traffic had therefore to be rerouted from terminal gates to the scanning site. This whole procedure was meant to secure the container’s environment, the potentially dangerous area that surrounds the box before it crosses the border. But it also produced new choke and control points for port traffic. At this point, it becomes obvious

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that the different layers of the cargo security apparatus produce a milieu that associates both distributional space and instances of sovereign territory. It shows, on the one hand, a logistical space within which difference in globalized production networks is reduced and the international is radically reconfigured. Yet, on the other hand, it reminds that a geoeconomic conception of security does not simply “replace geopolitical calculation,” as Cowen and Smith argue.38 Rather, both dimensions remain in a constant flux. In Tema Port, the scanner was successively both connected to and situated within a well-­calibrated translocal cargo security apparatus and “allowed Ghana to become part [of] an elite network of United States Customs Service certified shipping sites.”39 Therefore, because of its ability to facilitate circulation within the international and preserve sovereignty at the same time, nonintrusive scanning technology is central to the current trajectories of border and supply chain management.

Making Things Move Internationally Within geoeconomic conceptions of international security, an idle or stopped shipping container is problematized not only as a potential vehicle for terrorists or nefarious business activities, but all the more as congesting the interconnected network. A scanning unit, in contrast, allows the container to remain closed and mobile; its X-­rays reveal the density of a container’s load. Promising a seamless and standardized filtering, a scan image thereupon provides an objectifying regime of truth. Once a container is packed and sealed, there is no need to stop and open it again up to its final destination. Without any technical help, these boxes are anchored objects. Yet, with backing of “appropriate” devices, they are able to travel stable across space and time. The world is in motion and so is the scanner’s relation within the cargo security apparatus. Some connections seem to have the ability to remain rather strong and durable; others are more likely to fall apart. The scanning device coproduces geoeconomic calculations at a distance. Nevertheless, demands of national security can readjust the device at the very same time, so that it becomes a resistor, disconnecting a site from the international system. In 2007, the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act was signed into law by then U.S. President George W. Bush. The act implements several recommendations proposed by the 9/11 Commission; among others the mandating to scan 100 percent of U.S. inbound container traffic.40 Screening a cargo container can be an ephemeral and dispersed act. By using econometrical models, this political technology is said to produce legible objects in milieus of circulation. Rerouting every single cargo container through a container scanning

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unit instead of producing risk analyses is a significant break with the aforementioned development. While screening shipments allows for the quick and efficient disposition of things within the conduits of international circulation, the sovereign act of scanning every container displaces econometrics, risks assessment, and intelligence. As this episode about screening and scanning evokes, not only the opened black box of the container remains a source of controversy. The technopolitical solution to open containers in international trade—­the large-­scale deployment of container scanners—­has itself become a potential source of friction, delay, and imponderability, and hence a threat to the workings of the global economy and the international system.

Notes 1. Craig Martin, “Desperate Mobilities: Logistics, Security, and the Extra-­ Logistical Knowledge of ‘Appropriation,’” Geopolitics 17(2) (2012): 365. 2. Brenda Chalfin, “Border Scans: Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Customs Service in Ghana,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11(3) (2004): 403. 3. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager at Tema Port, February 28, 2012. 4. Alan Harding, Gvlfi Pálsson, and Gaël Raballand, Port and Maritime Transport Challenges in West and Central Africa, SSATP Working Paper no. 84 (2007), 1. 5. Margaret Mansa Sosuh, Border Security in Ghana: Challenges and Prospects, KAIPTC Occasional Paper no. 32 (2011), 20. 6. See William Walters, “Rezoning the Global: Technological Zones, Technological Work, and the (Un-­)Making of Biometric Borders,” in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, ed. Vicki Squire (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 51–­73, 59; Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24(3) (2007): 1–­25. 7. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager. 8. World Bank, “Report No: 17736—­ GH,” http://www-wds.worldbank.org/ external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1999/06/03/000009265_398070914 4444/Rendered/PDF/multi0page.pdf, 2 (accessed January 29, 2013). 9. Albert Laryea and Sarah Akuoni, “An Overview of Trade Policies and Developments in Ghana,” in Globalization, Trade, and Poverty in Ghana, ed. Charles Ackah and Ernest Aryeetey (Accra: Sub-­Saharan Publishers, 2012), 10–­32, 21. 10. Chalfin, “Border Scans,” 403. 11. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager. 12. Cotecna, “Computerized Risk Management System,” http://www.cotecna .com/en/Home/Services/Government-services/~/media/Documents/Product%20bro chures/CRMS_Brochure_screen-A4.ashx (accessed June 15, 2013). 13. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager. 14. Ibid. 15. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39.

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16. Deborah Cowen, “A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(3) (2010): 601. 17. Wayne K. Talley, Port Economics (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 172. In a similar fashion, Hector Guerrero, David Murray, and Richard Flood take (simulated) terrorist attacks, a natural catastrophe (Hurricane Katrina in 2005), and the aforementioned labor conflict into consideration in order to propose a new concept of port restoration and resilience (Hector Guerrero, David Murray, and Richard Flood, “A Model for Supply Chain and Vessel Traffic Restoration in the Event of a Catastrophic Port Closure,” Journal of Transportation Security 1[2] [2008]: 72–­74). 18. Stephen E. Flynn, “Maritime Transportation and Port Security,” Council on Foreign Relations, 2002, http://cfr.org/terrorism/maritime-transportation-port-security /p4547. 19. Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-­first Century (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004). 20. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995), 48. 21. Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD), Container Transport Security across Modes (Paris: OECD, 2005), 19. 22. Atlantic Council, “Advancing U.S., African, and Global Interests: Security and Stability in the West Africa Maritime Domain,” http://acus.org/files/publication _pdfs/3/advancing-us-african-global-interests-security-stability-west-africa-maritime -domain.pdf, 1 (accessed April 25, 2012). 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Mthuli Ncube and Michael L. Baker, “Beyond Pirates and Drugs: Unlocking Africa’s Maritime Potential and Economic Development,” African Security Review 20(1) (2011): 68. 25. Interview with (anonymous) Terminal Security Manager at Tema Port, March 5, 2012. 26. Interview with (anonymous) Terminal Operations Manager at Tema Port, March 1, 2012. 27. World Customs Organization, “WCO SAFE  Framework of Standards,” http://wcoomd.org/en/topics/facilitation/instrument-and-tools/tools/~/media/ 55F00628A9F94827B58ECA90C0F84F7F.ashx, i (accessed January 21, 2013). 28. Ibid., 14. 29. Cotecna, “Cargo Scanning Services,” http://cotecna.com/News-and-Media/~ /media/Documents/Product%20brochures/Scanning_Brochure_screen-A4.ashx, 2 (accessed January 21, 2013). 30. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager. 31. Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–­1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshal, John Mepham, and Kate Sober (New York: Prentice Hall, 1980), 195. 32. Martin Müller, “Opening the Black Box of the Organization: Socio-­material Practices of Geopolitical Ordering,” Political Geography 31(6) (2012): 386. 33. Ibid.

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34. Deborah Cowen and Neil Smith, “After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics,” Antipode 41(1) (2009): 25. 35. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 21. 36. Interview with (anonymous) Scanner Manager. 37. Interview with (anonymous) Terminal Security Manager. 38. Cowen and Smith, “After Geopolitics?,” 25. 39. Chalfin, “Border Scans,” 403. 40. “A container that was loaded on a vessel in a foreign port shall not enter the United States (either directly or via a foreign port) unless the container was scanned by nonintrusive imaging equipment and radiation detection equipment at a foreign port before it was loaded on a vessel.” See U.S. Government Information, “Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007: Public Law 110–­53—­AUG. 3, 2007,” http://intelligence.senate.gov/laws/pl11053.pdf, 225 (accessed May 12, 2014). Up until the writing of this essay, this percentage had not been reached.

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Diplomatic Cable Tobias Wille

Message/Messenger The term “cable,” as used in the context of diplomacy, is ambiguous. It denotes both a message and its technological messenger. Telegraph wires were used around the middle of the nineteenth century to connect the capitals of Europe. The network soon expanded, and by 1870, with the laying of submarine cables, fast-­traveling telegraphic messages could be sent between Britain, Continental Europe, North America, the Middle East, and India.1 Through these cables, diplomatic posts communicated with their ministries back home. But the term “cable” also came to denote the message that was sent by telegraph. In this chapter I use this ambiguity as an entry point for an exploration of what the new materialist turn can bring to Diplomatic Studies. I will demonstrate how at three particular points in history the cable, as both diplomatic message and technological messenger, made a difference to how things played out. To make sense of this, one needs to be perceptive of the myriad ways in which meaning and materiality intertwine in the making of what we call diplomacy. What is called for is, in other words, a material-­semiotic analysis of diplomacy.2 The argument I will develop builds on the poststructuralist literature on diplomacy with its sensitivity to questions of identity and difference.3 My starting point will be the poststructuralist insight that diplomacy is all about representation, about making present what otherwise would be absent. In particular, I will adopt Costas Constantinou’s argument that diplomacy is a staged plot, a plot that rests on and at the same time sustains a series of fictions.4 Two of these fictions are of particular relevance to the argument I develop. The first pertains to the sovereign subject. In modernity, territorial states are the main actors of international politics. They appear as autonomous subjects endowed with a will and interests, capable of communicating and entertaining relations, and as carriers of rights and obligations. But, in order to become real, these sovereign actors need to be theatrically performed.5 The second fiction

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necessary for the diplomatic plot to become credible is thus the fiction of the representative agent. One needs to believe that representation is working, that the diplomat really speaks for the sovereign. Only by taking this leap of faith can one see diplomacy. In their treatment of diplomacy, the poststructuralists put a very strong focus on language and meaning. James Der Derian identifies it as poststructuralism’s “organizing strategy” to “deconstruct or denaturalize through detailed interpretation the inherited language, concepts, and texts that have constituted the privileged discourses in international relations,”6 a strategy he skillfully applies on his own “journey through the archives of diplomacy.”7 In Constantinou’s treatment of diplomacy, the “constitutive role of language” is highlighted as the “core problematic.”8 Objects are consequently seen by the poststructuralists primarily as carriers of signs. Constantinou, for example, elaborates on the use of the table as an object of diplomacy. Its shape is taken to signify the status of those seated around it: “The point of the table as an instrumental object of diplomacy is precisely the capacity to infer from its form and shape the presence of status and policy.”9 This leads him to the conclusion that “the object of diplomacy is . . . an effect of signification, inscribed with political value and meaning.”10 This chapter on the cable will add a new materialist twist to Der Derian’s and Constantinou’s semiotic analyses of diplomatic representation. I will use three stories of the cable to put forth the argument that in diplomacy the fictions of the sovereign subject and its representative agent are not only discursively produced, but also that objects and their materiality play an important role in their making. Accounts of the first two stories can be found in the historiographical literature; the third story not long ago was all over the news and it is now also discussed in academic texts. Drawing on these sources, my aim will be to tell the three stories in a fashion that puts the cable center stage.

First Story: Reporting (on) Revolutions The first story is about two situations of revolutionary turmoil that occurred in Paris in 1848 and 1870 and about how the United States reacted to them. But it is also about another small revolution, a revolution in how diplomatic messages traveled across the Atlantic. I will use this story to reflect on the logic of diplomatic representation and give a first idea about how the materiality of the cable might matter in accomplishing such representation. One can find an account of the events in an article by historian David Paull Nickles.11 Although Nickles’s primary concern is how the introduction of the telegraph affected the

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autonomy of diplomats on post, I am particularly interested in how its materiality shaped representation. On February 24, 1848, mobs and soldiers are clashing in the streets of Paris; shots are being fired.12 Richard Rush, the United States’ minister to France, has difficulties assessing the turbulent situation. He still has to finish writing his dispatch as the steamship that is supposed to carry his message across the Atlantic is about to depart. The next opportunity to report home would be via another ship scheduled to leave more than two weeks later. So he concludes his hurried letter, in which he reports on a situation “little short of revolutionary,” with the note “when I am closing this communication, lest it should be out of time . . . my servants bring in rumors that the king has abdicated.”13 A little later, he would find out that the rumors were indeed true. The revolutionaries had overthrown the regime of King Louis-­Philippe and erected a republic. Now he has a difficult decision to make: Should he recognize the new government, as asked for by the revolutionaries, or should he wait several weeks for new instructions? Acting on his own initiative, he would risk being disavowed by his own government. On the other hand, not acting would also have its price. An opportunity to aid the spread of republicanism and also to enter into good relations with the new French government could be missed. Rush decides to act and on February 28 recognizes the new regime. In a dispatch to Washington, he explains: “In recognizing the new state of things, as far as I could without your instructions, and in doing it promptly . . . I had the deep conviction that I was stepping forth in aid of the great cause of order in France and beyond France—­and that I was acting in the spirit of my government and country, the interpreter of whose voice it fell upon me suddenly to become.”14 Knowing that he will have to wait weeks for an answer, he adds in a private letter to Secretary of State James Buchanan: “I shall remain inexpressibly anxious until I know how [my actions] will be officially received at home.”15 This anxiety is only resolved when, more than five weeks later, he receives a response from Buchanan reassuring him that President James K. Polk heartily approves of his actions. More than two decades later, on September 4, 1870, Paris is in revolutionary turmoil again after devastating military defeats and the capture of Emperor Napoleon III during the Franco-­Prussian War.16 This time, however, the United States’ minister to France, Elihu B. Washburne, has a much more expedient diplomatic messenger at his service. In an epic effort that had to overcome the resistance of the sea, unfavorable weather conditions, snapping copper cables, and oxidizing rubber insulations, in the 1860s three transatlantic telegraph cables had been laid.17 Washburne can thus report about the events in Paris by telegraph and two days later receives instructions that he should “not hesitate

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to recognize” the new government.18 The same day, he arranges for a meeting with the new French minister of foreign affairs Jules Favre and personally hands him a letter in which he officially recognizes the Third Republic. Part of the letter read: “It affords me great pleasure to advise you that I have this morning received a telegraphic dispatch from my Government instructing me to recognize this government of the national defense as the government of France.”19 This story of two revolutions nicely illustrates the logic of diplomatic representation. Diplomacy relies on the assumptions that there is a sovereign subject and that it is capable of acting through people and messages representative of its will. As Constantinou suggests, “this diplomatic fable exhibits nothing less than the story of modernity,” a story featuring “a sovereign who enjoys the ius legationis and has the capacity to send embassies and messages representative of his thought.”20 Both in 1848 and in 1870, the United States performed the sovereign act of recognizing a new government in France through its authorized representative in Paris. According to the “fable” of diplomacy, the sovereign people of the United States by election authorize the president to speak in their name, the president then appoints a secretary of state, and the secretary of state instructs the diplomatic representatives abroad. Through this series of delegations it is established that the diplomat speaks and acts for the sovereign people of the United States. Although in this “fable” diplomatic representation appears to result from a linear sequence of delegations, it is better characterized as the effect of a performance in which the authority of the representative agent and the reality of the sovereign subject are established at once. If the performance succeeds, a link is established between sovereign and representative and it becomes undistinguishable who acts. The diplomat then acts for the sovereign and the sovereign acts through the diplomat. As I will demonstrate, this link between representative and sovereign is not only semantic (i.e., made through signification), but also material, and its materiality makes a difference in how diplomatic representation can be achieved. In the days before the cable became a diplomatic messenger, diplomatic envoys received comprehensive initial instructions before they left for their post.21 They carried the will of the sovereign with them in written form. Furthermore, the link between capital and post was maintained through the circulation of written dispatches by which the diplomat reported and the ministry instructed. But when unanticipated situations such as the one Rush is confronted with in 1848 arose where these instructions provided no guidance, diplomats had to act on their own. This does not, however, mean that Rush can

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make the United States act as he wants. As the dispatch in which he justifies his actions illustrates, he has to anticipate what his superiors want him to do and convince them of both the appropriateness and the truthfulness of his actions. Thus his insistence that he tried to act “in the spirit of his government and country, the interpreter of whose voice it fell upon him suddenly to become” owing to the pace at which the revolutionary events unfolded and the remoteness of Paris from Washington. Whether his representation of the United States succeeds does not depend on Rush alone. He has to anxiously wait for President Polk (who speaks through, or is made to speak, by Secretary of State Buchanan) to approve of his actions and thus make them his own and the United States’. Twenty years later, a new actor has entered the diplomatic scene. The telegraph can carry a message from Paris to Washington at the speed of an electric impulse. This changes the logic of diplomatic representation. Washburne can now warrant the authenticity of the sovereign articulation by pointing out that he has received a cable. He has been in touch with Washington. An element of indeterminacy is thus eliminated; the United States is made more directly present. Here one could ask what this means for the diplomat. Maybe the telegraph reduces his autonomy. His principals in Washington can now better control what he is doing. Maybe it also increases his room for maneuver. After all, he is not bound anymore to comprehensive instructions that were formulated far in advance and without proper anticipation of the situation at hand. Moreover, he can now suggest a particular course of action to his superiors, and to a certain degree he can also control the flow of information back to Washington. I cannot, nor is it my intention to, answer the question of in what exact ways the introduction of the cable changed the diplomat’s autonomy.22 For me, the interesting point to be made is that the enrollment of the cable as diplomatic messenger had an impact on how diplomatic representation could be achieved.

Second Story: The Zimmermann Telegram The second story of the cable is about a well-­known episode of World War I. It provides a nice example of a situation where the cable, both as message and as messenger, clearly made a difference. It also allows me to reflect on the various translations involved in the making of diplomatic representation. In January 1917, the German ambassador to the United States, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, receives a telegram from the German Foreign Office and forwards it to the German minister in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckardt. 23 Through the cable, Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann instructs

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von Eckardt to seek an alliance with Mexico for the case that the United States declared war on Germany and, in return, to offer Mexico financial support and help in reconquering the territory of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, which Mexico had lost to the United States in 1848. As one of its first belligerent acts, Britain had located and cut all important German submarine telegraph cables in August 1914. Combined with the Royal Navy’s blockade on all mail to and from Germany, this deprived Germany’s diplomatic posts in the Americas from all means of regular communication with their government. From June 1915 on, however, the U.S. government allowed the German embassy in Washington to communicate with Berlin via American telegraph cables in order to sort out the controversy over the sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by German submarines (in which more than one hundred U.S. citizens had lost their lives). The encrypted Zimmermann Telegram travels over this route that crosses British territory. There it is intercepted by British Naval Intelligence. While the British cryptanalysts are able to recognize the telegram as a German diplomatic message, they can only partly decrypt it because the fairly new German diplomatic code 0075 has been used to protect it. Alerted by the deciphered phrases “unrestricted submarine warfare,” “war with the U.S.A.,” and “propose  .  .  . an alliance,” the British are confronted with a dilemma.24 How could they use their knowledge without alerting the United States to the fact that they were intercepting diplomatic communications? They solved the problem by acquiring a copy of the telegram as it was forwarded from Washington to Mexico City with the help of an agent who has access to telegrams that pass through Mexican telegraph lines. Because the German legation in Mexico City did not have a code book for 0075, the message was reencoded by the German embassy in Washington in the older code 13040 before it was forwarded, a code that British Naval Intelligence has already cracked. Now the British can present a decrypted copy of the intercepted message to the U.S. ambassador in London. To give additional credibility to the information, he is later also provided with enough details on the message for the U.S. government to be able to find it in the records of the Western Union Telegraph Company. When he is informed, President Woodrow Wilson is outraged by the fact that the German government has abused the means of communication granted by the United States. On February 28, 1917, Secretary of State Robert Lensing hands the telegram to a correspondent of the Associated Press. The next day, it is all over the news. Soon after, Zimmermann acknowledges the telegram’s authenticity. In the judgment of historians, the telegraph was not the main

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reason for the United States to declare war on Germany. But it is said to have enraged President Wilson and to have largely eliminated public opposition in the United States for entering the war.25 The message that links the German mission in Mexico City to the Foreign Office in Berlin in this story goes literally through a long series of translations. In Berlin it is first translated from plain German into code 0075 and then from code 0075 into Morse code. In Washington, it is translated from Morse code into code 0075, from code 0075 into plain German, from plain German into code 13040, and from code 13040 again into Morse code. And in Mexico City, the message is translated from Morse code into code 13040 and then from code 13040 into German. But it is also translated in a somewhat different sense. For Michel Callon, translation is a process through which entities are linked in such a way that one thing stands in for the other.26 Through translation, some entities gain control over others and thus the world is ordered. Spelling out the political implications of this idea, Callon and Bruno Latour define translation as “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force.”27 Through translation, the cable is made to speak for Zimmermann and von Eckardt is made to speak for Germany. In the sequence of political delegations from the sovereign German Emperor, to Foreign Secretary Zimmermann, to the diplomat von Eckardt, the cable is supposed to be a subservient messenger. But as Callon points out, it is only a small step from translation to treason.28 And indeed, the cable betrays its sovereign master by revealing the secret of its message to the enemy. The cable speaks to, or is made to speak to, British spies. Now they are doing the translating. The spies translate the cable from code 0075 into German and then into English. But if they passed the message on like this, it would reveal not only Zimmermann’s secret, but also that the British are spying on their friends. So they intercept the cable again in Mexico and begin a new series of translations—­from code 13040 into German into English. The cable is thus translated into evidence, evidence of Germany’s evil intent toward the United States. In the end, the cable helps Britain to translate the United States into an ally. Even though the cable betrays its author, it does not stop speaking for him. It still instructs von Eckardt to seek an alliance with Mexico. But now it also represents Germany’s intentions to the British spies. Passed on to President Wilson, the cable is still seen as a sovereign articulation of Germany. In fact, by helping their colleagues from the Unites States find the cable in the records

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of Western Union, the British spies bolster the telegram’s credentials as a sovereign articulation of Germany. Finally, the telegram is made public. It now speaks to the world. Everyone can read in the newspaper what Germany is up to. Two days later, Zimmermann acknowledges the authenticity of the message and thus makes it again his own. In this episode of World War I, the cable clearly matters, it clearly makes a difference. It is thus more than just an intermediary, something that or someone who “transports meaning or force without transformation”; it has become a mediator and “mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”29 In January 1917, the cable played its part in a tragic plot of war, espionage, and betrayal. It became an actor on the stage of international politics.

Third Story: Cablegate In my last story, the cable is involved in a scandal. A large number of secret messages, stolen from the U.S. Department of State, are made public. On November 28, 2010, the nongovernmental organization WikiLeaks publishes on its homepage the first 220 of roughly 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables from the U.S. Department of State and its missions abroad.30 Most of the cables are from the years 2005 to 2010, but some date back as far as 1966. More than fifteen thousand are classified as “secret” and more than a hundred thousand as “confidential.” On the same day, five major international newspapers to whom WikiLeaks had granted access to the cables—­the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País—­feature stories drawing on their contents. In the following days, the newspapers are full of revelations and juicy stories. We learn that U.S. diplomats reported about German Chancellor “Angela ‘Teflon’ Merkel” that she “avoids risks and is rarely creative,” saw in the French President Nicolas Sarkozy “an emperor with no clothes,” and thought of Vladimir Putin, at the time Russian prime minister, as an “alpha-­dog” who behaves like “Batman,” while then-­President Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin.”31 But we also find out that U.S. diplomats were instructed to spy on senior UN officials, offered money, attention from high level officials, and even visits from President Barack Obama in an attempt to convince other governments to take in detainees from Guantánamo, and were urged by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to attack Iran.32 In May 2010, the American soldier and intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is arrested in Iraq under the suspicion of having passed classified information

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to WikiLeaks. Later he would admit in court to having leaked diplomatic cables and other information he had downloaded from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), a computer network used by the Department of Defense to distribute classified information.33 The first surprise here is that diplomats are still sending cables in the age of digital communication. Why do they not communicate via telephone or e-­mail like everybody else? And indeed, U.S. diplomats do use these means of communication. But those electronic messages through which diplomats officially receive their instructions and report from their post are still referred to as telegrams or cables. According to the U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, they are used “between the Department and posts abroad to send information electronically, using established Department channels. These telegrams may convey information dealing with policy proposals, policy implementation, program activities, or personnel and post operations.”34 Like the real cables of the past, they are official messages sent between organizational units (and not individuals), which travel within the ministry according to specific rules guided by a system of country and subject codes, and are permanently archived. However, today’s cables are not carried by the telegraph anymore. The State Department began as early as in the late 1960s to use computers to process its cable traffic and since 1973 all incoming and outgoing cables are automatically archived in the digital Central Foreign Policy Files. The most recent development is that U.S. diplomats can compose and read cables on their desktop computers in the same Outlook application as their e-­mails. What we see, then, is that the cable as a diplomatic messenger has been replaced by computer networks. But as a diplomatic message, the cable has so far survived the withering away of its material roots. Actors in the diplomatic service have come to rely on the link the cable provided to an extent that they now make computer networks simulate the workings of the telegraph. As the Cablegate story shows, the new technological carriers of the diplomatic cable translate its message differently. Now words are turned into a digital flow of data, encrypted and displaced via glass fiber and satellite. A certain circle of recipients, designated by codes in the cable’s header, will have the cable in their digital inbox immediately. But the message is also translated into a record in a digital database. Everyone at the State Department with the appropriate access rights can search this database and retrieve cables. If a cable is marked by the sender with the tag SIPDIS, it will further be translated into a record in another database, the Net-­Centric Diplomacy Database, to which a large number of members of the United States’ domestic security community have access through SIPRNet. This new sequence of translations also allows for new forms of betrayal. Manning downloaded a huge bulk of 174

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cables (and other classified documents) from SIPRNet and transferred them to WikiLeaks. And by passing the cables on to their media partners, as well as by making them accessible on the Internet, WikiLeaks subsequently made them public. In spite of their displacement, the leaked cables continue speaking for the United States. As Jacques Derrida points out, “to write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.”35 Now the cables are out of the State Department’s control. U.S. government officials try to cut the link between sender and message by insisting that the content of the cables is private and that they thus do not officially speak for the United States. As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explained at a press conference, the United States’ “official foreign policy is not set through these messages, but here in Washington. Our policy is a matter of public record, as reflected in our statements and our actions around the world.”36 But now she, in whose name all outbound cables are signed, is only one interpreter among many. And some journalists have a different agenda; they want to make things stick. The Guardian makes the leaked cables speak for the United States by asserting that “they reveal how the US deals with both its allies and its enemies.”37 The New York Times explicitly makes us, the interested readers, part of this story when it writes that “to read through [the cables] is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.”38 The leaked cables thus represent, or are made to represent, to us what the United States does with and to the world. The crucial point for my argument is that the cable is a “sort of machine” that is not only semantic but also material, that how the cable and its message can be “read and rewritten” is not only a question of meaning but also one of matter. Of particular importance in this context is the fact that cables have become data in a digital network. As Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Evelyn Ruppert observes in a comment on the Cablegate affair, “data has many lives” and “as with any data, leaked data passes through many layers and filters including mediations of numerous actors, tools and devices.”39 As content of a digital database, cables can be stored, retrieved, stolen, leaked, filtered, edited, transformed, and published in specific ways. The diplomats themselves are certainly aware of cables’ materiality. As a former British ambassador reportedly said, “people will be looking at the security of electronic communications and archives. Paper would have been impossible to steal in these quantities.”40 Diplomatic Cable

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Toward a Material-­Semiotic Analysis of Diplomacy I told these three stories to demonstrate how the cable acts in international politics. As a diplomatic messenger, it instructed diplomats and carried their reports back home to their ministries. Sometimes it also betrayed its sovereign masters by revealing secrets to their enemies. As an actual messenger, it has long retired. But its spirit lives on in how diplomats are instructed and report. And because now other technological messengers do the cable’s work, things can go wrong in different ways. Throughout these stories, I was playing on the ambiguity that the term “cable” denotes both the message and the material structure that carries it to suggest that the boundary between what we so neatly divide into a social and a material realm is blurry. More generally, my agenda has been to illustrate what a material-­semiotic perspective can bring to Diplomatic Studies. In diplomatic encounters, states do not simply come together, they need to be represented, made present. The three stories I told highlight how this representation is achieved through the making of associations between myriad sites, people, and things. It also highlighted the fact that things play an important role in the making of these associations. Moreover, the things of diplomacy do not always do what human diplomats expect them to do and thus make a real difference in how diplomatic affairs play out. This, then, is the translation I have in mind: turning Diplomatic Studies from a semiotic into a material-­semiotic undertaking.

Notes 1. Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–­1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11–­27; David Paull Nickles, Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4–­13. 2. Cf. John Law, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), 141–­ 58; John Law and Annemarie Mol, “Notes on Materiality and Sociality,” Sociological Review 43(2) (1995): 274–­94. 3. James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), and Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992); Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For a continuation of this line of thought by authors who would most likely reject the label “poststructuralist,” cf. Paul Sharp, Diplomatic Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Iver B. Neumann, At Home with the Diplomats: Inside a European Foreign Ministry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011).

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4. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, 95–­120. 5. Cf. Michael Dillon and Jerry Everard, “Stat(e)ing Australia: Squid Jigging and the Masque of State,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 17(3) (1992): 281–­312; Cynthia Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium—­Journal of International Studies 27(1) (1998): 77–­95. 6. James Der Derian, “The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations,” in International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, ed. James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), 4. 7. Der Derian, On Diplomacy, 28. 8. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, 63. 9. Ibid., 107. 10. Ibid., 108. 11. David Paull Nickles, “Telegraph Diplomats: The United States’ Relations with France in 1848 and 1870,” Technology and Culture 40(1) (1999): 1–­25. 12. On the course of events in 1848, see ibid., 1, 4–­7. For an original account, see Richard Rush, Occasional Productions: Political, Diplomatic, and Miscellaneous (Philadelphia, 1860), 355–­76. 13. Nickles, “Telegraph Diplomats,” 1. 14. Ibid., 6. 15. John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, vol. 8 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1909), 3. 16. On the course of events in 1870, see Nickles, “Telegraph Diplomats,” 1f., 10f. For some of the original cables and dispatches, see Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1870 (Washington, D.C., 1870), 115–­17. 17. Cf. Jeffrey L. Kieve, The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic History (Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1973), chapter 5. 18. Nickles, “Telegraph Diplomats,” 10. 19. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1870, 117. 20. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy, 31. 21. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory, and Administration, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 136f. 22. The question of how the introduction of the telegraph impacted the autonomy of the diplomats is of central concern to Nickles in “Telegraph Diplomats” and Under the Wire. 23. The following account is based on Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2012); Nickles, Under the Wire, 137–­60. 24. Nickles, Under the Wire, 146f. 25. Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram, 250f.; Nickles, “Telegraph Diplomats,” 150–­52. 26. Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of

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the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 196–­233. 27. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-­Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro-­and Macro-­Sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr-­Cetina and Aaron Victor Cicourel (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 279. 28. Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation,” 224. The phrase works even better in French where translation (traduction) and treason (trahison) sound quite similar. 29. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39. 30. Cf. Charlie Beckett, Wikileaks: News in the Networked Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). 31. “A World of Candor,” Washington Post, November 30, 2010. 32. “Blurring Line between Spy And Diplomat,” New York Times, November 29, 2010; “Cables Depict Coaxing by U.S. in Bid to Clear Guantánamo’s Prison,” New York Times, November 30, 2010; “Saudi King Told US: You Must Bomb Iran,” Guardian, November 29, 2010. 33. “Bradley Manning’s Personal Statement to Court Martial: Full Text,” Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/bradley-manning-wiki leaks-statement-full-text (accessed August 19, 2013). 34. U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, vol. 5, Handbook 1, available at http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/regs/fah/ (accessed August 19, 2013). 35. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Derrida: Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8. 36. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks to the Press on Release of Purportedly Confidential Documents by Wikileaks,” http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm /2010/11/152078.htm (accessed August 19, 2013). 37. “One Tiny Memory Stick, One Big Headache for the United States,” Guardian, November 29, 2010. 38. “Leaked Cables Offer a Raw Look inside U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 29, 2010. 39. Evelyn Ruppert, “WikiLeaks: The Many Lives of Data,” Centre for Research on Social-­Cultural Change Blog, December 13, 2010, http://www.cresc.ac.uk/news/blog /wikileaks-the-many-lives-of-data (accessed August 19, 2013). 40. Sir Christopher Meyer, quoted in “250,000 Leaked Files That Lay Bare US View of World,” Guardian, November 29, 2010.

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PART II

Deterritorialization

The Yellow Car Debbie Lisle

During the intensification of the Cypriot conflict in 1974, many objects, lives, and attachments were abandoned as Greek Cypriots living in the north fled south while Turkish Cypriots living in the south fled north. Reinforcing the idea that Cyprus is constituted by only two distinct and homogeneous communities, a UN-­controlled buffer zone—­sometimes called the Green Line, and sometimes the dead zone—­was put in place to protect Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots from one another.1 Some sections of the buffer zone in the Old City of Nicosia/Lefkoşa are only a few meters across; other sections on the island are much larger and encompass, for example, the old Nicosia airport and small mixed villages such as Pyla/Pile. Building on the critical insights of those who have comprehensively deconstructed the prevailing two-­community thesis by giving voice to the multiple lives, relations, and communities present on Cyprus, I want to extend this analysis further into the registers of materiality and objects.2 More specifically, I want to explore some of the objects that were left behind in the buffer zone in 1974 as the population shifted and the UN erected its parameters. What do these abandoned objects tell us about the conflict? Can they be claimed by one side or another, or does their ruination resist such claiming? Do these objects have hidden lives? Who interacts with these objects? What will happen to them as Cyprus moves toward reconciliation and unification? One object in particular both speaks to and anchors these questions in powerful ways: a yellow Morris Minor that was abandoned in the buffer zone in Old Nicosia/Lefkoşa near the bisected thoroughfare of Ledra Street. It is parked on a grass verge beside a now crumbling building, in between two garage doors. The Yellow Car is emblematic of the hundreds of other cars that were abandoned in parking lots and automobile showrooms inside the buffer zone in 1974, many of which are still in working order but remain unused, covered in dust, and inaccessible to local communities. Over the course of forty years, the Yellow Car has slowly decayed in this spot, but it has not disappeared or sunk into a heap of unused rusted metal. Rather, the successive UN forces that patrol the buffer zone have adorned it with a sign

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reading “Yellow Car,” and have continually repainted its original bright yellow coat and cut back the plant life that threatens to engulf it. The United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) continues to use the Yellow Car as a reference point for their buffer zone patrols and diplomatic mediations between the two communities, and it remains a key feature in the official Green Line tours they operate for visiting journalists and dignitaries. This chapter works against prevailing macrotheories of global conflict that locate agency only in human individuals or collectives (e.g., citizens, nations), subordinate or efface the constitutive role of materiality in conflict, and develop anthropocentric models for containing, managing, and institutionalizing the multiplicity of social life. Instead, it uses a particular object—­the Yellow Car—­to articulate an alternative account of the international as a transversal, heterogeneous, and deterritorialized space constituted by emergent assemblages that always exceed and trouble the sovereign frameworks set up to partition it. Three things, in particular, interest me about the Yellow Car. First, because the Yellow Car is hidden from view inside the buffer zone and thus only visible to UN personnel and escorted visitors, it tells us something important about the way emergent assemblages operate through a constitutive distinction between visibility and invisibility. How is the seen/unseen distinction managed in situations of protracted conflict, and by whom? Second, while assemblages are understood to be emergent, mobile, and mutable, the intransigence of the Yellow Car—­its sheer persistence over forty years—­tells us something important about the different temporalities, speeds, and paces that operate in any assemblage. What kinds of relations are made possible between an object decaying at such a slow pace and the other surrounding objects transforming at different paces (e.g., the adjacent plant and animal life; the surrounding buildings currently being redeveloped; the constituent metals, plastics, and polymers of the car itself)? What about the intersecting relations between the Yellow Car and the highly mobile human subjects who encounter it (e.g., rotating UN forces; tourists; city planners; developers)? Third, the fact that the Yellow Car has not been left to decay of its own accord tells us something important about the comfort, solace, and pleasure we derive from objects, and the enormous amounts of energy we expend taking care of the objects we place value in. The Yellow Car is particularly interesting in this respect because it is not a symbol of national victory or commemoration that locals would understandably care for as a matter of pride, loyalty, or celebration; indeed, this object is of little importance to the local communities of Nicosia/Lefkoşa. Why, then, have the rotating UN forces made such an effort to preserve and take care of the Yellow Car? Does this caretaking extend to

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The yellow car abandoned in the buffer zone in central Nicosia. Reprinted courtesy of UNFICYP.

other objects on the island? Unraveling the experience of protracted conflict through a much slower, more focused account of a single object and the multiple relations it gives rise to is one way to reveal the richness, complexity, and dispersed agency of everyday life that is often excluded by abstract models of conflict resolution. Although this chapter does focus on a single object, it does not provide a political economy of the Yellow Car or offer a detailed account of its history (e.g., where it was designed and built, how and when it arrived in Cyprus). While that history is undoubtedly part of the picture, this chapter is more interested in the associations, relations, and circulations that are produced between the Yellow Car and the surrounding objects and human agents that attach themselves to it.

Visuality, Materiality, and the Enclaved Assemblage Yael Navaro-­Yashin offers a careful and theoretically nuanced account of how Turkish Cypriot refugees arriving in the north after 1974 engaged with the objects, spaces, and homes left behind by Greek Cypriots.3 For her, the assemblage of subjects and objects in Cyprus is not neutral because “it has been

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created by way of keeping certain people and things out, by excluding them, in this case with the erection of a border as a mark of sovereignty.”4 What the buffer zone does is cut through any emergent assemblage by determining which subjects and objects will materialize and become entangled with one another, and which subjects and objects will not. I am interested in the fundamental tension Navaro-­Yashin explores between a two-­dimensional, horizontal, rhizomatic terrain of emergence in which the language of affect and assemblage dominates, and a more historically specific, politically embedded terrain that encourages in-­depth case-­specific analysis. This tension speaks to a current difficulty within assemblage theory about how an apparently limitless and always shifting emergence is contained, bordered, and qualified.5 For me, one of the most important engagements with this question is through visuality—­how ontological heterogeneity is partitioned and mobilized by dominant scopic regimes that can be deployed by state power. For thinkers such as Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Nicholas Mirzoeff, the terrain of emergence is partitioned in advance by a powerful visuality that allows certain possibilities to be seen and rendered sensible (and thus available for mobilization by the state), while rendering other possibilities both invisible and impossible (and thus available as targets of sovereign power).6 While this work is attentive to the affective and rhizomatic registers within which subjects and objects coalesce, it insists on foregrounding the way power and visuality work together to preemptively partition a heterogeneous ontological terrain. Approaching the Yellow Car through this debate is important because it forces us to engage with an underdeveloped aspect of the visuality entailed in sovereign power. Certainly it makes sense to speak about how the imposition of sovereignty shapes the way Cypriots engage with left-­behind objects; that is, the buffer zone prevents some Cypriots from reuniting with their lost objects by not only blocking them from view, but also by disallowing access. But the Yellow Car is a different object in the sense that it remains invisible and inaccessible to both communities. It only emerges in an assemblage with a very specific population of UN peacekeepers, and its development, dispersal, and transformation remains out of sight of both local communities and a majority of visitors to the island. Unlike the abandoned and left-­behind objects scattered all over the island, the Yellow Car is not an object that is made visible or invisible by sovereign power—­that framing assumes a territory and population upon which sovereign power acts to either include or exclude (i.e., Turkish Cypriots or Greek Cypriots). Rather, the Yellow Car’s position within the buffer zone reveals the a priori, behind-­the-­scenes, intimate work that goes into making sovereign power visible; that is, it taps us into the everyday life of the UN

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peacekeepers charged with enacting, dispensing, and managing sovereignty. As agents of the international sent to a foreign land to arbitrate between warring communities, the peacekeepers are not advocates of a particular Greek or Turkish sovereignty. Rather, they are advocates of the sovereign order of the international and they are in place to ensure that the stalemate in Cyprus does not unravel that order. Their status as the privileged guardians of the sovereign order is reinforced by their physical location within the buffer zone: they enact, dispense, and manage sovereign power on the rest of the island (i.e., they make it visible to local communities), but develop their own separate habitus in the physical space between the two communities (i.e., they keep the inner workings of sovereignty invisible). I want to name the coalescing of subjects and objects around the Yellow Car within the buffer zone as an enclaved assemblage that is physically, visually, symbolically, and affectively separated from the surrounding conflict that constitutes it. For Captain Ali Simmons, one of the leaders of the Green Line Tour featuring an encounter with the Yellow Car, that enclaved status is also a melancholy one: As I walk through the Old City, what strikes me most is the feeling of sadness, the feeling of time standing still. In the tranquillity, I can hear normal life carrying on, on either side of the buffer zone, cars driving past, mechanical tools working in workshops, people greeting each other in the morning much like it would have been prior to 1974. Now the only things that you can hear in that hidden nature reserve are cats, chickens and UN patrols.7 Because it is invisible to most populations on the island, the Yellow Car poses important questions about what goes unseen in our studies of how the sovereign order is visualized, or more appropriately, what unseen work makes that visuality possible. I am particularly interested in the way peacekeeping forces are kept apart from the conflicts they are supposed to be alleviating, and the extent to which the enclaved assemblages they participate in become entangled in more local concerns. Certainly there are infamous cases of spillover on Cyprus in which that privileged enclaved space is breached, for example, when off-­duty British forces enjoying the clubbing pleasures of Ayia Napa engage in sexual violence.8 For the most part, however, UN forces exemplify an inward-­ looking disposition that reduces and relegates the complex lifeworlds developing outside the buffer zone until their host environment becomes a strange terra nullis. As Mark Gillen argues, “it is nothing and it is nowhere.”9 This

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modality of solipsism and separation begs the question: what, exactly, goes on inside these militarized spaces? Focusing on the interactions between the UN peacekeepers who rotate in and out of UN post 66 and the immobile Yellow Car is one way to scrutinize these usually unseen practices. Do these interactions tap UN peacekeepers into the surrounding conflict in more intense ways, or do they simply reinforce an entitled form of isolation bolstered by a powerful institutional history (i.e., of UNFICYP forces bravely keeping the peace)? The enclaved assemblage surrounding the Yellow Car in Cyprus exemplifies a mutually reinforcing visual modality: on the one hand, the confident outward gaze of sovereign power, and on the other hand, the privileged inward gaze of an occupying force—­both of which objectify local landscapes, populations, and lifeworlds into reductive warring factions that need to be both reconciled and civilized. Drawing on Navaro-­Yashin’s use of abandoned objects to deconstruct mainstream accounts of a divided society, I want to argue that the buffer zone is constituted by multiple assemblages in different states of emergence. Reflecting on the difficult border work of assemblages, what needs to be identified and analyzed are the multiple entry and exit points that bring the buffer zone’s constituent subjects and objects into relation with local lifeworlds. While Navaro-­Yashin undertakes some of this analysis by examining the detritus and rubbish that collects on the Turkish side of the Nicosia/Lefkoşa border, what needs to be studied further are the accretions piling up inside the buffer zone.10 Are these similar to or different from the eddies of junk outside the buffer zone? What complex relations and associations do they generate?

Ruin, Rubbish, Detritus, and Decay Given the constant emergence, mobility, and transformation of assemblages, as well as the tricky border work they engage in, it is difficult to frame them through familiar questions of identity. As such, one of the central questions that assemblage theory poses is “How do relatively durable orders repeat and endure?”11 How can an assemblage be recognized and analyzed as such when it is in a constant state of emergence, and when its constitutive subject/object relations traverse other adjacent assemblages-­in-­formation? Part of the challenge here is the different life spans of the human and nonhuman agents involved in an assemblage; indeed, a lingering anthropocentrism can be discerned when assemblages are pegged to the life cycles of humans rather than, say, polymers, cancer cells, nuclear reactors, or tectonic plates. What makes the Yellow Car assemblage particularly interesting is this regard is the way it foregrounds multiple temporalities and life cycles through its process of decay.

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By positioning the Yellow Car as the anchor of this particular assemblage, I am foregrounding the life span of the car itself, and more specifically, the moment in 1974 when it was abandoned in the buffer zone and started its slow decline. At that moment, the car was repurposed from its original function as a mobile vehicle to a now-­static and decaying artifact and became, in effect, a ruin among ruins. Because it remains hidden within the buffer zone, and thus protected from the constant transformations of modern urban living, its rate of decay has not been hastened by the usual forces of property development, urban gentrification, waste management, community regeneration, and public health and safety. Nor, of course, has the buffer zone itself, so the deterioration of the Yellow Car is mirrored by a similarly decaying environment—­a dilapidated border zone, degenerating urban infrastructure, rusty barbed wire, aging tarmac, layers of rubbish, and bricked-­up gateways, windows, and doors. The rather protected condition of this ruin among ruins means that its rate of decay is primarily determined by the durability of the Yellow Car’s component parts in the face of encroaching nature. And it is here, in the imbrications of nature and technology, that we get a sense of the multiple cycles of decay and regeneration that enfold large numbers of subjects and objects into the Yellow Car assemblage. That enfolding does not occur only in the present tense; indeed, any encounter with the Yellow Car calls forth the design innovations, research cultures, production practices, engineering expertise, industrial capacity, and distribution networks of the automobile industry in the early 1970s that produced this particular make of Morris Minor. Those temporalities resonate through the specific technologies, systems, and materials that comprise this particular car in this particular place, from the microscopic polymers, chemicals, and particles of each component, to the plastic, leather, glass, paint, petrol, glue, steel, carpet, fabric, and labels that constitute the car itself. All of these nonhuman agents have different life cycles and rates of decay that have become explicit during the Yellow Car’s forty-­year exposure to surrounding animal, plant, and atmospheric forces (e.g., moisture from the rain, heat from the sun, wind, bacteria, fungus, flowers, weeds, mulch, animal droppings, maggots, insects, birds, worms, spiders, mice, and gravel). As Tim Edensor argues, the material expressions of differential rates of decay blur the lines between nature, culture, and technology and make it possible to link an object back to its initial emergence: This physical deconstruction of objects reveals the artifice through which they are structured to withstand ambiguity. This erosion of singularity through which the object becomes “un-­manufactured”

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remembers the process by which it was assembled: the materials that were brought together for its fabrication, the skilled labour that routinely utilized an aptitude to make similar things, the machines and tools that were used to shape it.12 Edensor’s argument is that industrial ruins have a way of disordering the “normative assignments of objects” in our everyday lives because they prevent things from being designated as recyclable (and thus usable) waste (and thus discarded) or artifact (and thus preserved for future display).13 Although the buffer zone in Nicosia/Lefkoşa is manifestly not an industrial ruin at the edge of an urban center, it shares some important characteristics with the sites Edensor studies: they are both composed of multiple organic and man-­made objects at different stages of decay; those objects are situated in environments that are themselves deteriorating outside the gaze of urban populations; and they both have highly restricted levels of human interaction. It is within this complex feedback loop of materiality, technology, nature, and decay that human agents—­themselves decaying bodies—­become entangled. With respect to the Yellow Car, these agents have been part of the successive UN forces—­mostly British and Canadian—­patrolling Sector Two of the buffer zone in Nicosia/Lefkoşa and stationed at the UN platoon complex next to Lidra Street (rebranded Maple House for the resident Canadian forces). Given the extended life cycle of the decaying Yellow Car, these entanglements have to be understood across a forty-­year period of successive force deployment in which different human agents iteratively perform the same orientations toward the car. The car has become institutionalized as part of the daily rituals, practices, and movements of UN troops in the city, and has thus been doubly repurposed. First, it is an important visual marker for troops on patrol in the buffer zone, and thus orients them within a bifurcated urban cartography. Second, it has become an artifact encountered by arriving UN forces, government dignitaries, military commanders, and visiting journalists who participate in the Green Line Tour. This is not to suggest that the Yellow Car is purely an instrumental symbol; indeed, in both registers it provokes complex and contradictory feelings of security, familiarity, melancholy, and loss in those human agents who encounter it. In this sense, the observer’s entanglements with the Yellow Car are akin to those of museum spectators encountering objects of war: they are destabilized by the sublime presence of the object, but easily reconciled to it through prevailing discourses of peace, conflict resolution, and unification.14 This suggests that despite its state of ruin and decay, the Yellow Car is a lively object, teeming with potential associations that are

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realized most clearly in those moments of its repurposing—­when, for example, it functions as a signpost or an artifact in a new affective terrain.

Collecting, Curating, Caretaking As one of many decaying objects that remain within the buffer zone, the Yellow Car is a small example of a wider phenomenon epitomized by Varosha/ Maraş—­an entire ghost town of hotels, apartment buildings, and shops on the east coast of Cyprus that was abandoned in 1974 and that remains, thanks to a UN resolution, unavailable for resettlement. Given these ever-­present ghostly landscapes, it is unsurprising that Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have very complicated feelings of melancholia about the objects, detritus, and ruins of 1974. But those experiences of melancholia cannot be limited to the psyche of the human agents involved; as Navaro-­Yashin argues, they must be extended to spaces, objects, and nonhumans as well.15 While it is understandable that many of these melancholic interactions are shaped by feelings of ambivalence, disgust, fear, and loathing, there are also moments when discarded objects are adopted, taken care of, and cherished, when they are repurposed and given a new life within a new community. For me, these actions of positive repurposing demand more attention. Because the Yellow Car remains hidden within the buffer zone and entangled with only a limited set of nonlocal human agents, it does not carry the same affective charge as the abandoned objects from enemy communities that Navaro-­Yashin studies. In this sense, we need to see it in a different affective register that is not so overdetermined by the outward enactment, dispersal, and management of sovereign power. What particularly interests me about the Yellow Car is the energy, care, and attention lavished on it by UN forces: the repeated repainting of its bright yellow coat, and the continual pruning back of surrounding plant life so that it can function properly as a signpost and artifact. Speaking of the familiar objects of everyday life, Edensor explains how “work goes into the sustenance of an object over time. It is cared for, cleaned and polished, to bestow upon it an illusion of permanence, to keep at bay the spectres of waste and decay.”16 Like any abandoned object or decaying ruin, the Yellow Car is a constant and uncomfortable reminder to UN forces of time passing and of their own mortality. In this case, it is an additional reminder of their failure to break the political stalemate that has been in effect in Cyprus since 1974. But rather than getting rid of the car and consigning it to waste (i.e., putting it in its proper place), the UN forces have tamed the negative messages it exudes by resuscitating and repurposing it, by taking care of it and bringing

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it back to life within the orbit of military culture. Although the Yellow Car is not a personal object that is worked on and taken care of by individuals, the constant repainting, caretaking, and upkeep, not to mention the way it is proudly shown off to officials on the Green Line Tour, speaks of a collective, long-­term investment in this object by UN forces. How might we understand this investment? How are successive troops enrolled into caring for the Yellow Car? How does it become, in effect, a unifying presence for UNFICYP? There is, of course, a long history of how military populations tame their foreign surroundings by refashioning bases, outposts, and barracks to feel more “at home.” This ranges from the acquisition and adaption of local objects for personal use (e.g., off-­ duty soldiers cooking traditional Cypriot cuisine; troops adopting local animals as mascots; the transformation of conquered buildings into troop barracks) to the more recent practice of importing home comforts directly to foreign bases (e.g., fully fitted weight rooms, Burger King, Taco Bell). In this context, the repurposing and caretaking of the Yellow Car has flourished because of the lack of violence on Cyprus. Widely understood by military personnel as “a good tour” because the conflict has been at a stalemate for so long, a Cyprus posting involves peacekeeping in a relatively stable situation with very few—­if any—­outbreaks of violence, as opposed to a posting in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Helmand Province in Afghanistan. This means that UN troops experience long stretches of boredom on their Cypriot tour, and have thus had the time and energy to take care of the Yellow Car because they are not quelling riots, protecting civilians, or engaging in combat. In this sense, the affective register through which troops are brought to care for a decaying object in the buffer zone is quite a different thing than the highly charged relations soldiers develop with the objects they carry with them onto the battlefield (e.g., bibles, jewelry, letters, cigarettes, photographs). On Cyprus, soldiers must be actively brought out of a state of boredom induced by the repetitive tasks, routine patrols, and scheduled life of peacekeeping during a stalemate. What are the practices, techniques, and methods through which bored soldiers are motivated to care for a decaying object? Are these practices driven by external commands from senior officers, or are they willingly performed out of a sense of duty, camaraderie, and morale? These efforts to care for the Yellow Car are the external expression of a much more elaborate practice of internal collecting, curating, and caretaking that took place at the UN complex between 1964 and 1993. The Canadian forces who were stationed in Cyprus during this time collected a number of abandoned objects from houses and derelict buildings along the buffer zone and displayed

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them in a dedicated room within Maple House. This in-­house museum exhibited battered 1930s suitcases, black-­and-­white photographs of Old Nicosia/ Lefkoşa, an antique foot-­pedal Singer sewing machine, paintings, old television sets, radios, wooden furniture, and various bowls, pots, and containers.17 The objects were arranged and displayed in an orderly fashion that demonstrated an engagement with the basic practices of curating, and the one-­room museum allowed the resident UN forces to enjoy refreshments as they viewed the exhibits. The perpetual caretaking of the Yellow Car, and the effort put into collecting, curating, and displaying found objects within the Maple House Museum, speaks to an affection or love for objects—­even foreign objects—­rather than their neglect, relegation, or dismissal. But it also speaks to a larger desire, manifest at all levels of UN deployment, to order the disarray of conflict by “putting things in their proper place,” whether that means constructing a new constitution, resettling ethnic communities, or in this case improving or finding a new home for derelict artifacts. That desire has complex outworkings that remind us once again of the embedded power relations expressed by the presence of UN troops on foreign soil. For example, the collection of familiar items that remind troops of their everyday lives back home (e.g., television sets) suggests that soldiers feel an affinity and equivalence with local populations. But the collection of old items and the location of those items within a museum—­no matter how makeshift—­distances soldiers from their local hosts and creates an important hierarchy. Here, modern, international troops relegate Cypriot objects to ancient artifacts, and Cypriot lifeworlds to a traditional culture, all of which can be neatly defined and displayed in a museum exhibit. The point is that while the caretaking of the Yellow Car and the curating of the Maple House Museum are important, if often unseen, expressions of the affective registers through which soldiers become entangled with local objects, those attachments do not emerge solely on an undifferentiated rhizomatic plane. Rather, they are also powerfully shaped by expressions of sovereign power, memories of colonial rule, and the trauma of a protracted conflict. While it is tempting to understand assemblages in terms of their limitless possibilities, it is important to constantly track the constitutive modes of asymmetry that they generate and reproduce.

Entangling the International How can we gauge the relevance of the Yellow Car to International Relations? Surely a decaying object hidden from view in a run-­down border area on a small

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island is completely insignificant in comparison with drones, nuclear missiles, and the critical infrastructure of cities? I would argue, like Christine Sylvester, that the international is often found where we least expect it, and that hidden artifacts such as the Yellow Car actually tell us a great deal about the way global order is sutured into, and secured by, our intimate lives.18 For me, the virtue of object-­oriented analysis like assemblage theory is that it punctures the privileged realm of diplomacy and statecraft and brings us up against the everyday behaviors, practices, and activities of political agents. While UN peacekeepers are certainly empowered agents compared with many other identities in Cyprus, focusing on the objects they are entangled with is one way to unpack that privilege and demonstrate the multiple relations and materialities that are required to sustain it. My intention in bringing forth a hidden and decaying object like the Yellow Car is to confront us with three important questions. First, how does a prior, ontological mobilization of visuality enable certain things to be seen and attended to, while simultaneously excluding other things from the domain of the representable? Second, how can we pay attention to differential rates of emergence and decay in ways that do not privilege the life span of the human? And finally, what kind of subject/object relations produce unexpected and disruptive practices, and therefore prevent us from “putting things in their proper place”? What new dispositions, orientations, and trajectories are produced in these moments? When we analyze the Yellow Car as an anchor in a wider assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it is possible to see vibrancy, life, and energy in an object assumed to be dead. In other words, it forces us to analyze the distribution of agency across human, material, environmental, and organic registers. By insisting that the Yellow Car is a full-­fledged actant in the Cypriot conflict, the terrain of the political is opened up by embracing a heterogeneity that includes things, objects, and nonhumans. For me, this is a deliberate strategy to dismantle the prevailing two-­communities model of conflict resolution that reproduces a problematic anthropocentrism and reinforces the current stalemate. By insisting that things matter, and by foregrounding the relations between human and nonhuman agents, a radical pluralism begins to articulate new imaginaries that cannot be easily assimilated by the familiar enactments of sovereign power or used to reproduce prevailing global asymmetries.

Notes 1. Yiannis Papadakis, Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).

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2. The key figure within International Relations formulating this critical approach to the Cypriot conflict is Costas M. Constantinou; see, for example, Costas M. Constantinou and Constantinos Arimedes, “Comfortable Conflict and (Il)liberal Peace in Cyprus,” in Oliver Richmond and Audra Mitchell, eds., Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 242–­59, and Costas M. Constantinou and Mete Hatay, “Cyprus, Ethnic Conflict and Conflicted Heritage,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33(9) (2010): 1600–­1619. 3. Yael Navaro-­Yashin, “‘Life Is Dead Here’: Sensing the Political in ‘No Man’s Land,’” Anthropological Theory 3(1) (2003): 107–­25; Yael Navaro-­Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1) (2009): 1–­18; and Yael Navaro-­ Yashin, The Make-­Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 4. Navaro-­Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects,” 9. For an exploration of sovereignty’s exclusions with respect to the UK bases on Cypriot territory, see Costas M. Constantinou and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Long Mile of Empire: Power, Legitimation, and the UK Bases in Cyprus,” Mediterranean Politics 10(1) (2005): 65–­84. 5. B. Anderson and C. McFarlane, “Assemblage and Geography,” Area 43(2) (2011): 124–­27; Manuel DeLanda Deleuze: History and Science (New York: Atropos Press, 2010). 6. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004); and Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 7. Captain Ali Simmons, “The Green Line Tour,” Blue Beret, February 2003, 10; available at http://www.unficyp.org/media/Blue%20Beret%20-%20pdf%20files/2003 /BB-02-February%202003.pdf (accessed February 20, 2013). 8. Although British soldiers are officially banned from Ayia Napa, they continue to spend their off-­duty time at clubbing resorts on the island, which has, predictably, led to numerous incidents of sexual violence; see Owen Boycott, “Nine British Soldiers in Court Accused of Ayia Napa rampage,” Guardian, July 5, 2008; available at http://www .guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/05/cyprus.military (accessed February 21, 2013). 9. Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35. 10. Navaro-­Yashin, The Make-­Believe Space, 129–­60. 11. Anderson and McFarlane, “Assemblage and Geography,” 126. 12. Tim Edensor, “Waste Matter: The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World,” Journal of Material Culture 10(3) (2005): 320. 13. Ibid., 314; Caitlin DeSilvey, “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things,” Journal of Material Culture 11(3) (2006): 318–­38. 14. I have explored this relationship in greater detail in “Sublime Lessons: Education and Ambivalence in War Exhibitions,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34(3) (2006): 185–­206. 15. Navaro-­Yashin, The Make-­Believe Space, 174–­75. 16. Edensor, “Waste Matter,” 317.

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17. Editors, “The Story of Maple House,” Blue Beret, June/July 2010; available at http://www.unficyp.org/media/Blue%20Beret%20-%20pdf%20files/2010/BB%20June -July%202010.pdf (accessed February 21, 2013). 18. Christine Sylvester, Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2008). See also Mark B. Salter, “Theory of the /: The Suture and Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics 17(4) (2012): 734–­55.

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Smartphone Peter Chambers

The theory changes the reality it describes. —­Philip K. Dick, Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said

RIOT In February 2013 a friend sent me a link to a video hosted on the Guardian’s Web site detailing a data-­mining tool developed by Raytheon called Rapid Information Overlay Technology (RIOT).1 RIOT allows the user to quickly assemble a clear picture of a person’s network of associates and movements, as revealed through habitual, normal smartphone use, the repeated patterns of which can then be visualized in a number of ways to accurately disclose the person’s networks of association and predict future behavior. The smartphone is an extremely subtle and complex device whose uses, agency, and affects depend greatly on the assemblages in which it is an actant. The effectiveness of the smartphone in RIOT’s marketable surveillance assemblage, for example, depends on the interoperation of a large number of programmed systems, with interested group agents such as the Raytheon corporation and the U.S. government. It also depends on the broader, shifting social interaction between smartphones and their human and nonhuman users in their average, everyday dealings with one another via their smartphones—­for this is, after all, why the precise pattern of data is there in the first place and for the foreseeable future. Careful consideration of the surveillant assemblage visible through RIOT prompts us to rethink agency and causality: Is any “one” in control here? To what ends are these tools being put, and what are their probable and possible futures? To what do individual smartphone users and system agents of their surveillance tend to pay attention? What kind of control might they seek, and what might they have? Considering the smartphone’s enmeshment also encourages us to think very carefully about the possible political dangers this

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engenders, encourages, and normalizes. These are political dangers that the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures amply demonstrate are no longer science fiction, the cool-­but-­creepy imaginings of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Strategic Technology Office, or even marginal practices that are only the obsessive worry of paranoid cranks and conspiracy theorists.2 Rather, they are the normal political technologies of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its project of total planetary surveillance through PRISM, Boundless Informant, and the many other projects, programs, and applications of which large numbers of people are not yet aware.3 So far, the repercussions of the mass surveillance disclosures appeared to have perturbed the NSA without functionally altering its strategic program and its various programs.4 Nor has it upset smartphone use, which continues to increase, emanating from affluent young and business users, but diffusing globally as the price of handsets and data continues to fall. In 2014, global smartphone uptake sat at approximately 1.75 billion users.5 By 2017, most people in wealthier countries who wish to have a phone will have no choice but to have a smartphone: it will be the only consumer choice. In the same year, smartphone use is projected to hit 2.5 billion users, 33.8 percent of the world’s population.6 The further speculative assertion in this chapter is that the smartphone is a paradigm shift in computer use, not just an advance from mobile telephony. This is evidenced by the business models of Apple, Google, and Facebook, now predicated on increasing consumer reliance on smartphones: Apple through the app-­hardware-­ecosystem, Google through Android and search, and Facebook through manipulation of attention and emotion.7 The smartphone, I contend, is the qualitatively dominant new paradigm for pervasive computing. Along with the tablet, it is reshaping what networked computing means, and thus what it means to be surveilled. The imbrication of our mundane culture of everyday smartphone use in smartphone-­predicated surveillance has global reach and profound implications for our life in common. In this chapter, I read the smartphone as an actant whose modulating agency and meaning are intelligible through a number of moments, which have been chosen for their value in helping us better understand the emergent power relations that now appear visible through assemblages like those to which smartphone uses such as Facebook, Twitter, Web mail, RIOT, PRISM, and Boundless Informant are now attached and interact with. These power relations are also international relations: they upset conventional understandings of the international while remaking relations anew. From one perspective, smartphone-­predicated surveillance and its implications indicate that adding

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Niklas Luhmann’s conception of the international to our existing understanding is appropriate. For Luhmann, the international no longer refers to “a relation between two (or more) nations but to the political and the economic problems of the global system.”8 This is not to say that the international of old, predicated on regional differences, institutionalized hierarchies of governmental authority, enforceable territorial monopolies on physical violence, diplomacy, and (thus) the political sovereignty of nation-­states, no longer exists or matters. It does, and greatly: but its precise meaning, as well as the extent to which it matters, is also being partially transformed through smartphone predicated-­surveillance. It is this making and remaking of the international that this chapter works toward better understanding. What follows also raises the question of the United States as a nation in its sovereign relation to others, for both the smartphone and the NSA are American inventions and American projects. Vladimir Putin was wrong to describe the Internet as a “CIA project,” but perhaps only because he incorrectly named the central agency and device.9 Connecting the smartphone to its relations also means considering what citizenship means—­“inside,” “outside,” and in relation to this nation-­state in particular and the nation-­state form in general. Seeing the NSA’s tools and techniques as “merely that,” and not as political dangers, is about trust. It means trusting government agents who say they are acting in the name of the United States, which nonetheless still professes to be a liberal democracy. But as the NSA’s practices affect every smartphone user globally, it also means trusting that the United States’ interests, even if they still are the liberal democratic interests of its citizens, are international interests, global interests, our interests. As Putin’s remark says in its own way, this is asking a lot. The enmeshment of our smartphone use in the NSA’s machinations should lead us to question what the United States stands for. Do Internet users have a right to privacy and anonymity online (did we ever)? Do we have a right not to be killed—­globally, locally, overseas, or at home—­for what traces of our online operations reveal as suspicious to the NSA? What does citizenship mean when the leaders of powerful nation-­states and U.S. citizens alike are the target objects of this new surveillance? What does citizenship protect us from when certain among them are assassinated—­ even as citizens—­based in part on what their smartphones told the NSA about who and where they were? These questions guide what follows. This reading of the smartphone’s power effects and political implications will be done in three stages. In the first section I take a phenomenologically inspired approach, touching on what may be significant and different about the way we tend to pick up, hold, and use smartphones, as well as how we

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may subjectively understand this experience. The gambit behind the conjoining of “the thing itself” and the far more general account of power effects is that we cannot understand the surveillant networks that the smartphone is entangling increasing numbers of us in without first “picking up the phone”—­ not, for a change, to send a message or check the contents of one just received, but to try to encounter those other aspects of it which, as Heidegger would say, remain veiled in our concernful everyday dealings with smartphones as ready-­to-­hand equipment.10 This is a matter of understanding how it is that smartphones have come to pervade so many people’s lives so quickly, as well as why it might be that so many people seem stubbornly unworried about their involvement in what are always also potentially the NSA’s activities. The second section focuses on the way big data interacts both with subjective experiences and culturally normal habits and with patterns of smartphone use and surveillant attentions. This provides a bridge and door onto the third section on emergent power relations. Here, I focus on two salient, broader effects produced when the cultures of use engendered by everyday interactions of smartphones become entangled in smartphone-­predicated surveillance: control and spectacle. The assumptions underpinning the particular importance accorded to the smartphone for understanding power relations are as follows: There is no NSA without big data; there is no big data without pervasive networked computer use. This happens once computers are connected to the Internet by default, part of the “always on” concept that accompanied the switch to broadband, then wireless, in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. The only simple, effective safeguard against the NSA’s techniques is an air-­ gapped computer, a computer physically isolated from unsecured networks.11 However, pervasive computing is increasingly being conducted through smartphones, devices that are constitutively networked and networking. This means that smartphones are always disclosing their users’ patterns and whereabouts to the NSA, while it also means that the patterns of data are more telling, as RIOT indicates. The further importance here is that smartphones are very difficult for most users to modify and hack. Even judicious and well-­informed use is no guarantee against the NSA’s methods, and no guard of privacy and anonymity. In this assemblage, the smartphone is a surveillant device. These difficulties are also relevant for understanding tablets. But one thing distinguishes the smartphone from laptops and tablets. Smartphones follow their users around. Users carry them everywhere—­many even take them to bed. This means they disclose dynamic locational data, a rich, relational, accurate topography of moments, places, and people. This now-­central topography of power relations re-

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making the international is where we have to get to, but to begin with, let us first pick up the thing itself, these telling companions of everyday affluent life.

Picking Up the Smartphone Smartphones are magical devices to use, to have, and to hold. The smartphone is not merely subtle, complex, and magical, it is an extremely seductive piece of technology. The world in which a smartphone is central, crucial, and necessary to so many people is vastly different to the one in which the stirrup occupied a similar place.12 Yet the smartphone’s subtlety and complexity are belied by the presented unity of the device itself: the user sees, picks up, holds, and interacts with the tactile graphical user interface of a thoughtful, even beautiful piece of modernist industrial design. This hides what, following Benjamin Bratton, we might call a “densely stacked architecture,” that labyrinthine genealogy of theories, engineering, circuitry, and labor that every manufactured handset holds within its frame.13 The smartphone is an embodied idea, an enacted metaphor; and it is brimming with more than a century’s worth of deep and careful thought. The presented unity of the unit effaces this extraordinary work of design and development, the predicates and predecessors of each of those smoothly integrated elements, the obstacles of thought, materials, design, and manufacturing that stood between its past and its present. The smartphone is also an interface that effaces its traces, as Derrida might playfully put it. In other words, part of what’s amazing about the paradigm for smartphone design—­set by Apple—­is the way the presented unity takes all that twenty-­first-­century complexity and renders it perceptually invisible and functionally irrelevant. This is fundamental to generating an end-­user experience that encourages continual smartphone use for a large and growing number of functions: telephony, e-­mail, messaging, photography, social media, logging in, note taking, cross-­platform data input, storage and retrieval, and so on. The intuitive, appealing “simplicity” of the smartphone’s interface, regardless of the function or app, leaves the user free to intuit self and world by calling forth actions, notifications, calculations, information, and sociality all just by stroking and tapping its tactile graphical user interface. This is, indeed, very smart; but a further part of how it works so well and so subtly is also about what disappears. Smartphones are better thought of as mobile computers, not phones. To the extent they become ubiquitous, smartphones involve pervasive mobile computing over digital information networks through the tactile graphical user

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interface of a device that is handheld, pocketable, and highly portable. Smartphones are about pervasive computing, which as Alexander Galloway notes, “seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as to render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted.”14 The laptop liberated the computer from the desktop and the plug outlet, first for the time dictated by battery life, then for the space dictated by access to Wi-­Fi. The smartphone has done more than liberate networked computing from the lap: the tactile graphical user interface places any number of computationally possible functions behind the touch screen’s glass in the hand of the user, who is “liberated” not only from having to sit at a desk and type data into a computer, but from even thinking about the smartphone as “a computer” in the sense made conventional by the desktop metaphor of computing. The net effect is already this: in an actant network in which computing is omnipresent, the computer appears to have vanished. As the computerness of the smartphone is has been rendered largely invisible, the valid prepositions of computer use are changed, and our relations and dispositions of computer interaction with it.15 Smartphones are used for any number of tasks, all of which—­though they involve automating, databasing, and networking actions through a graphical user interface—­do so in a way that is so unobtrusive that it no longer need be recognized as computing at all. Smartphones are “used with” and “used while,” and here, crucially, while to an outside observer (or a frustrated loved one, pet, or public space-­sharing commuter) our attention is all too involved with the device, subjectively our attention is given over to whatever tasks the device is performing for us, and not the device as the device, or the device in its implications for surveillance, or our intimate lives—­or the future of humanity. When we use it as equipment, the smartphone in its equipmentality recedes into the background, precisely in order to be available to us as equipment.16 All that computing we’re doing becomes both pervasive and unobtrusive. The smartphone not only means that the computer vanishes, it also means that the smartphone itself recedes into the background as we focus on the task at hand. We not only do not think of the smartphone as a computer, very often we do not think about the smartphone at all. Having a computer unobtrusively compute while one performs any number of tasks in a way that is not seen as computing not only renders invisible the omnipresence of computing. It also seems plausible to suggest that it would tend to make people unaware that any computing is going on at all—­precisely where and while computing is going on all the time. This becomes significant when so much of this computing amounts to data entry being performed for

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corporations in exchange for access to their services. How many of us think of our messaging practices as “doing data entry work for Facebook,” and by extension the NSA? Facebook’s business model is based on a wager here: that we will continue to perform the data entry, while never experiencing this as performing labor for a corporation (or really caring even if we do), but rather as simply interacting with the people we “like.” The NSA’s surveillance model is based on a second-­order wager of sorts: that not only will we continue to perform the data entry work without experiencing it as producing the elements of value and profit for a corporation, but that we will never inquire how that data is being used, or by whom, nor will we think of it as performing data entry for the NSA. We will not know if we are being surveilled, not as we perform our data entry, nor afterwards, if our inscriptions are found to contain suspicious patterns. Pervasive computing using a smartphone according to the double wager always contains the potentiality for unobtrusive intrusion. Everyday smartphone use in this assemblage is ambient surveillance, both in the moment and in retrospect. As well as being powerful, handheld, mobile computers that involve us in ambient surveillance, smartphones, following Christian Licoppe, are notification devices that are designed to occur. They summon subjects to respond to a huge number of requests, and the momentum generated through these summonses is, if you will, what makes the world go round. This world precedes the contemporary human subject: the world of the employee, student, daughter, or friend is a world in which we all must respond to our summons, and the smartphone is becoming the de facto device through which the summons appears. This goes toward explaining why it is that smartphones have become so pervasive so quickly in the affluent West.17 Among other reasons, smartphones have been enthusiastically inserted in these actant networks because of intense social pressure from human actants. For increasing numbers of these globally diffused groups and classes of people, you cannot not have a phone; unless you are an eminent old technology theorist like Paul Virilio—­who famously refuses to have a mobile phone of any kind—­it is very difficult to choose not to choose. Sherry Turkle’s recent research in Alone Together shows clearly that (affluent Western) parents make their children carry them for their own safety, just as bosses expect their employees to have them—­and have them within earshot and arm’s reach, at all times.18 Being within reach of a phone, and being flexibly available to respond promptly to any and all notifications that arrive through it—­in a way that only doctors and drug dealers were available in the early 1990s of the rich West, via pagers—­has become an absolute social responsibility for all, whose nonnegotiability must nevertheless somehow be negotiated.

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The culturally normal social pressure to be reachable to negotiate timely responses via a mobile phone that is increasingly a smartphone tells us something important about contemporary affluent capitalist human centers of attention. Most people enmeshed in these assemblages are too busy coping with their summonses to worry about the global implications of smartphone-­based surveillance. The combined power of the summons and social pressure offer two further reasons why people are unwilling or unable to stop using their phones. First, most people so enmeshed cannot stop using their smartphones. Smartphone use is a matter of obligation to friends, family, and work.19 Second, smartphone users can’t or don’t stop, in spite of whatever misgivings or ambivalence they may have.20 This is because, having become the intermediary that interfaces between the many spheres of people’s lives, smartphones are also that which is used to cope with the coping. Smartphones are that through which the heavy summons to work keeps arriving, but they’re also that through which many people choose to lighten the load of the work summons—­by gossiping and bitching about it. Christian Licoppe’s empirical research around this conjuncture helps us zoom in on subjective centers of smartphone attention with greater precision. Licoppe’s research demonstrates that people recover agency in these pressurized contexts by enacting a very complex intersubjective patterning around the negotiation of being available to communicate. This is one key place where the conscious work of coping takes place. Cellular phones, “dumb” and smart alike, offer ways and means of coping by enabling human actants to negotiate their availability or make others available to them. In this context, Licoppe argues, people learn ways to cope, playing within the protocols, but between the rules. This interaction materializes a key tension.21 The tension is in the attentional involvement of the phrasing and timing of a communicated response; the involvements are in our relationships; and our relationships, work, and play are profoundly shaped by the anxiety of having to do things and the subjective necessity of arranging this in such a way that we can keep coping. In the background is, of course, work under capitalism, but in the foreground there we are with the phone in our hand—­thus these negotiated moments of coping are key points where the work takes place, again and again. In their various functions as part of pervasive computing, smartphones are also about augmentation: and this speaks to their subtlety, their subtle, ongoing additions to our lives.22 As mentioned, the smartphone is a computer liberated from the functions, tasks, settings, and dispositions that computing was formerly paradigmatically understood to involve. This also means that the smartphone can accompany a large and increasing number of everyday human

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activities that it adds to by augmenting; that is, providing information and guidance, keeping records—­storing, transmitting, processing things—­while we pay attention to what we’re typing, to “the content of content.” One means of facilitating this augmentation is through the use of an app. Aside from the institution of the touch screen, one of Apple’s other paradigm-­ shifting innovations was in facilitating the shift toward fast, searchable app stores. This revolutionized phone use by transforming the smartphone into a single-­interface life augmentation device that can solve any number of problems through the quick, effortless, cheap purchase of an app: “there’s an app for that,” as the phrase goes. As Charles Arthur reports, this encouraged the use of larger quantities and different forms of data, not just text messaging, within what was mobile telephony. This transformed the mobile telephone market: “where mobile internet connectivity had previously been parceled in per-­megabyte allocations, to screens with tiny displays,” “data” became a salable commodity, driven by insatiable consumer demand.23 This transformation, along with increasing processing speed and screen real estate, further opened the market for apps. More data and speed, more apps; more apps, more need for data and speed. Augmentation has fed a recursive loop of data supply and data demand—­all of which, barring government-­imposed limits on their data collection practice, offers an ever richer data set to the NSA. This brings us to its other specificity: the interface, and how it’s used both to bring the face close and keep it at a distance. My interpretation of findings from Licoppe’s and Turkle’s research indicates that smartphone use can be read as affording many users a sense of safety by securing a sense of effective control: used in this way, the smartphone becomes a control interface.24 To follow Turkle a little further, one of the key patterns within this general culture of use is that many people use their smartphones to ensure that only some people and things can get close, while using it as a way of staying in touch—­at a distance determined by the controller. The control that interests individual users most is the control of social distance: the smartphone allows some to get very close, while keeping others as distant as possible, or only as close as is absolutely necessary. Many of these distances are smartphone generated, such as the location-­aware gay dating and cruising app Grindr, which makes visible a heretofore invisible proximate landscape of sexual desire that is both local and between strangers.25 Grindr is a way of using smartphones to make globally mobile sexual desire local. These paradoxical relations of intimate distance central to our smartphone-­ mediated social lives are aptly captured by Turkle’s central phrase and title

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“alone together.” To say “alone together” suggests an interface as both a connection and a gap, and we should add this controlling notion of interfacing to the notions of pervasive computing and augmentation just developed. For those involved in this culture of control, the interface becomes a separation that keeps things together. As Peter Sloterdijk notes (and we should certainly think of Facebook here): It is no coincidence that the most distinctive new place in the innovated medial world is the interface, which no longer refers to the space of encounter between faces, but rather the contact point between the face and the non-­face, or between two non-­faces.26 This distinctive new place is, moreover, a control interface that needn’t be about faces at all anymore, and might even increasingly be about actively de-­ facing face-­to-­face intimacy in preference for the placid apparent controllability of the nonfaced Gorilla Glass™ tactile graphical user interface. If power relations consist in the conduct of conduct (to paraphrase Foucault), then pervasive computing through smartphone control interfaces is surely one increasingly important “contact point” where that conduct is conducted. In this section I’ve suggested that this conduct is conducted here for a number of reasons, key among which is reestablishing relational agency over social distance. These are subjective practices related to a certain culture of use. Yet regardless of how we subjectively experience or practice this interfacing, objectively it is currently a part of Raytheon’s business model and the NSA’s surveillance model. But how does this person-­specific, locational, relational, dynamic disclosure of and by smartphones and their users in these actant networks become the kind of resource that makes the NSA’s methods “the easiest most efficient and most valuable way” to achieve surveillant ends?27 This can be seen clearly by looking at surveillant smartphone assemblages’ entanglement with big data.

Surveillant Smartphone Assemblages’ Entanglement with Big Data Surveillance is a form of attention to data. With midcentury modern forms of surveillance (Cold War espionage), good data was difficult to obtain, extremely dangerous to transmit, and often required meticulous decryption if and when it was finally recovered. With RIOT we can see within the space of a few minutes how the smartphone’s surveillant interaction with big data means, first of all, that information about a subject of interest is no longer a scarce re-

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source. Surveillance here—­making good on that data by transforming it into legible information—­becomes a question of access, retrieval, and making easily intelligible sense of a hyperabundant resource. It also means turning a vast quantity of data into instantly visualizable, easily legible, quality intel, which requires computer power, smart coding, and creatively solving many design problems, including data visualization. Yet RIOT’s skimming of a mass of publicly available data indicates a further transformation engendered by pervasive smartphone use. Here, data is a hyperabundant resource that is easy and legal to obtain, aggregate, and transform into a salable commodity. Surveillance in the era of big data and smartphones already looks more like routine software development than espionage, more geek than spook. This semblance of technical, defensibly legal surveillant skimming is itself generative. Big data and smartphones engender a dynamic of reciprocal ease that feeds recursive increases in data input and data-­based surveillance. As analyzed above through augmentation, the smartphone has lowered the investment, cost, and effort of the increasing number of actions it enables for the user, to such an extent that it has actually transformed the mobile phone market into being about providing cheap, abundant data reliably accessible at high speeds, while generating a new, multibillion-­dollar market for apps. The existence of cheap data, its high-­speed delivery and beautiful, near-­instant presentation, and the prevalence of an enormous number of high-­quality, useful apps feeds the recursive development of big data, simply because it makes it ever more compelling to use a smartphone for almost everything. To the extent that it’s accessible to the automated data-­mining analytics and human analysts of the NSA, this means that a rich source of constantly updated, highly detailed ostensibly public data has become available for a number of surveillant purposes limited only by the resources and creativity of the cybersecurity-­ industrial complex. Data only becomes information for human purposes to the extent that it is rendered useful, readable, communicable. Big data is only a resource because it is capable of becoming decrypted, legible information at various points in a communication network, and communication networks only exist because there are faces and/or nonfaces “on the other end” (thus far). Dwelling on the technology in the smartphone, between smartphones, as part and parcel of what they do, shows that in practice it’s impossible to separate what it is from what it does and who’s using it: it’s entanglement all the way down, all the way out. That is to say, data’s intelligibility as good information for surveillant purposes rests upon seeing the functional relation between parts of a greater entanglement, and the implications and uses thereof. Government agents are

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applying inductive reasoning and reflexive understanding to the smartphone and using it socially according to culturally agreed surveillant purposes or ends. With this in mind, we have to consider the making of the international through surveillant smartphone assemblages: in order for there to be surveillant attention such as has been discussed so far, there has to be reflexive understanding that a global network exists and can be used in this way. Smartphone-­based surveillance in its various applications, through its many tools, all manifest ways of imagining the Internet and social relations. They are an implemented social theory of control—­and it works. The fact that RIOT exists and that there is a lucrative government market for it tells us, moreover, that this is a reflexive understanding firmly in possession of a large number of agents working in the name of states such as the United States and its allies. We may not think of our normal Internet and smartphone use being about surveillance, but increasingly large numbers of state-­attached actors already do. That Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, shows us that the international of old still matters greatly, but in the light of what Snowden has disclosed, it matters with a difference that makes a difference to the international. Snowden’s living body is safe in Russia, but his disclosures teach us that no one connected to the Internet is out of reach of the NSA, and everyone, anywhere with a smartphone is capable of being tracked and traced. To the extent that we become conscious of this and it shapes our conduct in any way, this means that we are all being governed by the USA as the NSA. Consider also Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Hackberry” experience. Notwithstanding its usual functions and the data trail left by her everyday smartphone use, Merkel’s Blackberry—­a system marketed as being immune from normal smartphone surveillant attention—­was deliberately designed and intentionally manufactured with exploits that made it a bugging device.28 According to the NSA’s own guidelines, these actions must have been approved by the director of national intelligence and the attorney general. More recent disclosures show “that the Obama administration obtained a top-­secret court order specifically permitting it to monitor communications related to Germany.”29 This opens profound questions about the surveillant use of the smartphone in contemporary international relations in the conventional understanding of the term, especially as more recent revelations show that Merkel was one of more than 122 world leaders targeted: on one list, her name appears between Mali’s Amadou Toumani Touré and Syria’s Bashar al-­Assad.30 As it involves reflexive understanding of the surveillant purposes of smartphones by high-­level government employees, it also renders suspect the meaning of conventional definitions of the international. Angela Merkel’s “Hackberry” is an instance

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of the international as a problem of the global system of society seen within the global system of society. It is also about the use of the global system of society by U.S. interests in full knowledge that this is what the international now means. To be sure, surveillant attention through smartphones is not the only conception or practice of the international being practiced globally, but it is remaking it in its form. It is the application of a new understanding to old practices that is transforming the form, substance, and meaning of both, while raising profound questions about the form of sovereignty and liberal democracy being professed and practiced in the contemporary United States. Consider, finally, the assassination of “militants,” “terrorists,” or people otherwise identified as killable categories of person by the United States, dealt with according to the Disposition Matrix. Throughout the Global War on Terror, a key distinction that remained intact—­for all its expedient blurring—­ from the U.S. side was the distinction between citizens and foreigners. This distinction was consequential for many detained, tortured, and killed by the United States who—­arguably—­would not have been so treated had they been U.S. citizens. The application of many War on Terror techniques to Chelsea Manning perhaps shows that the United States now only extends the privileges of citizenship to those who behave in U.S. interests. As for the Disposition Matrix, if the suspect is abroad, not coming back, cannot be arrested by a reliable government, is important enough to warrant action overseas, is an operational leader, and is deemed to present an imminent threat to the United States, then he or she can be targeted with lethal force. There is nothing in the Disposition Matrix about citizenship, only location. This is its first question: where is the suspect located?31 Where this question becomes a key question for the smartphone’s entanglement in surveillance is that, much more than earlier iterations of mobile phones, the smartphone gives precise, ongoing locational data. That means that the only rational strategic response within a terrorist organization that does not wish to have its members assassinated is the complete nonuse of the smartphone; it also means that the smartphone is, in effect, a bug, a tracker, and a great improvement on earlier missile-­guidance technologies, all rolled into one—­not least of all because the targets fit themselves, carry the beacon without having it stuck to them, and pay for doing so.

The Effects of Surveillant Smartphone Assemblages: Spectacle and Control If smartphones can be thought of as a key conduit for the conduct of conduct, then understanding their characteristic power relations means rendering

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intelligible the predictable broader effects of their use, what their use does. In other words, what might characterize the politics and power relations of a possible world in which pervasive smartphone use becomes ubiquitous, and which surveillant attention thereof by the NSA is accepted as normal, or unstoppable, or even acceptable? In what follows, I develop these possibilities, always necessarily speculative, as spectacle and control. Deleuze’s famous conception of control power rereads Foucault’s account of panopticism in order to apprehend an emergent postpanoptic dispositif.32 The operability of control power is, first and foremost, about a reflexive relation to networks and networking, as well as a know-­how that harnesses this understanding to shape the field of action of others.33 This accords well with the way in which the surveillant purposes of smartphone use interface with big data, as explored in the preceding section. In every way, control power is about positively harnessing networking by letting agents connect, fostering conditions of connecting, and promoting mobile connection and active collaboration as a normative way of being. Where discipline was about keeping the grid locked down, control is about letting the network free. Control is not an intentional agent here. Rather, smartphones provide technical affordances that enable effective control, while their imminent ubiquity means that effective control is, as it were, now approaching total network coverage. A fundamental insight I take from Deleuze’s “Postscript” is that a central political question of our time is not “who are you?” but “where are you?” Control power is a know-­where, and pervasive computing using smartphones has allowed this topology of power/knowledge to arrive in a workable form. As Deleuze wrote, “[In] the conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant . . . what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—­ licit or illicit—­and effects a universal modulation.”34 At the time of writing, Deleuze couched these assertions as speculative, remonstrating that this conception “it is not necessarily one of science fiction.”35 For us, the point is a fact of average, everyday life with the smartphone, even if, as explored, much of this escapes human possibilities of perception and habits of attention. Geolocation, most commonly used at the time of writing in conjunction with maps and tagged photos, means that an increasing number of agencies have near-­instant access to a rich relational topography of moments, places, and interactions. Smartphones don’t just describe where they are because they are networked (though this is part of it: IP addresses, cell-­tower triangulation), but they do so with an extremely high level of precision because of GPS, accelerometers, and so on. It is this dynamic locational

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data that allows RIOT to so accurately map habitual movement and predict future behavior, and this is predicated on the ubiquity of GPS and triangulation technology in smartphones and their use in conjunction with maps, photo apps, and certain kinds of social networking apps. The majority of smartphone users, thus far, use location services, and do so for an increasing number of functions.36 Foursquare, to give one example, relies on a small but growing and apparently influential market of people willing to disclose their location to their social network.37 This is not a matter of accident or a lack of consumer awareness; it is, rather, a feature built into smartphones that has produced an industry coding, designing, and marketing apps that some consumers are very happy to pay for and use on an everyday basis. Is control something that repels people, or attracts them?38 Or, perhaps: which people are so attracted to control, and why do these groups matter to marketing? The pervasion of this uptake has the following power effects. That which is trackable and traceable is controllable, to the extent that it is reachable. This means that pervasive mobile computing through smartphones is enabling an effective response to the “where are you?” question. Tagging and tracking is how control is effectuated; it is now a normal way in which mobility is transformed into secured circulation. The Disposition Matrix is one practical governmental application of this power of “know where.” Control does things, it achieves conditions (not least of all itself): and it does them lightly, easily, effortlessly. It is a question of reducing impedance to effect a universal modulation. Control is also noncoercive in that it enables various agents to know subjects of interest without breaking (into) anything or anyone. In this sense, control power is about modulating circulation to ensure that it continues safely and softly on its accumulative, consumptive path. This, in turn, is effective in a more diffuse sense, because it is feeding and shaping a reassembly of the relations between power, knowledge, and the body. Control allows actions and functions of the body to be engaged in virtually unimpeded (unlike discipline); and this also facilitates a partial realization of the fantasy of the body’s liberation from its own human limits (an escape from discipline and abjection). This is—­yet another—­fantasy of control. It is also fundamentally about pain. Just as it enables control to become effective, the smartphone takes the pain out of being human by taking discipline into itself. Humans have always outsourced discipline to their favored nonhuman objects: outsourcing hardness to our hammers, sharpness to our knives, and the effort required to plow to the plow horse. In a sense, the smartphone is one continuation of a whole trajectory of prosthetic technologies. What’s specific about it is the way it

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functions as a memory prosthesis: as far as control power is concerned, the smartphone is a mnemonic device, both for the end user holding her phone and, as it turns out, for the NSA. Remembering is a pain, it requires effort, it fails. The smartphone is eminently capable of sparing its users this pain of remembering, and provided our data entry practice is sensible and sensical (and we have the appropriate apps to enter that data into), users can relax and just follow the smartphone’s instructions, messages, reminders (or for that matter tag and follow a subject of interest, whether friend or foe). The fact that we still have to conduct data entry and rendezvous in real time in time space may be one aspect of why this feels stressful to many people. But in a Marxian spirit, consider what this entanglement does to the working day. The discipline of the smartphone does not fade over the course of the day; it remains resolutely attentive, not bored, and comprehensively accurate and complete in its reports, until its battery dies. If it’s on, it works, and if it works, it totally works—­so unlike the human who carries it. What we have to consider here is how habitual involvement in the smartphone assemblage is transforming the meaning and value of attention, and how this contributes to control effects. Human attention is an economic relation, a scarce resource in societies oriented toward perpetual increases in GDP growth. Here, the netting of individual attention for capitalism and its tethering to networks of distribution and consumption is a key potential for the capture of profit. Attention is the key value that advertising and marketing seeks to attract and shape, and it is difficult to get people’s attention, and even harder to keep it. The stream also has to constantly renew itself, because the novelty wears off. Content production, in Leslie Paul Thiele’s phrasing, routinizes novelty, which devalues novelty itself as it becomes expected, demanded, sooner, more, and for free.39 Human attention also tends to dissipate; retaining it over time becomes increasingly difficult. Smartphones continually solicit human attention, and they are also good at holding all-­too-­fickle human attention by allowing it to divide between several tasks, each of which, being the bearer of continual notifications, summons the subject again and again to look and respond.40 It matters profoundly who and what smartphones enable us to pay attention to. Yet, for the purposes of maintaining accumulative circulation, the content of content is objectively indifferent—­content is merely a matter of subjective interest. What counts is where you click through. Users may be profoundly invested in the notion that their chosen content is positively contributing to making them who they are, an individual unlike others. Fresh content refreshes the individual’s sense

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of herself as uniquely interested and interesting, and indeed, Google’s business model is predicated on generating meaningful, marketable patterns from the big data this produces. However, from a systemic point of view, what or whether we are watching, playing, working, or communicating with does not matter as much as that the users keep using, as long as we remain a society of content consumers. With Jonathan Crary’s interpretation of Guy Debord, I want to call this aspect of the smartphone assemblage spectacle.41 Here, spectacle would be the generic relation of separation maintained by our attention to the smartphone, a relation that contributes to the maintenance of accumulative circulation. Crary’s work on this set of critical theoretical connections gives us a novel way to think about spectacle and control together. Spectacle is the generic social relation of separation engendered by this mobile architecture, and control is the power effect generated: Spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous. In this way attention becomes key to the operation of noncoercive forms of power.42 Spectacle and control: light, mobile, separated, alone together. Turkle aptly sums up what may become of everyday lives involved in this assemblage: “We fill our days with ongoing connection, denying ourselves time to think and dream. Busy to the point of depletion, we make a new Faustian bargain. It goes something like this: if we are left alone when we make contact, we can handle being together.”43 A critical theory of the smartphone has to dwell upon the fundamentally paradoxical, thoroughly ambivalent outcome of all this. The smartphone enables many novel, useful, fascinating connections, by capturing human attention and tethering it to networks of associates who seek, intentionally, to leverage that attention for profit—­and the constitution of this network has also enabled the generalization of a form of surveillant attention that achieves spectacle and control in a way more effective than previous governmental attempts here. It’s true we nominate our apps, select our settings, and can disagree to the terms and conditions, but the common denominators of control and spectacle apply societally regardless. Moreover they are conditions that require us to think differently, because they are nonhuman, trans individual, infrastructural, and systemically integral, all at once.

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Apprehending the many intelligible aspects of this assemblage together really shows us how something that feels so light and free can also be a form of domination. What this analysis of the smartphone has pinpointed is two cultures of control. The first is a subjective, individual culture of control in which the smartphone is used to summon others and regulate social distance according to a user’s needs, desires, and anxieties. The second is an object-­oriented open system of control that uses the data generated by individuals in order to know, govern, and treat them as suspicious objects that can be tagged, tracked, followed, found suspicious, and, in some locations, for certain persons, once certain conditions have been met, be killed. For individuals and systems alike, the smartphone is a valuable, cherished device that enables us to find and treat one another according to our needs, desires, and anxieties. It is a device in which the other is transformed from a stranger back into a subject or object of interest based on what her retrievable, transmissible, computer-­archived transcriptions say about who she really is, where she is now, who she knows, where she might be, and what she intends to do to us. This tells us something interesting about who we are to ourselves and each other, what we value, and the worlds of ambient surveillance in which we now live. This may seem like a dystopian picture. To the future reader, what I want to note by way of conclusion is that, at the time of writing, my distinct impression is that most people I talk to are stubbornly unworried about this. Few people are sufficiently concerned about the mass surveillance disclosures to cease using their smartphones, or even modify their habitual use. Smartphones do elicit moments of reflexive worry, but they also solicit hours of seemingly unworried immersed attention as a matter of everyday life. Where this will lead, not even our smartphones can tell us yet.

Notes 1. As of 2011 Raytheon is the world’s fifth-­largest arms-­producing company. See http://www.sipri.org/publications (accessed June 30, 2014). See also Ryan Gallagher, “Software That Tracks People on Social Media Created by Defence Firm,” http://www .guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence (accessed March 29, 2013). 2. “Edward Snowden, World News,” http://www.theguardian.com/world/edward -snowden (accessed August 24, 2013). 3. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_mass_surveillance_disclosures. 4. I use the term “NSA” here more broadly than strictly to refer only to that agency but instead to the whole project of planetary ambient surveillance, taking in Govern-

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ment Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), the Five Eyes, and more diffusely all those directly and indirectly conspiring, colluding, cooperating, or otherwise working with the NSA—­including, in circular fashion, all smartphone users. Throughout this chapter, NSA is used in a tonally sharp way to remind readers about involvements and implications that, as ambient surveillance, tend to keep slipping into the background. 5. “Smartphone Users Worldwide Will Total 1.75 Billion in 2014,” http://www .emarketer.com/Article/Smartphone-Users-Worldwide-Will-Total-175-Billion-2014 /1010536 (accessed June 30, 2014). 6. Charles Arthur, “Think Smartphones Are Ubiquitous Now? Just Wait a Few Years,” http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jun/27/smartphones-iphone -mobile-market (accessed June 30, 2014). 7. Cf. Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know about Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06 /everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/37364 8/ (accessed June 30, 2014). 8. Niklas Luhmann, “Globalization or World Society: How to Conceive of Modern Society?” International Review of Sociology: Revue Internationale de Sociologie 7(1) (1997): 67. 9. Ewen MacAskill, “Putin Calls Internet a ‘CIA Project’ Renewing Fears of Web Breakup,” www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/24/vladimir-putin-web-breakup -internet-cia (accessed June 30, 2014). 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 11. The crucial importance of this was impressed upon Glen Greenwald by Edward Snowden in their initial correspondence. See Glen Greenwald, Nowhere to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Surveillance State (London, Penguin, 2014). 12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus (New York: Continuum, 2004), 440. 13. Benjamin H. Bratton, “iPhone City,” Architectural Design 79(4) (July–­August 2009): 94. 14. Alexander Galloway, “Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City,” Cultural Studies 18(2) (2004): 384–­85. 15. Cf. Jean-­Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000, and Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), for two explorations of the centrality of the preposition to understanding relations. 16. Heidegger, Being and Time, 97. 17. Cf. Australian Bureau of Statistics, “How Australia Uses the Internet,” http:// www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Fea tures~How%20Australia%20accesses%20and%20uses%20the%20Internet~175 (accessed August 25, 2013). 18. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

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19. On the centrality of obligation, as opposed to naive accounts of “freedom,” as a prompt to social presence, I am indebted to the insights of John Urry, Mobilities (London: Polity, 2007). 20. Turkle’s work uncovers significant amounts of ambivalence, as well as specific and organized forms of resistance, especially among the young, who are notionally the white middle-­class “kids these days,” “digital natives” (xii) supposedly embracing these technologies with the most enthusiasm and the least circumspection. 21. Christian Licoppe, ‘“The Crisis of the Summons’: A Transformation in the Pragmatics of ‘Notifications,’ from Phone Rings to Instant Messaging,” The Information Society: An International Journal 26(4) (2010): 289. 22. See Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Software, Objects, and Home Space,” Environment and Planning: A 41(6) (2009): 1344–­65. 23. Arthur, “Think Smartphones Are Ubiquitous Now?” 24. Smartphones need not be this; they could be so many other things—­and to some people they are. It is a question of a culture of use. Why and how this culture emerged is beyond the purview of this small contribution. 25. Cf. Courtney Blackwell, Jeremy Birnholtz, and Charles Abbott, “Seeing and Being Seen: Co-­situation and Impression Formation Using Grindr, a Location-­Aware Gay Dating App,” New Media Society 17(7) (2015): 1117–­36. 26. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres Volume One: Bubbles—­Microspherology (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2011), 190. 27. Edward Snowden’s wording. See Lara Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Society That Does These Sort of Things,’” http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower -edward-snowden-interview-video (accessed June 30, 2014). 28. Cf. “Privacy Scandal: NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data,” http://www.spiegel .de/international/world/privacy-scandal-nsa-can-spy-on-smart-phone-data-a-920971 .html (accessed June 30, 2014). 29. Ryan Gallagher, “Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders,” The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/29/der-spiegel-nsaghcq-hacked-german-companies-put-merkel-list-122-targeted-leaders/ (accessed June 30, 2014). 30. Ibid. 31. The Atlantic has visualized the Disposition Matrix on its Web site: “How Obama Decides Your Fate if He Thinks You’re a Terrorist,” www.theatlantic.com, http://www .theatlantic.com/misc/disposition-matrix/ (accessed June 30, 2014). 32. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (winter 1992): 3–­7; Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975), 195–­228. 33. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8(4) (1982): 789–­80. 34. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 7. 35. Ibid. 36. Cf. Kathryn Zickuhr, “Location-­Based Services,” Pew Research Internet Project, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/09/12/location-based-services/ (accessed June 30, 2014).

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37. Ki Mae Heussner, “Why Geolocation App Users Matter to Marketers,” www .adweek.com, http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/why-geolocation -app-users-matter-marketers-136950 (accessed June 30, 2014). 38. Again, this raises the political question of a specific contemporary culture of use, which is contingent, and should be further analyzed and compared to the many other possible worlds of smartphone-­enabled sociality. 39. Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29(4) (1997): 489–­517. 40. Licoppe, ‘“The Crisis of the Summons,’” 288–­302. 41. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 42. Ibid., 74–­75. 43. Turkle, Alone Together, 203.

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Hotlines and International Crisis Claudia Aradau

“US–­Moscow ‘Hot Line’ Open” titled an article in The Times on August 30, 1963 (The Times 1963). After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the hotline became the panacea of preventing global war, as a direct communications link between Washington and Moscow was supposed to avoid the mistakes of the Cuban Missile Crisis and prevent war by accident, miscommunication, or surprise (Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation 1963). As The Times goes on to note, the American and Russian leaders had to resort to open broadcasts given the delay in communications, which “during a period of uncertainty could have inadvertently heightened the risk of war” (ibid.). Even earlier, the conflict analyst Thomas Schelling had been credited with the idea of establishing a hotline with the purpose to “legitimately strengthen confidence, and reduce anxiety, in a crisis” (Schelling 1984, 58). From its emergence as the direct link between the Kremlin and the White House during the Cold War and its subsequently more mundane diffusion as a form of crisis intervention, the hotline is now the indispensable indicator of international crisis, from HIV/AIDS to human trafficking, from natural disasters to climate change. “Call 1–­888–­3737–­888 to report a tip; to connect with anti-­trafficking services in your area; or to request training and technical assistance, general information, or specific anti-­trafficking resources,” enjoins one of the antitrafficking NGOs in the United States (Polaris Project). “Stop traffickers from controlling you,” warns an ad for the London antitrafficking hotline (Metropolitan Police). The European Commission funded research into the usefulness of a single European antitrafficking hotline and has set up a unique European numbers for all emergencies. Local, national, and even regional hotlines are now set in place worldwide as a measure to fight a whole array of crises. Today, the hotline has become a banal thing of international politics, one whose operations are taken for granted and whose efficiency is often highlighted in crisis situations. The hotline appears a passive object that can mediate relations between superpowers or serve as an instrument of crisis resolution

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and conflict prevention. Yet, the banal hotline can shed different light on the operations of international politics. The hotline is not just a passive object, but is constitutive of political meanings of international crisis and possibilities for action. Its diffusion from nuclear crisis to social crisis has performative effects, enacting social and political worlds as traversed by intense moments of crisis.

The Double Life of the Hotline The emergence of the hotline was connected with the category of international crisis. In the context of Cold War security, Schelling is thought to have proposed a line for direct communications between the United States and the USSR. As chair of the U.S. Government Consultative Group on War by Accident, Miscalculation, or Surprise Attack, Schelling led the drafting of a report (the “Schelling Panel Report”) that proposed a “purple phone” as one of the preventive measures to be taken by the United States and Russia (1961).1 The purple color did not percolate the popular imagination and was replaced by the red telephone imagined to be sitting on the respective presidents’ desks. Although the hotline finally agreed upon between the two superpowers was not a telephone line, the imagination of the red telephone has been constitutive of international crisis and crisis management. Despite the concern in the Schelling Panel Report to downplay the image of a personal conversation that could “politically dispose of the World” (1961), the idea of direct communication and personalized link gained ground politically and publicly. In 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a Memorandum of Understanding on establishing a direct line of communication (Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation 1963). Rather than a telephone, the hotline was a complex assemblage of terminals, wire telegraph circuits, and radio telegraph circuits. Both red telephone and teletype, the hotline appears to lead a double political life. Karen Barad (2007) has noted a similar double life about light: depending on the instrument of measurement, light can appear as either a wave or a particle. What seemed impossible in classical physics turned into an important consequence for quantum physics: objects change depending on the apparatuses of measurement. The hotline has also been constituted as either a telephone or a teletype. This is not just to say that technologies are socially shaped, that their uses, functions, and meanings are socially created. Rather, the hotline is materialized differently. At times, the hotline is the telephone, at other times the teletype. The telephone hotline enacted particular symbolics of nuclear war, of crisis, and of the need for speedy decision making. In contrast, the teletype hotline

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was a complex assemblage of techniques and experts rather than a channel for direct communication. Yet, the materialization of direct communication was so powerful that the hotline was widely visualized as a red telephone in popular culture as in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In one of the few analyses of Cold War hotlines, Tobias Nanz has noted that not only did the media represent the hotline of a telephone, but so did politicians: for instance, Robert McNamara refers to the red telephone in his memoirs, despite knowing that the hotline was not a telephone (Nanz 2010). The hotline was the telephone. Nanz suggests that the hotline with its “set-­up consisting of terminals, telexes, cables, operators and translators,” its numerous agents, translations, codes, and decodifications was not adequate to the popular representation of crisis (ibid., 10). The icon of the red phone constituted the crisis as immediate and urgent, but also solvable through decision making, direct “talk,” and leadership. By contrast, “the ‘hotline’ maintains a distance, confuses the users concerning formal regulations (how to address the respondent) and is based on a technical system that only the well-­trained staff can handle” (ibid., 11). The teletype/ teleprinted hotline remained thus largely invisible, hidden in the entrails of the Pentagon, its complex materiality made invisible by the political life of the “telephone” hotline. The telephone hotline enacted international crisis as a threshold upon which catastrophic war was balanced. The task of security analysts and experts was to strategically plan, based on the rational and conscious estimation of possible advantages and disadvantages, a given course of action whose consequences could nevertheless be never known in full (Allison 1971). Most analysts saw the hotline as the response to heightened problems of uncertainty, emergency, and speedy response inherent in nuclear weapons. President Lyndon Johnson reiterated this view of crisis in his reflection on the use of the hotline during the 1967 Arab–­Israeli war: When the leader of another state talks about a very crucial moment, and he foresees the risk of a “grave catastrophe”, and he states that . . . the Soviet Union will take “necessary actions including military”—­this is pretty serious business. (The Times 1971, 8) The telephone hotline enacted crisis spatially and temporally. Rather than a “false” idea, the “red telephone” materialized international crisis in particular ways. International crises emerged at specific moments in time, concerned the leaders of the two superpowers, and were rendered as solvable through

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direct communication. The hotline does not just constitute crisis as a tension between speed and slowness, decision and reflection, action and nonaction. It also, to use Barad’s terminology, reconfigures the world and draws boundaries. As part of this reconfiguration, some materializations come to matter more than others and particular differences and boundaries are drawn: “Material discursive apparatuses offer constraints on what is produced, but they also always produce particular exclusions” (Barad, 2007, 14). In an often-­used example, the ultrasound does not just offer a realistic image of the fetus, it also reconfigures understandings of reproduction, responsibility, and choice. Moreover, fetal imagining technology excludes the mother as subject by rendering the maternal body as a partial “cocoon” and creates a conflict between the fetus as autonomous subject and the mother.2 Particular materializations come into being at the expense of others. For the nuclear strategists, the hotline was supposed to bring the superpowers closer together and to dispel the veil of misinterpretation or uncertainty that could hover over particular actions. The hotline was ultimately the materialization of a world whose fate was held in check by the two superpowers. Europe or Africa, just as Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis, were the sites where events were unfolding rather than actors themselves. The actors who “counted” in an international crisis were those with access to the hotline. However, this enactment of international crisis and apparent exclusion of the rest of the world from the purview of international politics came undone through the “entangled agencies” of the teletype hotline. Rather than made invisible, the hotline came to disrupt this political meaning of international crisis.

Entanglements of Agency The telephone hotline enacted as traditional understanding of agency as an attribute of particular state actors, endowed with different capabilities to buttress their capacity for action. Yet, the teletype hotline made visible agency as a process, a “doing” that emerges through particular entanglements of people and things. Constituted through multiple “entangled agencies” (ibid., 33), the hotline is made up of terminals, cables, landlines, radio communicators, translators, government officials, experts, the Encyclopedia Britannica from which messages are transmitted hourly, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and so on. As an article in the New York Times notes in a review of the hotline’s role, the hotline is constituted by a complex assemblage of humans and things:

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Five two-­person military teams—­each consisting of a communicator, a noncommissioned officer who can deal with the idiosyncrasies of the equipment, and a commissioned officer translator—­attend the hot line on rotating eight-­hour shifts. In addition to keeping up their language capabilities, translators are expected to stay current on world politics by reading a variety of newspapers and periodicals and by attending regular intelligence briefings . . . The Americans sometimes send Shakespeare, the Russians Chekov. The Americans also send passages from the encyclopedia, Mark Twain and even a first-­aid manual. (Stone 1988) The hotline is materialized through this assembling, which is both “produced and productive, generated and generative” (Barad 2007, 137). The hotline silently unmade the dominant materialization of crisis, as it slowed down decision through the process of translation, transmission of texts, and circulation of experts between locales of government. Rather than just the threshold upon which decisions were balanced, some with potentially catastrophic consequences, the hotline also produced crisis as a slow and complex process of translating, understanding, and responding to information. The hotline entanglement produced agency differently and reconfigured the boundaries of what counts as agential and what not. The first hotline between the two superpowers started with the materialization of international connections. The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation had to set up landlines and cables through Washington, Moscow, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki, connecting the international materially and symbolically. A reserve radio-­telegraph system was routed through Tangier (Sieg 2008). The cables make the international visible as a space of speedy circulation and communication. The hotline is supposed to be a reliable and speedy transmitter of information that can travel undistorted and unimpeded for the purposes of crisis management and resolution. At the same time, the hotline is also constituted through mundane actions that are not taken to be part of international crises or the space of the international. A Finnish farmer, while plowing the field, cut the telegraph line between the two superpowers (Egilsson 2003). Neither farmers nor plowing easily enter the purview of the international. A series of other incidents that suspend the functioning of the hotline are reported in the media at the time. The cables had been cut by a Danish bulldozer and a Soviet freighter, or even reportedly stolen by a thief (Thacher 1990). In its entanglement of people and things, the hotline makes visible the production of agency through mundane action and the interdependence of international and everyday politics. The hotline is en-

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acted as more fragile, constituted by banal actions across the world, and also in crisis because of these actions. Meaning does not travel unimpeded, but emerges through assemblages of people and things that need to be stabilized temporally and spatially. The people who disappeared from the stage of high-­ power politics make an appearance in the failure of the hotline. Even if only fleeting appearances, whose presence and action are temporarily recorded by the media, farmers, plows, and freighters draw attention to other sites of international politics. The marginalized subjects of politics gain agency through these multiple entanglements. This is not to say that agency becomes democratically distributed across international politics. Rather, the hotline makes visible power differentials and makes it possible to attend to the materialization of power hierarchies and imbalances. Access to the hotline remains a subject of desire and quest for status that only few can afford. In reporting the debates in the UK Parliament in 1964, The Times notes the unease over the political effects of the hotline: Mr FERNYHOUGH.—­Does the Prime Minister not appreciate this hot line was established because Cuba made both the United States and Russia see that the fate of the world might be decided in a matter of seconds? Many British people feel it would be better to be connected with the hot line than to have a place at the top table. (The Times 1964) The hotline does not only reflect differentials of power/knowledge, it is generated and generative of these differentials. Just as “Cuba’s marginal status in dominant U.S. narratives of the crisis is an effect of power” (Laffey and Weldes 2008, 559), the marginalization of other states and forms of politics is also materially performed through the hotline. However, the hotline can also reconfigure the production of agency and the drawing of boundaries. The hotline is a “prosthetic device for making and bridging boundaries” (Barad 1998, 100). Promoting hotline communications becomes a way of reconfiguring power differentials. In 1966, Paris and the Kremlin established a teleprinter hotline to give the French government “the same immediate access to Kremlin as the White House” (The Times 1966). One year later, a UK–­Russia hotline was also set in place. A red telephone link between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was proposed by the European Union in 1968 (The Times 1968).3 Yet, this access to the hotline of great power politics is limited. Even the telegraph cables only include a handful of countries in the mundane materialities that make up the hotline. Neither Cuba nor South Africa, for instance, is part of this map of the world. The people who plow the land and drive bulldozers,

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their tools, and their labor disrupt the materialities of the international. They make visible other locations of politics beyond presidential offices or even the entrails of the Pentagon. Yet, when satellites replace telegraph wires, Finnish peasants and Danish bulldozer drivers also disappear from the crisis-­hotline assemblage. The modernization of the hotline reconfigures relations, as intermediaries are rendered superfluous. Only rarely do people reappear on the scene of international politics, this time as the translators manning the hotline. One of the characters in Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears is told that the hotline is “duller than dirt, that why we trade poetry passages. Weren’t for that, we’d all go nuts” (2002/1991, 199). No dullness transpires when the success of the hotline is invoked, even as the details of its use remain secret. From the presumed success of the direct communications link in the international sphere, the hotline thrives and it acquires renewed life when it materializes crisis in a whole array of different political arenas.

The Afterlives of the Hotline: Human Trafficking If Reinhardt Koselleck and Michaela Richter have noted the historical migration of the terminology of crisis from medicine to politics, economics, history, and psychology (2006), the history of the hotline shows how crisis response has materialized the other way round, from international politics to medicine and psychology. At about the same time that the two superpowers held talks about the importance of hotlines in avoiding war, hotlines also became the panacea of more mundane crises, from personal to social ones. Hailed as a form of crisis intervention, the hotline “develops into a major therapeutic force which continues to proliferate” (Rosenbaum and Calhoun 1977, 1). The emergence of hotlines as personal crisis therapy is variously placed around 1965 or 1968. Although the exact time remains unclear, the temporal horizon is that of the Cold War, of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and popular support for telephone hotlines. Hotlines quickly superseded prevention centers, with a rate of 17 to 1 in the case of suicide hotlines (ibid.). Suicide, depression, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, child pornography, or drug use are recast as moments of personal crisis, emergency states that can be tackled through the immediacy of the telephone hotline. Crisis intervention is based on direct communication, where hotline workers are expected to have particularly acute listening skills. In the proliferation of hotlines, crises remain undefined, materially constituted by the presence and use of the hotline. The hotline enacts a multitude of crises, from individual ones to national, regional, or international. The hotline promises rapid response and the possible resolution of crisis. The imaginary

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of communication as unimpeded transmission underpins the seamless circulation of hotlines from one crisis to another. The red telephone does not only connect, it also produces crises as threshold moments, where decisions need to be made. These threshold moments are increasingly global, with differences between personal, social, and political problems mattering less and rapid responses mattering more as the appropriate response to crisis. The hotline also materializes a particular temporality—­of speed, acceleration, and decisive action—­and crisis as a separate time and space, differentiated from everyday life. The proliferation of hotlines goes hand in hand with the proliferation of crises. Antitrafficking hotlines have rapidly proliferated over the past years as one of the measures of choice put in place by local or national governments. In 2011, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) in the United States received 19,427 calls from or about victims of human trafficking and other forms of labor exploitation. The use of hotlines emphasizes the importance of the identification of victims of trafficking and their referral to police and social services (NHTRC 2012). As human trafficking is associated with shadow economies and underground practices, the telephone hotline brings visibility to the phenomenon by giving voice to its unseen victims. Yet, in so doing, the hotline also enacts human trafficking as a crisis or emergency moment, which needs to be thought through practices of salvage enabled through direct communication. The qualms that nuclear strategists harbored about telephone hotlines are no longer present in ubiquitous hotline communication: misinterpretation, psychological and cultural differences, misunderstandings, and miscommunication are supposedly surpassed through hotline worker training. If the superpower hotline was decelerated through the use of transmission, decryption, and translation, antitrafficking hotlines such as the NHTRC have translation services available in 170 languages, thus accelerating the communication. Although the hotline is supposed to identify victims of trafficking, render them visible, and extract them from crisis situations, NGOs are aware that the hotline is not a neutral mediator of crisis. The antitrafficking hotline emerges through the entangled agencies of law enforcement, telephones, telephone providers, translators, immigration enforcement, government agencies, antitrafficking NGOs, international institutions. In this assemblage, different power relations, boundaries, and exclusions are enacted. Thus, one NGO attempts to reassure potential victims of trafficking: “You will NOT get in trouble for being a victim of trafficking. Make the call” (Oregonians Against Tra­ cking Humans, 2012). Hotlines hold the promise of crisis resolution: on the

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one hand, the promise of protection and exit from crisis; on the other, the promise of stopping trafficking, surveillance, and neutralization. Thus, calling the hotline is not the end of crisis; rather, it is the reconnecting of the individual and state institutions, its insertion within a different assemblage of power relations. Rather than the end of crisis, making the call could also be the continuation or intensification of crisis through repatriation or law-­enforcement measures (Aradau 2008). Antitrafficking hotlines are both materialized as instruments of crisis resolution and materialize crises in similar ways to Cold War superpower hotlines. Crises are interruptions of normal life, which have clear boundaries of entry and exit. Hence the stories that hotline workers and institutions convey are focused on immediate exit from crisis: The NHTRC helped her [the caller] determine her location and discussed her options. The caller expressed that she needed help going to a safe place and finding shelter. With her permission, the NHTRC connected her with members of a local human trafficking response team for immediate assistance. After locating the woman, the responders brought her to a local anti-­trafficking service provider that could offer shelter and basic necessities, and she was immediately connected to an attorney for legal services. (NHTRC 2012) The hotline enacts the temporality of exit from an exceptional situation and reintegration into normality. Yet, crisis resolution is itself fragile, depending on existing resources, availability of shelters, changing policies under conditions of austerity, and access to citizenship. Victims of trafficking can at times be left in limbo, waiting for trials to take place, waiting for access to resources, waiting for identification, or even waiting for repatriation. The materialization of crisis as a container time/space with entry and exit signage excludes other forms of temporality: the duration of waiting, the rhythm of legal processes, data gathering, and identification, or the structural tendencies of capitalism and its role in the production of crises. The hotline simultaneously effaces forms of exploitation whose temporality does not fit the model of interruption of normal life. Sliding into poverty, becoming precarious, or experiencing normal exploitation disappears from human trafficking as crisis. Human trafficking becomes individualized, an interaction between traffickers and victims, which can be stopped through another personal connection: victims and hotline workers. At the same time, the individualization of human trafficking excludes the

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role of state and commercial enterprises from the discursive-­material assemblage of crisis. In 2013, Google committed $3 million to set up a global hotline to fight human trafficking (Alchindor 2013). Three NGOs—­Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International—­will connect the existing hotline and information derived from the calls with the help of commercial technologies offered by two companies: Palavir International and salesforce.com. The hotline materializes differently again, as part of an assemblage of technologies, state and commercial actors engaged in processes of global surveillance, and data mining. In this materialization, different modes of agency are produced, different boundaries enacted. Victims of trafficking disappear from the assemblage as suffering humans—­rather, they are reconfigured and materialized as data that can yield vulnerability patterns, hotspots, and risk trends. In enacting the global time/space of human trafficking-­as-­crisis, the global trafficking hotline redraws boundaries between what matters and what doesn’t. If the global crisis is to be stopped, then victims of trafficking need to become a global fountain of data that can be extracted and processed. In so doing, making victims visible and audible through the hotline assemblage reenacts hierarchies of power between savior and saved, and differentiates between useful and nonuseful victims, those who have information to offer and those who don’t. These hierarchies become starker when inequalities of resources and access to resources are rendered visible. As La Strada points out in a report on the possibility of a common European antitrafficking hotline, the free phone has a series of commercial and cost limitations (La Strada International, 2009). Offering free calls from national and nonnational mobiles raises complicated questions of cost and access, as these requirements need to be agreed on by private mobile providers. Matters of political economy, privatization, and commodification are intra-­actively entangled with circuits, landlines, cables, exploitation, and inequality.

From their emergence at the height of Cold War crisis, hotlines have proliferated to an ever-increasing array of crises. The telephone-­teletype hotline enacted particular materialities of crisis and simultaneously excluded others. If the “red phone” played out crisis as an exceptional event to be exited through direct “talk” and leadership, the telegraph materializes unexpected interdependencies of international politics, where the sites of crisis can emerge from a banal freighter or plow. Yet, the heterogeneous and mundane entanglements of the hotline are effaced when hotlines constitute responses to human trafficking as a global crisis. Rather than rapid resolution and exit from crisis, the

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hotline emerges through entanglements of agency, differential spatialities and temporalities, and power relations. Rather than momentary interruptions requiring speed and decisive action, crises emerge through the fabric of mundane practices and the redrawing of boundaries.

Notes 1. A detailed history of the Moscow–­Washington hotline is available at http:// electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2012/10/the-washington-moscow-hot-line.html. 2. For feminist discussions of ultrasound and the politics of reproduction, see, for instance, Catherine Mills (2011) and Lisa Mitchell (2001). 3. For a full list of bilateral hotlines around the world, see http://electrospaces .blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/bilateral-hotlines-worldwide.html.

References Alchindor, Yamiche. 2013. “Google Helps Bring Hotline to Human-­Trafficking Battle.” USA Today. Available at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/09 /network-aims-to-combat-human-trafficking-globally/2067497/ (accessed July 2, 2014). Allison, Graham T. 1971. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Aradau, C. 2008. Rethinking Trafficking in Women. Politics out of Security. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, Karen. 1998. “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” differences 10(2): 87–­128. ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. 2013. Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link. U.S. Department of State 1963. Available at http://www.state.gov/t/isn/4785.htm (accessed March 30, 2013). Clancy, Tom. 2002/1991. The Sum of All Fears. New York: Berkley Books. Consultative Group on War by Accident, Miscalculation, or Surprise Attack. 2013. Memorandum (Schelling Panel Report). CIA 1961. Available at http://www.foia.cia .gov/sites/default/files/document.../1961–05–02a.pdf (accessed March 29, 2013). Egilsson, Haraldur Þór. 2003. The Origins, Use, and Development of Hot Line Diplomacy. The Hague: Netherlands Institute of International Relations. European Commission. 2013. 112—­Get Help Wherever You Are in the EU! Available at http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/video/player.cfm?ref=I064292 (accessed April 12, 2013). Koselleck, Reinhardt, and Michaela W. Richter. 2006. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(2): 357–­400.

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Laffey, Mark, and Jutta Weldes. 2008. “Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis.” International Studies Quarterly 52(3): 555–­77. La Strada International. 2009. Feasibility and Assessment Study on European Hotline on Human Trafficking. Mills, Catherine. 2011. “Ultrasound, Embodiment, and Abortion.” In Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Politics, 101–­21. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Mitchell, Lisa M. 2001. Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nanz, Tobias. 2010. “Communication in Crisis. The ‘Red Phone’ and the ‘Hotline.’” Behemoth 3(2): 71–­83. NHTRC. 2012. Increasing Awareness and Engagement: Strengthening the National Response to Human Trafficking in the U.S. 2011 Annual Report. Available at http://www .polarisproject.org/resources/hotline-statistics (accessed March 27, 2013). Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans. What Victims Should Know. Available at http://www.mcso.us/public/human_trafficking/pdfs/Victims2.pdf (accessed April 10, 2013). Rosenbaum, Alan, and James F. Calhoun. 1977. “The Use of the Telephone Hotline in Crisis Intervention: A Review.” Journal of Community Psychology 5(4): 325–­39. Schelling, Thomas C. 1984. “Confidence in Crisis.” International Security 8(4): 55–­66. doi: 10.2307/2538562. Schelling Panel Report. 1961. “Memorandum: War by Accident, Miscalculation, or Surprise Attack.” Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document _conversions/16/1961–05–02a.pdf (accessed August 18, 2013). Sieg, K. G. 2008. “Hotline/Direct Communications Link.” In Military Communications from Ancient Times to the 21st Century, ed. Christopher H. Sterling, 221–­22. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-­CLIO. Stone, Webster. 1988. “Moscow’s Still Holding.” New York Times, September 18. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/18/magazine/moscow-s-still-holding .html (accessed July 2, 2014). Thacher, Stephen L. 1990. Crisis Communications between Superpowers. DTIC Document. Available at www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA222248 (accessed July 2, 2014). The Times. 1963. “US–­Moscow ‘Hot Line’ Now Open.” August 30, 6. ———. 1964. “Parliament Tuesday 12 May. Britain’s Links with U.S. and Moscow.” May 13, 6. ———. 1966. “Paris–­Moscow ‘Hot Line’ Soon.” November 10, 6. ———. 1968. “Hot Line to Moscow Urged.” October 18, 6. ———. 1971. “Kosygin Hot Line Threat on the 1967 War.” May 13, 8.

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Cookies Thomas N. Cooke

I think cookies are of the unsung sweet, you know? They’re incredibly popular. But everybody thinks of cakes and pies and fancier desserts before they think of cookies. —­Bobby Flay

When thinking of cookies, many of us may find ourselves in the company of Bobby Flay. Cookies are indeed delicious treats—­even if they take the backseat on the dessert menu. Perhaps this is because we know exactly what we are going to get. They are not as sophisticated as cakes or pies. They are relatively easy to make and you can take them wherever, whenever. They are also predictable. The word cookie reminds us of all these qualities each time we hear it. Perhaps this is the problem. The cookies this chapter explores are not your treats—­they are someone else’s. You cannot consume them—­your mobile technology does that instead. You cannot make them, social media companies do. The cookies are the thousands of unassuming, unobvious, and seemingly insignificant data files on your device. The chapter tells a tale of software cookies, whose deployment, circulation, and analysis interpolates internationality: an assemblage that harnesses, mirrors, and circulates our actions, creating new and extending previously established relationships between people, places, and objects across the globe. Cookies connect the globe together by facilitating two important processes. First, they allow social media data mining and Web analytics companies to track, record, and analyze how people browse the Internet. But the network is a relatively abstract one, as defined by the network’s intentionally anonymous and privacy-­sensitive character. So, what makes the network legible is what makes internationality legible as well. Government data surveillance preoccupations piggyback this network to reverse-­engineer its data-­ mining and Web analytics processes. They do so to read the content of these cookies and geographically locate people and their devices across the globe.

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Cookies, Mining, and Dataveillance Cookies are small data files installed onto a user’s smartphone, tablet, computer, or wearable technological device by the Web sites a user visits.1 There are various types of cookies, but they generally store information about an Internet user’s browsing activity. This information includes details about the Web sites a user visits, the length of her visits, her browser configuration and preference settings, and, in many cases, specific data about what the user is doing on these sites.2 When users revisit the host Web site from where the initial cookie was installed, the cookie is instructed to send all these details back to the Web site.3 For example, once a user visits a Google Web site or product (e.g., YouTube, Songza, Google Maps, Google.com) on his or her device, the Web site or social media product installs a cookie that records what the user is doing. The next time the user revisits that site or product, the cookie sends all of the information it has stored since the user’s previous visit back to the host Web site. Although cookies were initially created to assist Web developers in overcoming issues of server overload from increased Web traffic throughout the mid-­1990s, the information these cookies store has increasingly become a transferable commodity in the Big Data business. On any given smartphone, tablet, wearable technology, or computer, there exists upwards of multiple thousands of different kinds of cookies installed by virtually every Web site a user visits. The ubiquity of cookies across the Internet thus creates virtually limitless advertising and marketing research opportunities in the private sector, a preoccupation referred to as data mining. Data mining is the computational and statistical process of analyzing human behavior to generate quantifiable, predictive patterns—­a process that involves the mass accumulation of information from various databases and file sources such as cookies.4 Data mining is a widespread practice occurring across numerous industries, from scientific research, medical engineering, and musical entertainment to social media analytics, as well as government security and surveillance operations. As widespread as data mining has become throughout various industries and sectors of public and private life, Internet-­ based preoccupations—­particularly social media—­constitute the bulk of contemporary data-­mining efforts. Because the majority of Internet browsing happens through mobile browsers and Apps, social-­media companies have become increasingly invested in deploying numerous cookies onto users’ devices to facilitate comprehensive data-­mining operations in the pursuit of revenue. Data mining through cookies is advantageous for the private sector because it facilitates the ability to produce numerous marketing and advertising

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opportunities between social-­media companies across the Internet. The average Web browser, whether Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Chrome, and regardless of the kind of device, facilitates the installation of approximately twenty cookies per Web domain visited.5 With the average Western Internet user visiting more than 2,500 Web sites per year, any given Internet device accumulates an abundance of Internet browsing information stored across thousands of HTTP cookies.6 Data mining in the social-­media industry is a burgeoning business; billions of U.S. dollars per year are produced simply through the collection of information from HTTP cookies, information that is shared with business clientele for marketing and advertising purposes. For example, when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012, he proposed to potential investors the ability to harvest Web site visitors’ information by collecting the content stored by their cookies, and cross-­identifying the browsing data with individual Facebook user profiles. Facebook essentially offered its advertising clientele the ability to place targeted advertisements for specific products—­products as specific as a particular brand and model of running shoes—­along the newsfeed of the exact Facebook user who visited the client’s Web site to view its product earlier that day, a process that depends on the cookie itself.7 Facebook has since achieved previously unrealized levels of market share value because of the sheer volume and regularity of cookie-­based advertising opportunities with companies across the globe.8 This practice is an example of the kinds of connective and circulatory power that cookies contain in the private sector. The ubiquitous harvesting of cookies is a process that connects people and their devices to server farms, laboratories, and corporate offices across the globe. However, the picture of how cookies facilitate internationality is not complete here. A globally reaching network is indeed established through the proliferation and ubiquitous distribution, collection, and harvesting of cookies through corporate data-­mining business. Although it is a recursive process, the information flows are relatively linear and selectively produced; information is retrieved regularly from smartphones and computers to produce ideas about Internet consumer behavior, but that information is circulated through the databases, partnerships, and fingertips of private-­sector actors who tend to control the global cookie network itself. Most important, the wide nature of the flow of these cookies means that they are anonymized by their handlers. Whenever a cookie is deployed, and depending on the particular purpose of that cookie, it is often coded with unique device identification numbers. Although the specificity may seem counterintuitive to ideas about privacy, cook-

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ies are specifically used to supplant names, e-­mail address, and, in most cases, geographic location details. A conceptual challenge in internationality scholarship is thus the inability to read the cookie network itself; it connects people, places, and devices across the globe, but specifically which people, what devices, and where is not easily known. What thus assembles internationality, what truly makes it legible, are the forces of government surveillance that make this globally reaching network geographically traceable, forces that that break down the otherwise exclusive purview and control of corporate enterprise over cookies themselves. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede noted a decade ago the burgeoning governmental obsession with dataveillance—­the usage of new technologies and technological networks to proactively yet inconspicuously monitor the activity of suspect individuals and populations.9 Since 2001, state governments have become increasingly invested in strategies of risk management so as to predict, prevent, and even preempt violence and warfare against privileged populations. But in order to do so, governments must specifically identify who they believe to be risky people—­a process that invariably requires the ability to geographically locate an individual person and her smartphone, tablet, wearable technology, or computer. Turning to the data-­mining operations of Google Analytics, which deploys billions of HTTP cookies onto billions of devices across the globe every day for marketing and advertising purposes—­as well as the dataveillance operations of the QUANTUM program within the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)—­this chapter now explores a specific account of how cookies interpolate internationality.

Google Cookies and the Structure of Internationality The primary marketing and advertising operations within Google stem from Google Analytics, a data-­mining and Web analytics service that aims to generate detailed statistics about a Web site’s traffic and traffic sources. The service aims to provide marketers and advertisers measurements and statistics by tracking visitors from all the places they may come from across the Internet.10 This includes search engines, social networks, and visits from other Web sites.11 Google Analytics has an aggressive history of utilizing the most effective and efficient means to track Internet activity, always seeking to ensure that it offers its clients the most advanced tracking service. In April 2005, Google acquired

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Urchin Software Corporation, a company that developed the Urchin on Demand Web traffic tracking software. For seven years, the Urchin tracking and statistics analysis software allowed Google to read the Web server log file content of its clients’ Web site in order to visualize traffic information stored on the Web site’s servers. Within a week of the product being rolled out by Google, the company had to shut down Urchin because Google Analytics could not keep up with its own Web traffic. When Google reopened the software, it restricted its usage to clients via a lottery-­type invitation model, only allowing clients to track their own Web traffic as the Google servers permitted. Although the inundated state of Google’s servers softened a year later, the product was discontinued as Google’s primary analytics and data-­mining product in 2011. In 2012, Google replaced Urchin with its own analytics and data-­mining coding, asynchronous syntax.12 Google claims that in doing so, Google Analytics could offer its clients more detailed and accurate information about Web traffic, even allowing the service to track very short, mundane details of how people used the Web sites they visit. The primary technique/technology that makes the detail and accuracy of this service possible is cookies. Asynchronous syntax operates by providing Google Analytics’ clients a piece of JavaScript coding to install into their own Web site’s coding.13 The small snippet of coding is embedded on each page of the client’s Web site. Once someone visits the client’s Web site, that snippet of coding begins running inside the client’s device’s Web browser. As the snippet begins running both on the host Web site and the guest’s Web browser, it establishes a real-­time connection to Google Analytics’ servers. This connection allows Google Analytics to determine which analytics and data-­mining tools and products the Web site is subscribed to. Once this connection and verification is established, Google Analytics triggers the JavaScript snippet to begin recording the browsing activity of each user on the Web site. For example, if a client purchases eCommerce data, cross domain and subdirectory tracking, sampling, virtual page views, and social interactions tools, the JavaScript snippet aligns those services that the client purchased so that her Web site will record the information the Web site most desires. The actual tracking process proceeds in accordance to the analysis and monitoring packages the client purchased from Google Analytics, which is facilitated through the subsequent installation and exchange of cookies. After the JavaScript coding establishes the connection between the client’s Web site and Google Analytics’ servers, it triggers the installation of a number of different tracking, monitoring, and analysis cookies onto the visitors’ devices. Generally, a basic Google Analytics package offered to clients installs multiple, different

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types of cookies onto their visitors’ devices to make the tracking and analysis as efficient and encompassing as possible. Process cookies facilitate the functioning of the Web site; without these cookies, curiously enough, the Web site will not run. These cookies are also designed to facilitate the operation of specialized Google products such as Google Docs.14 Session State cookies collect information about how users interact with the Web site, including the subpages users visits most often, whether the user receives error messages from those pages, even details as specific as a video that the user most recently watched (ibid.). Security cookies such as the SID and HSID authenticate a user’s device’s identification, which are usually encrypted. Google stipulates that the reason for doing so is to prevent fraudulent usage of log in credentials, and to protect users from unauthorized access from malware or hacking services (ibid.). Advertising cookies such as the, id, __gads, _drt_­, FLC, _uid, NID, and SID cookies assist in organizing and storing browsing session information for certain Google products such as Google Search, DoubleClick, and customized advertisement packages. These cookies offer the client a wide variety of tracking information, such as the user’s most recent searches on Google.com, previous interactions with an advertiser’s ads or search results, what other Web sites the user frequents, how many advertisements are clicked, and details about whether or not a user purchased one of the client’s products either physically or via Web stores in the past. Google also deploys a variety of similarly specific cookies that serve vital analytics functions, such as the _utma, _utmb, _­ utmc, _utmv, and _utmz cookies. These cookies determine the beginning/end of a session, the times and frequency of visits, how a user reached the Web site, and which domains should be prioritized for analysis. The _utmv cookie in particular allows clients’ Web designers to create a highly customizable cookie that establishes measurement parameters for the other cookies on the user’s device. This information includes session timeout limits, the expiration date/time of a cookie, triggers for displaying targeted advertisements and other customized Web site content targeted to specific login credentials, how long certain pages take to load, and so on. One of the most important and interesting cookies that the Google Analytics JavaScript snippet installs onto every visitor’s device is Preferences cookies, or the PREF cookie. This cookie allows Web sites to remember information about the changes in the way a Web site is displayed and behaves, such as preferred viewing languages and the geographic region the user is visiting from. The PREF cookie thus allows users to view, for example, local traffic news and weather reports, as well as changing text size, font, and other content that may be personalized (ibid.). With double-­digit billions of U.S. dollars in social-­media acquisitions since

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2001, alongside the approximate 1.17 billion people who use its products worldwide, Google enjoys more Web traffic than any other social-­media company in the world.15 This means that Google harvests a virtually unfathomable amount of information from the cookies it installs onto those billions of devices worldwide. The combination of all the different types of cookies not only means that Web site owners know and even produce knowledge about their visitors, it also means that these cookies connect hundreds of thousands of retailers, marketers, advertisers, and research firms directly to billions of users and devices across the globe. In essence, these cookies establish a massive, international network between devices, places, and people irrespective of their geophysical whereabouts or constraints. However, a massive conceptual challenge rests in attempting to comprehend the international accordingly. Google Analytics attempts to protect the privacy of the Web site visitors who are captured by their cookies through anonymizing the information collected. For example, many of the cookies—­but most notably, the PREF cookie—­store a unique device identifier code to allow the Web site and Google Analytics to uniquely identify each device. This does not contain any personal information about names or e-­mail addresses. The issue for our comprehension of internationality is thus the inability to conceptually visualize and locate the objects and individuals that these cookies otherwise connect to one another across the globe. In essence, a worldwide network facilitated by cookies exists, but how they physically connect places, people, and things together internationally is not so clear. There are, however, forces that make the network legible, and internationality legible as well.

Government Dataveillance and the Legibility of the International Because of the global ubiquity of Google Analytics’ operations, many privacy issues exist despite its attempts to anonymize the information the cookies collect. A primary concern is that governments reverse-­engineer social-­media data-­mining networks in order to target specific cookies for security and surveillance purposes.16 In particular, the NSA’s QUANTUM program is designed to specifically attack Google Analytics cookies—­especially the PREF cookie—­to specifically identify where a user and her device are located geographically, anywhere in the world. Once the PREF cookie is harvested by the QUANTUM program, the NSA shares the information it collects about targeted individuals and shares it internally and with the four other nations comprising the Five Eyes surveillance pact (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) as a way of circumventing domestic regulations on

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spying.17 Curiously enough, the invasive preoccupation of reverse-­engineering cookies for geographic information is a force that completes our comprehensibility of how cookies interpolate internationality; the geographic location of the device and her body are connected to the wider technological data-­mining network through ubiquitous government dataveillance programs that target the Google Analytics PREF cookie. On December 10, 2013, the Washington Post reported that the NSA is secretly piggybacking and reverse-­engineering particular Internet tracking tools as a means of locating people and their devices across the globe.18 The report was based on a PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The slide indicates that the NSA’s so-­called approach to tracking people of interest worldwide is most effectively achieved through select technologies and networks, with cookies in general, and Google’s PREF cookie in particular, being on the list.19 On a different slide from a different presentation leaked in June 2012, titled Analytics: Cookie Leakage, the NSA details how information is retrieved from the Google’s cookies. The NSA uses software called QUANTUM with that utilizes a specific subroutine titled QUANTUMCOOKIE. The software forces users to visit particular Web sites, which in turn send their device’s cookies directly to the NSA’s servers.20 The process occurs through an otherwise illegal and exploitative method called “packet injection”: the interfering with an established network connection by creating fake Internet data packets, making them appear as if they are part of the normal communication stream.21 This allows the NSA to disrupt or intercept information traveling through communicating parties—­such as the exchange of cookies and their information between users’ devices, Web sites, and (in this case) Google Analytics’ servers.22 What makes Google’s PREF cookie so attractive to this process is the information it stores. As mentioned, Google Analytics instructs this cookie to store information about how a Web site behaves and looks, and stores information about preferred language settings. These cookies also set the necessary conditions for providing location-­specific content to certain users, for example, on local traffic and weather news. But in order to do so, the cookie must also store crucial information including the device’s unique identification number and geographic location information.23 While the precise details of how a PREF cookie’s unique identification number stores/ reveals a device’s geographic details receives differentiated analytic treatment and debate across various computer technoscience communities, Google states in its privacy policy that each time a PREF cookie is retrieved from a user’s device, the JavaScript snippet embedded in the Web site automatically sends a portion of the device’s IP address with it.24 However, the privacy policy also

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stipulates that the last octet numbers of the IP address be scrambled to prevent geotagging and geographic discovery. For example, Google receives conventional IPv4 addresses associated with most mobile devices and computers in a 172.16.254.xxx format. The x’s indicate an intentional blurring of the remaining numbers for privacy reasons.25 Whether the QUANTUMCOOKIE subprogram de-­scrambles the missing information to ascertain geographic content data is not known. However, two things are particularly important here with regard to how the NSA overcomes these technical difficulties in ascertaining geographic information. First, the assignment of IP addresses worldwide is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), an organization that is responsible for coordinating geographically unique IP addresses. Because there are well over four billion unique IP addresses worldwide, the IANA often defers the management responsibility to Regional Internet Registries, who in turn work with regional actors to allocate IP addresses.26 The significance of the process is that the NSA must confront these dynamics in order to geophysically locate users and their devices. However, this also indicates that not all of the numbers in an IP address are required in order to exact a user’s geographic whereabouts; knowledge about the IANA process assists in deducing where a targeted individual and her device reside. And, as significantly, the NSA may only need the PREF cookie’s unique identification number in order to determine a user and her device’s location—­the IP address that the JavaScript snippet sends may not even be necessary. Indeed, and as mentioned, the details of specifically what information the PREF cookie can reveal about a user and her device’s location are in debate. However, the assigning of a specific and unique device identification number is a fact. With that knowledge, the NSA employs other programs to cross-­identify this unique identification number with other sources of information that similarly reveal geolocation data. For example, the NSA’s HAPPYFOOT program is designed to intercept Internet traffic generated by mobile devices through Apps downloaded off Apple’s iStore or Google’s PlayStore. Many Apps on smartphones and tablets request Global Positioning System (GPS) information as well as any details entered onto the phone about a user’s service provider, preferred Wi-­Fi networks, closest cellular towers, roads and walkways most traversed, and so on. The NSA has a division called Tailored Access Operations whose purpose is to cross-­identify any unique identification information with any geolocation data at its disposal.27 Either way, the point is simply that Google’s PREF cookie can be parsed and/or cross-­identified and/or independently and solely harvested in order to reverse-­engineer the cookie network and locate specific individuals. Moreover, the QUANTUM slideshow further suggests that it is not merely Google’s PREF cookie that the 236

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agency is interested in. The capacities for piggybacking corporate data-­mining and Web analytics efforts are thus not limited to one particular cookie, which in turn raises even more compelling empirical and conceptual opportunities for exploring the ways in which dataveillance makes legible cookie-­inspired internationality. By virtue of the NSA’s actively employing software programs to seek out the precise geographic locales of risky people and the devices they use on a daily basis, coupled by its willingness to share this information with other governments for the mutual security benefits, the otherwise conceptually abstracted nature of the global network that cookies interpolate becomes galvanized, traceable, and readable. The network and its technological streams of data, including the locales of the devices and their users, are made knowable through an analysis of both Google Analytics’ cookie-­based preoccupations, and the ways in which governments read the network backwards in the name of risk management.

Cookies and the International Cookies are things we eat and enjoy. But seldom do we consume a cookie we do not taste, touch, bake, or purchase. We also tend to have a much better understanding of the cookies we consume through our mouths, as opposed to through our memory sticks. Alas, a quick glance at the cache of your smartphone, tablet, wearable technology, or computer reveals an almost militaristic occupation by cookies. But why should that be of any interest or concern, especially when we encounter a word so innocent, enticing, and unassuming as cookie? This chapter tells a different tale about cookies, one of digital cookies that bring together the world’s places, people, and technologies in completely unexpected and relatively unknown ways. The ubiquity and utility of these cookies to data mining and Web analytics regimes play an intimate role in interpolating the international. By monitoring the Internet activity of billions of people through billions of devices worldwide, cookies formulate a massive network of digital data flows that operate autonomously and indefinitely. The connection they create also happens to be a relatively abstracted one. Because cookies tend to be operationalized with anonymity in mind by the corporations invested in their functionality, it is exceptionally challenging to comprehend the physical characteristics of internationality itself. In other words, the network and its technological streams are difficult to visualize in their geophysical connection to people, their devices, and the places they inhabit because this information is purposely hidden by the technoscience of cookie mining and analytics itself; to build a network without privacy as a core feature Cookies

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threatens the existence of the entire assemblage. Nevertheless, and as ironic as it may seem, government dataveillance renders this international network comprehensible to internationality scholarship. Because of heightening post–­ September 11, 2001, national-­security obsessions over cyberterrorism and organized Internet crime, Western security regimes are increasingly invested in prediction, prevention, and even preemption online.28 But to preclude risk requires understanding it, and therein lay the feverish commitment to identifying, tracking, and geographically locating people and populations deemed risky through whichever technology or network is available. Cookies indeed interpolate internationality, but it is their manipulation by both corporations and governments that makes this internationality comprehensible. This tale of internationality vis-­à-­vis cookies carries with it two analytic lessons for internationality scholarship. First, where one relationship is found, there exist many. Information/knowledge retrieved/created about, for example, a user’s alleged Internet shopping and browsing behavior indeed shapes how we interpret meaningfulness and assign value to a connection. The meaningfulness and value assigned thus also compel us to define the relationship that the connection facilitates, typically driven by a coalescing of obvious related interests (such as entertainment and profitability). Accordingly, the project of conceptually tracing the international network also begins to assume the character of the connections we initially unearth: entertainment and profitability. The issue in doing so is that we run the risk of inadvertently precluding analysis of other interests, forces, and preoccupations inescapably contributing to the network and its data flows as well. The epistemological challenges that accompany the past calendar year’s worth of NSA ubiquitous surveillance revelations reveal that the international assemblage of cookies carries a tremendous amount of surveillant baggage, baggage that not only piggybacks on corporate tracking and monitoring techniques (despite the privacy implications they create) but also perpetuates the network’s momentum—­only with different interests in mind. This network is thus truly an international assemblage because of the ways in which multiple, seemingly unrelated and unobvious interests coalesce in unpredictable ways. Individual pilots do not fly assemblages alone; where one relationship appears isolated, investigation into the even most peripherally related technosciences, actors, and objects becomes a necessity for comprehensive international network analysis. Second, and perhaps most important, an analysis and study of internationality ought to begin not just with the object as its own analytic starting point, but from within the object itself. Various bodies of social-­scientific theory seek to understand social phenomena, and the international itself, by

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starting at unobvious and unsuspecting locales. One of many analytic advantages in doing so is that we push the limits of many normative bodies of theory that approach social phenomena and the study of the globe through specific theoretical lenses. By starting with the object or artifact, we invariably challenge the limits of prevailing and popular logics and explanatory frameworks. In doing so, object-­oriented analysis raises new questions, observations, and arguments that test theory-­driven scholarship. However, it is also important to not fall prey to treating objects as black boxes; the relationships between places, people, ideas, and objects must not be assumed because of how an object looks, allegedly behaves, or gets used by the hands of individuals. Rather, we must strive to inquire into the component parts of objects, to inquire about their physical, internal materiality and the intangible software systems that attempt to command their purpose and functionality. In doing so, we confront technological knowledge, areas of study that are, in many cases, for social scientists, unfamiliar territory. Nevertheless, “technological knowledge . . . is social through and through.”29 The insides of objects are reflections of the social world and not merely a domain devoid of politics. By starting at the object of analysis, and then to break it open and unearth the social forces within, we can expose unanticipated and exciting observations about the globe around us.

Notes 1. Catherine Dwyer, “Behavioral Targeting: A Case Study of Consumer Tracking on Levis.com,” presentation to Fifteenth Annual Americas Conference, San Francisco, April 6–­9, 2009, http://aisel.aisnet.org/do/search/?q=cookies&start=0&context=896904. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. David J. Hand et al., “Data Mining for Fun and Profit,” Statistical Science 15(2) (2000): 111. 5. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306070. 6. http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/mar /19/attention-span-internet-consumer. 7. Yannick LeJacq, “Facebook Raises Privacy Concerns with DataLogix Partnership,” International Business Times, September 24, 2012, http://www.ibtimes.com /facebook-raises-privacy-concerns-datalogix-partnership-795325. 8. Jeff Macke, “Facebook Shares Heading Back to $38 IPO Price Says Kilburg,” Yahoo! Finance News, January 29, 2013, http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/face book-shares-heading-back-38-ipo-price-says-132702382.html. 9. Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, “Governance, Risk, and Dataveillance in the War on Terror,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 43 (2005): 151. 10. http://www.google.ca/analytics/features/.

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11. Ibid. 12. http://marketingland.com/urchin-is-closing-4068. 13. http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/10/29/universal-analytics-the-next-generation -of-google-analytics/. 14. https://www.google.ca/policies/technologies/types/. Subsequent references are given in the text. 15. http://www.statista.com/chart/899/unique-users-of-search-engines-in-decem ber-2012/. 16. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9757895/Jobless-to-be-remotely -monitored-by-Government.html. 17. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/revealed-australian-spy-agen cy-offered-to-share-data-about-ordinary-citizens. 18. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses -google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/. 19. Ibid. 20. http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-nsa-might-use-hotmail-or -yahoo-cookies-to-identify-tor-users/. 21. Qijun Qu, Peng Liu, Sencun Zhu, and Chao-­Hsien Chu, “Defending against Packet Injection Attacks in Unreliable Ad Hoc Networks,” Global Telecommunications Conference 3 (November 28, 2005). 22. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/12/nsa_tracks_peop.html. 23. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244702/_NSA_taps_tracking_cook ies_used_by_Google_others_to_monitor_surveillance_targets. 24. http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=jpc. 25. Ibid. 26. https://www.iana.org/about. 27. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244702/_NSA_taps_tracking_cook ies_used_by_Google_others_to_monitor_surveillance_targets. 28. Robert Latham, Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between Information Technology and Security (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004), 3–­12. 29. Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 11.

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The Atom Casper Sylvest and Rens van Munster

We require a multitude of starting points. Let’s begin with an atomic one. —­Gabrielle Hecht (2007, 100)

Atoms are the tiny pieces of matter that make up the universe and every tangible thing around us. To investigate how things are made international—­to probe into Dingpolitik, as Latour (2005a, 14) would have it—­is, therefore, literally atomic. The atom itself has plenty of agency: it separates, splits, and fuses. In this chapter, we examine the atom in its weaponized form, which is arguably the point in time when the atom became truly international. In this context, the atom has been credited as an agent that prevents or ends great power war, acts as a deterrent, or creates social movements. Clearly, the atom as it has been studied, understood, and utilized during the last century has structured, authorized, encouraged, influenced, and rendered possible a whole range of international practices. In short, if “any thing that does modify a state of [international] affairs by making a difference” (Latour 2005b, 71) is an actor (or actant) in international politics, few candidates can sport the power or reach of the atom. Nevertheless, International Relations (IR) scholarship has downplayed the agential capacity of the atom as an object that forges social relations and practices (see also Bourne 2012). In an attempt to take seriously the notion that the nonhuman has agential capacity, this chapter surveys what the atom produced and made possible in becoming international. It argues that the atom enacted conflicting yet highly interlaced visions of the international/global, ranging from military strategy to visual culture. Although the world of the atom has overwhelmingly been associated with a particular form of national-­security politics and an attendant imagination of cataclysm, it also transgressed this domain, reconfiguring and reshaping languages and images of globality in the

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process. This duality and complexity of the atom, and its wider intellectual, technological, and political demands, are something we stress. We do so by taking our cue from the new materialist turn in the social sciences, particularly Latour’s notion of an object-­oriented politics, and by drawing on a range of (proto)materialist thinkers who lived the nuclear revolution and for whom the atom indubitably called new worlds into being. The latter group—­which includes Günther Anders, John H. Herz, and Lewis Mumford—­ were highly alert to how materialities reshaped the political/international and what this reconfiguration meant for the distribution and realness of liberty, equality, and power. Although these early materialist analyses were bleak and largely pessimistic, they each in their own way insisted that a thoroughly Dingpolitical analysis of the penetrated atom made it necessary to have this matter considered, represented, at a global level. This was not because every other thing the atom brought into being was global in effect. Many aspects of the deeply technologized society they inhabited and scrutinized had local, even psychological, effects. Rather, it was because, in their judgment, the decisive configuration of the world of the atom threatened to destroy the earth, end civilization, and spiritually exhaust human beings. Faced with this predicament, protomaterialists refused to accept the existing order of things; rather, it spurred in them a sustained, progressive critique of the power the atom exercised over minds, things, men, and nature (van Munster and Sylvest forthcoming).

The World as Laboratory One of the central contributions of the recent materialist turn in the social sciences is the reorientation of purely discursive understandings of social constitution to an understanding of sociopolitical reality as coconstituted through concrete material devices of representation (Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010; Latour 2005b). The focus on nonhuman agency should not be taken to mean that objects, things, and devices are attributed with human emotions, cognitive capacities, and ethical values they obviously do not possess.1 Rather, the idea of nonhuman agency—­which Latour (2005b) captures in the notion of actant—­simply recognizes that technical designs and devices are bound up with the constitution of the human and the social; devices materially inscribe everyday life as well as broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures, giving rise and shape to complex arrangements in which the human and the nonhuman are entangled. The materiality of nuclear weapons to affect the political distribution of

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power, authority, justice, and privilege, locally as well as globally, gradually became clear to observers. At the nadir of the Cold War nuclear standoff—­in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis—­David E. Lilienthal, the U.S. public official who had coauthored the Acheson–­Lilienthal report on the international control of atomic energy and later chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), reflected on the power of the atom in a way that captures the dissonances and disparate jumbles of dread and expectation that came to be associated with this massive miniscule: The atom had us bewitched. It was so gigantic, so terrible, so beyond the power of imagination to embrace that it seemed to be the ultimate fact. It would either destroy us or bring about the millennium. Our obsession with the atom led us to assign to it a separate and unique status in the world. So greatly did it seem to transcend the ordinary affairs of men that we shut it out of these affairs altogether; or rather tried to create a separate world, the world of the Atom. (Lilienthal 1963, 18) Such testimonies have led to the now commonplace observation that the atom bomb is the ultimate fetish of modernity, either as the weapon to end all wars, a symbol of civilization, or simply the materialization of utmost potency. The atom clearly reconfigured the dynamics and distribution of roles, function, and geopolitical status in international politics between nuclear haves and have-­ nots. Although early efforts failed, important treaties of the 1960s (including the Limited Test Ban Treaty [1963] and the Treaty on the Non-­Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [1968/1970]) led to a slow but incomplete institutionalization of nuclear politics. Still, this atomic, international order carried with it some relics of the old age of empire. Indeed, scholars have long pointed out how current nuclear politics is not only dominated by nuclear haves but also structured by an oppressive, disenfranchising, colonialist discourse amounting to “nuclear apartheid” or “nuclear orientalism” (Biswas 2001; Gusterson 1999; Price 2007). For early materialists, the central issue at stake was not only how states fetishized the atomic bomb as an object with intrinsic value, but rather that the atomic bomb (an object) already had an in-­built politics and agency (Anders 1956; Mumford 1954a). Suggesting that things and objects had achieved a pseudopersonality, these observers argued that relations between objects and humans needed to be conceptualized as sui generis rather than as fetishized. Anders, Herz, and Mumford quickly recognized the distinct status of atomic bombs and, later, thermonuclear weapons. For them, these devices were not

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first and foremost weapons to be used politically; rather, they constituted a new material condition that defined, enabled, and limited social and political actions. For Herz, it implied that the politics of protection could no longer be applied territorially, challenging the ways in which politics and security had been organized. Anders and Mumford, as well as others, were concerned with the fact that the bomb implied authoritarian or totalitarian forms of politics. Because its destructive force required rigid centralization of command, they feared that the development of the bomb would demand a nuclear “garrison state” (Lasswell 1941), where individual liberties were jeopardized in a world ripe with security checks, emergency measures, surveillance, and espionage. From this perspective, the weaponized atom is a device of political ordering, which defines the framework for politics and political action, showing that “issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and transistors, nuts and bolts” (Winner 1980, 128). The current materialist turn has found much inspiration in Science and Technology Studies, which has pointed out how scientific discoveries in laboratories are not simply discoveries of a previously hidden reality, but co-­ constitutive of reality (Bennett 2010). New facts do not speak to the world in an unmediated fashion but are rather “made to speak” by laboratory protocols, inscription devices, data programs, and other representational devices (Latour and Woolgar 1979). This view dovetails nicely with the perspective of earlier materialist thinkers for whom the invention of nuclear weapons turned the entire world into a laboratory or test site (Anders 1956). The hugely complex processes of developing, testing, producing, deploying, delivering, maintaining, and securing atomic and thermonuclear bombs obviously required an enormous amount of personnel, money, test sites, and natural resources. But the effects of atomic testing were also global as fallout from nuclear testing permanently changed the earth’s atmosphere (Masco 2010). Nonetheless, the early materialist idea that the atomic bomb inherently conditions an authoritarian form of politics may seem too deterministic. Artifacts are always open to experimentation and contestation and can be realigned with other arrangements. Borrowing from the work of Isabelle Stengers, Latour refers to such collective experiments as cosmopolitics. This term does not signal the aspiration for a world government or a globe united by a universal set of values and norms, but rather points to a form of politics that unfolds around objects, how they are represented, through which medium, and how a public is assembled around them. Politics, Latour argues, is always Dingpoli-

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tik or an object-­oriented struggle that involves disputes between cosmograms (Latour 2004, 2007). Cosmograms are ethically grounded worlds that allocate roles, functions, and agencies through which humans and materialities are connected (Tresch 2005). By extending the walls of the laboratory to the entire globe, the development of nuclear weapons has turned all of us into participants in a collective experiment that concerns the most profound political question of all: how to collectively assemble a world that can secure human survival?

The Enactment of National Security Los Alamos, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Cuba, Berlin, the uranium mines in Canada, Congo, Niger, South Africa, and other places, Little Boy, Fat Man, Mike, and the Tsar Bomba—­these are but some of the sites, names, and stuff that together make up the world’s collective, global experiment with the atom. In the transition to the new world of the atom, the superpower arms race had very real local effects on people occupying geographies close to and far from the two ideological blocks (Hecht 2012; van Wyck 2010). However, the atom has not always been international and, arguably, it was not until the 1930s that a series of scientific discoveries beginning in the late nineteenth century held out the serious possibility of a sustained nuclear chain reaction that could be used to make bombs more powerful than the world had ever witnessed. This prospect had already been imagined in science fiction and popular science, but as the Second World War intensified and as rumors emerged that Nazi Germany was pursuing such weapons, scientists in the United States suggested a similar venture to President Roosevelt. After some prevarication, the development of an American atomic bomb was authorized in October 1941. From that point onward, and especially following U.S. entry into the war, nuclear physics became deeply militarized. The Manhattan Project was under military command, and as it mushroomed and spread geographically to locations all over the country, it was shrouded in secrecy. Wartime shaped the atom, and the atom came, eventually, to halt or extend in another shape a time of war. Indeed, the development of atomic and later nuclear weapons was central in the production of the Cold War (Craig and Radchenko 2008) and soon came to be regarded with such importance that it was a prime target for secret state activities. The biggest scoops for atomic espionage took place in the early years, particularly as Soviet agents such as Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs managed to channel information to the Soviet Union (Rhodes 1987, 1995). Stalin only authorized a serious nuclear weapons program, directed by the infamous

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Lavrenty Beria, on August 8, 1945, but by then the Soviets had secured so much valuable information that technological catch-­up was made a whole lot easier. In U.S. politics, stories of atomic espionage and the return of red scares formed the backdrop to the development of a national security state in thrall to fear and secrecy. When President Truman in late January 1950 decided to pursue the development of the hydrogen bomb, he also asked for a report to reexamine U.S. policy on the use of nuclear weapons. In requesting this report, Truman acknowledged the far-­reaching consequences of the atom: it involved a “general reexamination of this country’s strategic plans and its objectives in peace and war” and a range of “moral, psychological, and political questions” (National Security Council 1950, 3). In this foresight, Truman was clearly right. In the theory and practice of U.S. national security, the resulting report, NSC-­ 68, is considered a pivotal document. It has been described as “nothing less than an attempt to set down in the unforgiving medium of cold type a comprehensive statement of what United States national security policy should be” (Gaddis 1980, 164), but it also is a document that has been taken to discursively embody U.S. national identity (Campbell 1998). NSC-­68 is also, however, a cosmogram in embryo: “a text that results in a concrete practice and set of objectives, which weave together a complete inventory or map of the world” (Tresch 2005, 68). The development of nuclear weapons required the acquisition, development, and instrumentalization of a wide range of materials, knowledge, and fields of inquiry that have shaped national security and since changed many aspects of domestic and international politics. The institutional infrastructure of the military soon combined with industry and the federal government in Washington to produce a sprawling military-­industrial complex. Two things are noteworthy about this development: its huge costs and the amount of political centralization it involved. One study has found that the incurred costs of U.S. nuclear weapons projects in the period 1940–­96 (including primarily the costs of building, deploying, controlling, and defending against the bomb) totaled more than $5.5 trillion (1996 dollars), some 70 percent of the amount that the U.S. government spent on Social Security during the same period. If this amount was “distributed evenly to everyone in the United States at the start of 1998,” each person would receive in excess of twenty-­one thousand dollars (Schwartz 1998, 6).2 Most of this money was funneled into new or reformed government agencies or institutions charged with centrally directing and controlling the functions of the U.S. national security state (Craig and Logevall 2009). One contemporary protomaterialist thinker, highly alert to how technology shapes the social, argued that

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U.S. nuclear policy created that “very need for secrecy,” which in turn produced “pathological symptoms of the whole body politic” (Mumford 1954b; 1959). These included an expansion of central government agencies and a culture of fear and suspicion. The cosmogram of this powerful complex, the foundations of which were laid down in NSC-­68, not only required technical knowledge—­reflected in the surge of federally and privately funded big science—­it was also highly receptive toward, mediated by, and inscribed by a particular kind of political and strategic analysis that approached deeply uncertain times armed with the authority of scientific certainty. Indeed, during the early Cold War decades the atom was primarily represented and “made to speak” through a vocabulary of science and strategy that shaped (and was shaped by) the cosmogram of the U.S. national-­ security state. Central features of nuclear statehood were thus encapsulated in the languages and practices of, for example, cybernetics, game theory, and civil defense. The splitting of the atom restructured knowledge production well beyond sciences like physics and engineering. Disciplines of the human sciences—­ including organization studies, politics, psychology, and economics—­all contributed to the development of U.S. nuclear statehood, not least through well-­ funded transdiciplinary research centers and a think-­tank complex interposed between the military and the Cold War university (Mirowski 2012, 68). These new structures of knowledge often took the form of what Paul N. Edwards has called “closed world ontologies,” where science, truth, and an ambition to map and anticipate every potential consequence in large, complex systems produced opaque, specialized languages devoid of the ability to comprehend the anomalous (Edwards 1996). This could also take the form of reenvisioning practices of military combat, training, and resilience on a (new) battleground populated by cyborgs. Reflecting the drives toward social-­science experiments and private contracting, military personnel charged with the task of detecting and defending against a surprise Soviet attack were scrutinized in simulations and exercises. This changed, according to Sharon Ghamari-­Tabrizi, “contemporary notions of what counts as real,” just as the focus on vigilance altered “habits of time” and “elicited new kinds of boredom, distraction, trance states and monumental error” (Ghamari-­Tabrizi 2012, 290–­91). The crews being tested in these circumstances were essentially simuliving the nightmare of push-­button warfare, as it had been envisioned by science-­fiction writers or as it was imaginatively portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. The more abstract practice and language of nuclear strategy are, perhaps, even more striking in a closed-­world discourse trying to eradicate contingency

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by bridging the social and natural worlds. Here, and particularly in the emerging and soon widely accepted vocabulary of deterrence, atoms—­as nuclear weapons—­were endowed almost with a logic of their own; they were inscribed through metaphors, theories, and concepts that conferred a virtually freestanding power to weaponized pieces of miniscule matter. Civilian strategists, refining game-­theoretical models of strategic interaction and new forms of system analysis, became the “Wizards of Armageddon” (Kaplan 1983) that relentlessly fed the executive branch new, superior nuclear strategies for upholding a credible deterrent that could ensure the avoidance of nuclear war, as well as strategies that could ensure victory should a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union take place. Not only could—­and would—­these weapons be used in a coming war, but they were also described in biological terms as undergoing (inevitable) processes of evolution, growth, and proliferation to which humans had to adjust (e.g., Anders 1956). Nuclear strategy has been criticized for being overtly rational, “apolitical,” “unhistorical,” “wrongheaded,” “muddled,” “if not mistaken,” and therefore of little use in resolving political conflicts in a thermonuclear world (Trachtenberg 1989, 332; Kuklick 2006, 223). Despite their limited usefulness, these ideas were dangerously productive. Intoxicated by the atom, strategists sought to tackle the cosmopolitical question of survival by relying on the fundamentally insecure concept of deterrence and yet thinking through “the unthinkable” by planning for and simulating World War III. For contemporary protomaterialist thinkers, however, this closed-­world ontology, flourishing in a context of centralized authority, secrecy, and rampant power politics, was the ultimate nemesis-­prone phantasm. The atomization of politics and security in the early Cold War and its attendant cosmogram also had an extramilitary face that interpellated almost every U.S. citizen. The ideology of civil defense was predicated on the notion that it was possible to survive nuclear war either through physical actions (duck and cover, build a shelter) or by practicing a form of citizenship (vigilance, reverence for authority, support for further militarization) recommended in government propaganda. Institutionally, this campaign had its center of gravity in the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), set up in 1950 following years of anxiety and indecision. In its communication, the FCDA sought to discipline citizens by threading some fine lines: between the secret and unclassified and between imposing the severity of the danger and insisting that it was survivable. According to one scholar, the constant invocation of negative affect in such campaigns meant that nuclear war became “a state of mind that could be incorporated into one’s normative reality—­it was simply a matter of emotional preparation and mental discipline” (Masco 2008, 376). Indeed,

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civil defense was an ideology of self-­help par excellence. The national-­security cosmogram that crystallized around the atom and its weaponization led both institutionally (as the FCDA evolved gradually into the Department of Homeland Security) and politically to a subtle militarization of everyday life. Indeed, many scholars continue to see parallels between the pervasive and unending, yet also somehow unwarlike, conflicts of the Cold War and the war on terror. The similarities include curbing of civil liberties, the secrecy and centralization of political authority, and the political exploitation of fear (Aradau and van Munster 2011).

The Atom and the Cosmogram of Globality Having witnessed the successful Trinity test in July 1945, Robert J. Oppenheimer, scientific leader of the Manhattan Project and amateur Sanskrit scholar, quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: “I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” Nuclear folklore is littered with such anecdotes of dystopia and death. But the splitting of the atom is also associated with genesis, birth, and dawn. The sun that rose on a new nuclear age might have been dark, but it rose. In tune with the bifurcated, ambivalent even, nature of the atom as both agent of Armageddon and harbinger of peace, we devote this section to the cosmogram of globality that the atom also, slowly, helped bring into being, and which has since extended, if not reconfigured, the international.3 In this analysis, at least two forms of representation are at play: on the one hand, a form of representation where political actors legitimately gather around an issue, and, on the other, a form of representation that denotes “a topic, a concern, an issue, a topos” arising from a particular object (Latour 2005a, 16). The atom invoked, that is, both a new demos (humanity) and a new topos (survival). As an intellectual, Oppenheimer was a crucial figure in this transition. Working within a highly specialized province of knowledge that provided the basis for his political authority, he was universal in his ambition (Foucault 1977, 12). As the iconic atomic scientist of the day, Oppenheimer achieved a legitimacy that made it possible for him to speak, sardonically and solemnly, as a Destroyer of Worlds, which in turn enabled him to pose as a representative of humankind. In the late 1940s, when the standing of Oppenheimer and other nuclear scientists was at its apex, they intensively used the bomb to campaign for a universal project summed up in the slogan “One World or None” (Masters and May 1946; Boyer 1985). Before long, as the Cold War intensified, this project faltered and scientists lost some of their clout. The popular appeal of scientists that had allowed them to address the world as sages or universal intellectuals faded, and

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increasingly they were cast as emblems of madness and nemesis in a world too clever for its own good. Despite the fate of the scientists and their campaign, the invocation of a new demos and a new topos centering on the splitting of the atom never disappeared. Surely it waxed and waned, sometimes reflecting the intensity of the superpower conflict. But it issued in a new, increasingly textured and independent cosmogram of globality that, imbued with a certain utopian intent, reforged practices and objects through which new maps of the world were produced. In this heterogeneous process, the material possibility of destroying planet Earth combined with a series of technologies and knowledge structures to create a new, more organic worldview stressing the fragility and unity of the globe. The atom played a huge role in this transformation. Globality, understood as a condition characterized by the presence of a single physical and sociopolitical space on a planetary scale became inscribed by ideas, technologies, and images called into being by the atom. For some protomaterialist thinkers, the thermonuclear revolution led to a form of countercultural critique that, ultimately, helped produce this cosmogram of globality. In these years, their thought was bound together by the central conviction that the modern world could survive collective suicide only by radically rethinking and transforming its foundations. To stress the role of the atom in producing this vision, we elsewhere label it nuclear realism (van Munster and Sylvest forthcoming). It was, namely, first and foremost the incredible destructiveness of atomic, but in particular thermonuclear, weapons that led this group of thinkers—­including Anders, Herz, and Mumford—­to formulate alternative (arguably, more realistic) visions of global politics, in which the reconfiguration of military force as suicidal evoked new sensitivities. According to one protomaterialist, the invention of thermonuclear weapons with the ability to (self-­)destroy nations and the entire planet amounted to “the most radical change in the nature of power and the characteristics of power units since the beginning of the modern state system or, perhaps, since the beginnings of mankind” (Herz 1959, 22). The title page of the book in which this claim was made reflected a transformed vision; it displays a map of the globe seen from above through a dense web. In this vision, the globe is almost transposed into the nucleus of the atom with ICBMs performing the role of orbiting electrons. The implication was obvious: the survival of the world was in danger. From this new centrality of the globe and humanity developed a deep concern with liberty and individuality under conditions of modernity, but also an appreciation of truly planetary issues such as population growth, resource depletion, and environmental degradation (Anders 1956; Herz 1959; Mumford

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1954a). During the years in which these ideas emerged, concern about nuclear fallout traveling in the upper atmosphere descending to pollute the habitat of human beings was a prime driver in the growth of social movements demanding a ban on nuclear testing (Wittner 2009; Boyer 1998). Visual representations of the earth are also instructive in grasping the cosmogram of globality brought into being by the atom. The most rapid buildup in nuclear weapons inventories occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s when global stockpiles quadrupled over a five-­year period (Norris and Kristensen 2010). This massive upsurge coincided with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles that made the modern territorial state defenseless against a truly global potential for the projection of military power. But rocket technology was also essential for the space race that—­although deeply militarized—­ produced its own unanticipated political and cultural fallout. Perhaps the best example of this concerns how space photography led (unexpectedly) to a new sense of humility and fragility on planet Earth, which in turn had a major impact on the emerging environmentalist movement in the West. Indeed, a recent cultural history of the famous Earthrise photograph stresses how the “eco-­ renaissance” that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s—­the years of the first Earth Day and the first UN Earth Summit—­reached a “tipping point” in December 1968. From the dust of the mushroom cloud rose a new image of the world; “the mightiest shot of the Cold War turned into the twentieth century’s ultimate utopian moment” (Poole 2008, 8). Thus, while the cosmogram of globality is heavily infused with tropes of holism, organicism, ecology, preservation, and peace, some of its central elements were called into being by a deeply militarized atom. Such links might have been “unintended byproducts” (Masco 2010, 7); hence they can “seem perverse” (Edwards 2012a, 37). They are, nevertheless, ubiquitous, powerful, and diverse in their mixture of ideas and artifacts. To take a prominent example, recent scholarship has pointed out just how intimate the relations between the institutional, intellectual, and political complexes surrounding nuclear weapons and climate change are. Some of these relations concern techniques and technologies used to identify, simulate, and model climate change. The huge surge in the funding and standing of the Earth sciences—­including biology, space science, and geophysics—­is in large part attributable to the Cold War conflict, but these sciences eventually enabled “a new vision of the globe as integrated political, technological, and environmental space” (Masco 2010, 9). The atom brought about a range of other ideas and dual-­use technologies that were subsumed in the cosmology of globality. At the microlevel, worries about the nature and extent of nuclear fallout facilitated the first measurements

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The Earthrise picture taken during the Apollo 8 mission. Courtesy of NASA.

of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Moreover, military interests in weather forecasting and modeling funneled research money into meteorology, which led to the production of many of the data, simulations, and models that are indispensable for our understanding of anthropogenic climate change (Edwards 2012b). Much of our current environmental understanding and imagery of the world would also have been impossible without the supercomputing hardware conceived in the nuclear age (Edwards 1996). Apart from appearing perverse, these links have also proven entirely unpredictable. The environmental movement and its heightened sense of an ecologically fragile planet fed into the debate about nuclear winter that erupted in the early 1980s and played a major role in the final decade of the Cold War. The current scientific consensus is that nuclear winter theory—­positing that a major nuclear exchange will produce smoke and dust resulting in a drop in temperature that affects the planet’s ecosystems and not least food production—­is correct and, if anything, has underestimated the atmospheric and

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derivative consequences of a local or regional nuclear exchange (Robock and Toon 2012). Again, however, this consensus is based on climate models in large part brought into being by the splitting of the atom. Even at an institutional level this interlacing continues to occur. U.S. national laboratories established within the cosmogram of national security have sought to ensure their institutional survival by also directing efforts to surveying and preventing the slow incubation of climate catastrophe—­a rather strong contrast to the swift nuclear omnicide that these laboratories have also made possible (Edwards 2012a). At the same time, it can also be argued that in our very perceptions of security and catastrophe, the cosmogram of national security continues to hold sway. Threats that challenge global humanity are accorded less priority or co-­opted and transformed so as to fit existing categories. Tellingly, George Bush asked his fellow Americans to imagine the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by thinking of a detonation of a nuclear weapon (Masco 2010, 27). Thus, the national-­security cosmogram inhibits a range of policies and strategies concerning ecological risk that would follow from the focus on planetary survival in the rivaling cosmogram of globality. In the struggle that is cosmopolitics, the former cosmogram arguably dominates the latter by the most effective means imaginable: by “block[ing] both thought and action” (ibid., 30).

The Future of Atomic Cosmopolitics Approaching the atom from the perspective of Dingpolitik yields many insights into how the international has been called into being, interpellated, and (re)structured by this smallest of material building blocks. We have sought to illustrate how at three levels the agency of the atom has been important for our conception of the international. First, the splitting of the atom involved a reconfiguration of international politics along the lines of nuclear haves and have-­nots. The slowly emerging and imperfect system of governance surrounding current nuclear politics reflects this new situation as well as older legacies of power and domination. Second, we depicted how the atom produced, particularly in the United States, a cosmogram of national security that fundamentally restructured American government and government spending and had wide-­ranging ramifications for political and intellectual life in the United States and beyond. Finally, we analyzed some of the inadvertent and counterintuitive effects that the deeply militarized atom had in the production of a cosmogram of globality that in the postwar period has chiefly been tied to a notion of global ecology and environmental preservation. Some of these

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images, knowledge structures, and technologies brought about by the atom proved instrumental in giving this gradually emerging cosmogram magnitude and appeal. Still, it is important not to read the narrative of these two competing cosmograms as sequential, that is, to suggest that the atom was wrestled from the military and became exclusively central in a broader more peaceful vision. This is obviously not the case. Even if the nuclear infrastructure has spurred more global visions of the international, its center of gravity remains profoundly affected by the superpower that survived the Cold War intact. Nonetheless, the cosmogram of national security is contested by that of globality, reminding us that the atomic configuration of the international is dependent on history, science, technology, and politics. Attuning ourselves to the materiality of the atom—­to the hybrid nature of world coproductions in which the atom is implicated—­we are allowed to investigate not only how such cosmograms are constructed but also how contingent and contentious they are. In short, we come to see politics as a complex ecology of people and things, which in turn makes it possible to ask “the great questions” we should ask of any thing or world for that matter: “How well designed is it? How solidly constructed is it? How durable or reliable is it? How costly is the material?” In short: “Is it well or badly constructed?” (Latour 2005b, 89).

Notes 1. Nuclear weapons often have been imbued with human—­or rather, masculine—­ qualities. The first atomic bombs dropped over Japan were euphemistically personified as “Fat Boy” and “Little Man.” When the first hydrogen device (“Mike”) was successfully tested in 1952, the fiery Hungarian émigré physicist Edward Teller, who played a central role in its development, gleefully reveled in paternal triumph: “It’s a Boy!” 2. For an overview of recent expenditure on the management and modernization of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, see Zak (2013). 3. The focus in this essay is on the weaponized atom and its wider implications. A fuller analysis would include the role of civilian nuclear energy, which has also been imbued with hopes of salvation and prophecies of doom throughout the nuclear age—­ from Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Program to contemporary debates about nuclear energy among environmentalists. See also Weart (2012).

References Anders, Günther. 1956. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Vol. 1, 3d ed. Munich: C. H. Beck.

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Aradau, Claudia, and Rens van Munster. 2011. Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown. New York: Routledge. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Biswas, Shampa. 2001. “‘Nuclear Apartheid’ as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?” Alternatives 26: 485–­522. Bourne, Mike. 2012. “Guns Don’t Kill People, Cyborgs Do: A Latourian Provocation for Transformatory Arms Control and Disarmament.” Global Change, Peace, and Security 24: 141–­63. Boyer, Paul. 1985. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1998. Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-­Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Campbell, David. 1998. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Craig, Campbell, and Fredrik Logevall. 2009. America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. Craig, Campbell, and Sergey Radchenko. 2008. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2012a. “Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68: 28–­40. ———. 2012b. The Vast Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “The Political Function of the Intellectual.” Radical Philosophy 17: 12–­14. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1980. “NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat Reconsidered.” International Security 4: 164–­76. Ghamari-­Tabrizi, Sharon. 2012. “Cognitive and Perceptual Training in the Cold War Man-­Machine System.” In Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, 267–­93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gusterson, Hugh. 1999. “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination.” Cultural Anthropology 14: 111–­43. Hecht, Gabrielle. 2007. “A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things.” Isis 98: 100–­108. ———. 2012. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge: MIT Press. Herz, John H. 1959. International Politics in the Atomic Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Kaplan, Fred. 1983. The Wizards of Armageddon. New York: Touchstone. Kuklick, Bruce. 2006. Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Lasswell, Harold D. 1941. “The Garrison State.” American Journal of Sociology 46(4): 455–­68.

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Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” Common Knowledge 10: 450–­62. ———. 2005a. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 14–­41. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2005b. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. “Turning around Politics: A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper.” Social Studies of Science 37: 811–­20. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: SAGE. Lilienthal, David E. 1963. Change, Hope, and the Bomb. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Masco, Joseph. 2008. “‘Survival Is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America.” Cultural Anthropology 23(2): 361–­98. ———. 2010. “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis.” Social Studies of Science 40: 7–­40. Masters, Dexter, and Katharine May, eds. 1946. One World or None. London: Latimer House. Mirowski, Philip. 2012. “A History Best Served Cold.” In Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, eds., Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, 61–­74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mumford, Lewis. 1954a. In the Name of Sanity. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. ———. 1954b. “Policy on Bomb Examined” (letter to the editor). New York Times, March 28, section IV, 1. ———. 1959. “The Moral Challenge to Democracy.” Virginia Quarterly Review 35: 560–­76. National Security Council. 1950. “United States Objectives and Programs for National Strategy, NSC-­68.” April 14. Available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistle stop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/10–1.pdf (accessed August 7, 2013). Norris, Robert S., and Hans M. Kristensen. 2010. “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–­2010.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66: 77–­83. Poole, Robert. 2008. Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Price, Richard. 2007. “Nuclear Weapons Don’t Kill People, Rogues Do.” International Politics 44: 232–­39. Rhodes, Richard. 1987. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1995. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster. Robock Alan, and Owen Brian Toon. 2012. “Self-­Assured Destruction: The Climate Impacts of Nuclear War.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68: 66–­74. Schwartz, S. I., ed. 1998. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. Trachtenberg, Mark. 1989. “Strategic Thought in America, 1952–­1966.” Political Science Quarterly 104(2): 301–­34.

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Tresch, John. 2005. “Cosmogram.” In M. Ohanian and J. C. Royoux, eds., Cosmograms, 67–­76. New York: Lucas and Sternberg. van Munster, Rens, and Casper Sylvest. Forthcoming. Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought after the Thermonuclear Revolution. New York: Routledge. van Wyck, Peter C. 2010. The Highway of the Atom. Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press. Weart, Spencer R. 2012.The Rise of Nuclear Fear. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109(1): 121–­36. Wittner, Lawrence S. 2009. Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Zack, Dan. 2013. “The Prophets of Oak Ridge.” Washington Post, April 29.

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Asbestos Nicky Gregson

Asbestos is not an object but, like much stuff, it is many things. It is, and has been, cement sheeting, water pipes, insulating material, mixed in with adhesives, cements, paints, and sealants; for much of the twentieth century it was used in friction products in most things that moved, including cars and locomotives; but it has also been used in a vast array of other products, including cigarette filters, gas masks, dish towels, surgical thread, banknotes, bed mattresses, talcum powder, ironing boards, piano felts, cat litter, coats, children’s coloring crayons, and tampons (McCulloch and Tweedale 2008). To focus on asbestos, then, allows for consideration, first, of materials—­in this case, a mineral—­in the materialist turn. Second, it addresses a material that for much of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-­first, has been what Bruno Latour (2005) calls a matter of concern. Third, it draws attention to the distributed qualities of many materials. These qualities matter, because they have implications for the efficacy of political interventions that seek to govern materials through the international. So, it is important to establish first how asbestos became a matter of concern and, correspondingly, a material of global governance. The first recorded asbestos-­related death in the world is that of Nellie Kershaw, in 1924, who worked in the spinning factory of Turner and Newall’s in Rochdale, England. Kershaw’s diagnosis and the findings from the subsequent inquest form the basis for the first scientific publications on asbestosis, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1924 and 1927 (Jeremy 1995). This established asbestos as a matter of concern in the UK. Through the remainder of the twentieth century, asbestos’s physiological effects gradually became named, first as asbestosis and then as mesothelioma. They gathered to them scientists and public health experts, companies, lobbying organizations, lawyers, journalists, the insurance industry, NGOs, local and national governments, United Nations bodies, and social and environmental justice networks, to generate what is one of the largest occupational and environmental health controversies of our age (McCulloch and Tweedale 2008).1 In their book on the global asbestos industry, historians McCulloch and

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Tweedale show how the industry corrupted and censored scientific research and scientific research teams, exploited scientific uncertainty, and allied with journalists, the public relations industry, and the insurance industry to cast doubt on asbestos’s effects. So successful was this defense that it was not until the final decades of the twentieth century that asbestos bans began to be declared unilaterally in EU member states. However, it was not until 2005 that all forms of asbestos were banned across the EU-­27. Asbestos continues to be mined in Russia, China, Brazil, Kazakhstan, and Zimbabwe, and—­until very recently—­Canada. The primary markets are Asian, where asbestos cement products are widely used in building materials and in water-­related infrastructure, notably pipes for drinking water and sanitation. In recognition of this, the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat refers to a looming Asian asbestos crisis (Kazan-­Allen 2007), and calls for a global ban on asbestos. Similarly, in 2006 the International Labor Organization called for a complete ban on asbestos mining and production, with the World Health Organization seeing a ban as the most effective way to eliminate asbestos-­related disease worldwide. With global exposure estimates at 125 million people per annum, and recorded occupational deaths at approximately nine thousand per annum, including 4,500 per annum in the UK alone, where asbestos is the single biggest cause of work-­related deaths (http://www.hse.gov.uk), the arguments for a global ban as the most effective politics of asbestos are seemingly incontrovertible. Yet, these arguments rest on a politics that, while international, shows the limits of the international in governing materials. This essay therefore begins with a classic case of asbestos governance, Canadian chrysotile, which both establishes the limits of global governance and demonstrates the continued importance of nation-­states, in governing materials. Nevertheless, asbestos is shown to exceed the techniques and devices of territorial governance; instead, as a material, it is a materialist, or ontological, politics that is shown to offer scope to understand its continued effects, in the conditions of its banning in Canada. Materials are foundational to life itself. Further, what humans do with them and to them is integral to the ordering and reordering of social, economic, and cultural life and its possibilities. From the Bronze Age and the Stone Age, through to the contemporary Plastic Age, and to current research and development with nanomaterials and graphene, human-­material experimentation, tinkering, fabrication, and manufacture have made materials things, assembled things as technologies, and turned certain materials and things to products bought and sold in markets. Homo faber meets homo economicus. But in that pairing, at least within the social sciences, materials get deadened,

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black-­boxed by a focus on the thing, on how things are assembled, and things’ effects once assembled. For those who work with materials, though, for scientists, technologists, engineers, and laborers, interventions with materials, be they human-­material or ex-­human, are the very moments of interaction (Bensaude-­Vincent and Stengers 1996; Pickering 1995, 2005); they are where stuff happens, where reactions occur, and where new associations, combinations, and alliances of materials and of humans with materials are forged (or not). There are gradations of intervention. Manufacture is reaction rendered repeatable, stabilized, predictable, and controlled—­that is at least the theory; downtime and plant outages tell other stories of materials and reactions that exceed what is supposed to happen. The nuclear accidents at Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Windscale are but four of the most prominent examples of such overflow. Experimentation is livelier still, as a litany of work in the history of science demonstrates. So, material is not dead matter; rather, its vitality is such that it does things with and to other stuff; it has capacities that allow it to become other things; and it can change states. Also, importantly, materials endure. They are what Ingold (2007) calls the “underbelly of things”; they “continue to mingle and react as they always have done, forever threatening the things they comprise with dissolution or even dematerialisation” (9). So, unlike humans and other beings, materials do not die. Rather, they occur and recur, in so doing showing that they are more than things. This we will see with asbestos. As will become clear, the enduring qualities of materials have profound implications for the shape, scale, and site of a materialist politics of asbestos. But first, there is a need for some basics. Asbestos is the collective name given to a group of silicate minerals. In the early years of the twentieth century, asbestos was known as “the magic mineral.” That attribution reflected its capacities, principally as a fiber that can be woven and spun, and its heat-­retardant qualities. These capacities come together beautifully in a tale recounted by environmental historian Jessica van Horrsen of miners from Jeffrey Mine living in a town called Asbestos in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada, where men were so superhuman that they could apparently walk through fire, but only because they were wearing socks knitted from chrysotile fibers (http://niche-Canada.org). Elsewhere in the expanding cities of North America, asbestos mined in Quebec was manufactured into insulation products that were the means for making electricity safe. Its fire-­retardant properties were marketed as the means to protect homes and buildings (and lives) from the fires that accompanied the spread of the electricity network (Hughes 1993). In this way, the associations between

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asbestos and safety, which were to be rehearsed repeatedly by the industry at later points in the twentieth century when under challenge, were established. Equally, the connections between asbestos, the built form, and urban infrastructure were being fabricated into urban landscapes. Across the advanced industrial nations, cities were illuminated day and night, but they became cloaked simultaneously in a web of asbestos. With electricity went asbestos; so, the electricity network was also an asbestos network. As we will see, it is the connection of asbestos, the built form, and urban infrastructure that is critical to a materialist politics of asbestos in the conditions of its banning.

States, Borders, and Governing Materials: The Case of Canadian Chrysotile As recently as 2012, Canada was being described by NGOs and parts of the international media as an international pariah state with respect to asbestos. Reports state: even though it is banned in over 50 countries, Canada continues to block international efforts to control its use, financially supporting spin doctors, and promoting the continued trade of this toxic, cancer-­ causing substance to the developing world, despite it being effectively banned in Canada. (http://www.independentaustralia.net) Since 2008, Canadian public health experts have mobilized to challenge the Canadian government’s pro-­asbestos position, exposing double standards, and posing the question that if asbestos is being removed from Canadian buildings and infrastructure, how is it safe to export to Asian markets? The course of this public health challenge is described by Ogden (2008, 2009). In 2007, in response to international pressure, Health Canada called an expert panel, chaired by Ogden, to establish the degree of scientific consensus on the risks associated with chrysotile. The report for Health Canada was delivered in the early spring of 2008 but was not published; it was publicly released more than a year later in April 2009, following a Freedom of Information request (Ogden 2009). The report’s findings concur with the findings of meta-­analysis studies: “A worker exposed at work to an average of 0.1f year ml-­1 chrysotile for 10 years . . . has an estimated probability of 1 in 10000 of dying of cancer due to the exposure” (ibid., 308); it rejects the hypothesis that tremolite-­free chyrsotile does not cause cancer, and confirms that amphiboles are many times more likely to cause both lung cancer and mesothelioma than chrysotile (ibid., 309).2

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The report affirms that to trade in chrysotile is to trade in a known human carcinogenic substance. In reporting the delay to the publication of the expert panel’s report in an editorial of the journal Annals of Occupational Hygiene, Ogden (2008) suggests a connection with the timing of the 2008 round of the Rotterdam Convention. The Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade is but one of many devices that attempt to address global environmental (in)justice, in this instance by insisting on the prior informed consent of the importing country. The inclusion of chrysotile on the list of hazardous chemicals requiring prior informed consent has been consistently blocked by a small number of countries, including Canada—­and the same occurred in 2008. Change came finally in late 2012, with the election of the minority Parti Québécois administration in Quebec province, resulting in the cancellation of a C$58 million loan agreed previously by former Liberal Premier Jean Charest.3 With the cancellation of the loan, any hope of further chrysotile mining at Jeffrey Mine in Quebec’s Eastern Townships ceased, leaving a two-­kilometer-­wide hole in the ground and the one-­industry town, fittingly called Asbestos, in need of economic regeneration and diversification (http://www.montrealgazette.com; http:// www.rightoncanada.ca). The tale of Canadian chrysotile is significant not just in and of itself but also for what it has to say about the scalar politics of governing materials, which show the limits of the international. Notwithstanding the pressures internationally on Canada, and the work of NGOs and UN lobby bodies in favor of a worldwide ban on asbestos, the cessation of chrysotile production in Canada in 2012 was an effect of the intersections of Canadian federal and provincial politics, of Québécois nationalism, of economics and a failure of refinancialization, and of the mobilization and enrollment of Canadian scientific expert evidence reviews and public health bodies within this territorial space. After decades of political struggle, Canadian chrysotile has finally been sequestered within Canadian borders. Yet, this has not come about through the devices of global environmental governance. Although asbestos is a matter of global concern, and the actions of the Canadian state in support of chrysotile production were a focus for critical global politics, the techniques of Canadian chrysotile sequestration were territorial. Why so? Public health developed as part of the biopolitical techniques of governing the body social in the nation-­state in late n ­ ineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Northern and Western Europe. Much as Latour (1988) showed the pasteurization of France to require the enrollment of microbes with laboratories, and

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with the then-­emergent public health bodies in France, to ban a material requires that the same sorts of alliances be brought together and held together. In this case, those alliances are of fibers, bodily tissue, scientific research, and public health, which have to be brought together and held together, as asbestos-­related diseases (ARDs). Asbestos must be translated to, or constituted as the relations or associations of, ARDs. Equally, for bans to be effected requires those alliances to work together politically against parallel sets of corporate interests that, as part of their tactics, will endeavor to undermine and destabilize the underpinning science that turns asbestos the material to the ARDs of asbestosis and mesothelioma in sufficient numbers of people. In this way, but always though a long process of political struggle, a growing number of bans on the production and consumption of asbestos have entered law in particular nation-­states. By contrast, global instruments have had little purchase on governing asbestos. The challenges for governing materials such as asbestos through the international lie primarily in the unevenness of ratification of global devices, and its effects: what is illegal in certain parts of the world and in certain states is legal in others. That situation results in legitimate trade and creates endless loopholes that allow materials to cross and leak through borders. In this instance, chrysotile is a perfectly legal commodity throughout Asia. But more than this, so too are the asbestos-­containing legacy products from Western countries that find their way through international markets in secondhand, reusable, and recyclable goods to states such as Bangladesh. Walk into a shop on the Dhaka–­Chittagong Highway in Bhatiary, near Chittagong in Bangladesh, for example, and there is the opportunity to bulk-­buy asbestos boards, which have in turn been stripped out of the hundreds of commercial merchant vessels that are broken up each year on the nearby beaches, again in contravention of international law (the Basel Convention).4 These boards are widely used in the local construction industry and they are distributed across most of the domestic housing stock (Gregson et al. 2010). If the tale of Canadian chrysotile affirms the continued capacities of the nation-­state to govern materials, while simultaneously showing the limits to the international, it also imagines sequestration as the political endgame and humans as the agents who get to define material futures. Politics in this tale has got chrysotile tamed; it is turned into what Kazan-­Allen calls a “yesterday’s material,” confining it to the dustbin of Canadian technological history. Canada can be imagined as an asbestos-­free country, in which the production as well as the use of chrysotile are now banned. The limits to that view start to become apparent in the current epidemic of ARDs in Quebec province and in

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studies of South African diamond miners (Nelson, Murray, and Phillips 2011), which show that the risk of asbestos exposure remains for miners, even in the conditions of its banning. Bans, then, perform fictions. They allow sequestration to appear as erasure. The spatiality of sequestration, however, repositions asbestos. It moves it from a regime of global governance to position it within territorial boundaries, and within a regulatory framework characterized by the political techniques of remediation and disposal. In the next section, I focus on remediation as a political technique in the UK.

Remediation as a Political Technique Akin to the surgical removal of the tumors it encourages, asbestos is being systematically removed from the UK’s built form. John Law and Annemarie Mol show that the boiling of pig swill is a political technique (Law and Mol 2008). So too is the remediation work that accompanies the banning of asbestos. Remediation is the term used to describe a whole set of practices that remove asbestos from structures, typically buildings, but also infrastructure and end-­of-­life ships, trains, and cars (Gregson, Watkins, and Calestani 2010). This is the point at which asbestos black-­boxed in objects reaffirms its presence. Once rediscovered, asbestos’s presence requires very particular handling, because it is captured within a regulatory framework that declares it to be hazardous waste requiring professional removal, and then safe disposal, typically in a landfill licensed to accept it. Remediation is going on across all those states where asbestos has been banned. So, a litany of nondomestic buildings, including schools, universities, hospitals, office blocks, government buildings, and shops, in the UK have seen asbestos removal work conducted within them over the past two decades. As a technique, licensed asbestos removal typically involves the following: the contaminated . . . area is confined within an airtight enclosure. Depressurisation is applied by an aspiration system equipped with high efficiency particulate air filters to avoid asbestos contamination outside the enclosure. The work area is accessed and left through a three-­stage air lock transit facility including a clean end, a shower compartment and a dirty end connected to the enclosure. To enter the work area, workers should wear personal protection equipment including clean . . . protective suit, single use gloves, safety boots, and respiratory protection equipment consisting in an autonomous or powered respirator connected to a positive pressure air adduction line. Typical tasks are

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mounting and dismantling enclosures, scraping of ACMs (asbestos contaminated materials), cleaning of surfaces and bagging and evacuation of removed material for disposal. (Dumortier and de Vuyst 2011, 50) Periodic sample testing of air outside the enclosed area is also required by independent site investigators. Politically, the techniques of remediation work in at least four ways. First, in the UK, asbestos is one of a handful of materials that are positioned within a “permissioning regime” by the regulator, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE 2003). Permissioning regimes apply only where work is considered to involve significant hazard, risk, or public concern (nuclear installations, railways, offshore and onshore installations, and work involving genetically modified (GM) organisms, gas, petrol, and explosives). In the case of asbestos, the act of licensing creates permission for remediation work to occur, with risk assessments and risk matrices used to create further distinctions between licensed and nonlicensed remediation work. In making the distinction between licensed and nonlicensed work, it is the physical and material state asbestos is in that matters, and the anticipated effect that any disturbance will have on the intensity of asbestos fibers circulating in the air. Work anticipated to animate less than 0.6 f cm3 over ten minutes, and that involves either short maintenance or removal tasks with nonfriable materials, the bagging of materials in good condition, or sampling for laboratory testing, are all nonlicensed activities. In contrast, licensed work applies where worker exposure is anticipated to be of higher intensity, where the risk assessment cannot demonstrate compliance within fiber control limits, and for particular categories of asbestos material. In a clear change to previous procedures, under the 2012 Control of Asbestos Regulations in the UK, owners of nondomestic buildings now have a duty to manage asbestos on their premises. This means being aware of its presence and the physical and material state it is in, and having in place an active management and maintenance program, which extends to ensuring that it does not deteriorate, or removing it if it does (HSE 2012). In this way, the (anticipated) presence of asbestos in particular objects renders those objects subject to ongoing monitoring and maintenance work, and all nondomestic buildings in the UK built before 2000 are incorporated in this surveillance regime. Second, licensed remediation work involves the building of enclosures. Enclosures create temporary borders, marked by wooden frames, plastic and duct tape™, of air and its circulation. These borders are simultaneously an effect of sovereignty (the decision and authority to ban asbestos) and a spatial

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displacement of that sovereignty from the site of the border to the microgeographies of buildings, or structures containing asbestos, and the air within. Third, these enclosures, once assembled, create distinctions in who may enter, let alone cross, their border. They work to separate publics from those who may pass through these temporary borders (remediation workers). To pass through, these workers must become cyborgs—­donning temporary and disposable second skins and auxiliary breathing systems. To return to the world outside the enclosure, these workers must pass through a decontamination and cleansing system. They must shed skins and prosthetics, returning to a world where skin, air, and bodily tissue can be copresent yet unmediated. A condition of doing, or having done, this work is ongoing annual medical surveillance. Fourth, measurements—­of external air quality and of worker exposure—­in turn work to declare remediation safe; they state that the work of remediation has been conducted within permissible limits. Altogether, the technologies that are assembled in remediation constitute distinctions between here (the countries where asbestos is banned) and there (those countries where asbestos is still legal). Here is where asbestos is no

Temporary enclosures. Copyright The Waste of the World.

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Asbestos remediation work. Copyright The Waste of the World.

longer exchanged in markets and manufactured into legal products, as it is there, but rather is being recovered safely from the built form. Remediation is therefore a progressive technique as well as an ethical one, enacted in the name of responsibility and care. More proximate spatial distinctions are also drawn by these enclosures of air. On the inside, in conditions of negative pressure, are the practices that disturb and animate asbestos fibers. On the outside is clean(er) unbounded fiber-­free air. Enclosures’ boundaries then draw lines, between safe zones and dangerous zones. But further, they suggest that remediation is safe work, precisely because this is a licensed, spatially sequestered, sealed, and contained process within buildings and structures. This is not always the case. The difficulty here is that remediation is not just political: it is economic too. Remediation work is business. A recent high-­profile court case involving the leading UK high-­street retailer Marks and Spencer’s shows the issues at stake. Following a three-­month trial concluding in February 2013, Marks and Spencer was fined £1 million for safety failings relating to the removal of asbestos in three of its UK stores during 2006–­7. Three of its contractors were also fined.

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Evidence presented in court cited reports of “ceiling dust falling on a shop assistant stacking sandwiches.” Although contract workers told her to move, Marks and Spencer management sent her back to stack shelves covered in asbestos dust and breathing air full of asbestos dust. Other testimony refers to “asbestos minefields”; to stripping out asbestos cladding with sledgehammers; to asbestos being “everywhere”; and to three dangerous breaches of safety in one week (http://www.bbc.co.uk). In bringing the case, the HSE alleged that Marks and Spencer did not comply with the appropriate minimum standards for asbestos removal; that the company had provided its own guidance on removal, and insisted that its standards were followed by its contractors; that the contractor on the Reading store had failed to minimize the spread of asbestos to the shop floor; and that areas deemed clean were recontaminated by air moving through the void between the ceiling tiles and the floor above, as well as by poor standards of work (http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/2011). In summing up, Judge Christopher Harvey Clark stated that “there has been a ‘systemic’ failure by Marks and Spencer management and its response to asbestos safety complaints was to ‘turn a blind eye’ to what was already costing the company too much” (http://.www.bbc.co.uk). In its summary of the case, the HSE states that the outcome should act as a wake-­up call to all refurbishment programs in the UK and that organizations carrying out refurbishment work must allow contractors sufficient time and space to carry out work safely. It adds that where this is not done, and where the public and construction workers are put at risk, it will not hesitate to take robust enforcement action. However, with asbestos removal going on everywhere all the time, HSE and Environment Agency inspectors cannot be all places at once. Breaches such as those evidenced in the Marks and Spencer case can be anticipated to be relatively commonplace. Evidence now in the public domain therefore suggests that remediation as a practice is itself a mask; under the guise of work conducted safely, it animates asbestos fibers in ways that suggest that the distinction between here and there is neither so clear-­cut nor as clearly maintained as the politics of banning makes out.

Pandora’s Box Remediation is a statutory requirement for all UK nondomestic buildings in nation-­states where asbestos is banned but where asbestos recurs. By contrast, private domestic housing stock is exempt from regulation—­although homes built after 2000 will not have asbestos in them. However, given the age of the UK’s housing stock, much is likely to have asbestos present, in packing between

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walls, partition walls, sprayed on beams and girders, as lagging on pipe work, as insulating board, as gutters and drainpipes, and as floor tiles. Although pretty much invisible to the nonspecialist eye, asbestos is a copresence in the infrastructure that holds the home together. For this reason, for the HSE it is private builders and tradespeople who currently are the occupational groups at highest risk of asbestos-­related disease (http://www/hse.gov.uk/asbestos/hid denkiller). Ignorance and hypermasculine cultures in these trades, combined with a subcontract economy that pushes costs ever downwards, are seen to result in a potential wave of ARDs in these occupations. But it is not just these occupations that constitute “at-­risk” groups. So too are do-­it-­yourself (DIY) consumers and their families. Take the case of Artex™. Artex is the trade name for a textured decorative ceiling coating that was extremely popular in UK interiors in the 1970s and 1980s. Artex ceilings then were decorative must-­haves and estate agents would list them as positive features on sale particulars, alongside modern heating systems and other forms of tasteful decoration. Even in the early 1980s, Artex was being manufactured with a small percentage of chrysotile in its content. By 2013, however, Artex was no longer fashionable. The curly lines and dust-­gathering peaks and troughs do not fit with contemporary interior aesthetics. And there is a new market for Artex ceiling removal. Because it is occurring in private domestic dwellings, this work does not require the use of licensed asbestos contractors, although if such contractors are used the cost is likely to be of the order of £1,200 + VAT for a room of 20m2. Domestic removal has therefore gone on primarily beyond the techniques of remediation, resulting in uncontrolled fly-­tipping (illegal dumping) as well as uncontrolled removal. Although the HSE advocates caution, and the use of licensed contractors, if one goes to various DIY Web sites, there are numerous suggestions as to how to remove Artex physically, including with a Stanley knife or hammer and chisel or with chemical mulches.5 Only one of these DIY sites mentions that it might be advisable to wear protective clothing, but in this instance to protect from chemical splashes. The comments pages on these sites mention that a side effect of removal is that rooms fill with dust. Other sites advocate getting rid of Artex by skimming over ceilings. One of the thread lines on Mumsnet, for example, is “have you had Artex ceilings made into smooth plaster ones?” with the predominant focus for comment being the cost per room.6 £100 seems to be the going rate. But, skimming over renders Artex invisible. As interior fashions change and as ceilings continue to collapse following pipe bursts in the loft, it is not hard to envisage future generations rediscovering asbestos dust in ways that would capture homes, their contents,

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Disposal bags. Copyright The Waste of the World.

and their unsuspecting occupants in clouds of asbestos dust and then the techniques of remediation (http://www.guardian.co.uk). At the other end of the spectrum, remediation connects with disposal. Designated hazardous waste, removed asbestos is collected in specially marked, double-­sealed plastic bags and taken by licensed contractors to licensed landfill sites, where it is placed in a specially prepared cell and then covered over. It is buried and forgotten. As landfill mining emerges as a technology for reclaiming and recycling resources it is salutary to think of the effects of digging up asbestos cells on unsuspecting workers. There will be no maps here, just surprises—­of materials left behind, but never gone away, and of asbestos fibres once more unbound, circulating in air.

Toward a Materialist Politics Materials, as Ingold (2007) states, are the underbelly of things. They are never subdued, but rather appear to disappear, and then recur. Asbestos is a prime

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instance of these qualities. The history of the “magic mineral” in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries has been one in which the standard political instruments have been used to effect bans on the production and consumption of asbestos in the territory of the nation-­state—­not all states, for sure, but a significant number of them. In this way, asbestos can be represented as a yesterday’s material. But, for materials there are no yesterdays. The combination of bans and sequestration does not erase. Instead, it works to displace politics elsewhere. Most obviously, asbestos bans in one part of the world have had the effect of concentrating activist politics in those parts of the world where bans have yet to occur, notably in Asia, where new generations of asbestos miners and those whose work is to manufacture products from chrysotile are exposed to the same risks of ARDs as their counterparts in the twentieth century in Europe and North America. At the same time, and largely invisible to a politics that is defined through the international, the risks of working with asbestos in Europe and North America have been transferred to other occupational groups, notably remediation workers whose task, in the name of rendering buildings safe for publics, is to remove the mineral. In this world, where the political techniques of remediation meet economics, asbestos, as has been shown, frequently overflows. But asbestos, as this chapter has argued, is also many things, certainly everywhere, and often unknown and unbound. As such, it continually exceeds the devices of governance and governing and exemplifies the Pandora myth. Notwithstanding human attempts to sequester and contain it, asbestos is endlessly potentially recurring, dispersed, and dissipated, and as such touches us all. In this way, asbestos signals the advent of a politics whose site is no longer purely that of the territory of the nation-­state, of the laboring body made political through occupational health, or even the environmentally exposed body of public health. Rather, this is a form of materialist politics that enacts a radical network ecology, comprising myriad transient associations and connections of human and more-­than-­human bodies with materials and their effects. The site of this ontological politics of becoming in the case of asbestos is the interface of the corporeal with air—­the embodied conjuncture of skin, tissue, lungs, and breathing that are conditional for life itself but that, when they conjoin unmediated with asbestos fibers in the air, inhale a potential future life with ARDs, and death.

Notes 1. The academic literature on asbestos is vast, particularly in medicine and epidemiology. In the social sciences, McCulloch and Tweedale (2008) is the most

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comprehensive synthesis and is supplemented by a range of studies that concentrate on particular countries, particularly the United States, Britain, Australia, and South Africa. Key texts include Johnston and McIvor (2000), Tweedale (2001), McCulloch (2002), Peacock (2003), and Waldman (2011). 2. Typically, three forms of asbestos are identified: white (chrysotile), brown (amosite), and blue (crocidolite), although fibers are not as distinct as this product-­ based typology suggests, with copresence in mining being relatively commonplace (McCulloch and Tweedale 2008, 145–­48). Fibers are also differentiated by class. Serpentine, or curly, fibers (chrysotile) are distinct from amphibole, or needle-­shaped, fibers (amosite, crocidolite, and tremolite). More than 90 percent of asbestos traded globally currently is chrysotile (Kazan-­Allen 2007). 3. See http://www.nytimes.com; http;//www.huffingtonpost.ca/david.suzuki/ asbestos. The conditions of the loan required that a further C$28 million be secured via private finance. Attempts to raise this proved unsuccessful. 4. The Basel Convention seeks to control the transboundary movement of hazardous wastes, and particularly the dumping of hazardous wastes on less developed countries (Clapp 2001). Like the Rotterdam Convention, it works through lists of designated hazardous materials but unlike the Rotterdam Convention these materials are declared wastes and are banned, not goods which require prior informed consent to trade. The crux however is what is, or is not, a waste. Wastes can become goods, declared as “for reuse” and/or recovery for recycling, but they result in the export of hazardous materials. In this way, e-­waste and goods such as end-­of-­life ships containing asbestos cross international boundaries. 5. Examples of such Web sites include http://www.channel4/com/4homes; http:// www.painterspitstop.com; http://www.asbestosadvisor.net. 6. Mumsnet is a peer-­to-­peer parenting Web site in the UK.

References Bensaude-­Vincent B., and I. Stengers. 1996. A History of Chemistry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clapp, J. 2001. Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Dumortier, P., and P. de Vuyst. 2011. “Asbestos Exposure during Uncontrolled Removal of Sprayed-­on Asbestos.” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 56: 49–­54. Gregson, N., M. Crang, F. Ahmed, N. Akter, and R. Ferdous. 2010. “Following Things of Rubbish Value: End-­of-­Life Ships, ‘Chock-­Chocky’ Furniture, and the Bangladeshi Middle Class Consumer.” Geoforum 41: 846–­54. Gregson, N., H. Watkins, and M. Calestani. 2010. “Inextinguishable Fibres: Demolition and the Vital Materialisms of Asbestos.” Environment and Planning A 42: 1065–­83. HSE. 2003. “Policy Statement: Our Approach to Permissioning Regimes.” Available at http://www.hse.gov.uk/asbestos/regulations (accessed March 3, 2013). ———. 2012. “Managing Asbestos in Buildings: A Brief Guide.” Available at http:// www.hse.gov.uk/pubns (accessed March 3, 2013).

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Hughes, T. 1993. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ingold, T. 2007. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14: 1–­16. Jeremy, D. 1995. “Corporate Responses to the Emergent Recognition of a Health Hazard in the UK Asbestos Industry: The Case of Turner and Newall, 1920–­1960.” Business and Economic History 24: 254–­65. Johnston R., and A. McIvor. 2000. Lethal Work: A History of the Asbestos Tragedy in Scotland. Glasgow: Tucknell Press. Kazan-­Allen, L. 2007. Killing the Future: Asbestos Use in Asia. London: International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. Latour, B. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public.” In Bruno Latour and Peter Weiber, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 14–­41. Cambridge: MIT Press. Law, John, and Annemarie Moll. 2008. “The Actor-­Enabled: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001.” In Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris, eds., Material Agency: Towards a Non-­ Anthropocentric Approach, 57–­78. Dusseldorf: Springer. McCulloch, J. 2002. Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians and the State in South Africa. Oxford: James Currey. McCulloch, J., and G. Tweedale. 2008. Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, G., J. Murray, and J. Phillips. 2011. “The Risk of Asbestos Exposure in South African Diamond Mine Workers.” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 55: 569–­77. Ogden, T. 2008. “Canada, Chrysotile, and the Search for Truth.” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 52: 673–­74. ———. 2009. “Canadian Chrysotile Report Released—­at Last.” Annals of Occupational Hygiene 53: 307–­9. Peacock, M. 2003. Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation. Boulder, Colo.: Johnson Books. Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. “Decentering Sociology: Synthetic Dyes and Social Theory.” Perspectives on Science 13: 352–­403. Tweedale, G. 2001. Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner and Newall and the Asbestos Hazard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waldman, D. 2011. The Politics of Asbestos: Understandings of Risk, Disease, and Protest. London: Earthscan.

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Dirt Mary Manjikian

Where did the earth come from? A Yoruba creation myth tells us that the sky God lowered a chain down from the sky to the water. His son Oduduwa climbed down the chain, carrying with him three things: a handful of dirt, a chicken, and a palm nut. He scattered the dirt on the water and then the chicken scratched away at it until the dry earth was formed. —­“Creation Myths in Africa”

Practically every culture in the world has a creation myth—­and many of them feature dirt as a character in that narrative. Dirt thus has a sacred character in many cultures—­serving as the source and sustainer of life. But at the same time, our relationship to dirt is one of ambivalence, because, dirt is associated with life and vitality, with growth and renewal, while also being associated with poverty, squalor, and lack of life chances. Dirt is thus seen as simultaneously holy and sinister—­the foundation of life and a carrier of poison and disease, both a source of life and a source of threat. In recent years, economic researchers have argued that both individual and communal poverty is an experience that is not adequately described or measured simply by looking at what consumer goods an individual or group may own or have access to. Instead, they have begun developing so-­called multidimensional indices of poverty. These new indices may have up to ten factors that are considered in “diagnosing” a community as suffering from poverty. What is telling is how many of the ten factors are associated with dirt. The United Nations 2010 Human Development Report included the following four factors in its list of ten indicators: whether individuals are cooking with wood, charcoal, or dung; whether or not they have a conventional toilet; whether they have access to clean water; and whether they have dirt, sand, or dung flooring. That is, nearly half of one’s “poverty score” can be calculated with reference to dirt and excrement. To be poor is truly to be dirt poor.1

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Dirt is thus a substance that binds together biology and politics, and as such, dirt is also an important element in international relations. In thinking about the relevance of dirt in international relations, it is important first to distinguish between dirt as a material object and dirt as a concept—­for the international system is structured and organized with reference to both of these ideas. First, there exist divisions within the international system based on empirical qualities of dirt—­including soil fertility, soil pollution, soil erosion, and the chemical makeup of the soil itself. Fertile soil is a source of wealth, status, and security within the international system, while a lack of soil or the existence of poor soil can threaten a nation’s well-­being. A nation with good soil is less likely to be dependent on its neighbors, but is also more likely to be invaded by those seeking to own and exploit that same soil. At the same time, there are inequities within the international system based on the concept of “dirtiness.” As we consider international politics from Westphalia to the present, we can identify a sort of long-­term, chronic discourse having to do with dirt. Indeed, international development discourse is in some ways the story of the West’s long-­term war of attrition against the forces of dirt and disease. In this teleological narrative, the (Western-­led) forces of cleanliness and modernity will eventually prevail, assaulting and subjugating the dirty places and people and assimilating them into Western norms of cleanliness and order. Labeling someone or something as “dirty” thus has far-­reaching and broad implications for international relations and international development. Dirtiness has traditionally referred not only to a biological condition, but also to a moral condition, and it has been inflected through cultural understandings. Thus, just as the development economists have described poverty as containing more than one or two separate elements, the ways in which cleanliness and purity are understood are similarly complex, based on unspoken understandings about other groups of people and their role in society. It is an idea that is much more far-­reaching than the material state of being dirty or clean—­and so is the West’s assault on “filth” in the developing world.

A Bucket Full of Dirt: Dirt and Soil as Physical Objects Structuring International Relations In considering dirt as a physical object that affects the international system, we might begin by considering how wars are fought over the land and soil that peoples depend on for agriculture and sustenance. Nations that have fertile

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soil can consider themselves wealthy, while nations like Bangladesh—­where soil is permanently in short supply—­find themselves constantly on the verge of disaster. We can consider as well Russia’s need to control Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe—­or America’s own wealth based on the fertile plains of the Midwest. In some instances, dirt is prized not for its qualities or growing potential but for the physical components it literally contains. Here we can consider the newly emerging subject of “rare earth”—­a collection of minerals that can be mined from the earth and used in the creation of numerous green energy innovations, military technologies, and popular products such as cell phones and laptops. Within the international system, China in particular has profited from the existence of rare earth elements (REEs) in its own soil—­raising concerns over the REE global supply chain, spurring new mining projects around the globe and, at times, contributing to international disputes. China is currently the hegemon in the global rare earth industry, producing 97 percent of the world’s REEs. As a result, the scramble for rare earth elements has been likened to the “great game” or the scramble by Europe’s great powers for natural inputs such as rubber that occurred in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Africa and Asia. China’s emerging interest in owning property in Greenland, Iceland, and Mongolia can be tied to this scramble for rare earth. In considering how dirt structures global politics we should acknowledge that while healthy soil can enrich a nation, unhealthy soil can devastate it. Poor soil can result in famine, devastation, and often violence. And as the world’s population grows, the soil is more and more frequently being overused and exhausted. In the developing world, agricultural fields may be displaced by growing urban settlements, and agricultural activities may be extended into previously unexploited territories. As a result, desertification has occurred, leading to situations where dirt blows away, creating unhealthy air and dust storms. Dirt thus structures international relations as it can literally change the borders of territories. The dust storms that blow through China claim nearly four thousand kilometers per year of grassland, and the effects of these storms are felt in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification works to halt desertification worldwide, particularly in Africa, where some estimates state that up to two-­thirds of Africa’s arable land will be lost to desertification by 2030. And as the dirt fails, a nation that was formerly self-­sufficient may find itself the subject of international aid programs and dependent on its neighbors. Refugees flee their homelands, increasing immigration flows when the land

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fails, and dirt failure can thus contribute to state failure within the international system. Nations facing the threat of erosion owing to global warming also fight a constant battle to preserve their dirt, or soil, for future generations. In Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most densely settled nations on earth, soil erosion is increasing in rate and scope. Currently, 25 percent of Bangladesh’s land is vulnerable to erosion. Soil is lost, washed away, or degraded in quality because of natural disasters such as monsoon floods and landslides, as well as the man-­made effects of global warming. While programs such as tree planting have succeeded in halting desertification and bringing back lands lost, erosion caused by water is generally regarded as irreversible.2 On a global scale, citizens were shocked in 2012 when the president of the tiny island nation of Kiribati announced plans to purchase land in Fiji. He plans to relocate the nation’s entire population when rising sea levels caused by global warming threatened to overtake and wash away the land. If such a scenario were to occur, Kiribati’s residents would be left literally without a state and without any land or soil. While as individuals we may thus endeavor to shower away the dirt from our bodies, within the international community we are committing to measures to preserve and conserve dirt on a global scale. Dirt and its politics thus provide an organizing structure as we think about the tug-­of-­war between preservation of the natural habitat and the drive for development. The tug-­of-­war between the sacredness of the soil or the dirt in which we lay our ancestors and the needs of a modernizing nation is best illustrated by the politics involved in the preservation of Chinese burial grounds in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s. As Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Tan Boon Hui argue, “In the context of the need to reconstruct a war-­torn country in the 1950s and later the pressing demands of nation-­building in the 1960s, the ‘problem’ of Chinese burial grounds was constructed as the need to release ‘sterilized’ land for ‘development’ within planning discourse.” They contrast the discourse of Chinese immigrants who regarded the land as sacred with the discourse of city planners who saw it as a resource to be developed.3 In some instances, however, it is not an absence of dirt but an abundance of dirt that kills—­for example, in a landslide. Here, much of the earth’s most vulnerable population lives with the primal fear that they will be swallowed by the dirt of the soil, drawn into or eaten by the earth, so that they never again emerge. But although sometimes the danger produced by dirt is obvious—­as in the swirling clouds of dust blowing away or the land opening up and eating cars—­at other times the dangers associated with bad soil are less obvious. The trope of poisoned soil or dirt whose danger lies hidden beneath the

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surface also appears in international relations and domestic politics. Here dirt itself becomes a sinister substance—­which can harbor poisons and pathogens unseen within itself, from the toxic chemicals found in Love Canal, New York, that sickened a neighborhood to the invisible microbes that can kill an individual. The same soil that provides crops to nurture a nation can thus also poison its residents. In the late 1970s, in a landmark environmental case, the nine hundred residents of the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, sued the federal government to force it to relocate them after high levels of toxic chemicals were found in the soil near their homes. The case led to the creation of the largest U.S. environmental mitigation program, known as Superfund, and the development of stricter laws regulating the disposal of toxic chemicals in the United States.4 However, while the environmentalist movement in the United States acted to keep American citizens safe from toxic chemicals, international environmental groups point to an increase in practices like the international dumping of toxic chemicals. In the past few years, the government of China in particular has begun to release information confirming the existence of “cancer villages,” areas of the country where industrial waste has leached into the water and soil, sickening and killing local residents. A profile by the Blacksmith Institute describes villages where the soil is polluted with cadmium, as well as copper, lead, zinc, iron, and arsenic. Many of these chemicals have leached out of so-­ called e-­waste—­the chemicals created when abandoned computers and electrical products break down—­that has been dumped in China. Produce and rice grown in that soil are now considered too dangerous to eat, and while officials have had limited success with remediation, the pollution is likely to leave a legacy for generations to come.5 Here again, dirt becomes an international issue when wealthy nations are able to keep their soil pristine through exporting their toxic waste to the soil of other lands. The ability of soil to harbor its own organic pathogens is also reflected in international laws and regulations prohibiting the export or import of soil from abroad unless strict sanitation restrictions are met. A Web site put together for visitors to the United States from Mexico informs its readers that Soil is considered the loose surface material of the earth in which plants, trees, and scrubs grow. In most cases, the soil consists of disintegrated rock with an admixture of organic material and soluble salts. Soil is prohibited entry unless accompanied by an import permit. Soil must be declared and the permit must be verified.6

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Regimes thus exist to prevent the importation and exportation of dirt so that it too acquires a national character. Thus, on many levels, the story of dirt is one of inequity. We can begin to conceptualize the world as divided into two groups: those nations that have good soil and those that have bad soil. We can distinguish as well between classes of people: those who live in the dirt and are thus most vulnerable to its effects—­including the effects of drought, pesticides, and toxins, as well as the threat of flooding or landslide when the soil erodes—­and those who live a relatively pristine existence in urban areas and industrialized nations. In this way, dirt becomes not only a physical object but also a metaphor, leading to and creating an identity politics of dirt.

Dirt and Identity: Oh, to Be Washed as White as Snow! As Peter Clark and Anthony Davis suggest, the distinction between perceived dirtiness and cleanness is a fundamental concept that structures many types of social distances and separations within both the domestic and international political systems.7 As Julia Kristeva notes, filth “establishes a boundary.”8 Ancient taboos regarding filth and cleanliness can be identified, stretching back to the Old Testament. Because such taboos are so old, they are often not questioned, but rather appear natural to those who have grown up within a given culture.9 Along with rules regarding the establishment of ritual cleanliness and purity for bodies and objects, the Old Testament also contains explicit instructions regarding who should be cast out from society either permanently or temporarily for reasons of “uncleanness.” Those who are dirty (or labeled as such) are thus often regarded as not fully human and other. They have often not been welcomed in ordered societies, because their very presence has been associated with chaos and instability. The trope of the dirty foreigner or the dirty Other can be traced throughout histories written by the dominant group. The fourth-­century Roman historian Ammianus Mercellinus described the dirty barbarian, and Christian writers in the Middle Ages contributed the notion of “dirty Jews” who were required to live in ghettos so others would not be polluted by coming into contact with them. In the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, stereotypes about groups such as the Roma in Europe as “dirty” and “filthy” have again provided a pretext for racist legal initiatives and incidents of violence. Dirtiness and otherness are thus closely bound together—­those who are dirty are othered, and those who are othered through possessing a social or

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cultural status that differed (or deviated) from the mainstream may also be described as dirty. The most common way in which the label “dirty” was extended was through its application to those who engaged in deviant sexual practices, including promiscuity. We can trace the etymology of the current term “slut” to the fourteenth century, when it referred to “a dirty, slovenly or untidy woman.”10 The twin ideas of foreign women as both promiscuous and dirty carriers of disease reappear in modern history, when U.S. and British soldiers were, for example, cautioned against having sex with foreign women when going abroad to serve in combat. The figure of the peasant as one who works with dirt as being less than others persists to this day. We can also point to the continued existence in the twenty-­first century of the figure of the “cleaning lady”—­a figure that is both gendered and racist. In film, literature, and real life, this individual, usually female and either black or Hispanic (frequently an undocumented worker in the United States), is constructed as being in a subordinate position to the often wealthy, white family whom she picks up after.11 The pairing of dirt and disorder thus contrasts with the pairing of cleanliness and civilization. Descriptions of concentration camps, squatter encampments, and refugee camps often focus on the physical squalor, the flies, and the dirt, which signal the marginality and chaos associated with the place. However, dirt creates not only a boundary, but also a hierarchy. This hierarchy is implicit in what development economists refer to as the ladder of development. Sean Mallin describes the ways in which our reactions to dirtiness play into our attitudes toward those who are dirty: From late-­night infomercials showing hungry, fly-­ridden children, to the pages of bestselling books decrying the abject misery of one-­sixth of the world’s population, Third World bodies are universally represented as diseased, dirty, malnourished and desperately in need of help.12 Within biology, the discourse of evolution describes the ways in which humankind arose or “crawled out” of the primordial ooze, moving from a primitive organism to one that was more advanced. In this way, dirt comes to represent the primitive, and those who dwell within the dirt are similarly labeled as primitive. At the same time, however, the language of development suggests that as the situation improves, dirt will be banished. Cultures and societies will converge once all adopt the gospel of cleanliness. On a global level, the theme of “washing the great unwashed” can be identified as one of the major forces behind the Western imperialist movements of the 1800s, as political desires

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to acquire empires were married with religious desires to cleanse those who ostensibly required it. The theme of sin, guilt, and dirt is succinctly expressed in the following verses from a Methodist hymnal from the 1800s: My God, my God, to thee I cry. Thou only would I know The purifying blood apply and Wash me white as snow. Touch me and make the leper clean, purge my inequity Unless thou wash my soul from sin, I have no part in thee.

In the dominant colonial narrative, the emphasis on becoming clean suggested that assimilation to the dominant culture was possible by those on the periphery. Utilizing the slogan “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” missionaries taught the importance of hand washing and not drinking dirty water. The academic discipline of tropical medicine also arose, based largely on the association between dirt and the diseases of the developing world. The dominant metaphor that development associates with dirt is therefore that of progress—­the implication is that everyone everywhere should seek to emerge from the dirt, just as humankind itself evolved from the primordial ooze toward a higher stage of development. In a way, the entire discourse of development can be summarized as a desire to escape the dirt. Thus, not surprisingly, the narrative of dirt and dirtiness is often the foundation for appeals for development aid today. As Janice Nathanson notes, this particular narrative has not changed much since the founding of one of the earliest charities, World Vision, in the 1800s.13 Just as then, today’s foreign aid appeals often start out the same way, with a description of children living in a dump. The narratives are remarkably similar, regardless of where the garbage dump is located—­in India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Argentina, or Guatemala. Children are described as dirty in appearance, either dressed in dirty clothes or in nothing at all. They are described as eating food that is unsanitary and possibly dangerous, with descriptions of how they might pick up a bit of rotten fruit from off a garbage dump pile, where it has often lain next to a diaper or some other filthy object. In each case, the innocence of childhood is compared and contrasted with the filth and danger of life in a garbage dump.14 In a description of life in Haiti, we are told that the poorest of the poor even eat the dirt itself, molded into cakes that can fill the stomach when actual food is not available or unaffordable.15 Dirt also provides the backdrop for stories about international adoptions. Such stories may feature a narrative in which a child was taken away (or “rescued”) from a life of living on a dirt floor in a mud hut, forced to play along a

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“river” filled with raw sewage.16 Here the trope of the dirty child sitting in a dirty environment, dressed in dirty clothes and drinking dirty water, suggests that the situation is hopeless. The individual and the society that produced him or her can be described as failed. Indeed, the inability to provide clean drinking water and basic sanitation is one of the indicators of state failure on the international level, while on the domestic level, a mother of dirty children in a dirty house is more likely referred to as an “unfit mother.” As Lucy A. Williams shows in her analysis of the ways the “welfare mother” is portrayed in the popular American press, the narrative suggests that by failing to provide cleanliness, this woman has failed, and it is therefore appropriate for her children to be taken from her, and often for her to be punished.17 In each case—­the domestic and the international—­the discourse (or actual presence) of dirt provides an excuse for intervention; that is, it is regarded as justifiable to take things (and people) away from people who are dirty and also to take people who are dirty away from their environment. The fact that dirt provides a justification for intervention is as true on the international level as it is domestically. This discourse emerged again after 9/11, most notably in remarks made by then Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, who spoke of the need to “drain the swamp” where the terrorists live. The statement was meant to convey his, and America’s, frustration with the actions of states that provided a sanctuary for terrorists—­whether the states did so willingly or by default, through their own inabilities to track and police activities within their own states.18 In either case, Rumsfeld’s statement that a dirty environment should be cleaned up through the use of military force was perhaps not thoroughly challenged because the language of squalor and cleaning made it seem both self-­evident and unassailable.

Final Thoughts Dirt and the eradication of dirt have provided the impetus for many international adventures—­both by states and by committed nonstate actors. These activities are still ongoing, and account for a significant amount of the international monetary transfers in the world today. Protecting citizens against dirt and filth and the physical consequences of that dirt is big business internationally. Presently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spends nearly $7 billion per year on health-­related activities, including the administration of its Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) program. The U.S. Agency for International Development also administers programs aimed at

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improving water and sanitation, while the U.S. Peace Corps sends volunteers worldwide to educate about safe sanitation practices in the areas of food preparation, water, and medical activities such as childbirth. Thus, one can identify dirt as a substance that plays many roles in the international system, both literally and figuratively. Environmentalists are concerned with the tug-­of-­war between soil and water, between soil and humans, and between dirt and development. Those in public health traffic in the business of cleansing and washing in order to bring about health and a higher living standard. Demographers are aware of the traffic in immigrants (both documented and undocumented) involved in the cleaning industry, and agriculturalists are aware of the inequities created by soil differences. However, in recent years, scholars of race in particular have begun to question the ubiquity and the power of narratives about purity, adulteration, the preservation of purity, and the opposing discourses of purity and filth. To some analysts, Western obsession with dirt and cleaning can be described as irrational or even phobic, because it is out of proportion and not rooted in reality. The “war on germs” is, as Dana Berthold points out, often highly irrational and even harmful. She notes that no other culture on earth bathes as often, nor devotes such a large amount of its resources to the creation of cleaning products. These cleaning rituals, such as the regular application of hand sanitizer, are of questionable scientific validity and may even be harmful to the environment.19 The fear of dirt is thus, perhaps, a sort of international obsessive-­compulsive disorder—­a constant desire to wash one’s hands both literally and figuratively on both an individual and a global scale.

Notes 1. See Martin Ravgallion, “On Multidimensional Indices of Poverty,” Policy Research Working Paper 5580 (2011): 4. 2. No Author, “Erosion,” National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (2013); available at http://www.banglapedia.org (accessed August 13, 2013). 3. Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Tan Boon Hui, “The Politics of Space: Changing Discourses on Chinese Burial Grounds in Post-­war Singapore,” Journal of Historical Geography 21 (1995): 189. 4. Ronnie Greene, “From Homemaker to Hell-­raiser in Love Canal,” Center for Public Integrity, available at http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/04/16/12465/home maker-hell-raiser-love-canal (accessed August 15, 2013). 5. Blacksmith Institute, “The Toxic Rice Fields of China’s Cancer Villages,” Pollution Blog, available at http://www.blacksmithinstitute.org/blog/?p=1638 (accessed August 14, 2013).

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6. Miguel Sedano, “What You Can Bring from Mexico” (Baja, Calif.: Baja Real Estate Group), available at http://www.bajarealestategroup.net/What_you_can_bring _from_Mexico/ (accessed September 2, 2013). 7. Peter Clark and Anthony Davis, “The Power of Dirt: An Exploration of Secular Defilement in Anglo-­Canadian Culture,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 26 (1989): 650–­73. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 69. 9. Robbie Duschinsky and Ian Robson, “Morality, Color, Bodies: Epistemological and Interpretive Questions of Purity,” Excursions 4(2) (2011), available at http://www .excursions-journal.org.uk/index.php/excursions/article/view/125. 10. Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term= slut. 11. Mary Romero, “Domestic Service in the Transition from Rural to Urban Employment,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 13(3): 199–­222. 12. Sean Mallin, “Embodying the Development Discourse: Images, Metaphors, and the Body Economic,” available at http://www3.nd.edu/~druccio/Sean.pdf. 13. Janice Nathanson, “The Pornography of Poverty: Reframing the Discourse of International Aid’s Representations of Starving Children,” Canadian Journal of Communication 38(1) (2013): 103–­20. 14. These appeals can be found at the following Web sites: https://www.concern .net/donate/appeals/escaping-rubbish-dumps-pakistan; http://canodia.com/living-in -a-dump/children-of-the-dump/; http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/06/09 /cnnheroes.duron.miranda.argentina/; http://www.foodforthepoor.org/about/topics /spotlight-on/life-in-a-garbage-dump.html. 15. See Jonathan M. Katz, “Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt,” Associated Press, January 30, 2008. 16. Anthony Shiu, “Flexible Production: International Adoption, Race, Whiteness” (2001), available at http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v6i1–2/shiu.htm. 17. Lucy A. Williams, “Race, Rat Bites, and Unfit Mothers: How Media Discourse Informs Welfare Legislation Debate,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 22(4) (1994): 1159–­96. 18. Kathleen Rhem, “Rumsfeld on Terrorists: Drain the Swamp They Live In,” September 18, 2001, U.S Department of Defense, available at http://www.defense.gov /news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44863. 19. Dana Berthold, “Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene,” Ethics and the Environment 15(1) (2010): 1–­26.

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Shit Sagi Cohen

The whole world shines shit and calls it gold. —­Michael Steintorf, The Wire

The Stuff of Dreams This chapter explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It focuses on the stakes involved in raising global politics to an ideal, and does this by appealing to a specific methodology: thinking from a position of shit. Engaging a thick description of the shit-­disposal practice at NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) will foreground the political presuppositions, not to say impetus, of the ISS’s metastate, following from the fact that its shit is the only “thing” that this new international—­rallied under the flag of humanity—­cannot contain. This will lead to a more theoretical meditation about the dream of unifying the international, and will proceed by analogizing the assumptions conditioning the physical existence and position of this international-­cum-­station and those conditioning the conceptual ones of an international-­cum-­globe. As that which is thoroughly annihilated in a silent assumption of necessity, and then flushed on a world that mistakes it for a shooting star, shit’s short and brutal adventure will make this ideal (of) humanity betray its political gesture: the globe that is made to appear on the horizon of this unified and discrete international colludes with the spectacular annihilation of humanity’s other(s). The main text that inspired this exposition is R. B. J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World, where he doggedly insists on the thickness of supposedly ideally drawn limit-­lines when it comes to thinking the international, refusing to let go of the persistent problem of sovereignty that they elide, and wondering whether, and how, it might be possible to imagine other, new avenues for thinking about, or engaging in, politics.1 A global approach to politics necessarily represses much of the bloody history and sociopolitical discriminations

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of these sovereignly drawn lines, and indeed the book makes us suspect that this repression is its very raison d’être. Walker stubbornly resists this history’s systematization, as the aforementioned lines are too hastily explained away as either natural or exceptional. Such aversions do not solve the persisting problems of sovereignty and its limit(s) still dogging political and academic discourses, but only seduce an already riveted, under-­, or hypocritical gaze, made blind to this scale’s political assumptions and claims. The ISS’s dropping its shit on the horizon of a transfixed globe in the name of humanity is thus perfect, in this regard, to give substance to Walker’s subject, however insubstantial it might initially appear—­whatever the aversion it awakens against it.

Shit Happens: An Abject Methodology What is this “position of shit”? How and why can shit have a critical import? Shit denotes the remainder of a process by which a certain living being is maintained. Thus, when it comes to thinking about politics, to think that which links, but also defines, means and ends, shit grants a very rare perspective: that of an essential material becoming inessential, immaterial. As inessential as shit, as waste, may have proven to be with regard to a particular system—­as its expulsion invariably attests to—­it still bears the unique sign of this visceral, intimate decision. Shit is, then, as remainder, also a reminder that a different digestive system, an­other organism, might have been possible, or at least imagined. The way we treat this “thing” betrays something of how we relate to this decision, to this reminder. Irreducible, by definition, to both the entity and the process that evacuated it, shit cannot, strictly speaking, oppose the shitting being—­only threaten it with contradiction. The processual/metabolic coherence that a political (id) entity devises so as to achieve its goals—­in short, the coherence of a political project—­can only come into being by first shitting, as it were, its inner contradictions, in the name of its always particular weltanschauung. Although somewhat making its appearance as distinct, shit, as a sign of this processual exclusion, problematizes any essentialized account of its being, for it is precisely being that had already expelled it. Any number of shitting beings, wielding any number of weltanschauungen, can cooperate and sign treaties, make peace or cold/hot wars, while the disinterested historian narrates and the political scientist generalizes; but they’ve all already colluded in favor of distinct, cohesive Welten, and against, or more precisely away from, these worlds’ respective waste products. In this very aversion of being, shit suggests its own peculiar ontology.2

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Shit’s problematic brings two distinct types of negation to bear on each other: the processual negation of historicopolitical narrative that affirms specific links of means to ends (while excluding others), and the structural negation of language that gives those means and ends their meaning as discrete entities (by distinguishing them from other words/concepts). Deciding to use a hammer to drive a nail into a coffin, for example, requires both (1) the exclusion of any other possibility of handling the nail and coffin—­like, say, wishing it be so, or using one’s own skull for this endeavor; and (2) an understanding what a nail, a coffin, and a hammer are—­which assumes an understanding of what they are not. The assumption made here is that these two negations—­the processual and the structural—­while not reducible to each other, are nevertheless interdependent. Thus I will proceed by linking a given telos to its prepolitical, hidden exclusions—­the base violence it cannot, however lofty its intentions, own up to. I will do this with the constant reminder that telos can only acknowledge objective, structural oppositions, such as those of other, definite projects; other teloi. But there are “other others” that it cannot address—­cannot even recognize.3 Shit stands in a strange, uncanny relation to life. On the one hand, it is full of life—­an overdetermination of nutrients that sustains, and is sustained by, scores of heterogeneous milieus and life-­forms. On the other hand, it is abject to the life-­form that secretes it—­useless at best, at worst it signals the threats of contamination and disease, even death (briefly recalling here typhus’s long and respectable history). The “shitting being” thus both recognizes and does not recognize itself in its own shit. Like the corpse, shit is also a sign of its limit, a witness to its finitude. It confounds this being with a double signification: life’s exhaustion and limit, but also its hope-­for renewal, the result of a subterranean, ever-­unfulfilled desire to metabolize, to transform. Shit’s very abjection, thus, the repulsive response it wrests out of the living, is owed to its own—­discarded, yet still there—­life; where the life of the organism exceeds the life in an organism, if you will. There’s both a promise and a threat in this excess. Shit, hence, is in a perfect position to radically question any political project, any ideal, especially one that purports to be an absolute coherence or necessity. Shit never just happens. I claim that any semblance of coherence or self-­evidence of a political project will always assume that the structural negation somehow justifies the processual one; forgetting—­conveniently or inconveniently—­that any weltanschauung means that one can only see a difference after it has been passed through the necessarily exclusive demands of

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a definite Welt: ridding itself of the—­political, historical—­contradiction, the coherent ideal seeks the frozen, egalitarian solace of a regulated system of oppositions, where there are no irreconcilable victims, for which the raison d’être is a given, where what remains are only necessities, or fate, over which we have no power and hence no responsibility. Once problematized, which is to say politicized, shit will force us to ask why, rather than leave it up to fate—­that is its promise, its power of horror. To think about what gives a political identity its cohesion and definition cannot, even logically, presuppose this being. It cannot revert to the usual story of this being’s sovereign power of decision for attaining definite goals and interests, for that would mistake the effects for the cause, a classic begging of the question. The position and methodology of shit, however, provide a rare glimpse into the dark chiasmus of both “goal” and “decision”; it is, after all, a trace element of their dialectic. Thought under the sign of shit, then, any political ideal or goal can be recalled to its unconscious exclusions, the always-­ yet-­to-­be-­thought history it presupposes, through which it came to be(ing). Because any project-­driven (read: teleological) thinking must, by definition, operate under a definite ideal—­to legitimate or direct it—­it needs a theoretical engagement that responds to this peculiar alchemy.4 All this, of course, is easier said than done, and precisely for the liminal position that shit occupies. As such, it only speaks in an obscure, seemingly irrelevant idiom. This “thing-­position” denotes a methodological problem, specifically for a scientific model still beholden to the dream of a detached observation of objects.5 In modern science, the latter has, for centuries now, been synonymous with a proper methodology of research. Shit’s position, affording no such objective detachment, calls for an active intervention of thought in this thing itself; it demands that one enter and imagine rather than merely detach and analyze. To assume the position of shit, a modern scientific thought will have to somehow question its own seemingly instinctive aversion for shit’s idiom, that seemingly natural rejection and muting of its voice as marginal, contingent, or immaterial. This thinking also needs to submit itself to what just might be its own destruction—­such is the precarious and threatening methodological position, not to say rigor, of shit thought of as an abject thing—­where science is faced with the troubling reflection of critique.6 If history is written by the victors, then the losers’ story would have to be written in, or as, shit. Any political thought, I submit, cannot afford to, uncritically, step back to a supposedly neutral vantage point and narrate a generalized story from the exploits of some political beings vis-­à-­vis other politi-

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cal beings. Critique demands that this procedure be, not done away with, but held accountable to this aversion, this action of separating oneself, of stepping back. These beings were never eternal or essential in any way other than as units of narration, and such narration cannot but coagulate them into existence out of the endless stream of—­historical, religious, socioeconomic, and so on—­becoming from which they came to be. By the time a coherent narrative is achieved, a lot of latent possibilities will have already been dumped into the waters of the Lethe. As a phenomenological rule of thumb, the abject thing, by its very arousal of aversion, can point the more finely tuned noses to that dump site.7

When You Wish upon a Star Outside the Earth’s pull, freed from the various interferences of its habitat, the “international,” as station, indeed looks extraordinarily peaceful for its name. Elevated above, and separated from, the globe, it enjoys a relatively secure existence, not to say freedom. This external, exclusive vantage point allows the ISS to fulfill its official mandate: “to drive advanced science and technology that will deliver benefits to humanity, while preparing the way for future collaboration on international space exploration missions.”8 NASA’s ISS, as its Web site makes clear, is considered a global effort.9 Its raison d’être is scientific, and as such it is indeed in a uniquely privileged position to conduct “innovative experiments that could not be done anywhere else.”10 As the “International Cooperation” section of the Web site makes clear, in this international endeavor “each partner shares a unified goal to extend the resulting knowledge for the betterment of humanity.”11 The ISS’s overarching, cosmopolitan concern is, therefore, not with this or that nation, culture, or ethnic group, but with a unified, cohesive humanity. It is humanity (and her interests) that tie these divergent threads together. Through technological innovation and cooperation, this “politically complex” station supersedes and reconciles past conflicts in an unprecedented, amazing feat. Its “[p]rogram’s greatest accomplishment is as much a human achievement as it is a technological one.” A mysterious alchemy is afoot here: science and technology provide humanity with the unified goal necessary to accomplish the long sought-­after domestication of that politically complex chimera known as the international. If the International Space Station is indeed international, then both its position and its mandate give us a clue as to the conditions of this alchemy, by which an entity’s telos justifies its being. The ISS, and the rhetoric that underwrites it, suggest that the reality encapsulated in the international designation

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changes, literally, as it scales up. This higher international is also free to behold a new global object, one that our Earth-­dwelling fetters obscure from our gaze. Only a separation from, an undoing of, these fetters can enable something like a “globe” to, literally, show up on the horizon; to, quite spectacularly, appear as it “really is”; to be encompassed in a glance. The international scientist can assume the pure nothing of outer space as the inert background against which the globe can be—­safely and objectively—­observed, in the process becoming an almost pure agent of humanity, a veritable international citizen. What are the political stakes of such a separation, such a position? What can be heard from such a space? What is the specific type of propriety that it imposes, and how? What is this strange alchemy by which agonistic—­not to say murderous—­international relations become a peaceful and clean, defined and unified “International Cooperation”? How, by what physical and conceptual means, could one storm this as a Bastille, if one were so inclined? And, conversely, if a violent revolution were to break out on Earth—­would this international be at all affected? Would it be able, or even willing, to smell what’s burning?12 Is not this little strip of space a structural—­but also a very real, and quite deadly—­limit, conditioning this claim to a “higher international”? Is not the inhospitality of outer space, its mindless, absolute hostility toward life, also very much employed and presupposed by the ISS’s position and mandate? Is this strip of death that is outer space not the limit that this science—­in its conception and interpretation of humanity—­places around itself, recalling Charles M. Schultz’s Linus van Pelt exclaiming, “I love mankind . . . It’s people I can’t stand!!”? These are questions best left to shit. Shit will help us give substance, thickness, to this supposedly inert and neutral limit, endowing this higher international and its globe with their neatly illustrated contours, their identities. As astronaut Chris Hadfield explains, shit in the ISS is collected—­separately from other waste products—­in a designated container.13 While liquid waste from the ISS is recycled and reused by the station, the dedication of a specific process for an expelled substance such as shit does seem deserving of question. Why this difference in the handling of international wastes? The purification and treatment of liquid waste is a process necessitated by the self-­sustaining design of the station, and is indeed processed and recycled by the station accordingly. Yet, despite not bringing any benefit to the international laboratory and despite its ultimate disposal, shit goes through a specific process as well. In this context, two—­not at all obvious—­facts about the procedure of its expulsion stand out in Hadfield’s description: for one, the shit container, when full,

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is deliberately opened to the vacuum and absolute zero of outer space, rendering its contents inert by killing all life in them; for two, this gentrified shit is released into Earth’s atmosphere. As Hadfield explains, this release causes the shit to burn to nothingness, eliminating all trace of its existence, and, he adds smilingly, appearing to an Earthly gazer as a shooting star. Why bother? Why not, for example, just let shit float out there, in orbit, pelting the occasional satellite or astronaut? Why not store it in the station? This line of questioning might seem immaterial, inappropriate; I warned you this was going to happen. And yet the fact that it cannot just be stored in the international station indefinitely, and has to be killed and burned to nothingness rather than allowed to float around in orbit or in space, does point to something in the unique position and conditions already discerned in this international. It also points to a more general implication of having an absolutely coherent political ideal.

Next to Godliness Shit is the useless, abject by-­product of the ISS. It cannot be left to just float about in that sterile space—­it seems to call for concentration and extermination. Its handling thus makes the ISS’s spatial position betray something of its political economy, the edifice behind the scenes of its privileged position. The boundary that affords this international its autonomous separation is actively used for its absolute violence, even as it is assumed as a neutral, ideal background. If this limit is taken as geometrically ideal, or—­what amounts to the same thing—­merely geographic, then this fate of shit exposes precisely its thickness, its political activity: shit outs this small strip of outer space as a useful—­however unacknowledged—­active force, issuing absolute violence and death to the unpalatable remainders of this international’s peaceful existence. It is precisely this assumption of ideality/neutrality of the limit that makes its violence go unnoticed, unaccounted for. Perhaps shit, having been produced with earthly materials, after all, wants to get back to Earth, its abject excess seeking to sustain other forms of life, or—­which doesn’t amount to the same thing—­other teloi than the “human” one? Perhaps our ideas of randomness and fate—­the invisible hand of God—­ are so misguided and manipulated that they have us wishing upon fake stars? The separation I keep insisting on thickening here might name itself a scientific necessity, but it is also a threshold, or bouncer. The ISS might seem in this way to be egalitarian, apolitical: it objectivizes the totality of the globe in the same way (not the way, say, a particular nation’s spy satellite does, pursuant

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to that nation’s interests). Treating everyone equally might be easier at a distance, but both this ease and this distance have a price. Everything is to be clean-­cut, as immaterial, useless differences do not make it past the strip of death that—­seemingly passively—­maintains the ISS’s position. The ISS is, literally, there to give us higher truths. The more separate one is from one’s studied object, or so goes the scientific dream, the more comprehensive and universal—­the more cosmopolitical—­one’s view. This act of separation is a political act, or, more precisely, it acts on the political by limiting it to a specific cosmology. Dreaming of some pure objectivity to give us direction and unity is, literally, dreaming of an incontestable, absolute position, immune to political contestation—­like an Archimedean point, for example, or God’s. This position is free to project objects upon its horizon at the same time that it fashions its human observer, who is detached from his or her milieu and purportedly without remainder. The separation seems pure, ideal; but, as shit just made apparent, it is not so much pure as it is purifying. This picturesque globe, as a newly found Bild, is the correlated rhyme and reason for the Bildung of a human, global citizen.14 On this account, “global politics” shows itself to be built on an eschatology of a specific approach to politics. This approach is dedicated to the problematic of escaping the fragmentation haunting the international, and unifying it under the heading, not to say ruling, of a totalized, objectified globe.

Just Being International To treat international relations and world politics as synonyms is to invite a seductive leap into discourses of universality and universalization. To treat them as antonyms is to invite an equally seductive leap into discourses of specificity and plurality. Both seductions rest on an even more profound desire to believe that, taken together, these very specific discourses of universality and plurality might eventually add up to a politics of the entire world.15 R. B. J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World calls for nothing less than the reimagining of politics itself. After years of subtle analyses of Western discourses of international relations and political theory, Walker recognizes an “elementary and even willful failure . . . of political imagination [and] . . . of political analysis” (30–­31). My focus on shit, specifically in its abject position, occupies that nearly impossible space, trying to shed some light, via a

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performative illustration, on why so much of academic discourse in the domain of political theory is “even willfully” failing to resist these totalizing seductions. Earlier, we articulated two different types of negation—­the oppositional and the processual—­so as to better consider their mutual implication. Political violence can be critiqued—­that is, defined, given a limit—­by either type of negation. The oppositional critique of violence will ask it to be precise and just, within the line, or contract, previously drawn, perhaps even more efficiently directed toward better-­identified goals. This oppositional critique is the one that gave so much (political) import to epistemology, the assumption and demand that knowledge always precedes, both in time and in importance, political action. Accounting for political entities and identities, however, necessitates accounting for their historical processes and ideal aspirations, bringing the uneasy dimension of time, a diachrony, to bear on identities that the previous critique could only view synchronically, in a static system of oppositions. Thus the questions of being revealed themselves to be intimately implicated with those of time, and all horizons of thought—­fused or not—­had to henceforth admit to a difference that will forever soil their claims to universality. The processual critique thus brings us back to ontology, the existing framework or project that decides on a (political) being, and the complicated, seldom fully registered history of decisions and conditions implied in the construction of this entity. It is this second negation that complicates, thickens, the too neatly demarcated lines of the first. This thickness of boundary and the blindness to it is what Walker has been trying, for decades now, to teach us: There are no simple lines, no zones of zero width, between insides and outsides, even when exceptions are declared, when particular discriminations are authorized . . . , when the abject but constitutive outside that haunts or mirrors the sovereign voice of normality and authority inside is rendered mute. The outside is always somehow inside, and the inside is somehow outside. . . . Limits cannot work politically if they are hermetically sealed. (146) Refusing to simply “let the facts speak,” Walker keeps reminding us that every ontological structure, everything we accept as a naturally existing end of story, has a political claim, has specific historical conditions through which it came to “just” be. For the world to become a coherent political entity then entails—­in the context of the international—­that it function as the limit of politics as

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such, that it capture the entirety of what Hannah Arendt called “the human condition” under its purview. But this gesture of placing a limit—­and here is the main knot—­is itself a thick, political gesture—­perhaps more dangerously so if this limit is supposed to be the defining horizon of the political, and not a difference within it. There can be no apolitical drawing of a limit to politics, however natural and commonsensical this limit might sound. Thus the strip of death that distinguishes the globe from the international human observer betrays what Walker calls its “political work” precisely as it is breached by the ISS’s shit. The more politics becomes cosmopolitical, however multilayered or multicultural, it will necessarily aspire to extinguish this political-­ontological difference. The accommodated otherness implied in the multi-­is always in danger of obscuring the muted violence perpetrated on the otherness of the hetero. The more total the political entity, the more possible political sites it will digest, and, hence, the more shit it will have to produce and deal with. The critical question is not whether this or that occurrence is inside or outside the lines defining sovereignty and legitimacy, but precisely the thickness of these very lines: their history, their assumptions, their ideology. This state of affairs is not an accident. Rather, it tells us something about the necessary condition of the political ideal: to recall, a coherent ideal can only account for oppositions between entities under its purview; whatever never makes it to that status it shits out. In political terms, when cohesion has been met in the political project, one might arrive at a politics that ends up criminalizing acts that might be, or could be imagined as, political in essence. The more coherent and total the ideal, after all, the more it must process the potentially legitimate abject stuff into a framework of legitimate political entities, the more it has to assume its limits as ideal, natural, or self-­justifying. A lot of the oppositional-­logic critiques championed by an epistemological methodology obsessed with the questions of reality versus fiction (what falls or does not fall within the scope of reality) allowed their parent ideals—­unchecked by an ontologically critical gaze—­to quietly burn their corpses beneath political thought’s radar. It was, after all, ideology that taught us that the more radical the political gesture, the less chance it has of ever being registered as such, and, hence, the more chance of silently victimizing—­either actively by punishment or passively by ignorance and neglect—­its others. Where there is less and less political heterogeneity, there will be more and more criminals, traitors, refugees. They are the tip of a mostly invisible iceberg that holds the stakes of our political ideals. The violence escalates the more encompassing and coherent the ideal, thus forcing more and more potential

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forms of political life to be, as Walker puts it, “squeezed out of contention” (207). Refugees, for example, will have their problematic position, as stateless, aggravated to the impossible position of “worldless”; will they one day be deported into outer space? This might seem like an outlandish possibility, but does not the ever-­growing number of exceptional zones, where international law and human rights are suspended (the acts of violence allowed by such zones notwithstanding), nominate these enclosures as precisely such “outer spaces”? When seen on a global scale, would not the severity of a crime previously judged to be against the community or state also threaten to escalate to the status of a crime against the world, or against humanity? Does this not threaten to criminalize not just people, but also rituals or behaviors, religions, or ideas?

Conclusion: Imagine There’s No Heaven It was Wittgenstein who famously remarked that in order to think a limit one must be able to think both of its sides, thus raising the ethicopolitical problem of transgression as the stink that philosophical logic tried to bury. The problem of the international is stuck with that logic, becoming only more hypocritical of it (and itself) as it scales upwards. If it is to be thought of in a democratic vein, if its claims for internal legitimacy, for universal freedom and equality, are to be sustained, the unit(y) named “international” must have already decided its outsides in a democratic manner. However, as democracy’s ancient history had shown, this outside is always, by definition, inconceivable as a potential political entity, and can only stutter a disarticulated claim to justice.16 What was true for the relatively small spatial delimitation of a polis is a fortiori relevant for any dream of global democracy: it risks not only reenacting the same exclusions in the name of global, supposedly innocuous and universal concepts like humanity (i.e., deciding what is human) but escalating a political enclosure’s spatial totality to a totalitarian spatiotemporality of coercion, employing decisions not only about what lies within the concepts of the human or the global but also a hypocritical decision about their inconceivable outsides (where so many people and places in the world are, exceptionally or of necessity taken out of contention). The terms of necessary exception and assumptions of fate belie this always-­already-­made decision and spell out in the clearest way possible the unrelenting hypocrisy hardwired into what Walker calls our modern political imagination. This decision about the outside is hardly ever discerned by the ideal, as the word aversion so aptly summarizes. As a critical look at history shows time

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and again, when the conditions arise that this decision is contested, an exceptional, or necessary, violence is employed in a no-­choice, hypocritical logic that tries to resolve the contradiction as if it were a mere opposition. The ideal of the secularized human citizen, for example, only covers up decisions already made on difficult and unresolved questions and tensions of religious difference (God), of socioeconomic inequality (nationality and citizenship), and what is or is not within the purview of political decision (i.e., what may be considered as just or natural). Having already decided their worth and content means already possessing both a theology and a cosmology, not to say anthropology, all of which are now literally unimaginable, inconceivable (e.g., a theology that does not allow talk of God is not secular, but dogmatic, and blindly so). Debating whether this or that policy is humane, secular, or legal will always leave out the decisions already made by adopting these ideals. And, of course, the stakes become potentially much more violent the more actual people are captured within the purview of these ideals—­such, I believe, was the minimal lesson from the ideologically fueled mass deaths of World War II. The stakes of this analogical meditation, however merely metaphorical they might seem, are very real. The processes by which an ideal produces a remainder, and, furthermore, the spectacle made out of the handling of this remainder to further ensconce the ideal in people’s hearts and minds, are also all too real. When viewed from the position of shit, ideals might be forced to admit all those who don’t really fit the assumptions that go unquestioned within them, and, furthermore, be a lot less surprised—­that is, less hypocritical—­when these ideals’ shit, for some reason, fails to be properly disposed of, and starts implicating those who discarded it with its filthy stench. Such uncontrolled, flying dung might include religious antagonisms from the Dark Ages that the West likes to think it enlightened out of existence (by declaring itself secular); or racist perceptions assumed to be countered with the defeat of Nazism, or the very recent, and in many ways only nominal abolition of slavery (or this or that affirmative-­action policy); or misogyny and patriarchy thought a thing of the past because of (also quite recent) women’s suffrage, or a supposedly gender-­blind market economy . . . As Walker so aptly put it, “hypocrisies sprout like weeds in spring.”17 My claim here is that the soil they grow on is only fertile for the shit that’s buried behind the concepts that grew them.18 Will the Earth itself one day become the shit that humanity left, abject and indigestible, behind? Is it not at least imaginable that, in a not-­so-­distant future, a globe, made utterly inhospitable to life, will be orbited by numerous, ISS-­like space stations? Might not then Earth’s apocalypse finally reveal itself to be a gaudy spectacle wherein scores of shooting stars appear on its horizon, but with no one left to make a wish? 296

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Notes 1. R. B. J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World (London: Routledge, 2010), hereafter AGBW. 2. That is why the position of shit, the otherness it confronts us with, should not be reduced to the already-­established otherness of the political entity known as “minority”; it is simply not precarious (i.e., not critical) enough. 3. One can only recall here what the political status of the Athenian polis’s slaves and women (among others) contributed to subsequent Western thought about political legitimacy and democracy. 4. Admittedly, this necessity is already inflected by a certain democratic approach promoted here—­specifically, the democratic impetus that is wary of anything resembling dogma or tyranny, including what came to be called the tyranny of the majority. The following will maintain this wariness, yet trouble its weariness, especially as often exemplified in the fetishized form of the human (the still too hypocritical discourse of human rights). 5. These methodological considerations follow in many ways what I perceive to be the novel intervention of this book’s taking serious account of things, rather than discretely defined objects. 6. I allude to the original sense of the word, coming from the Greek krinein, which means to judge, to separate (from the root krei-­“to sieve, discriminate, distinguish”). 7. The phenomenological meditation offered here owes a great deal to Julia Kristeva’s meditation on abjection. It also bears close affinities with at least two other publications appearing in the previous volumes, Jessica Auchter’s insightful exposé about/of the bearing of corpses on international and state discourse, and Michele Acuto’s discerning piece on the multiply subversive assemblages that a consideration of garbage affords. Both are faced with similar methodological problems with prevalent discourse: Auchter laments a “vitalist bias” in academic discourse—­something I allude to here as an aversion; and Acuto notices a “shyness” on the topic of waste, which he relates, I think quite appropriately, to precisely this difficulty of defining its essence, of making it into an object. Cf. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Jessica Auchter, “Corpses,” in Mark B. Salter, ed., Making Things International 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 129–­40; Michele Acuto, “Garbage,” in Salter, Making Things International 1, 266–­81. 8. “MCB Joint Statement Representing Common Views on the Future of the ISS February 3, 2010,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, http://www.nasa .gov/pdf/423071main_mcb_joint_stmt_020110.pdf. 9. “International Space Station,” NASA, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages /station/main/index.html (accessed July 1, 2014). 10. “International Space Station: Benefits of ISS Research,” NASA, http://www .nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits/index.html (accessed July 1, 2014). 11. “International Space Station: International Cooperation,” NASA, http://www .nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/cooperation/index.html (accessed July 1, 2014). 12. One cannot help but be reminded of that famous Bernard Shaw quote: “I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men.”

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13. “Chris Hadfield Explains How to Poop in Space,” YouTube, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=w7UM4AQ9Cco (accessed July 1, 2014). 14. This is but one brief allusion to the Hegelian eschatology of the Absolute Subject that I believe persistently haunts this debate, which, for reasons of scope, I will leave as such. Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), §§77–­78. 15. AGBW, 21. Subsequent references are given in the text. 16. More interesting in this regard is to think of animals as potential political entities, but the list can go on indefinitely. Indeed, in many ways that is the point of this critique. 17. AGBW, 56. 18. Walker shows how these ideals are, even among themselves, at times highly incompatible; for reasons of scope I cannot elaborate further. Cf. ibid., 54–­95 (chapter 3: “The Politics of Escape”).

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Burning Cars Helen Arfvidsson

Sensationalized images of young people burning cars in urban peripheries often bring to mind a series of events that took place in French banlieues during three weeks in 2005. These events are by no means restricted to France or to a specific national context. Using the example of youth burning cars in the peripheries of Gothenburg, Sweden, in the late summer of 2009, this chapter aims to engage with these burning cars by doing multiplicity and connecting them to international processes of urban planning, migration, and economic transformations. The chapter will set out to break with the dominant framing of these events where the youth in question, but also the city of Gothenburg, are portrayed within a dichotomous rendering of a divided city in which the peripheries are positioned as excluded. When the binary categories of victims and villains, inclusion and exclusion, or national and international are not taken for granted, a focus on multiple worlds can bring about a different understanding of these burning cars, and in turn of the making of the international. By doing multiplicity, it will be argued that multiple worlds are at once enacted and materialized through these events. The approach of doing multiplicity, inspired by the works of Annemarie Mol and John Law, is a way to engage in a different kind of intervention into these burning cars with the aim of moving away from a singular, bounded, and limited understanding of the world.1 It will bring attention to the heterogeneities of relations, human and nonhuman, brought into being through these acts and thereby help open up spaces for ambivalence and ambiguities.

On Burning Cars A burning car in an urban periphery is a lot more than simply a vehicle set on fire. There are spectacular flames and destruction, youth, the police, and bold headlines, but there is also much more going on: things less visible and audible, things left out of the sensationalized framing. The burning car is not

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simply a passive and neutral object, existing in an out-­there reality, waiting to be unveiled, analyzed, and understood. It resonates and circulates. Particular locations are often in focus, such as the French banlieues. This chapter takes as its entry point how Loïc Wacquant has analyzed the burning of cars in France 2005 as a communicative device for the “malaise of the banlieues,” and the growing intolerance and blindness of the French state.2 According to Wacquant, the violence is neither random nor meaningless. It is well directed and represents a calling on the state to live up to its responsibilities. The burning of cars, in this light, can be seen to represent a local concern of rejecting marginality, police harassment, and injustices. In this particular rendering, however, the politicality of the burning cars is framed within a binary and spectacular frame of opposition where the youth rise up as political subjects and resist the brutality of the state by burning cars. This chapter will approach the burning cars differently. It will not give an explanation to the burning cars per se, and will instead move beyond a politics of resistance and exclusion. It will enact an alternative ontology in which the burning cars do not immediately fit into predetermined frames and categories of opposition to state repression. To do this, the burning car itself will be in focus. Although the burning car is located somewhere in the particular, it also resonates and circulates beyond this location. It is not still and passive, waiting to be depicted from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.3 It is doing something; the burning car is an active subject. Throughout 2008 and 2009, an unprecedented spree of burning cars took place in several Swedish förorter. Förort(er), for those not familiar with Swedish, is similar to the banlieue in France. In brief, these are areas constructed in the peripheries of many European cities in the postwar period, highly influenced by modernist planning, and characterized by concrete high-­rises, unemployment rates above average, and often, but not always, a large immigrant population. In reference to these events, Carl-­Ulrik Schierup and Aleksandra Åhlund suggest that “youth unrest ran like wildfire across the disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the Swedish cities of Malmö, Gothenburg and Uppsala.”4 They portray the unrest as only one of the latest examples in a series of urban rebellions. The vocabulary used strongly signals their understanding of the burning of cars. Rebellion, insurrection, and riots are used interchangeably as they suggest that “the last two decades have, step by step, led towards neoliberal disciplinary strategies, neoconservative moral reaffirma­tion and the erosion of a comprehensive citizenship pact. Seen in a historical per­spective, the riots of 2008–­2009 appear to signify a breaking point, as it were, a probable beginning of the end of Swedish exceptionalism (56). 300

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To make this line of argument, they first need to make Sweden exceptional in order to frame the burning cars as a break with what they call Swedish exceptionalism. Implicit in this argument is that the act of burning cars is more or less expected elsewhere, for instance, in France, but not in Sweden. Schierup and Åhlund point to how Sweden has been different compared to other countries, more generous with respect to welfare and immigration practices. Nevertheless, this exceptionalism, or superiority, has come to an abrupt end. They suggest that “until recently Sweden continued to be seen, from an international perspective, as the model of a tolerant and egalitarian multicultural welfare society, a kind of exceptionalist model for others to follow” (47). In their rendering of these events, the burning of cars is an attempt to reclaim Sweden by ethnic minority youth who are excluded and barred from participating in wider political struggles (61). This kind of analysis allows Schierup and Åhlund to frame the unrest as political uprisings by marginalized youth, tired of their situation and ready to take to the streets to show their discontent in spectacular ways. They hereby make the burning cars stand out as exceptional and framed within an antagonistic ontology. This kind of ontology simply allows for a linear narrative of the burning of cars and, in turn, of the world out there that is understood by exploring different perspectives of a single event or reality. However, a burning car in this chapter cannot be understood by stacking multiple interpretations or perspectives on top of one another. Instead, the burning car will in what follows be rendered multiple. Inspired by Mol and The Body Multiple, a burning car is more than one, but less than many. It is, of course, real; the flames and destruction are not simply discursive or performative constructions. At the same time, the burning car is brought into being and enacted in multiple ways, simultaneously and separately. The burning car, therefore, exists in different worlds at once. An ontological shift takes place here. These worlds are not the same as different perspectives on a single reality. They are neither fragmented nor isolated. “They hang together, but not quite as a whole,” as Mol suggests.5 They generate tension and ambiguity as they resonate far beyond the particular location of the burning car itself. This notion of hanging together, but not quite as a whole, is explained by Mol in the example of the disease atherosclerosis. She suggests that while atherosclerosis is being enacted, many other subjects and objects are simultaneously present on the scene. They all have different realities, overlapping and interfering with one another. There are no invariable variables; there is always interdependence and interference, as no entity can stay the same throughout the making of the disease. A disease does not exist by itself. It depends on Burning Cars

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everything and everyone active while it is being practiced.6 The same can be said for a burning car. The burning car is simultaneously and separately something the youth do, something the bold headlines do, along with the police and the various expert commentators, but also the concrete buildings and the car itself matter. This making of the burning car differs, however, from one site to another. The site is not merely located where the car was set on fire; it is not fixed to a specific location. Mol suggests that if we focus in on a few details of any site, it immediately turns into a multiplicity.7 Sites, in this sense, are not locations. They are defined not by spatial boundaries or scales, but by enactments and activities.8 To illustrate this, and to engage with the multiple worlds brought into being by the acts of burning cars, this chapter turns to the particular, to a street where an incident allegedly set in motion an unprecedented spree of burning cars in the city of Gothenburg in August 2009. The street is called Blendas Gata and is situated in the förort of Backa.

On Doing Dichotomies This particular incident involved a police intervention outside a small convenience store on Blendas Gata in which a few teenage boys were searched by the police on suspicion of carrying arms.9 According to the police, the incident represented merely a routine intervention. Nevertheless, the rumors quickly circulating in the area after the intervention suggested that this was yet another example of police brutality and racial discrimination directed toward the youth in question. This particular incident allegedly set in motion an unprecedented number of burning cars in Gothenburg in the weeks to follow. The fires spread back and forth between several peripheral areas of the city. The media could hardly keep up in their production of bold headlines and sensationalized images of burning cars, while a variety of experts commented and speculated about the underlying motivations and reasons. Two experts in particular stand out, because they both evoke the figure of being a spokesperson. The first example resonates with the frame of analysis presented by Schierup and Åhlund, as well as by Wacquant. In this explanation, the burning of cars is about unemployment and discrimination. It is about police harassment. It is about being fed up and about not being seen and heard. At least this is what a small group of youth in Backa argue when they meet with the local newspaper, Göteborgs Posten, a few days after the incident at Blendas Gata. The spokesperson of the group, Fofo, together with local youth put together a statement about the events on the back of several cigarette packs. It

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reads: “We stand here every day . . . The authorities have seen us grow up on this street for the past five–­six years, but done nothing. Of course we get fed up and that is why it has turned out this way. This is our only way to be seen and make our voices heard.”10 In the second example, also published in Göteborgs Posten, another explanation is given. It is about exclusion and failures of integration. This time it is the minister of integration at the time, Nyamko Sabuni, who speaks.11 In the article, a number of issues are merged, including those of burning cars, processes of social exclusion, youth gangs, lack of parental support, and alleged problems of integrating newly arrived immigrants. Sabuni argues that youth in these urban peripheries are not as active as elsewhere, and she proposes that besides ensuring that the authorities are present and that parents are more involved, civil society must be more engaged in order to deal with “problems of exclusion.”12 She ends by suggesting how the future of these areas is in the hands of the residents. They are the ones with the most to “win or lose in the battle over the peripheries,” as they have to “stand up and reclaim their areas with the message that burning cars is an unacceptable behavior.”13 These two explanations are in agreement in that the burning of cars undoubtedly took place in certain areas: förorten. These areas become the focus of their respective arguments. Fofo blames society and structural discrimination for how these areas are being excluded, while Sabuni directs the blame and responsibility toward vaguely defined groups of residents by making connections between youth gangs, exclusion, and failures of integration. The world of exclusion is thereby brought into being in both of these accounts. In the first, the figure of the victim emerges as an object of structural discrimination. In the second, the youth are positioned as villains and framed as dangerous perpetuators in a battle over the peripheries. By enacting these figures of either the victim or the villain, both Fofo and Sabuni help bring about a dichotomous rendering of the city. This rendering is different from the notion of the body multiple in that it assumes the city to be a fragmented whole that is falling apart, rather than a whole that does not quite hang together. There is an important difference in these two approaches. The fragmented whole can always be fixed, the excluded areas can be included, and the city can return to its real and original state through efforts of revival and inclusion. The all-­encompassing and bounded world of exclusion and inclusion being enacted through these binary categories, however, misses the nuances, tensions, and contradictions present in the particular moment of burning cars. Such nuances and contradictions appear in my fieldwork, conducted in

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Gothenburg between November 2011 and June 2012, during which I talked to municipal officials and helped to organize workshops with local youth. During the course of the fieldwork there were regular trips to Gothenburg. Each time I returned, the city emerged a little differently. The more people I talked to, the more streets I walked, the more books I read, the more the city changed. It was always differently experienced and evoked, not in any drastic way, but rather in the details and nuances, noticing the small things that had previously passed me by. These small details, this constant change, encouraged me to think about how to do research differently and thus opened up new ways of engaging with the burning cars, the city itself, and the international. In one of my conversations, addressing the topic of burning cars in Gothenburg, the municipal official asked rather rhetorically if I knew about the recent surge of burning cars in Askim.14 For those not familiar with Gothenburg, Askim is a suburban area in the southwest of the city, close to the coast, and with an average income far above the city at large. Areas such as Askim have become known as villaförort, suburbs dominated by single-­family houses, as opposed to the high-­rises in förorten, sometimes also called the concrete (“betong”) förort. The municipal official in question argued that, of course, I do not know about these events. They are not in the media, because they do not fit the image of the area. Burning cars are associated with betongförorten, not the well-­ off area of Askim, she suggested. Fofo’s and Sabuni’s explanations also reiterate this claim that in the world of exclusion, burning cars belong in förorten. To bring this particular world of exclusion into being, however, is far from neutral or innocent. This particular making of förorten has effects and consequences, resonating with how förorten is repeatedly enacted as without a history: as constantly young and immature, in need of intervention and discipline.15 When enacting this particular world, other worlds are simultaneously being silenced.

On Concrete When burning cars are understood as multiple and are brought into being in different worlds at once, the world of exclusion becomes only one of these. This is not the same as to suggest that the inequalities, divisions, and exclusions addressed by practices of doing dichotomies do not exist or matter. They do, but so do other worlds. Moving away from practices of doing dichotomies to doing multiplicity, the focus shifts from defining the shape and form of these burning cars as Wacquant, Schierup and Åhlund, Fofo, and Sabuni so far have

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engaged with. This is a move away from the spectacular flames. With the ambition of making the world of exclusion a little less visible or noisy, a possibility emerges for other worlds to be engaged with. Although cars are not only set alight in förorten, as demonstrated by the burning cars in Askim, these areas are nonetheless singled out in the examples above. To challenge this framing, the multiplication of förorten will next be engaged with. In the multiple making of förorten, it is far from only humans present on the scene. Objects such as concrete also help enact förorten in multiple ways. Focusing in on the details of concrete allows for a different entry point into the past, present, and future of förorten. It draws attention to how matter and meaning interact and are mutually constitutive, and it opens up for ambivalence and ambiguity. When referring to förorten, it is often a particular housing program that is in focus: Miljonprogrammet (the Million Program).16 Miljonprogrammet and förorten are not synonymous. Still, many of the concrete high-­rises that stereotypically portray these areas as concrete jungles were built through this national program, heavily subsidizing municipalities to boost their housing stock and standards. Many of the buildings constructed through Miljonprogrammet were indeed built with precast or site-­cast concrete blocks that allowed for cost-­effective and efficient construction methods.17 These methods required the housing blocks to be at a certain distance from each other and for the existing vegetation to be removed in order to make the building process as efficient as possible. This helped to contribute to the often critiqued monotonous structure and appearance of these areas. This is where several scholars locate the beginning of a downward spiral—­ from dreams of utopia to territorial stigmatization. Ericsson, Molina, and Ristilammi show how many moved into these areas excited to leave overcrowded and deprived wooden houses behind, and to live the dream of modernity, yet ended up on construction sites that quickly developed a “stigma of the unfinished.”18 This stigma was largely replaced in the 1970s by a focus on crime and social problems in these areas, and in the 1980s was gradually dominated by the “Other,” the immigrant, as both dangerous and exoticized.19 Förorten was made deviant and dangerous as it increasingly became connected to the notion of the concrete jungle. Lotta Särnbratt, nevertheless, points to the myth of the concrete jungle and shows how despite being a common understanding of these areas, large-­scale blocks of concrete high-­rises are far from the most common building types constructed through Miljonprogrammet.20 Hall and Viden put forth similar

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arguments, proposing how the uniform large-­scale mass production associated with Miljonprogrammet conceals a great variety in building types and forms.21 Förorten through these accounts starts to multiply beyond the concrete jungle. The divisions in the city are much older than förorten, of course. Prior to the demonization of concrete, other building materials helped to bring the city and its inequalities into being. Kent Olsson draws attention to how, by the 1920s, wealth and prosperity were materialized in stone and bricks.22 These materials were common in the central areas of Gothenburg, such as Vasastaden and Linné, where the more affluent resided. These areas came to prosper in tandem with the industrial development of the city, which materialized rather late, between the 1890s and 1920s. Wooden houses were at the time more common in what was then the outskirts of the city: to the west, in Haga and Majorna, close to the harbor, and to the east, in Gårda, Olskroken, and Gamlestaden, closer to industrial production such as SKF, textile manufacturing, the Pripps brewery, and the Pellegrin margarine factory. Many of these areas with remaining wooden houses are today very fashionable. Yet again, förorten multiplies as the boundaries between the peripheries are in constant negotiation and change. The peripheries of yesterday are sought-­after areas to live in today. People moved to the new peripheries built through Miljonprogrammet during the 1960s and 1970s primarily from areas dominated by wooden houses, as several of these houses were demolished because of sanitation concerns. The old, cramped, grim, unhygienic living conditions of the past were to be replaced by a future of light, space, balconies, fridges, laundry rooms, and concrete. Ristilammi, in this respect, suggests how Miljonprogrammet was the imagined manifestation of modernity, and points to how the planning and design of these areas aimed to discipline the population into becoming democratic, productive, and modern citizens.23 The buildings are thus not passive objects, but rather helped to mediate these relations of modernity. Concrete is accordingly not only a symbol of a modern utopia, but also ushers the population into ordered and measured lifestyles. These arguments are illustrated in a documentary about Gothenburg made in 1971 to celebrate the 350th-­year jubilee of Gothenburg.24 The film highlights the role of the planners and architects, drawing attention to the dominant enthusiasm over the newly built periphery of Hjällbo, as well as functionalist architecture and urban planning at large. Interviews with urban planners and architects show how convinced and proud they were in regard to the enhanced life that the area of Hjällbo would bring to residents about to move in. Another film, Good Housing Fosters Good Citizens, from 1976, focuses on the

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peripheries of Stockholm and shows similar sentiments of pride and meticulous attention to detailed planning when constructing these urban peripheries.25 In a long sequence, a woman is filmed moving about in a modern kitchen. The male narrator, in an animated voice, describes how the planners helped to facilitate her every move, so that she will not have to make one single unnecessary step. We are told how the kitchen was thought of as a factory in the planning process. Studies were made and statistics assembled to maximize the utility of the space in order to reach ultimate conclusions about how to construct the perfect kitchen. For instance, the perfectly sized sink was ninety centimeters tall to accommodate the average woman. These two films draw attention to the widespread belief instilled in the planners and architects, primarily male, with regard to how these areas would help people prosper and transition to a modern way of living. They also show how urban planning was clearly influenced by prevailing gender norms and how förorten is accordingly gendered down to its structural details. In the postwar period leading up to Miljonprogrammet, Gothenburg experienced a shift in production that helped to significantly transform the city. Besides concrete, two other objects came to matter considerably: the container and the car. In the early postwar period, the harbor and the shipyards dominated the city, but these were gradually surpassed by Volvo, the car manufacturer, as the dominant employer in Gothenburg. Until the mid-­1960s, the south side of the harbor was the node of commerce with several ferry lines and ship-­building agencies. With the introduction of containers, as well as the growth in railway infrastructure and oil refineries, the focus gradually shifted almost exclusively to the north side, to the island of Hisingen.26 This can be illustrated by how the new Volvo production plant and the container port were established at Hisingen in the mid-­1960s. This concentrated previously dispersed industrial production to fewer locations further away from the city center, and was in turn vital to the development of förorten. The increased affordability of the car in the postwar period also radically changed the conditions and possibilities for where and how to build. In Bilsamhället (The car society), Per Lundin illustrates a “car explosion” in Sweden during the postwar period, as a sometimes violent encounter between the car and the city.27 The car thus transformed modes of transport and infrastructure in an unprecedented way. Not only did it allow for Gothenburg to expand and incorporate neighboring municipalities such as Frölunda, Torslanda, and Angered, many of which were populated through Miljonprogrammet, but it also helped to transform the physical planning and structure of the city in substantial ways.

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The car was significant not only for the location of the new areas in the peripheries, but also in its connection to Volvo. Many of the areas populated through Miljonprogrammet, in the northeast of Gothenburg and at Hisingen, were intended for workers employed at Volvo.28 The bridge connecting Angered with the island of Hisingen, which opened in 1978, along with the wide thoroughfare leading right up to the new production plant, demonstrate the growing importance of Volvo and the car at the time. Before the bridge was completed, several of the developments that initiated Miljonprogrammet had come to a halt. In addition to the wider economic transformations, the postwar baby boom had slowed down significantly and the housing shortage turned into the opposite: an abundance of empty apartments. The housing demand simultaneously shifted in character. The allure of concrete faded and was in part replaced by the “green wave,” a trend among young families to move from the city into single-­family homes in neighboring municipalities. Several factors materialized into this demand for single-­family houses in the late 1960s. Examples include how the average household had increased its income considerably, the growing affordability of the car, and how government subsidies shifted in favor of home owners.29 As a consequence, the car, which had in part brought förorten into being, also brought the surge for single-­family houses into being. Contradictions and tensions emerge in relation to förorten and the car. Objects including concrete, the container, and the car have accordingly been crucial in bringing förorten into being in multiple ways. When focusing in on these, förorten in turn multiplies. Nonetheless, förorten is still repeatedly enacted as being without a history, in need of intervention and discipline. An illustrative example of this is a recent series of debate articles in Göteborgs Posten by Mark Isitt, a well-­known architectural critic. In three articles he paints a picture of Hammarkullen, a förort in the northeastern section of Gothenburg, as ridden by problems of crime and unrest, including burning cars.30 In conclusion, he suggests that the concrete high-­rises at Bredfjällsgatan should be demolished and subsequently replaced by smaller dwellings to prevent these criminal activities. In these articles, Isitt explicitly uses concrete to demonize Hammarkullen and förorten overall. He makes references to concrete in a purely derogatory way and suggests there is a desire to “run away from the boredom of concrete.”31 Hammarkullen is associated with monstrous, ugly, and functionalist architecture prone to criminal activity, rather than with human interaction and enjoyment. By tearing the buildings down, alleged problems of criminality

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and unrest would be addressed and dealt with, Isitt suggests, concluding that the concrete buildings are to be blamed when cars are set alight. One way to approach this demonization of concrete is to ask how it is possible for a building material to evoke such fierce images signifying disadvantage, otherness, and criminality. Another way to approach these articles is to suggest that concrete is not merely a symbol associated with a linear narrative of förorten: from building a modern utopia, to signifying failure, disappointment, and burning cars. Instead, concrete matters. It is enacted in this way for a specific purpose. The focus shifts from how concrete has become a symbol of stigma and deprivation to what these concrete buildings actually do to the city, as well as what people do to these buildings. In other words, concrete helps to bring into being particular worlds, while silencing others. Moa Tunström draws attention to how the numerous negative narratives about Miljonprogrammet are used in national and municipal policies as a basis for projects of regeneration dealing with the need to renovate many of the buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s.32 The report Så fick Miljonprogrammet ett nytt ansikte (How Miljonprogrammet got a new face) is a telling example. It describes the area of Gårdsten, in northeastern Gothenburg, as representing a lot of “the bad from Miljonprogrammet” before a major facelift took place.33 As described in the report, the “bad” include the brutal architecture with mile-­long apartment blocks, making the inhabitants feel small, as well as the traffic separation with parking lots and roads that divide the areas like moats. Miljonprogrammet is clearly depicted as a failure in desperate need of solutions and interventions in terms of both structural planning problems and maintenance mismanagement.34 These efforts of restructuring Gårdsten resonate with how it is made easier to intervene in an area when it is framed, along the lines of Isitt, as without a history, as ugly and prone to criminality.

On Doing Multiplicity This chapter has focused on a spree of burning cars during the late summer of 2009 in the peripheries of Gothenburg. However, this particular event did not start at Blendas Gata, nor did it end when the fires subsided after a couple of weeks. It is still ongoing, being analyzed and talked about, and being brought into being in multiple ways. If we claim to start at the beginning of an event, a certain notion of the story is evoked: that it can be explained only if we pinpoint the beginning and follow the story until its end. By doing multiplicity, however, it is not about bringing more perspectives into the same linear story

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or frame of analysis. Doing multiplicity is an approach that acknowledges that research objects, whether the body, the burning car, the city, or the international, exist simultaneously in multiple worlds, and that there are various possible reasons for enacting one kind of reality over another. As Mol suggests, it is about attending to resonances and difference at any given site, and to how these multiply, interfere, and constantly change. In this approach, methods do not only have effects and consequences. They do something else. They are never innocent tools. They do not only depict realities, they also participate in the enactment of these realities. In other words, there is a shift from suggesting that knowledge depends on which perspective the researcher chooses, to how knowledge is being made differently through enacting different worlds, and furthermore to how these clash and cohere in various ways. In a similar vein, Law suggests that attending to multiplicity opens up different worlds to be brought into being. These worlds are multiple, partial, and uncertain, yet without being fragmented parts of a preexisting whole, making space for ambivalence and ambiguities.35 Similarly, in the example of burning cars, instead of simply asking for the motivations and reasons behind the burning cars, doing multiplicity turns attention to questions of what is being enacted through these events. What worlds are brought into being and, simultaneously, what worlds are made absent and silenced? In this approach, worlds do not exist by themselves. They come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are made and manipulated. They never stay the same throughout these enactments, as they are always open to challenge and critique. In this chapter, the burning cars have resonated far beyond the national context and the narrative of a divided Gothenburg. The dominant framing has been challenged in order to show that the burning cars do not simply exist in a single world of exclusion. Rather, the burning cars multiply as they resonate not only with French banlieues, but also with concrete and the container, with Miljonprogrammet, with Volvo, with Göteborgs Posten, and with the Minister of Integration. All these, and many more, are involved in enacting the burning cars in multiple ways and forms. The research focus accordingly turns to the question of what is brought into being. It is not about choosing the right reality, but about different reasons for choosing what worlds to amplify at different moments and sites. A world of victims and villains might be enacted for certain reasons, while a world of the concrete jungle might be enacted for others. These are indeed connected, but can never be reduced to a single whole. Doing multiplicity has in turn allowed this chapter to rethink the burning cars beyond dichotomous divisions,

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by showing how focusing on a few details of any site quickly turns the site into a multiplicity of worlds. This investigation into the multiplicity of the burning cars accordingly allows for an understanding of the international that moves away from a singular, bounded, and limited worldview. The burning cars, as well as the international, are not defined by spatial boundaries or scales, but rather by enactments and activities. By making things such as the burning cars international, specific relations and realities are brought into being. This is not the same as to suggest that these are the only realities possible, or that these are passive and neutral endeavors. It is instead about attending to resonances and differences at any given site, and about drawing attention to how these multiply, interfere, and constantly change.

Notes 1. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 2. Loïc Wacquant, “Burn Baby Burn, French Style? Roots of the Riots in Urban France” (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Center on Institutions and Governance, 2005), available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opbApqKyk-k. 3. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14(3) (1988): 575–­99. 4. Carl-­Ulrik Schierup and Aleksandra Åhlund, “The End of Swedish Exceptionalism? Citizenship, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Exclusion,” Race and Class 53 (2011): 46. Subsequent references are given in the text. 5. Mol, The Body Multiple, 55. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Ibid., 51. 8. Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant, Paris: Invisible City, trans. Liz Carey-­ Libbrecht (Paris: La Découverte-­Les Empêcheurs de penser en ronde, 1998). 9. Udo Spongberg, “Bakgrund: Detta Har Hänt,” Göteborgs Posten, September 6, 2009. 10. Per Sydvik, “Arbetslöshet och Trakasserier,” Göteborgs Posten, August 20, 2009. 11. Nyamko Sabuni, “Unga i Förorten Ska Lockas till Föreningslivet,” Göteborgs Posten, October 26, 2009. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Field notes from conversation December 14, 2011, Gothenburg, Sweden. 15. Urban Ericsson, Irene Molina, and Per-­Markku Ristilammi, Miljonprogram och Media Föreställningar om Människor och Förorter (Norrköping and Stockholm: Integrationsverket and Riksantikvarieämbetet, 2000).

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16. Miljonprogrammet was a national, not short of utopian, endeavor to build one million homes in a ten-­year period, from 1965 to 1974, in a country with less than eight million inhabitants. 17. T. Hall and S. Viden, “The Million Homes Programme: A Review of the Great Swedish Planning Project,” Planning Perspectives 20 (2005): 301–­28. 18. Ericsson, Molina, and Ristilammi, Miljonprogram och Media Föreställningar om Människor och Förorter. 19. Ibid. 20. Lotta Särnbratt, “Perspektiv på Miljonprogrammet,” Chalmers Technical University, 2006, 109. 21. Hall and Viden, “The Million Homes Programme,” 321. 22. Kent Olsson, Göteborgs Historia 3 från Industristad till Tjänstestad 1920–­1995 (Stockholm: Nerenius & Santérus, 1996). 23. Per-­Markku Ristilammi, “Memento Rosengård,” in Storstadens Omvandlingar: Posindustrialism, Globalisering och Migration i Göteborg och Malmö, ed. Ove Sernhede and Thomas Johansson (Göteborg: Daidalos, 2006). 24. BBC and NDR, Places for People: An Expanding Town in Sweden Gothenburg (1971). 25. SVT, Goda Bostäder Fostrar Goda Medborgare (1976). 26. Olsson, Göteborgs Historia 3 från Industristad till Tjänstestad 1920–­1995, 210. 27. Per Lundin, Bilsamhället: Ideologi, Expertis och Regelskapande i Efterkrigstidens Sverige (Stockholm: Stockholmia Förlag, 2008). 28. Olsson, Göteborgs Historia 3 från Industristad till Tjänstestad 1920–­1995. 29. Anders Gullberg and Arne Kaijser, “City-­Building Regimes in Post-­War Stockholm,” Journal of Urban Technology 11(2) (2004): 26–­27. 30. Mark Isitt, “Del 1 från Luften Ser Allt Bra Ut,” Göteborgs Posten, March 20, 2011; Mark Isitt, “Del 2 Att Riva Eller Inte Riva, Det Är Frågan,” Göteborgs Posten, March 23, 2011; Mark Isitt, “Del 3 Hur Ska Förorten Få Ett Tryggt Stadsliv,” Göteborgs Posten, March 25, 2011. 31. Isitt, “Del 1 från Luften Ser Allt Bra Ut.” 32. Moa Tunström, “På Spaning efter den Goda Staden: Om Konstruktioner av Ideal och Problem i Svensk Stadsbyggnadsdiskussion,” Örebro University, 2009. 33. Boverket, Så Fick Miljonprogrammet ett Nytt Ansikte (Karlskrona: Swedish National Board of Housing, Building, and Planning, 2007). 34. Ibid. 35. Law, After Method, 69.

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Tear Gas Miguel de Larrinaga

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. —­Winston Churchill

This epigraph from Winston Churchill on May 12, 1919, from a War Office minute was recorded while he was serving as president of the Air Council. Churchill is making reference to the British position regarding chemical weapons at the Paris Peace Conference as well as to the potential use and effects of lachrymatory gas—­or tear gas—­as a tool of imperial pacification in the colonies. One of the interesting aspects of this quote is that it has elicited much controversy on a couple of fronts: •It

seems to not only condone the use of chemical weapons, but it also does so in relation to colonial populations. In this context, it is usually edited down for effect around the potential use of “poisoned gas on uncivilised tribes.”1 •It is used retroactively as evidence regarding the alleged British use of chemical weapons during the Iraqi revolt in 1920.2

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Within the context of this chapter, I am not so much interested in these aspects of the quote or to reveal the way in which its meaning and context have been distorted or omitted for political purposes. My concern is, rather, the biopolitical argument that Churchill is making in relation to the use of tear gas as a nonlethal weapon. In other words, what is interesting is the way in which the nonlethal quality of this gas is made evident and compared to lethal means of force as instruments of colonial pacification. Although I am interested in the lethal/nonlethal distinction, it is not the juridico-­legal or ethical dimensions of this distinction that are central for me—­ for example, if nonlethal weapons are supportive or subversive of jus in bello or if they are “better” or “worse” than lethal weapons in their deployment internationally.3 Rather, in line with my previous research and following upon the work of Seantel Anaïs on nonlethal weapons more generally, my interest is in examining tear gas as a technology of governmentality—­that is, as an object produced by assemblages of particular forms of power that concurrently contributes to making particular forms of governance possible.4 Moreover, in making tear gas international, I would like to situate this object historically as an instrumental part of development as Mark Duffield understands the term, as a “liberal strategization of power and tutelage” of the West in relation to the global South.5 What this chapter will then sketch is the way in which the history of tear gas can provide us with a particular thread complicit in the production of a vast, varied, and mutable imperial governmental assemblage in the production of liberal space that we can follow from the colonial to the postcolonial world. Although the use of tear gas has, in our present conjuncture, become mundane and the reasons behind its use have become self-­evident, taking the history of this object seriously not only unsettles these givens in the present, but also participates in sketching the contours of how this “thing” has been an instrumental part of the production and maintenance of liberal forms of international and global order historically. Moreover, and intimately related to these questions of order, I would like to argue that what a brief genealogical sketch of tear gas can suggest is that our present concerns about the blurring of the lines between the domestic and the international, between the military and the police, between friend and enemy, between sovereign power and biopower, between the lethal and the nonlethal, are not only unprecedented but have also been a continuous feature and preoccupation of liberal forms of power and government. In contributing to this volume by reflecting on what purchase tear gas can afford us in relation to the international I would like to, in first instance, recount how this object irrupted into my research. In this way, I can relate how

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to make things international through personal experience and situate tear gas within a broader set of concerns as well as specific forms of scholarship. In the second instance, I would like to suggest some of the ways in which an examination of the history of tear gas can provide continuity between colonial and postcolonial worlds and, therefore, understand our present conjuncture within the broader context of imperial relations in world politics. Moreover, in doing so, I would like to briefly sketch a few of the ways tear gas provides us with a particular vantage point to contextualize our current concerns regarding the blurring of the lines between some of the most fundamental conventional markers of international and global order.

Tear Gas: An Autobiographical Sketch From early attempts to bring to the fore the impact of traditional security issues on development such as that found in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), to a broader, more sustained examination of the articulation and deployment of human security as a discourse of global governance and the significance of security sector reform (SRR) as a central aspect of the Peace Building Commission (PBC), a major theme of my collaborative work has been to explore the tensions between security and development as they pertain to global governance. Increasingly, the primary way in which I have tried to make sense of this tension has been through a Foucauldian analytic that attempts to theorize the different ways in which forms of power (sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power) articulate themselves in producing governmental rationalities and technologies related to global governance. Beyond the broad question of security and development, this form of analysis has also been used to examine the invasion of Iraq as well as to sketch global governance in relation to the events of a single day. It is within this context and, in particular, thinking through the relationship between sovereign power (as a decisionistic form of state power constituted by and constitutive of the law and the sovereign decision between life and death) and biopower (as a regularizing, expansive form of governmental power with the health and welfare of the population as its target) that I have attempted to make sense of the continuities and transformations of global order. It is within this theoretical context and this set of concerns that the question of nonlethal weapons initially came to the fore in my thinking. In this sense, I conceive of these weapons as being produced in a complex assemblage of different forms of power while simultaneously constituting certain subjectivities and making certain forms of governance possible. Moreover, the increasing

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use of these weapons within theaters of intervention and their widespread use as crowd-­control weapons by governments around the world made nonlethal weapons a fantastic object to research to gauge the types of transformations that have been central to my broader research program. It is, then, within this context that things have increasingly become central to my work. My initial entry point into the world of objects was therefore not originally inspired by the work of object or thing theorists or actor-­network theory but through a Foucauldian-­inspired analysis of forms of power around the main probématique of global governance. This is not to say that my entry point into the world of objects in incompatible with theorists of the new materialism. It is clear that in being sensitive to rationalities and technologies of government, Foucault is sensitive to the material in his understanding of power and what it produces. Moreover, it is also clear that much of the theorizing behind the new materialism is informed by a Foucauldian sensibility, if not directly engaging with Foucauldian themes or concepts then often supplementing them or in critical tension with them. From a broader project regarding nonlethal weapons as weapons of international intervention I have increasingly focused my research on tear gas as a specific type of nonlethal weapon. Beyond the advantage of a narrower research focus, the specificity of tear gas has enabled me to begin to trace a genealogy of the rationalities involved in its production, the justification for its use, and its deployment as a tool of colonial pacification. The fascinating history of tear gas has irrupted into my research as an uninvited but welcome guest that I am now attached to, as something through which it is possible to trace, as Bruno Latour suggests, “a hidden continuity and a hidden coherence.”6 Moreover, as more explicitly addressed below, the intimate association of the history of tear gas with that of chemical weapons and the indistinction that accompanies the rationalities behind their use can be used to provide a tracing of the occluded history of the ambivalence at the heart of those lines that have accompanied the conventional markers of global and international order.

Tear Gas: Imperial Continuity and Blurring the Markers of Order The history of nonlethal weapons is usually traced back to the 1960s because it is at this time that a group of different weapons began to be collectively framed by law-­enforcement officers and policy makers under the moniker “nonlethal” as technologies to be used for riot control.7 However, lachrymatory gas—­or tear gas, as it is most commonly known—­has a much longer history that has its roots in World War I. Although the lachrymatory properties of a number

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of chemical compounds were identified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and there are recorded instances of the use of lachrymatory agents by the Paris police in 1912 and 1913 to smoke out barricaded criminals, their systematic production and weaponization was a consequence of World War I.8 Tear-­gas munitions were developed by chemists in a number of great powers during the war as one of a number of chemical weapons in the arsenal of warring states. Lachrymatory gas was not yet clearly categorized according to a strict separation between “lethal” and “nonlethal” weapons. In fact, its initial deployment and use by the French in August 1914 became a source of contention after the war as a number of German authors interpreted this event as the first use of chemical weapons of the war, eight months before the infamous German chlorine gas attack at Ypres on April 22, 1915.9 Lachrymatory gas was subsequently widely used during the war as a very effective weapon of trench warfare. This weapon was primarily used in conflict as what we would now call a “force multiplier.” In other words, its effectiveness was not associated to its toxicity but to the way in which it reduced the effectiveness of the enemy to fight with conventional means. In other words, it was a weapon that was very effective in much lower concentrations than other toxic gases and forced the enemy to wear gas masks for extended periods of time and, therefore, minimized his efficiency to fight. The use of chemical agents during the war was met with revulsion, particularly in the wake of the Hague declaration of 1899 prohibiting the use of these weapons, which politicized their every use.10 This is remarkable considering that these weapons were strictly used against enemy combatants and were not intentionally used against civilians. Moreover, to use Richard Price’s term, the “taboo” of chemical weapons continued to be institutionalized in a series of treaties and conventions, including the Versailles and Washington treaties and the Geneva Protocol. Owing to the indistinction between tear gas and other chemical compounds, with the end of the war, the inertia of this taboo became a central aspect of the way in which the deployment and the use of tear gas was perceived and acted upon. Indeed, as the epigraph by Churchill at the beginning of this chapter suggests, the immediate postwar period saw the beginning of the labor of framing tear gas as a more humane weapon, one that is not understood as a weapon to be used against enemy combatants but that would be deployed against populations and taking into consideration their health and welfare. However, this transformation is not as easy as it may seem or as self-­evident as we take tear gas to be today. There is a certain commonality between tear gas and other forms of chemical weaponry that transcends the lethal/nonlethal

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divide. The use of gas on populations, as Peter Sloterdjik has noted, can be seen as part of the shift from targeting the body of the enemy to targeting the enemy’s environment. In what he sees as being the transition from classical war to terrorism—­or what he calls “atmosterrorism”—­chemical war is “an attack on the vital functions of the enemy that depend on the environment—­namely breathing, central neural regulations, and the temperature and radiation appropriate for living.”11 What is interesting about tear gas in this context is that the rationalities behind its deployment are very similar to those behind the use of lethal gas (how it is deployed, in a given milieu, with attention to atmospherics, etc.). However, there is also something else at work here: a biopolitical impulse behind nonlethality itself—­that is, that the preference is to incapacitate temporarily rather than doing so permanently through death. Once the distinction between lethal and nonlethal gas is established, there are some interesting parallels in the evolution of their production, the rationalities behind their use, and their deployment. Here again, Sloterdijk provides some interesting insights around poison gas that can be used to compare to the evolution of tear gas. His tracing of the use of poison gas from World War I to the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps has a very specific spatial dimension. In this evolution, the passage toward enclosed spaces is central in moving atmosterrorism to the exterminism of total war. From the open spaces of the use of chemical weapons and the science of “military climatology” that accompanied it, chemical weapons “move indoors” in their peacetime applications as well as their use during the Second World War as an instrumental factor in the Final Solution (45). In the shift toward the interior, according to Sloterdijk, we witness governmental and commercial interests being central in the development of and promotion of the “peaceful” use of these technologies. The author recounts how, in the post–­World War I period, the technologies of gas development were put to new, more mundane uses such as disinfection and pest control. As he notes, for example, one of the founders of the company Testa established in 1924—­ Dr. Bruno Tesch—­had been one of the scientists central to the development of chemical weapons during the war and in the development of a version of hydrocyanic acid called Zyklon B during the interwar period that reached a near monopoly in the global pest-­control market. Chillingly, Sloterdijk then traces both the idea of “pest control” and the use of Zyklon B to the way in which the Jewish people were metaphorically perceived and their systematic execution through “the union of the idea of the anti-­parasite struggle with the execution of human beings by means of hydrocyanic acid gas” (56). Sloterdijk understands this move toward the interior in relation to moder-

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nity, efficiency, and consistency: “[a]s opposed to the application of poisonous gas in open air, its use in a chamber offered the advantage of eliminating the problem of unstable deadly concentrations in unconfined spaces” (54). He also traces the motive to exterminate organisms through the destruction of their environment to the use of hydrocyanic acid in the “civil” gas chambers of capital punishment in the United States. In this context, the move toward the interior is understood in relation to a more humane form of execution and where increased lethality would therefore be seen as not only more efficient but also more humane by “the presumed reduction of suffering of the sentenced by the rapid action to the poison” (ibid.). When we move now to an analysis of the development and popularization of tear gas, we must also take into account both governmental and private interests in finding new outlets for the substantial chemical weapons industry after the war. Because of the institutionalization of the chemical weapons taboo, both governmental programs and private industry shifted their research and development toward nonlethal weapons and pushed to create a market for these weapons by catering to police forces. This led to increased dissemination of knowledge about the use of tear gas in crowd-­control situations both academically and commercially, or even of the blurring of the two. For example, in an article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology from September 1935 titled “Chemical Warfare Munitions for Law Enforcement Agencies,” Seth Wiard makes the case for the use of “new and improved” gases for use “against civilians under conditions where only the temporary blocking of their activities would be required, rather than the permanent removal of such civilians from the scene of action.”12 The author of the journal article is listed as the Technical Director of the Lake Erie Chemical Company and formerly Instructor of Police Science at Northwestern University. The Lake Erie Chemical Company was one of the main producers of chemical weapons in the United States during the war and this was part and parcel of the shift to peacetime production by selling the idea of using new chemicals for riot control in the United States and abroad. The push to commercialization through nonlethality can also be found in the way in which, in the 1920s, research and development into new chemical irritant compounds became the central vocation of the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). In particular, focus went into a new type of compound that had been originally developed during the war: chloroacetophenone, or CN gas.13 In contrast to those lachrymatory weapons used during the war—­ bromoacetone and adamsite (DM)—­work on CN gas and the subsequent invention of 2-­chlorobenzalmalononitrile (CS) in 1928 reveal a trend toward

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more potent while simultaneously less toxic compounds. This can be seen as an indicator of how tear gas was being tailored for use against domestic populations rather than in the service of military troops or solely to be deployed toward barricaded criminals. In contrast to the continued development of “poison gas” that sought to increase its lethality during use in enclosed spaces to ensure a more humane outcome in putting the intended target to death, the development of tear gas moved in the opposite direction—­toward less toxic compounds in order to allow its deployment to control the conduct of populations in specific instances. Here we can clearly see how lethal gas becomes inherently bound to the logics of sovereign power while, concurrently, tear gas is gradually brought into the orbit of the rationalities and technologies of government. The rationalities associated with tear gas can also be seen as biopolitical at another level—­that is, we can also see how the planning of this weapon and its actual deployment are intimately biopolitical in that its target of intervention is populations and it is understood in relation to a milieu and to circulation: what Foucault would name “apparatuses of security” that are intimately associated to the advent of liberal order and its attendant governmental rationalities and technologies.14 In other words, the referent object of tear gas is populations—­what Foucault defined as the “biological or biosociological processes characteristic of human masses.”15 Moreover, the rationalities behind the planning of tear-­gas use, as mentioned in relation to the work of Sloterdjik, is about the environment—­the geography, the climate, the physical givens—­ and the human species and its existence in this environment, what Foucault would define as “milieu.”16 The deployment of tear gas is also about circulation; about the ordering of movements and interactions within this milieu with the aim of “making a division between good circulation from bad circulation” and fostering the good while mitigating the bad.17 It is within this biopolitical frame of reference, then, that we see both mounting pressure for the use of such weapons and debate about their deployment and use. Moreover, in the British case, it is only in the context of their use in the colonies that this pressure and debate takes place. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s in colonies and protectorates, including India, China, Ceylon, and Northern Rhodesia, and in the Middle East, there was increasing pressure on the British government to allow for the use of tear gas for riot control by colonial police in the face of multiple instances of popular uprisings.18 The experience with chemical weapons during World War I conditioned the debate about the deployment and use of tear gas. British tear-­gas policy was bound up within the broader British postwar debates around the use of battle-

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field gases and general disarmament, as well as those juridico-­legal constructs such as the Hague convention, the Versailles and Washington treaties, and the Geneva Protocol and their positions regarding the use of chemical weapons. The debate over the deployment and potential use of tear gas led to a stalemate pitting those who saw the weapon as a more humane tool in the arsenal of police forces to deal with potential civil disturbances against those who saw their deployment and use as the thin of the wedge in the potential reintroduction of lethal gas in warfare.19 This stalemate translated into policy paralysis on the issue and it was only in the early to mid-­1930s that a number of secret permissions to potentially use tear gas against mobs were granted to Palestine (1933), Ceylon, and Northern Rhodesia (1935).20 Moreover, even if these permissions were granted, training was provided, and equipment was gradually acquired, as Simeon Shoul suggests, “the will to use tear gas was conspicuously lacking.”21 Instances of the use of tear gas by British-­trained police forces in the colonies were rare. The first such instance did not come until 1939 in Burma, followed by its use in Northern Rhodesia in 1940 and in Bombay, India, in 1942. Following Latour, we can examine the “assembly of different parties” and the “occasions to passionately differ and dispute” that are gathered through and triggered by this “thing” called tear gas historically.22 What this tracing of tear gas suggests is that the lines between lethality and nonlethality were not clear from the outset as this weapon’s discursive framing went from being one among many chemical agents deployed during World War I as a weapon of war to a legitimate tool in the arsenal of police forces. Moreover, in the British case this shift could only take place through the appendages of empire, through tear gas’s deployment and subsequent use in colonies and protectorates. The specificity of tear gas as a tool of empire thus also helps us reflect on the international, as Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey suggest, as a “‘thick’ set of social relations” rather than a “‘thin’ space of strategic interaction.”23 Furthermore, and intimately tied to this understanding of the international, the use of tear gas can also be seen in terms of what Foucault called the “boomerang effect” where “a whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism on itself.”24 Of this, the history of tear gas in relation to Britain provides an illustrative example. Even though it was the colonial police forces that had the experience in the use of tear gas in crowd-­control situations, the use of tear gas domestically in the United Kingdom had to then be made through cooperation with the army. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the use of tear gas was primarily restricted to sieges around individuals where the police would borrow tear-­gas grenades from the army. It

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was only in the 1960s that there began a discussion about using it domestically for crowd control. Tellingly, in 1969, permission was given for use in Northern Ireland, where it was first used by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 1969. It wasn’t until the Toxteth riots in July 1981 that tear gas was finally used in England.25

Continuities and Transformations Through a brief examination of the history of tear-­gas development, deployment, and use within the British Empire, I have attempted to give historical context to some of the major issues confronting international and global order today. By focusing on tear gas as an object I have attempted to highlight how there is some continuity to the types of concerns that we find today that are primarily framed as unprecedented. In doing so, rather than seeing the present blurrings between the domestic and the international, between the military and the police, between friend and enemy, between sovereign power and biopower, between the lethal and the nonlethal, as something entirely new and part of some erosion of sovereignty or rise of global security governance, our analysis suggests some of the continuities that we can trace in the production and maintenance of a liberal strategization of power. The contemporary emphasis on asymmetrical conflict in the post–­Cold War post-­9/11 world and how the language about warfare has changed to low-­intensity conflict and indefinite war occludes the fact that these same rationalities are at play in the early twentieth century in relation to British use of tear gas in the colonies. The tensions and debates around tear gas and the attempts to circumvent some of the provisions of the Hague convention, the Versailles and Washington treaties, and the Geneva Protocol and their positions regarding the use of chemical weapons are echoed in more recent concerns regarding the use of nonlethal weapons in spaces of intervention. This can be seen, for example, with the case of the United States where the same type of imaginative circumventing of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was made with regard to the use of incapacitating chemical agents (ICAs). The following year, President Bill Clinton issued a statement on the interpretation of the CWC decision stating that these weapons could be used in “riot control situations in areas under direct and distinct US military control.”26 After 9/11 and with regard to intervention in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed that he was “authorized to use lethal force and authorize troops to shoot somebody, but I’m not authorized . . . to authorize the use of non-­lethal riot agents.”27 Conversely, tear gas is increasingly being deployed in new ways as a riot-­

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control agent on “domestic” populations in spaces of contention. Patrick Gilham and John Noakes trace the different styles of policing protests and their history—­from the escalated force style of the 1960s to the negotiated management style used from the mid-­1970s to the late 1990s, to the strategic incapacitation model that we have increasingly seen in the post-­Seattle era (after the antiglobalization protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999), including, they say, “a range of tactical innovations aimed at temporarily incapacitating transgressive protesters including the establishment of extensive no-­protest zone, the increased use of less-­lethal weapons, the strategic use of arrests, and a reinvigoration of surveillance infiltration of movement organizations.”28 Transgressions in these contexts imply the breaching of a set territorial perimeter where the spatial dimension is perceived by the territorial sovereign state as “an object and matrix of power.”29 In this sense, transgression of these perimeters made up of fences or police lines is understood by sovereign power as a direct challenge to state control and is met with a number of measures, including the use of tear gas. However, we have seen more recently certain mutations in the use of tear gas in instances such as the various Occupy movements and the occupation of Gezi Park in Turkey, where political activism consists of the seizure of physical space. The deployment of tear gas in these cases goes beyond its use to deter the transgression of perimeters. The massive use of tear gas in the Turkish case, where the targeted space is made completely unlivable, can be seen as an instance of what Sloterdijk would call “atmosterror” in its most literal sense. Moreover, the use of tear gas in Bahrain and its “weaponization,” according to a report by the Physicians for Human Rights, can also be seen as a further mutation in the strategies of deployment of tear gas. Here, massive use in public spaces is also accompanied by the use in enclosed private spaces by deploying tear gas inside the homes of individuals who are targeted as being activists or against the regime.30 These cases suggest further transformation in the use of tear gas that continues to blur the lines between military and police, between war and peace, between public and private space, and even the existence of public space. By using the object of tear gas, it has been possible to make sense of both continuities and transformations in the governing of populations. Moreover, this analysis also suggests that instead of seeing the present international interventions in terms of a core–­periphery model where we understand present liberal interventions in illiberal spaces, we can examine how liberal rationalities and technologies were first developed and deployed in the colonies, producing certain forms of liberal subjectivities, before being deployed in the domestic spaces of the West. We can then also use tear gas to trace both some of

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the thick social relations of the international historically and the assemblages of power that constitute them.

Notes 1. Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, “Whither Iraq? Beyond Saddam, Sanctions, and Occupation,” Third World Quarterly 26(4–­5) (2005): 609–­29. See also Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London: Verso, 1991). 2. R. M. Douglas, “Did Britain Use Chemical Weapons in Mandatory Iraq?” Journal of Modern History 81(4) (2009): 861. 3. David Fidler, “‘Non-­Lethal’ Weapons and International Law: Three Perspectives on the Future,” in Nick Lewer, ed., The Future of Non-­lethal Weapons: Technologies, Operations, Ethics, and Law (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 26–­38; Christian Enemark, “‘Non-­ Lethal’ Weapons and the Occupation of Iraq: Technology, Ethics, and Law,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 21(2) (2008): 199–­215. 4. Seantal Anaïs, “Ethical Interventions: Non-­Lethal Weapons and the Governance of Insecurity,” Security Dialogue 42(6) (2011): 537–­52. 5. Mark Duffield, “Development, Territories, and People: Consolidating the External Sovereign Frontier,” Alternatives 32 (2007): 231. 6. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or How to Make Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 15. 7. Neil Davidson, “The Early History of ‘Non-­Lethal’ Weapons,” Bradford Non-­ Lethal Research Project Occasional Paper No. 1 (Bradford: University of Bradford, 2006), 3. 8. See Kirby E. Jackson and Margaret A. Jackson, “Lachrymators,” Chemical Reviews 16 (1935): 195–­242; Daniel Jones, “From Military to Civilian Technology: The Introduction of Tear Gas for Civil Riot Control,” Technology and Culture 19(2) (1978): 152; and Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Volume II: CB Weapons Today (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 1973), 212. 9. Jones, “From Military to Civilian Technology,” 152. 10. Richard Price, “A Genealogy of the Chemical Weapons Taboo,” International Organization 49(1) (1995): 90. 11. Peter Sloterdijk, “Airquakes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(1) (2009): 44. Subsequent references are given in the text. 12. Seth Wiard, “Chemical Warfare Munitions for Law Enforcement Agencies,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 26(3) (1935): 439. 13. Davidson, “The Early History of ‘Non-­Lethal’ Weapons,” 7. 14. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–­78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 6. 15. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–­ 76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 250. 16. Ibid., 21.

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17. Ibid., 18. 18. Edward M. Spears, “Gas and the North-­West Frontier,” Journal of Strategic Studies 6(4) (1983): 94–­112; Simeon Shoul, “British Tear Gas Doctrine between the World Wars,” War in History 15(2) (2008): 168–­90; Mike Waldren, “Tear Gas and Empire,” Police History Series, Police Firearms Officers Association (PFOA), 2013, 1–­28. 19. Shoul, “British Tear Gas Doctrine between the World Wars,” 176–­77. 20. Waldren, “Tear Gas and Empire,” 15. 21. Shoul, “British Tear Gas Doctrine between the World Wars,” 188. 22. Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 15. 23. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, “Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations,” Millennium 31(1) (2002): 110. 24. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 103. 25. Waldren, “Tear Gas and Empire,” 25. 26. Cited in Enemark, “‘Non-­Lethal’ Weapons and the Occupation of Iraq,” 207. 27. Ibid. 28. Patrick F. Gillham and John A. Noakes, “‘More Than a March in a Circle’: Transgressive Protests and the Limits of Negotiated Management,” Mobilization: An International Journal 12(4) (2007): 343. 29. William H. Sewell, “Space in Contentious Politics,” in Ronald R. Aminzade, Jack A. Goldstone, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth J. Perry, William H. Sewell, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, eds., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 68. 30. Physicians for Human Rights, Weaponizing Tear Gas: Bahrain’s Unprecedented Use of Toxic Chemical Agents against Civilians (Washington, D.C.: Physicians for Human Rights, 2012).

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Drones Kyle Grayson

Enter the Drone The drone, or remotely piloted air system (RPA), has emerged as a central component in contemporary counterinsurgency war fighting and border surveillance. My argument is that drones, their capabilities, and their implications for world politics are productive of the international. Therefore, it is important to acquire a sense of what the drone might be, and its relationships to other objects, discourses, practices, and embodied affects within global counterinsurgency. In other words, we must ask how the RPA, like other material objects, actively shapes the international itself.1 As other contributions to this volume have emphasized, things, structures, and agency contribute to the complex ways that the international is produced, felt, understood, and experienced. RPAs illustrate this complexity. They demonstrate the material, discursive, and semiotic links underpinning the practice of contemporary counterinsurgency warfare. The current capabilities of drones are a perverse mixture of highly sophisticated sensor, telecommunications, navigation, weapons, and power-­generating systems within a slow-­moving, erratic, and fragile shell. Predators and Reapers—­two of the highest-­profile systems—­remain vulnerable to the most basic antiaircraft technologies and are no match for faster and more nimble piloted aircraft. They lack the structural resilience to endure weather that would not trouble regular airplanes. And they also crash at a disproportionate rate in comparison to other piloted systems.2 Yet, the drone is most often venerated for its persistence, defined in terms of its tenacity in finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, engaging, and assessing within the kill chain of counterinsurgency. These tensions are politically important because they reveal how drones have come to matter and where they have come to matter in the contemporary constitution of the international. In this chapter, my focus will be on the reconfigurations of meaning and matter in political economy, networks, embodiment, and the agency of the drone. Given the complexity of the individual

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phenomena—­let alone the assemblage that forms through their interactions—­ much of what follows is indicative. The point is to identify select elements that illustrate how the RPA has entered “into a permanent and historical reconfiguration of the world.”3

Materialism and the Political Economy of the Drone The relationship between the revolution in military affairs (RMA) and dominant modes of production has been a neglected area of study with respect to the rise of drones. Drones emerged within a political-­economic context where the United States and other advanced militaries were initially under pressure to produce a peace dividend with the end of the Cold War through reductions in defense spending. Although the peace dividend never materialized, more significant in terms of the RMA, and the organization of the U.S. military, was the adoption of the cultural values and tactics of private industry, a process that accelerated under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In heeding Rumsfeld’s call to emulate entrepreneurs, the Department of Defense was driven by a desire to create more flexible military structures through delayering (a process that attempts to strip away management tiers between executive authority and those on the ground), developing adaptable war fighters (including moves toward the deskilling of enlisted troops so that they could be deployed for multiple purposes), and the privatization of service and maintenance duties.4 These strategic transformations in force structure were enabled by the emphasis on command-­and-­control systems generated through the RMA that ma de it theoretically possible to instruct, observe, and adjust orders as they were undertaken in the battle space.5 The drone as a unit of military technology was an extremely good fit within an organization undergoing this kind of structural change. First, RPAs offered excellent prospects for improvements in command and control by providing commanders with a microlevel view of the battle space in real time. Potentially, this access to the front lines and the ability for units to be managed on the fly could contribute to more proactive, responsive, and flexible forms of war fighting. Second, drones could support the transformation of the U.S. military into a network-­centric fighting force. Third, RPAs did not require an as expensive, or as time-­consuming, investment in training as regular strike aircraft. Drone operators could therefore be developed, certified, and deployed far faster and with less cost than regular air pilots. Similarly, RPAs could reduce the need for expeditionary deployments of pilots and ground troops to engage in counterinsurgency. Fourth, drones themselves were represented as providing significant

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cost savings over piloted air platforms. This was in terms of the initial costs of production as well as maintenance and servicing. The perceived ability of RPAs to achieve cost savings was such that the U.S. Congress passed two bills enshrining a legal commitment to pursue the development and procurement of remotely piloted and autonomous systems as a significant proportion of defense spending.6 Concurrent with these institutional changes in the largest market for military equipment in the world, the global development and production of new RPA platforms has become an area of intense market competition. Because drones can perform multiple military and civilian functions from targeted killing, to border surveillance, to search and rescue in dangerous environments, there is a high demand for systems from both inside and outside the armed forces. Some analysts have argued that the development of the personal home-­ computer market during the 1980s may prove to be the most apt historical analogy for the growth of the RPA sector over the next decade.7 Although the United States and Israel enjoyed an early lead in the development of drone technology, Russia, China, Iran, Canada, the UK, and several countries in the common market of the EU are directing significant resources toward nurturing a domestic RPA production capability. Part of this competition has involved forms of deregulation through the opening up of national civilian airspaces to RPAs, either wholesale as in the United States or piecemeal as in the UK.8 From the preceding discussion, one could conclude that myriad political economic conditions were favorably disposed to the development of the drone and that the RPA was conceived, developed, produced, and deployed to achieve particular aims identified within this environment. The achievement of these aims was in part dependent on the successful combination of multiple materials brought together through various processes of production to create the drone. And the acquisition and maintenance of vital inputs for the production process itself reveals a complex web of material relations and effects. For example, the ongoing production of RPA technology in the United States is reliant on securing access to rare earths that are essential to weapons and propulsion systems. Currently, China is the single biggest national source of rare earths, enjoying an unrivaled monopoly in this mining sector by providing nearly 95 percent of the world’s supply.9 The Pentagon has been seeking a non-­Chinese supply chain for the high-­performance magnets that are important elements of advanced weapons systems. This diversification was given an added impetus when prices increased dramatically in 2010 through the imposition of export curbs by the Chinese government in order to conserve materials for its own industrial purposes. In response, Bloomberg reported

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that “The U.S. Department of Defense and Asia’s biggest carmaker [Toyota] are working with Canada’s Ucore Rare Metals Inc. and Matamec Explorations Inc. . . . [to] develop . . . North American mines that would boost supplies of so-­called heavy rare earths.”10 Thus, an international industrial network and commodity chain is emerging in which the production needs of the world’s single largest consumer of military drone technology and a preeminent industrial concern serve as a catalyst for Canadian-­based extraction companies to pursue rare-­earth mining at sites across North America. This requires that these firms be sufficiently capitalized to be able to undertake this exploratory work. These capabilities are generated by capital secured through the TSX Venture and OTCQX Exchanges, both nodes in the global circulation of finance. Thus the maintenance of the capacity to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess persons of interest across a battle space conceived of on a planetary scale involves various material calculations such as the profitability of specific rare-­ earth mining sites.

Networks The RPA is also enmeshed within network-­centric warfare. The international is now increasingly understood as being composed of systems of networks with interconnections, circuits, nodes, and channels.11 A central task of state security is improving the speed with which resources and information can circulate within and across these networks, as well as having the know-­how to discriminate among the good and bad flows that traverse them. Similarly, a core element of counterinsurgency is uncovering dangerous networks and mapping them. Yet, the point of these network-­sensitive security practices is to protect a territory that is still imagined as a discretely bounded entity. Thus, a strange mixture of geopolitical strategies from the containment preferences of homeland security through the enhancement of real-­time border surveillance to the preemptive interventions into the “ungoverned areas” of the global South are enabled by RPA technologies.12 For example, early versions of the Predator drone that first saw service over Kosovo in 1999 were conceived as being an important sensor node in a global communications network. But once the platform was weaponized, this role was reconceptualized as a “sensor shooter” with the capability to compress the kill chain.13 Along with its persistence, the RPA occupied a unique position within the emerging technological structure of counterinsurgency thanks to its ability to observe and act upon observations with deadly kinetic force. Materially, drones are linked into emerging global telecommunications structures

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being established by advanced militaries and private industry actors across the world. While these structures are used to transfer information, data, and financial resources, they are also a conduit for conducting material and virtual interventions in geographically distant and dispersed spaces. Take the example of a Predator drone stationed in Afghanistan. This RPA may be controlled by pilots and sensor operators stationed more than 7,500 miles away at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. Telecommunications lines transfer flight commands to Europe where they are bounced via a series of satellites to a small dish on the RPA itself, while concurrently sending back camera feeds and other sensor data via the same communication lines.14 Both the operators and the intelligence officers located across the United States have access to these data feeds, which have been dubbed Death TV.15 Text communications can take place between drone operators, intelligence officers, who are used to analyze and verify video and photos captured in flight, commanders issuing orders, and troops who may be located on the ground. While most of the radio and intranet communications take place in real time, there is at least a two-­second delay between commands initiated by a pilot in Nevada and the execution of the command by the Predator in flight over Afghanistan. Delays in the control systems explain why extremely time-­sensitive operations like takeoff and landing are conducted on-­site using radio signals.16 Thus, while offering new military capabilities and fostering new forms of intra-­action among branches of the U.S. security apparatus, these networks also produce emerging dynamics with respect to command and control. First, the lag in command and control means that there is significant room for error in piloting drones. This includes during the process of conducting air strikes when it may be extremely difficult to make adjustments if new information becomes apparent, for example, the appearance of civilians in the viewing screen. Second, the sheer volume of data recorded by an RPA, the necessity of having several groups of experts available to interpret it, and the desire to be able to claim that drone strikes are precise paradoxically work against the compression of the kill chain as pilots, operators, and intelligence analysts interpret images captured by RPA sensors.17 Third, as a communications node, the RPA has produced new forms of intra-­and interservice camaraderie as ground troops have an unprecedented ability to directly communicate with drone pilots and sensor operators. Conversely, pilots and operators often get to know ground troops by assisting them for extended periods of time. These relationships often continue outside of the RPA network over personal e-­mail.18 More broadly, the drone has also been productive of the emerging network of RPA bases across the Middle East and Africa. Geopolitical understandings

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and calculations of territorial importance are being shaped by the current flying ranges of Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawks. Recent maps illustrate that ungoverned areas (e.g., Somalia, Yemen) said to be the most problematic in the global war on terror are now within the operating range of RPAs launched from several of these newly acquired airfields.19 Similarly, emerging hot spots of insurgency in western Africa are now within the range of the American drone fleet. Thus, previously marginalized sites such as Djibouti have found themselves positioned as highly valued assets in the extension of global control and are now ensconced within emerging patterns of clientelism.

Embodiment and Affect The materiality of the drone has also produced forms of embodiment and affects that link pilots, sensor operators, ground troops, intelligence officers, insurgents, civilians, and RPAs into political dynamics that cross national boundaries. The many interfaces of humans and machine in drone warfare, through what Donna Haraway would refer to as “cyborg assemblages,” are reconfiguring how wars are fought as well as how they are understood and imbued with meaning.20 Neither human nor machine emerges from this assemblage unchanged. Contemporary drones pose a host of challenges for pilots. One of the most difficult is that, unlike regular piloted aircraft, the RPA provides none of the usual embodied experiences of flying. Pilots are unable to draw upon sensations such as orientation, visual cues, g-­forces, turbulence, wind speed, or the direct feel of control mechanisms. With the field of vision on a drone for piloting being restricted to 30 degrees, as opposed to the normal human field of vision of 50 degrees, controlling an RPA is reportedly similar to “flying while looking through a soda straw.”21 The difficulties of flying, high operational tempos, constant shift work, the ability to view the results of strikes through sensor technologies, the decontextualization of the battle space, and the collapse in the distance between the battlefield and the domestic home enabled by the technology have contributed to experiences of high operational stress among pilots in relation to comrades who fly regular aircraft.22 As a result, the U.S. armed forces have begun to explore the specific characteristics that make for the best drone pilots and sensor operators. Surprisingly, initial research has indicated that while manual dexterity and quick reaction times are important, far more essential are cognitive abilities and personality traits, including being able to quickly process information accurately, to translate 2-­D images taken from a monitor into 4-­D mental representations, personal resiliency, and emotional compartmentalization.23 Although drone strikes do not involve the

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same direct elements of physical risk as traditional air combat missions, their continuing viability rests, in part, on the physical and emotional durability of drone operators. What pilots feel, how the drone shapes what they feel, and the ways in which they manage their feelings show that RPAs do not isolate operators from the war-­fighting experience but rather embed pilots and sensor operators into the practices of contemporary counterinsurgency in particular ways.24 Nowhere is this more evident than through the visual practices enabled by the RPA. In this regard, the drone works as a prosthetic to enhance the vision and situational awareness of the battle space for ground troops, sensor operators, and commanders.25 The promise of a godlike perspective, “the god-­ trick of seeing everything from nowhere,” is able to produce a host of affects and effects.26 First, the amount of surveillance and data being collected by RPAs has increased to a point where it may become counterproductive. Already, drones in the U.S. Air Force are estimated to be producing 1,500 hours of video and 1,500 photo stills a day.27 It is believed that when new camera technologies such as Gorgon Stare and ARGUS become operational and are placed into the drone fleet, as many as two thousand analysts per RPA will be required to keep pace with the volume of visual data produced.28 Second, the camera sensor technology in tandem with the range of the RPA provides pilots with an unprecedented ability to observe the places and people of interest in counterinsurgency operations for extended periods of time. Similar to the experience of snipers, drone pilots are beginning to get to know their targets as well as their everyday routines and rhythms.29 Paradoxically, Allen Feldman argues that the ability to know the victim without being known to the victim enables the commissioning of violence and may even induce feelings of pleasure.30 Third, the susceptibility to being closely monitored has significant impacts for those under the gaze of the drone. It is perhaps not coincidental that these populations primarily reside in former spaces of Western colonial and imperial control. Foucault noted that being rendered visible creates power relations in which those who are subject to surveillance feel pressure to internalize the preferred norms of those who may be watching them.31 Yet, unlike RPA operators for whom vision is the primary sense guiding potential moments of encounter, it is the buzzing sound of these systems that can indicate to populations under surveillance that they are indeed being watched. As Eyal Weizman has noted with respect to Israeli Defense Force tactics in Gaza, revealing aerial forms of control can be an intentional move to increase levels of stress on a target population.32 Moreover, “signature strikes” by the United States—­strikes

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where individuals and/or groups are targeted through observations that are said to indicate a life pattern consistent with being an insurgent—­are reported to be a source of considerable anxiety among populations for whom drone patrols have become a regular occurrence.33 Thus, the technological capabilities of the RPA enable particular forms of embodiment and a range of affects while inhibiting others. Command and control, ways of seeing, and anxiety all contribute to the power relations of counterinsurgency that are shaping the international.

Agency But what of the drone itself as an agent or actant that may think, initiate, act, empathize, and even rebel? For example, in its plan for drone development, the U.S. government has expressed the desire to develop systems that would assume a “bird-­dog/warrior’s associate” role in relation to their human operator.34 This would require that drones became capable of sensing changes in the emotional states of their human operators. While the goal of developing fully autonomous systems with complex communication channels that will allow for the formation of swarms against emerging threats may still be decades away, RPAs have already demonstrated capabilities that have exceeded expectations and designed intentions. While the agency currently assigned to objects may not be “the strong kind of agency traditionally attributed to humans,” it would be nearsighted to overlook the ways in which drones through their complexity might actively shape the international in ways that go beyond human control and/or intention.35 These excesses have thus far taken two main forms. The first type is instances where RPA operators have lost communications with their drones and been unable to reestablish contact. Normally, drones are programmed to revert to a holding pattern when communication is severed until their human operator is able to reestablish control. Some are even programmed to head in the direction of the control station in order to reconnect if contact is lost for a period of time.36 Yet, there have been several instances of RPAs going rogue and ignoring these fail-­safes.37 In one instance over Afghanistan in 2009, a fighter jet intervened when pilots lost control of an armed Reaper that later crashed into a mountain. In 2010, a Fire Scout robochopper strayed into restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., ignoring its safety protocols, before operators could regain control. In the same year, drone patrols over the Texas–­Mexico border had to be suspended after a Predator experienced what was described as “pilot deviation” after losing its communications link.38 Perhaps most boldly, at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti in 2011, a Predator,

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while grounded, managed to start its own engines despite a disconnected fuel line and a disengaged ignition.39 The second type is instances where the capabilities of drones are harnessed and/or reconfigured for purposes not intended by their operators. There is evidence to suggest that insurgents in Iraq were able to access the camera feeds of drones using laptops and low-­cost software.40 In 2012, American researchers were able to launch a spoof attack against the GPS guidance system in a RPA causing it to fall from the sky; it was alleged that a drone crash that occurred earlier that year in Iran was a product of a similar spoofing attack.41 In the fall of 2011, a key-­logging virus was discovered in the RPA command-­and-­control systems at Creech Air Force Base. The implication was that for an undetermined period of time, every keystroke made by pilots and sensor operators to communicate with intelligence officers, ground troops, and commanders had been recorded.42 While current alleged instances of RPA hacking have not yet resulted in the manifestation of behaviors beyond the limits of what had been thought possible, drones have already shown themselves to be capable of exceeding designed intentions. Thus, the global implications of the drone span virtual and physical worlds as well as the continuum between human intention and actant excess.

Drones and the Future of the International This chapter has sought to reveal some of the key dynamics underpinning a historic geopolitical change that has made it possible for the battle space to be conceived of on a planetary scale within a threat matrix that places a premium on the preemptive elimination of insurgents. The focus has been on the materiality of the drone and how this materiality has contributed to this geopolitical possibility. The rise of drone warfare has not resulted solely through technological determinism, the construction of a specific threat matrix, or manipulation of the law. The historical materialism of the RPA and its materiality (including capabilities, perceived technological advantages, and vulnerabilities) have all played a role in the turn to targeted killing from the air. Moreover, the impact of drone warfare on the form of the international extends beyond notions of sovereignty, the laws of war, and counterinsurgency. It speaks to the formation of global communication networks that have both military and civilian uses. It draws our attention to how drone warfare is dependent on the terra-­forming of the earth—­whether through rare earths mining or airfield construction. It highlights how technology can shape the perceived value, development, and intentional honing of specific human attributes. It demonstrates how the in-

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ternational may be shaped by the formation of military–­private sector partnerships in resource acquisition. It reveals new calculations of geopolitical importance based on the material capabilities of current drone technology. It suggests the emergence of new divisions in global populations based on experienced disruptions to everyday life generated by RPA activity and neocolonial systems of control. And perhaps most provocatively, it proposes the prospect of drones as engaged forces that actively shape the future of the international.

Notes 1. For example, see Claudia Aradau, “Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection,” Security Dialogue 41(5) (2010): 491–­514. 2. Brendan McGarry, “Drones Most Accident-­Prone U.S. Air Force Craft: BGOV Barometer.” Bloomberg, June 18, 2012: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012–06–18 /drones-most-accident-prone-u-s-air-force-craft-bgov-barometer.html. 3. Aradau, “Security That Matters,” 498. 4. See Nicole Deitelhoff and Anna Geis, “Securing the State, Undermining Democracy: Internationalization and Privatization of Western Militaries,” TranState Working Paper no. 92, Universität Bremen, 2009: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/27914. 5. For a discussion of the RMA, see Eliot A. Cohen, “Change and Transformation in Military Affairs,” Journal of Strategic Studies 27(3) (2004): 395–­407. 6. See Section 220 of the 2001 Floyd D. Spence National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 106–­398) and the 2007 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 109–­364). 7. European Commission Enterprise and Industry Directorate General, “Study Analysing the Current Activities in the Field of UAV,” ENTR/2007/065, 2007: http:// ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/security/files/uav_study_element_2_en.pdf, 62. 8. See Federal Aviation Authority, FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (Washington, D.C.: Federal Aviation Authority, 2012): http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg /CRPT-112hrpt381/pdf/CRPT-112hrpt381.pdf, and Nick Hopkins, “Revealed: Who Can Fly Drones in UK Airspace,” Guardian, January 25, 2013: http://www.guardian.co.uk /world/2013/jan/25/who-can-fly-drones-uk-airspace. 9. Lydia Mulvany, “Pentagon Challenges Chinese Monopoly on Rare Earths,” Bloomberg, November 7, 2012: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012–11–07/pentagon -challenges-chinese-monopoly-on-rare-earths-commodities.html. 10. Ibid. 11. John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1(1) (1994): 53–­80. 12. Robert Lamb, Ungoverned Areas and Threats from Safe Havens: Final Report of the Ungoverned Areas Project (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, 2007): http://www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/ugash_report_final.pdf. 13. Department of Defense. FY 2009–­2034: Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2009), xiii.

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14. Matt J. Martin and Charles W. Sassler, Predator: The Remote-­Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2010), 29–­30. 15. Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (New York: OR Books, 2012), 116. 16. Martin and Sasser, Predator, 22. 17. Ibid., 30. 18. Elizabeth Bumiller, “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress,” New York Times, December 18, 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/world/asia /air-force-drone-operators-show-high-levels-of-stress.html?_r=0. 19. See Leila Hudson, Colin S. Owens, and David J. Callen, “Drone Warfare in Yemen: Fostering Emirates through Counterterrorism,” Middle East Policy 19(4) (2012): http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/drone-warfare -yemen-fostering-emirates-through-counterterrorism. 20. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14(3) (1988): 575–­99. 21. Martin and Sassler, Predator, 24. 22. See James Dao, “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do,” New York Times, February 22, 2013: http://www.nytimes .com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-incombat-do.html. 23. Katharine K. McMillan, Wayne Chappelle, Ray King, and Kent McDonald, “Psychological Profile of MQ-­1 Predator and MQ-­9 Reaper Pilots,” USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Neuropsychiatry Branch, 2010. 24. Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture, and Society 28(7–­8) (2011): 200. 25. The argument here on vision was introduced in Kyle Grayson, “Six Theses on Targeted Killing,” Politics 32(2) (2012): 123–­24. 26. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581. 27. Benjamin, Drone Warfare, 306. 28. See Gregory, “From a View to a Kill,” 193–­95. 29. Martin and Sasser, Predator, 110. 30. Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” Public Culture 10(1) (1997): 30. 31. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 206–­13. 32. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso Books, 2007), 240–­44. 33. Chris Rogers, Civilians in Armed Conflict: Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan (New York: Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, 2010), 59. 34. Department of Defense, FY 2009–­2034, 154. 35. Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17(3) (2005): 463. 36. Jeremy Hsu, “Air Force Shoots Down Runaway Drone over Afghanistan,” PopSci, September 14, 2009: http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article /2009–09/when-drones-go-wild-air-force-shoots-them-down.

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37. Lewis Page, “Robot Kill-­Chopper Goes Rogue above Washington DC,” The Register, August 26, 2010: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/26/fire_scout_wash ington_hiccup/. 38. Emma Perez-­Travino, “Rogue Drone Causes Pause in Operations on US Border,” Brownsville Herald, June 16, 2010: http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/article _fa168e29-f3e4–5f96–8910–66d2c5df0e6e.html. 39. Craig Whitlock, “Remote U.S. Base at Core of Secret Operations,” Washington Post, October 25, 2012: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012–10–25/world /35499227_1_drone-wars-drone-operations-military-base. 40. Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen, and August Cole, “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126 102247889095011.html. 41. Melissa Mixon, “Todd Humphreys’ Research Team Demonstrates First Successful GPS Spoofing of UAV,” University of Texas at Austin, http://www.ae.utexas.edu /news/archive/2012/todd-humphreys-research-team-demonstrates-first-successful -gps-spoofing-of-uav. 42. Noah Shachtman, “Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet,” Wired, October 7, 2011: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/.

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4 x 4s Adam Sandor

Thinking about security and the nature of the state in North and West Africa involves questioning some fundamental distinctions that structure conventional understandings of modern politics. It is also an exercise in recognizing the intersectional nature of social and political life under conditions of drastic change. There is nothing natural about distinctions like the state versus the nonstate, the public versus the private, the global versus the local, the inside versus the outside, or the licit versus the illicit.1 Each of these categories is inherently political and involves an evolving set of contests of relations of power and social interests that often result in striking levels of violence. The security politics surrounding these categories are being felt worldwide, and in ways that connect the most unlikely of spaces, through objects and histories that have been previously inconceivable and unimaginable. One such object is the 4 x 4 all-­terrain vehicle. This chapter seeks to understand the dynamic interplay of relations between illicit economic operators, narcotics, state officials, global security experts, and international terrorism that produce violent transboundary formations throughout the Sahelo-­Saharan region.2 To do so, I focus on the 4 x 4, an object that must be recognized as a key material crux that connects and enables global illicit economies between South America and Europe, transnational security practices, and through which local competition and rivalries become amplified into global initiatives for security, development, and state-­ building interventions. For at least the last decade, the Sahel has become a space of global security concerns and is regularly defined as “ungoverned,” or a source of transnational threats to global order. Most of these states are commonly understood as some of the poorest and weakest in the world.3 These concerns culminated in France’s 2013 military intervention in Mali to regain the country’s north from an array of local Islamist movements and Al-­Qaeda offshoots. Over this period, global security initiatives have converged on this space, as Western security experts have been sent from European and North American capitals to strengthen the capacities of the security services of the countries of the subregion. 338

To understand how these social forces, objects, mentalities, and practices come together in the production of new social forms, practices, and normativities, it is useful to conceive of this space as a global assemblage: a heterogeneous compound of diverse parts operating within a larger sociospatial formation or whole that is provisional and contingent, emergent, processual, and that binds disparate spaces together in multisited institutional orders.4 The combinations of these assemblages enable new forms of political action and social understanding that are politically generative and unveil a general reconstitution of social relations that blurs categorical divisions like the ones mentioned above. Conceptualizing the Sahel as a space of political intersectionality, or as an assemblage, is underpinned by a deeply relational way of looking at the world that proves to be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to pin down analytically, or that will remain constant, durable, or knowable for extended periods of time. Methodologically, the approach taken here is to be inspired by Bruno Latour’s famous advice to “follow the actors themselves,” and to follow the object as it acts as the material epicenter or intersection of these transboundary social formations.5 By following the practices associated with use of 4 x 4s in the Sahel, we can come to tease out the relations of power, competition, and social transformations as they relate to global security politics. To do this, I demonstrate how the use of 4 x 4s impacts and enables a slippage between state and non­state, licit and illicit, public and private in the Sahel, with a focus on drug trafficking and state building. The purpose for examining these themes is first to demonstrate the processes of assembly that 4 x 4s enable in the Sahel, and then to show how through drug trafficking and state building 4 x 4s constitute some very consequential global political dynamics. All-­terrain vehicles are a key enabling commodity for very important activities in Mali: they are also needed for trafficking hashish and cocaine; they are the principal means of mobility and strategic planning for Islamic armed groups that operate in the subregion; finally, and often in response to this activity, they are the key matériel provided by Western governments in their interventions to build the capacities of what Michael Mann calls the “infrastructural power” of Sahelian states.6

Trafficking West Africa’s international drug trade has a fairly long historical pedigree. Lebanese smugglers based in West Africa have been using the subregion as a transit point for heroin trafficking since at least 1952, and by the 1980s Nigerians and Ghanaians were operating well-­established trafficking operations from locations in Thailand, Brazil, India, and even Afghanistan.7 Nevertheless, since 4 x 4s

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the early 2000s, West Africa has become an alluring transit point for traffickers’ efforts to introduce large amounts of cocaine into lucrative Western European markets.8 Shifts in demand for cocaine from North America to Europe may be the result of a declining rate of cocaine usage among North American narcotics users, or the decline of the American dollar.9 Successful interdiction efforts closer to cocaine production countries in Latin America, with North America as the primary destination market, have also seriously dented cocaine supplies in the United States.10 If the path of least resistance in transiting narcotics points toward alternate market opportunities, then trafficking operations shift—­in this case from the Andean region to European markets via West Africa. The cocaine route from Latin America to West Africa is not one route but is composed of several shifting trajectories that open up opportunities presented to illicit economic operators socially connected to both continents and to Western Europe. The trafficked product leaves those countries and makes the jump from Latin America, crosses the infamous “Highway 10”—­the shortest distance between Latin America and West Africa—­running along the 10th parallel line of latitude, and lands somewhere in the subregion. From the West African coast, cocaine is partitioned into more manageable quantities, before departing toward their market destinations. The itineraries taken are the results of fluid conditions, the adaptabilities of illicit economic operators, and ecological and social forces that direct possible action toward particular lines of flight over others. Such trafficking patterns therefore involve intimate patterns of local practice that are honed in on logistical opportunities and constraints. Locally, illicit economic operators in the Sahel acknowledge that they are contravening state law. However, because the social ills of drug consumption are not readily evident in West Africa, illicit economic operators understand trafficking as a legitimate business opportunity. Moreover, many see their smuggling as a necessary provision of goods that the central state ought to provide but does not. Illicit economic operators in the Sahel have historically responded to market distortions in many different goods. Prohibition regimes, devised in either their national or global forms, amplify opportunities for profit and “function as price supports—­which, in turn, help to attract new market entrants willing to accept the occupational hazards.”11 While a trafficker today may be moving cocaine or hashish from the Nouadhibou region of Mauritania through Mali’s Gao region and across the Salvador Pass that connects the Algerian–Libyan–­Nigerien borders, upon return, the product moved might likely be heavily subsidized flour or powdered milk from Algeria, or fuel from Libya.12 Smuggling becomes a profitable activity because governments and interna-

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tional organizations create regulations and laws and attempt to enforce them. Thus, even in one of the most remote spaces in the world, such national and global prohibition regimes connect the local activities of agents in the Sahel to a thriving illicit global political economy. Enter 4 x 4s. The introduction of 4 x 4s to Sahelian economies has significantly facilitated smuggling practices that once relied on transportation by camel in large caravans or by transport trucks more recently. While traveling by camel allows for a wider range of possible itineraries across the desert, it is extremely slow-­going. Traveling by transport trucks, because of their size, minimizes the travel options to roads constructed or other hard, flat surfaces. All-­terrain 4 x 4s allow for the best of both worlds, providing incredible speed and route adaptability, making it possible to traverse areas of thick sand, sand dunes, rocky or hilly terrains, and when necessary tight mountain passes.13 Knowledge and mastery of desert routes is a hot commodity in the Sahel, particularly when individuals find themselves in marginalized social positions that tend to mark socially stratified systems of livelihood like those of nomadic communities in the Sahel. Lack of access to formal economies, advancement through state channels, or the ruling classes through marriage necessarily means developing and manipulating attainable forms of knowledge, resources, and repertoires, in order to translate these into the advancement of social status. Acquiring a 4 x 4, in addition to intimate knowledge of desert routes, is an important means of developing social and economic capital in many communities of the Sahel. The centrality of the ecological features of the Sahel presents trafficking hardships for some and tactical blessings for others. This is one of the pertinent reasons for the political centrality of the Kidal region of northern Mali. By practicing such forms of local knowledge, illicit economic operators can (and do) become well connected to the very sinews of the Malian state. For example, Tuaregs from Mali’s Kidal region are understood to have provided their services of tracking, guiding, and directing trade caravans across the Sahara for centuries.14 Kidal Tuaregs have for generations served as a transmission belt for north/south and west/east flows across the Sahelo-­Sahara region.15 Now that drugs are moving across the Sahel, it is the same types of individuals with genealogical pedigrees and intimate local knowledge of the Sahel’s geography that serve illicit economic operators as guides and drivers in the desert—­as the ecological features of Kidal, such as the Adrar mountain range, would normally block the passage of trafficking convoys. Kidal Tuaregs are the necessary middlemen between other regions of the continent—­through use of camels anciently, to 4 x 4s more recently. Since 1999, small Tuareg groups have operated as guides and drivers for drug-­trafficking operations that run

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across the Sahel and Sahara, from southern Morocco or Mauritania in the west through to Egypt in the east. Along the way, the convoys may have to pay passage taxes to Islamic militants from Al-­Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as is the practice in the desert. Kidal has also been the seat of several armed rebellions against the region’s central administrative powers—­first against colonial France and then repeatedly with the Malian central state.16 The latest rebellion began in early 2012 when nationalist armed rebels took over the north of Mali (a space larger than France). These rebels hailed from several clans and subclans of Mali’s north (mostly from Kidal), many of whom had returned after having been the primary armed Tuareg battalions fighting for Muammar Gadhafi before he was deposed.17 Instead of following historical precedent and seeking concessions from the Malian central state, the Mouvement National de la Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) sought political independence and recognition of statehood for the north of Mali, the region they call Azawad, arguing that northern Malian populations had experienced severe disenfranchisement from the Malian government since the country’s independence. In its effort to achieve that, the armed group had to form an alliance with a subset of the local Tuareg population, a group that happened to self-­identify as Islamists—­Ansar ‘Dine, led by a charismatic and cunning political operator, Iyad ag Ghali.18 At the beginning of the rebellion, these two groups operated with the support of AQIM and what is often considered a splinter group or offshoot of the latter, the MUJAO (Mouvement d’Unicité et du Jihad dans l’Afrique de l’Ouest). Most of these groups are assumed to be financed, at least in part, through some type of involvement or complicity in the trans-­Saharan drug trade.19 After some stunning advances south, the Islamist groups sidelined the nationalist MNLA. The Malian armed forces, dissatisfied with the government in Bamako’s handling of the situation in the north, led a coup d’état and eventually set up an interim government.20 Each successive rebellion solidified the role of the traditional religious elite of the region, which received several concessions for autonomous rule from the Malian central government in return for ending violent insurgencies.21 These elites also dealt out opportunities to loyal clients for integration into the Malian armed forces, security services, and customs agency. Their positions of local notoriety and patronage translate into knowledge over the illicit economic practices of the zone in which they govern in place of, yet still connected to, the Malian state.22 In this way, elites in the north of Mali become nodal points within the illicit global economy. The maintenance of these key social positions has enabled the leadership of the Tuareg clans to become at once central state and nonstate actors. They govern with a large degree of autonomy from Kidal,

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while liaising with and informing Bamako (and other regional capitals) of the comings and goings of Islamic armed groups, and an array of illicit economic operators that pass through territories where the Tuareg are masters. Being connected to them, either locally or abroad, means being furnished with opportunities for social and economic advancement and inclusion in trafficking and other illicit activities.23 Traversing the desert is an inherently dangerous affair. High winds shift the positions of sand dunes or hide underlying boulders that can destroy the undercarriage of a convoy vehicle. Although rocks do not display conscious forms of agency, they can still accentuate a force of action that modulates human behavior.24 Intense heat and sunlight exhausts many a 4 x 4 motor working under the weight of trafficked goods placed in the bed or cab of a truck. Should a vehicle break down in the middle of the desert because of lack of fuel or an overheated engine, or become stuck in a sand dune, the lives of convoy participants will be in marked danger. Immediate tactical/practical adaptabilities are central to the behaviors of illicit economic operators as they respond to nature’s moves. Knowing how to adapt to nonhuman forces requires knowing how to choose and use the “tools of the trade” appropriately. Traffickers in the Sahel nearly exclusively use Toyota 4 x 4s (generally pickups instead of SUVs), and generally one of two models: the Land Cruiser 4500 EFI with eight-­cylinder engine; or the 4500 EFI V-­6.25 While the eight-­cylinder engine is much more expensive, its engine is much more durable than the V-­6 and features an exterior air filter, allowing traffickers to travel at speeds exceeding 140 km/h for up to six hours, without the engine overheating; the V-­6 will overheat in only three hours.26 These vehicles are generally purchased in Algeria, as government subsidies on merchandise means that 4 x 4s will be much cheaper. However, many of these 4 x 4s are also purchased through networks based in Dubai, and, since the revolution and NATO intervention, in northern Libya. Special-­ordered 4 x 4s are also purchased through dealerships in Dakar, or Bamako, and shipped from Japanese factories to ports in Lomé or Cotonou. In order to meet the requirements of trafficking convoys passing through the Sahel, 4 x 4s must be “tricked out.” The 4 x 4s are fitted with hidden compartments to hide trafficked product or weapons. They often come equipped with built-­in navigational systems, although portable GPS is more common. Thuraya satellite phones are required, as are additional adaptors and devices for recharging batteries. The 4 x 4s are also fitted with two fuel reservoirs with a combined 195-­liter capacity. This would allow for nearly 600 kilometers to be traveled under normal road conditions, but in desert conditions, a distance of

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only 250–­300 kilometers.27 This is generally a point of weakness for trafficking operations as convoys are obliged to coordinate specified, regular, and frequent supply points. This constraint increases the chances of attacks from the regions’ national armed forces or, even more likely, by armed bandits. The 4 x 4s are therefore mounted with machine guns, which are operated by individuals who have experience in violent combat—­a relatively easy task because so many of the Sahel’s nomadic populations have been involved in armed rebellions.28 Interception has become a favored strategy of specialized groups within the Sahel’s illicit economies, as its ecological features are favorable to raiding activities, or razzias.29 Violent confrontation between competing armed groups of illicit economic operators is a regular occurrence that happens more often than confronting any of the military forces of Sahelian states. Avoiding confrontation is the standard practice adopted; but should violence commence, the capacities of an adversary are balanced against one’s own physical location, degree of weaponry, and what is stood to be lost. Paying off a competing network may be the least expensive and least dangerous option. Once it is understood by a convoy leader that his forces are outgunned, negotiations begin, the trafficking bankroller/organizer is called, and a deal is reached. Should an agreement not materialize, the product is stolen and then resold to the original owner. Many times, the losing side will then recuperate the product from its bandits after the latter have been paid through a local wire transfer, and the operation will continue.30 Owners of trafficked narcotics are the categorical “Big Men” of the subregion who wield a seemingly inordinate social and economic capital to instigate action, mobilize networks, and build loyal factions by transforming “social relations into strategic power and control.”31 These Big Men are connected to networks in Europe, Latin America, throughout North Africa, and the Middle East, if not further afield. Profits accrued from illicit economic operations are used to purchase real estate in West African capitals and other major cities, gas stations, transport companies, clothing stores, and luxury vehicles. In order to continue operating beyond the legal parameters established by global prohibition regimes and state legislation adopted and meant to be enforced, local Big Men leverage the connections made possible by their social and economic capital and draw in the states of the subregion by bribing government or military officials.32 Illicit economic operators are connected to well-­established political and military networks throughout the region, but especially in Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger. There is high-­level complicity with military officials of these four states. All that is needed to transit through these spaces are connec-

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tions with officials from any of these states’ armed forces and the appropriate amount of funds to pay for their services or nonservices. Local military officials will coordinate and manage patrols so that drug convoys have a precise set of time to pass through the territory unseen (generally, forty-­eight hours through a particular space). Military officers in the north that stumble upon drug convoys will call their military commands to ask for procedural advice and will be informed of the classic protective excuse: “It’s OK. They are only moving cigarettes.” If the local military officers insist that the convoys are indeed moving cocaine or hashish, they are instructed to speak to their superior officers, who then let the drug convoys pass. Malian and Nigerien armed forces and other security services are also used to chase out competitors known to be blocking the itinerary of a convoy, thus paving the way for transit without obstacle. Funds from trafficking operation complicity acquired by state officials (police, gendarmes, and military officials) are sent to Niamey, Bamako, Nouakchott, and so on at the end of every month to upper echelons of these services. This ensures that those “sur place” stay in Agadez, Timbuktu, Gao, Kidal, Diffa, and so on, and continue profiting from the trade, with extended nodes in connected networks each receiving their cut, from which villas, luxury vehicles, and travel to Europe are purchased with funds that well exceed the salaries usually paid to public servants.33 The drug trade across the Sahel permeates state institutions. Local illicit economic operators insert themselves into the sinews of the region’s states and conduct their affairs in the space between licit and illicit economic behaviors. They are simultaneously practicing and enhancing state and nonstate forms of authority by benefiting from sanctioned, public purviews while satisfying private economic and social interests. The geographic reach of their activities is simultaneously local and global as they participate in the entrenchment of illicit economic practices and root them into the central units of the transnational system, which is founded in the principles of statehood and sovereignty.34

State Building Western governments believe it to be essential to strengthen that system through building the capacities of “fragile” states, especially by reinforcing state borders.35 This common understanding of a lack of border security underpins bilateral and multilateral cooperation efforts to build the capacities of West African security forces. Security knowledge and its related practices that are conducted at borders in the subregion become interlinked and constituted in relation to state-­building interventions of the international donor

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community. Hence, by examining the ways in which global security experts interact with and attempt to inculcate knowledge regarding how borders ought to operate in their West African counterparts, we can come to better understand how borders are made and unmade in this part of the world, and also how security knowledge is transferred across global spaces. But while global security experts attempt to inculcate understandings of security in local security agents through specialized training, local security agents often translate these understandings in ways that reflect an advancement of private instead of public goods and interests. Global security experts who operate in West Africa and other locales do not arrive alone. They also bring toys that articulate how border security ought to be practiced. These objects of security, such as laptop computers and related software and databases, bullet-­proof shields, helmets and other riot gear, audio surveillance equipment, drug-­testing kits or other forensic equipment, and, crucially, 4 x 4s, are important security vectors as they can come to embody social meanings of security and are inherently tied to security practices through their use. Such objects can also produce competition between security practitioners as they compete to claim credit for delivery of material, its receipt by some and not others, or in the ways in which such security objects come to be used. As Western security logics are not always adopted, the objects of security given are often used in unintended ways that refract notions of public/ private and licit/illicit. The number of global security experts currently operating in the Sahel, or on the Sahel but from national capitals, is staggering in terms of its scale, which has been steadily increasing for more than a decade. The assumed strategic convergence of drug-­trafficking operations and Islamic terrorist networks has been translated into a violent flurry of global security activity in all Sahel countries. The United States, the European Union, INTERPOL, France, Spain, Denmark, Germany, and others have all introduced security initiatives in the region aimed at strengthening the capacities of these states’ justice and security sectors. A large portion of these funds has been allocated to providing security training. Nevertheless, nearly all of these initiatives include a significant budgetary portion devoted to procurement in material to be given to justice and security forces and agents. For example, the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy Mission EUCAP-­Sahel, has been designed with two dominant pillars. First the mission is to advise the Nigerien security services on how to strengthen Niger’s security institutions and organizational frameworks to tackle terrorism and organized crime. Second, the mission must provide training to security service agents by developing capacities to investigate organized criminal activities and 346

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organizations. Nevertheless, 450,000 euros have been set aside for procuring equipment intended for Niger’s internal security forces. With these funds, the EUCAP-­Sahel mission has renovated classrooms at the National Academy of the Gendarmerie and purchased desks, chairs, and laptop computers. It has also purchased computers for Niger’s intelligence service, the Renseignements Généraux, as well as laboratory forensics equipment that will be used in training sessions and given to the units trained.36 An expansion of this project is in development, and Nigerien security officials have been actively lobbying for the purchase of sophisticated security matériel, especially 4 x 4s. These vehicles connect in important ways to the material and digital infrastructures of border posts. Border and military posts are often provided by global security experts to the Sahel’s security forces. Border posts anchor the use of particular border security practices, such as confession to state agents, the use of technologies like passport scanners that capture details of mobile individuals, and verification of one’s identity at key locations chosen by the state.37 It is hoped that from these posts, the presence and power of these states are projected beyond the administrative centers of national capitals, thereby replacing alternative systems of governance by state control exercised by “autonomous” and professionalized state security forces. U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of African Affairs Linda Thomas-­Greenfield recently put renewed emphasis on building the institutional capacities for border security in the Sahel, arguing that helping governments and communities manage their borders through an extension of the state’s authority and legitimacy is a key strategy that should be pursued by future U.S. Trans-­Saharan Counter-­Terrorism Partnership and Department of State endeavors.38 In this way, border posts encapsulate the security understandings and ideals of Western forms of statehood and sovereignty manifested in material forms. For example, building border posts in the Malian or Nigerien desert, and thereafter tasking a team of state security agents to be posted there, implies an extension of the institutional capacity and authority of a sovereign government that can more easily engage with society as an object of control within a demarcated territory.39 It is in this way that Frowd explains how a diverse set of global actors has increased an “infrastructure of legibility” over Mauritanian populations, which enables the Mauritanian state to govern its territory through the construction of a set of border posts around the country with the aid of the European Union.40 Thus, training in border management, counternarcotics, and counterterrorism is often premised by the very requirement of border facilities. Nevertheless, because of the remoteness of these posts and the fact that most African populations will either forgo dealing with state security officials out of a lack of trust, or simply a lack of resources required for the journey, the use 4 x 4s

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of border posts requires state agents to be mobile: they need 4 x 4s. For example, through the Trans-­Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (TSCTP), a counterterrorism desert training center was built outside of Gao in 2008 toward the Mali–­Niger border. From here, Canadian and American counterterrorism specialists trained Malian internal security forces (gendarmes, national guards, and police officers) in rural border security measures such as engaging in hot pursuit, communicating between forces and other border posts, and trust-­building interaction with local populations.41 Thus, border posts become crucial to governance efforts for states such as Mali, Mauritania, and Niger as they expand the visibility and, it is hoped, the authority and legitimacy of the state for a population that normally associates statehood with its lack of presence, especially in remote areas traditionally beyond its reach. As a result of this territorial rationale, increasing the ability of the Sahel’s security forces to move across long and remote expanses of these states and amplifying their ability to communicate across these distances have been key features of the installation and construction of border posts. Having 4x4 all-­terrain vehicles and radio equipment allows for the possibility of such practices. Most international donors have caught on. For example, in March 2013, Nigerien law-­ enforcement agencies were given more than nine hundred thousand euros’ worth of all-­terrain vehicles, camels, and communications equipment under the EU’s Programme d’appui à la Justice et à l’état de droit (Support to justice and the rule of law program), much of which would be sent to northern regions of the country in order to facilitate patrols that branch out from remote state border posts.42 In July 2013, the European Union purchased 36 all-­terrain 4 x 4s and has plans to provide a total of 153 4 x 4s to the Malian security sector: 93 for the national guard, and 60 for the national gendarmerie. Both of these institutions are tasked with border security, antitrafficking, and rule-­of-­law functions in remote Sahelian areas.43 As we have seen, however, many state agents in the region do not practice “public” duties as understood by the international donor community. The security logics to be inculcated by global security experts through the provision of material objects of security, such as border posts, are not always adopted by their West African security counterparts. One reason for this is that local concerns and understandings of how to be a law-­enforcement officer do not necessarily follow the same patterns of behavior for local security agents as articulated by global security experts in training and advisory sessions. Historically, security forces in Africa generally have been used more for the security of the regimes in power than for the protection and advancement of the public good of the state or citizenry.44 This understanding of security and its associ-

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ated security practices still holds sway in many countries of the subregion. For example, in Mali, while tasked to respond to situations of immediate crisis, the frequently trained gendarmerie rapid reaction unit, the Peloton d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (PIGN) ought to undertake specialized counterterrorism and antikidnapping functions and use required equipment provided by European donors (such as armoured 4 x 4s with machine-­gun mounts) for these purposes—­this is what global security experts have trained them to do. Instead, the PIGN is often tasked with protecting members of the central administration’s entourage as they drive around the greater Bamako area, or provide escort for bank monetary transfers—­activities that would make it difficult to respond to an immediate security event.45 While local security agents may attempt to court global security experts, it proves wiser still to recognize the social standing of local political and security authorities, and to curry favor from them while attempting to appropriate global sources of security authority and expertise. This is an incredibly delicate balancing act. As these local political and security elites ultimately serve as gatekeepers within West Africa’s dominant patron–­client relationships that in large degree control access to strategic forms of global rents and prestige, in the end it pays to follow orders, even if doing so contravenes security understandings advocated by global security experts and their training manuals. In several West African countries, state bureaucrats and public servants are poorly paid or not always paid at regular intervals. Many public servants, including those of the security services, are not given funds with which they can effectively pursue their duties, which results in demands by security agents for payment from citizens who call for their help, even if it is just for gasoline or to purchase cell-­phone airtime. These types of financial constraints and the desire to advance one’s social standing through the accumulation of material wealth are also potent motivating factors that can alter the use of security objects that are provided from global security experts. This is definitely the case in the Sahel, where many border or military posts, and the 4 x 4s that extend mobility through these stationary points, have come to be used for purposes that run directly counter to the entire purpose of the initiatives exported to these states, and instead are used as bases from which trafficking convoys are facilitated.

Conclusion The guiding and principal categories of modern politics, public/private, licit/illicit, and state/nonstate are not universally held or practiced. Neither

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are conceptions of security. Narcotics trafficking in North and West Africa is viewed by the majority of the populations as a nonissue, while Western security experts, policy makers, and advocates decry its threatening characteristics, destabilizing elements, and fusion with nonstate Islamic extremism. The answer provided by the latter is to strengthen the states of the region against the threat of narcotics while the former manipulate and leverage the potential benefits of global prohibition regimes and transnational connections in support of local political competition and the strengthening of positions of power and prestige. By following the 4 x 4, how it is used, who uses it and benefits from its use, the interests that it serves, the communities for which it provides, the contests over its acquisition, its physical modulations with other tools of the trade, and the itineraries that it travels, one can decipher a global assemblage of security and crime in the Sahel. Through the 4 x 4, the international and the global are constituted.

Notes 1. Seminal works include A. Claire Cutler, “Artifice, Ideology, and Paradox: The Public/Private Distinction in International Law,” Review of International Political Economy 4(2) (1997): 261–­85; Patricia Owens, “Distinctions, Distinctions: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Force?” International Affairs 84(5) (2008): 977–­90; R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); A. Claire Cutler, Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, eds., Private Authority and International Affairs (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Richard Higgott, Geoffrey Underhill, and Andreas Bieler, eds., Non-­State Actors and Authority in the Global System (London: Routledge, 2000); Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, Security beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2. On “transboundary formations,” see Robert Latham, Ronald Kassimir, and Thomas M. Callaghy, “Introduction: Transboundary Formations, Intervention, Order, and Authority,” in Thomas M. Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham, eds., Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global–­Local Networks of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13. 3. According to the United Nations Development Program Human Development Index (HDI), countries of the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger) are listed as the lowest-­ranked human development countries in the world: Mauritania: ranked 155th out of 186 countries; Mali: 182d; Burkina Faso: 183d; Chad: 184th; and Niger: 186th. For data, see https://data.undp.org/dataset/Human-Development-Index -HDI-value/8ruz-shxu.

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4. Assemblage theory is vast, continuously growing, and incredibly complex. Space is not available here to delve into the nuances between the various positions that make use of the assemblage concept. The assemblage approach (and not necessarily theory) used here is influenced by Abrahamsen and Williams, Security beyond the State; Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane, “Assemblage and Geography,” Areas 43(2) (2011): 124–­27; Katja Franko Aas, “(In)security-­at-­a-­Distance: Rescaling Justice, Risk, and Warfare in a Transnational Age,” Global Crime 13(4) (2012): 235–­53; Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006); and George E. Marcus and Erkan Saka, “Assemblage,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23(2–­3) (2006): 101–­9. 5. Admittedly, I only take the words of advice from Latour, and leave the theoretical baggage of his version of actor-­network theory aside. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12. 6. Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25(2) (1984): 185–­213. 7. Stephen Ellis, “West Africa’s International Drug Trade,” African Affairs 108(431) (2009): 171–­96. 8. U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, March 2012), http://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2012. 9. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), World Drug Report (Vienna: UNODC, 2012), http://www.unodc.org/unodc/data-and-analysis/WDR-2012.html. 10. Ibid., 37–­38. The statistics that are used by government agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, or from international organizations, are fraught with shortcomings and should be taken with a grain of salt. For a critical assessment of such data, see Peter Andreas and Kelly Greenhill, eds., Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 11. Peter Andreas, “Illicit Globalization: Myths, Misconceptions, and Historical Lessons,” Political Science Quarterly 126(3) (2011): 410. See also Ethan Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society,” International Organization 44(4) (1990): 479–­526; Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 12. Judith Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 95–­124; Said Bentouba, “Contrebande: 55 tonnes de farine saisies près de la frontière malienne,” Le Quotidien d’Oran, February 4, 2014, http://www.lequotidien-oran.com/index.php ?news=5193750. 13. Interview by author with three Mouvement National de la Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) rebels, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, July 22, 2012; interview by author with Arab notable from Timbuktu, Bamako, Mali, April 12, 2013; interview by author with Tuareg development practitioner from Kidal, Bamako, Mali, April 13, 2013;

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interview by author with former Nigerian senior customs official, Niamey, Niger, April 27, 2013; interview by author with former Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice (MNJ) rebel (senior cadre), Niamey, Niger, November 23, 2013. 14. Interview by author with Tuareg cultural anthropologist from Kidal, Bamako, Mali, April 16, 2013; interview by author with Arab notable and alleged trafficker (now member of the Malian National Assembly) from Gao, Bamako, Mali, April 16, 2013; focus group conducted by author with nine Kidal Tuaregs (six men, three women), Bamako, Mali, April 19, 2013; interview with Malian government development practitioner from Kidal (Agence de Développement du Nord), Bamako, Mali, October 8, 2013. 15. See Morten Bøås, “Castles in the Sand: Informal Networks and Power Brokers in the Northern Mali Periphery,” in African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, ed. Mats Utas (London: Zed Books, 2012), 119–­34; Julien Brachet, “Le négoce caravanier au Sahara central: Histoire, évolution des pratiques et enjeux chez les Touaregs Kel Adagh (Niger),” Les Cahiers d’Outre-­Mer 226–­27(2–­3) (2004): 117–­36; Yvan Guichaoua, Circumstantial Alliances and Loose Loyalties in Rebellion Making: The Case of Tuareg Insurgency in Northern Niger (2007–­2009), MICROCON Research Working Paper 20 (Brighton: MICROCON, 2009). 16. See Bøås, “Castles in the Sand”; Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms, and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2010); Morten Bøås and Liv Elin Torheim, “The Trouble in Mali: Corruption, Collusion, Resistence,” Third World Quarterly 34(7) (2013): 1279–­92. 17. Bøås and Torheim, “The Trouble in Mali,” 1282. 18. “Mali: Iyad ag Ghali, le nouveau maître islamiste du nord,” Slate Afrique, October 29, 2012, http://www.slateafrique.com/85115/mali-iyad-ag-ghaly-nouveau-maitre -nord-islamiste-aqmi; William Lloyd-­George, “The Man Who Brought the Black Flag to Timbuktu,” Foreign Policy, October 22, 2012, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles /2012/10/22/the_man_who_brought_the_black_flag_to_timbuktu; Andy Morgan, “What Do the Tuareg Want?” Al Jazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth /opinion/2014/01/what-do-tuareg-want-20141913923498438.html. 19. Most law-­enforcement and intelligence officers from Mali’s neighbors assert that AQIM taxes drug and cigarette trafficking convoys; but there is some evidence that following June 2012, MUJAO liaised with local Arab traffickers operating out of Gao, Mali, and was directly involved in trafficking these goods. Interview by author with senior Mauritanian intelligence official, Dakar, Senegal, September 12, 2012; interview by author with Arab Berabiche notable from Timbuktu, Bamako, Mali, April 12, 2013; interview by author with Songhai notable from Gao, Bamako, Mali, April 17, 2013; focus group discussion by author with seventeen Gao residents (sixteen men, one woman), Bamako, April 20, 2013. 20. This is a vastly simplified recounting of the events owing to issues of space. For important research on the development of the rebel takeover of the north of Mali, and the subsequent coup d’état in Bamako, see Wolfram Lacher, “Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-­Sahara Region,” The Carnegie Papers (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2012); Susanna D. Wing, “Briefing Mali: Politics of a Crisis,” African Affairs 112(448) (2013): 476–­85; Caitriona Dowd and Clionadh Raleigh, “The Myth of Global Islamic Terrorism and Local Conflict in Mali and the Sahel,” African

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Affairs 112(448) (2013): 498–­509; Baz Lecocq, Gregory Mann, Bruce Whitehouse, Dida Badi, Lotte Pelckmans, Nadia Belalimat, Bruce Hall, and Wolfram Lacher, “One Hippopotamus and Eight Blind Analysts: A Multivocal Analysis of the 2012 Political Crisis in the Divided Republic of Mali,” Review of African Political Economy 40(137) (2013): 343–­57. 21. See Pierre Boilley, Les Touaregs Kel Adagh (Paris: Karthala, 1999). 22. Thomas Hüsken and Georg Klute, “Emerging Forms of Power in Two African Borderlands: A Theoretical and Empirical Research Outline,” Journal of Borderland Studies 25(2) (2010): 107–­21; Utas, African Conflicts and Informal Power. 23. This does not limit the chances of other regional Big Men of other ethnic communities or regions of the Sahel. This is only to say that individuals from many Tuareg clans from Kidal have developed intense knowledge of the desert, and have skillfully positioned themselves to acquire key rents from the Malian state through decentralization agreements. In fact, while trafficking in cocaine and hashish is believed to have been first taken up by Kidal Tuaregs from around 1999, Arab elites have since well surpassed this initial Tuareg advantage. A division of labor has developed across ethnic communities depending on the comparative advantage of tangible and intangible resources available to different individual illicit economic operators in the Sahel: guides, armed guards, drivers, logisticians, convoy leaders, surveillants, bankrollers, bosses. 24. The death of two Radio France International (RFI) journalists, Ghislane Dupont and Claude Verlon, fifteen kilometers on the outskirts of Kidal sadly demonstrates this fact. Dupont and Verlon had been interviewing a senior official of the MNLA rebel group when they were kidnapped by gunmen allegedly connected to AQIM. Kidnapped Europeans have fetched sizable amounts of cash for several extended networks in the Sahel who sell kidnapped victims to AQIM, with the latter receiving hostage payments from Western governments. The perpetrators hit an unseen boulder covered in sand, causing the total loss of oil from the vehicle’s motor, which subsequently overheated. It is believed that escaping with the hostages in tow would have been too difficult, as French intervention forces based outside of Kidal were surely en route. Dupont and Verlon were killed. See Radio France International, “Journalistes de RFI tués au Mali: La thèse d’une prise d’otages ratée est privilégiée,” November 14, 2013: http://www.rfi .fr/afrique/20131114-enquete-sur-les-deux-journalistes-rfi-tues-mali-these-une-prise -otages-ratee-est-privilegiee/. 25. Insights gleaned from interviews by author, Bamako, Mali, April 11–­21, 2013; Niamey, Niger, November 18–­23, 2013; verified by personal e-­mail communication to author from former MNJ rebel (senior cadre) July 8, 2014. 26. Personal e-­mail communication, former MNJ rebel. 27. Interview with Malian government development practitioner from Kidal; personal e-mail communication, former MNJ rebel (senior cadre). 28. These convoy armed guards are often drawn from the rank and file of former rebellions who had not been given the opportunity of integration into state security services by local Big Men. Involvement in trafficking activities is one way to advance in social standing and position in societies marked by hierarchical and caste systems of dominance. 29. See Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience, 138–­40; Baz Lecocq and Paul Schrijver, “The War on Terror in a Haze of Dust: Potholes and Pitfalls on the Saharan Front,” Journal of

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Contemporary African Studies 25(1) (2007): 141–­66; James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 171–­72; focus group Kidal Tuaregs. 30. Interview by author with member of the Nigerien National Guard from the Agadez region, Niamey, Niger, November 19, 2013; former MNJ rebel (senior cadre); interview by author with former Tuareg rebel/integrated Malian customs official, Bamako, Mali, April 21, 2013. 31. Utas, African Conflicts and Informal Power, 6–­7. 32. Ellis, “West Africa’s International Drug Trade,” 173, 182; Simon Julien, “Le Sahel comme espace de transit des stupéfiants: Acteurs et conséquences politiques,” Hérodote, no. 142 (2011): 137–­38; Lacher, “Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-­Sahara Region,” 9–­12; Roland Marchal, “Briefing: Military (Mis)Adventures in Mali, African Affairs 112(448) (2013): 493. 33. This information was triangulated by nearly every interview conducted with both state and nonstate interlocutors and testifies to the research cited regarding state complicity in the drug trade. Interview by author with senior Malian foreign affairs official, Niamey, Niger, April 26, 2013; interview by author with Malian journalist, Bamako, Mali, October 10, 2013; interview by author with Tuareg notable from Agadez, Niamey, Niger, November 20, 2013; interview with Malian government development practitioner from Kidal. 34. See Jean-­François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, eds., The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). 35. See World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2011); European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Annual Report 2010: The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010); UNODC, Cocaine Trafficking in West Africa: The Threat to Stability and Development (Vienna: UNODC, 2007); UNODC, Drug Trafficking as a Security Threat in West Africa (Vienna: UNODC, 2008). 36. Interview by author with three senior EUCAP-­Sahel Officials, Niamey, Niger, April 30, 2013; personal e-­mail communication to author from senior EUCAP-­Sahel official, March 13, 2014. 37. See Mark B. Salter, “Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession,” International Political Sociology 1(1) (2007): 49–­67; Ayse Ceyhan, “Technologization of Security: Management of Uncertainty and Risk in the Age of Biometrics,” Surveillance and Society 5(2) (2008): 102–­23; and Philippe M. Frowd, “The Field of Border Control in Mauritania,” Security Dialogue 45(3) (2014): 226–­41. 38. “Eighth Annual Trans-­Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership Conference, Remarks by Linda Thomas-­Greenfield Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs,” October 30, 2013; available at http://www.state.gov/p/af/rls/rm/2013/216028.htm. 39. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 189–­92. 40. Frowd, “The Field of Border Control in Mauritania,” 232. 41. Interview by author with three senior U.S. state department counterterrorism officials, June 10, 2013, Washington, D.C. 42. Ministère de la Justice, République du Niger, “Allocution de son excellence,

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Monsieur Marou Amadou, à l’occasion de la cérémonie solennelle de remise de matériels roulants, moyens de transmission et autres matériels techniques financés par l’Union Européenne dans le cadre du PAJED-­II,” March 14, 2013, http://www.justice .gouv.ne/?q=node/254. 43. These funds are provided through the EU’s Instrument for Stability short-­term crisis funding. The initial thirty-­six vehicles provided cost €9 million. See “Coopération Mali-­Union européenne : L’Union européenne dote en véhicules les forces de sécurité et la justice maliennes,” L’Indépendant, July 3, 2013, http://www.maliweb.net/armee /cooperation-mali-union-europeenne-lunion-europeenne-dote-en-vehicules-les-forces -de-securite-et-la-justice-maliennes-156461.html. 44. See Mutuma Ruteere and Marie-­Emmanuelle Pommerolle, “Democratizing Security or Decentralizing Repression? The Ambiguities of Community Policing in Kenya,” African Affairs 102(409) (2003): 587–­604; Alice Hills, “Police Commissioners, Presidents, and the Governance of Security,” Journal of Modern African Studies 45(3) (2007): 403–­23; and Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, “Securing the City: Private Security Companies and Non-­State Authority in Global Governance,” International Relations 2(2) (2008): 237–­53. 45. Interview by author with four senior French security officials, Niamey, Niger, April 23, 2013. These types of insights were also shared in other conversation with European and North American police and security liaisons posted in the Dakar and Ouagadougou in July–­September 2012, and in Bamako and Niamey in October–­November 2013.

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Acknowledgments The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided support for this research and for the presentation of this research at the International Studies Association, the Canadian Political Science Association, and the Millennium Conference. Earlier versions of the Introduction were presented at the invitation of Goethe University, Queen’s University, Queen’s University Belfast, and the Université de Québec in Montreal. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues who gave essential feedback and support, particularly Can Mutlu, Jairus Grove, Miguel de Larrinaga, Benjamin Muller, Pete Adey, Emily Gilbert, and Debbie Lisle. I thank Pieter Martin at the University of Minnesota Press for his sincere, enthusiastic support for this project at every stage.

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Contributors

Rune Saugmann Andersen is a postdoctoral researcher at University of

Tampere, Finland. His interdisciplinary research is concerned with the visual mediation of security in images, video, and textiles. His work has appeared in Security Dialogue, EJIR, Journalism Practice, European Journal of Communication, and JOMEC Journal, and his research video and papers are available via saugmann.tumblr.com. Josef Teboho Ansorge is a JD candidate at Yale Law School. He has worked

at the World Bank and was a principal policy adviser and human rights investigator in the U.S. government–­funded Libera Security Sector Reform Program. He earned a PhD in international relations from the University of Cambridge, where he was editor in chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He writes on information technology and international security. Claudia Aradau is senior lecturer in international relations and war studies

at King’s College London. She is associate editor of the journal Security Dialogue and member of the editorial collective Radical Philosophy. Her most recent book is Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown, coauthored with Rens van Munster. Helen Arfvidsson has a PhD in politics and international studies. Her re-

search spans the fields of citizenship, urban restructuring, and transformative politics. She has worked with labor unions on HIV/AIDS policy in South Africa and with urban development and youth policy in Gothenburg, Sweden. Alexander D. Barder is assistant professor of international relations at

Florida International University. He is author of Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance and (with François Debrix) Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Horror, and Violence in World Politics. His work focuses on a neomaterialist theory of crisis.

359

Tarak Barkawi is reader in international relations at the London School of

Economics. He earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota and specializes in the study of war, armed forces, and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South. He is author of Globalization and War. Peter Chambers is lecturer in criminology at Deakin University. He works

on borders, security, and technology in developing a social theory of power in transformation. His recent work addresses Australian border security and jurisdiction, sovereignty and security governance, and the interface of control, spectacle, and surveillant attention. Shine Choi is the Korea Foundation visiting assistant professor at the Uni-

versity of Mississippi with joint appointments in the Croft Institute for International Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is author of Re-­imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and Alternatives and has published on love, North Korean art, borders, and sovereignty. Sagi Cohen is a doctoral candidate of political studies at the University of Ot-

tawa and visiting scholar at New York University’s comparative literature department. He has degrees in philosophy and media and communication from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in political science from the University of Victoria. He has published in Journal of Historical Sociology and Cahiers de l’idiote. Thomas N. Cooke is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in Communica-

tion and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His research explores the intersection of U.S. National Security Agency surveillance techniques, Google Glass, privacy theory, materiality studies, technology studies, and critical security studies. He is a graduate fellow at the York Centre for International and Security Studies, and he discusses surveillance, privacy, and technology issues weekly on the radio at News/Talk 1290 CJBK. Anna Feigenbaum is senior lecturer in digital storytelling in the Faculty of

Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. She is coauthor of Protest Camps, which explores the media, governance, and social practices of more than fifty protest camps during fifty years. Her research interests include security culture, data curation, and communication for social justice. She is writing a monograph on the history of tear gas as a policing technology and has writ-

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Contributors

ten for the Guardian, Salon.com, and OpenDemocracy. She can be found on Twitter @drfigtree. Andreas Folkers is a researcher in sociology at the Goethe University Frank-

furt. He studies the biopolitics of catastrophe preparedness in Germany. He was a visiting scholar of international affairs at the New School in New York. Fabian Frenzel is lecturer in political economy of organization at the Univer-

sity of Leicester, UK. His primary research interest is the political implications of travel, tourism, and mobilities, with a focus on the mobility of social movements and political activists. His empirical research areas are slum tourism and protest camps. He is coauthor of Protest Camps and coeditor of Slum Tourism, Poverty, Power, Ethics and Geographies of Inequality. He can be found on Twitter @fabnomad. Kyle Grayson is senior lecturer in international politics in the School of Ge-

ography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University, where he teaches international relations, geopolitics, and popular culture. He is coeditor of the UK Political Studies Association’s journal Politics, associate editor of the journal Critical Studies on Security, and coeditor of the Popular Culture and World Politics book series. Nicky Gregson is professor of human geography at Durham University. She

directed The Waste of the World program, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (2006–­11), and led a project on global ship breaking. She is coauthor of Living with Things, Second-­hand Cultures, and Servicing the Middle Classes. David Grondin is associate professor in the School of Political Studies at the

University of Ottawa. His research centers on the U.S. national security state, the transformation of the American ways of war, secrecy, surveillance, and American popular culture. He is the editor of a special issue of Geopolitics and of War beyond the Battlefield. Xavier Guillaume is lecturer in international relations at the University of

Edinburgh. He is author of International Relations and Identity and coeditor, with Jef Huysmans, of Citizenship and Security.

Contributors

361

Emily Lindsay Jackson is assistant professor in politics at Acadia University.

Her research focuses on the neoliberalizing of security discourses in relation to counterterrorism policy, urban governance, and violence against women. She is particularly concerned with how neoliberal securitization can be resisted and reworked through community-­based, decolonizing, and transformative justice approaches. Miguel de Larrinaga is professor of political science at the University of

Ottawa. His research concerns the deployment of discourses and practices of security, and his projects study securitization and the political, nonlethal use of weapons as weapons of intervention, and politics of air. Debbie Lisle is senior lecturer in international relations in the School of Pol-

itics, International Studies, and Philosophy at Queens University Belfast. Her research explores the intersections of identity, difference, travel, mobility, visuality, materiality, culture, security, colonialism, affect, and violence. She is author of Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (Minnesota, 2016). Mary Manjikian is associate professor and associate dean of the Robertson

School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She is author of Apocalypse and Post-­Politics: The Romance of the End, Threat Talk: Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction, and Securitization of Property Squatting in Western Europe. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. A former Fulbright scholar and former U.S. foreign service officer, she is an external research associate for the U.S. Army War College. Nadine Marquardt is a researcher of human geography at the Goethe Uni-

versity Frankfurt, where she completed her PhD. Her research projects concern the government of homelessness in Germany and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in area-­based social policies. Patrick McCurdy is associate professor of communication at the University

of Ottawa. His research focuses on the media practices of social movements in an age of media saturation. He is coauthor, with Anna Feigenbaum and Fabian Frenzel, of Protest Camps and coeditor of Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the

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Contributors

Future of Communications, Journalism, and Society and Mediation and Protest Movements. He can be found on Twitter as @pmmcc. Mark B. Salter is full professor in political studies at the University of Ot-

tawa. He is editor of Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion (Minnesota, 2015) and Politics at the Airport (Minnesota, 2008), and coeditor, with Can Mutlu, of Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. He is associate editor of Security Dialogue and International Political Sociology. In 2014, he was awarded the Canadian Political Science Association Prize for Teaching Excellence. Adam Sandor received his PhD in political studies from the University of

Ottawa. His research takes an ethnographic approach to examine international state building and police cooperation against organized crime in West Africa. He has contributed to several reports on organized crime in the subregion published by the Institute of Security Studies, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the European Commission’s Mid-­term Review for the Counter-­Terrorism in the Sahel Project.  Nisha Shah is assistant professor of political studies at the University of Ot-

tawa. Her research explores the role of material objects and artifacts in world politics; she considers how and why technological instruments and physical geographies become important political and ethical components in the historical evolution of frameworks of governance and war. Julian Stenmanns is a research associate of human geography at Goethe Uni-

versity Frankfurt. He holds degrees in political science and human geography from the University of Frankfurt and has studied at the School of Geography and Earth Science, Glasgow. His work focuses on critical logistics and the technologies, infrastructures, and territories of global circulation. Casper Sylvest is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark

and the author of British Liberal Internationalism, 1880–­1930. Combining the study of politics, history, law, technology, and film, his work examines modern visions of world politics. He is writing a book, with Rens van Munster, on global political thought after the thermonuclear revolution.

Contributors

363

Rens van Munster is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Interna-

tional Studies (DIIS) and author of Securitizing Migration: The Politics of Risk in the EU and Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (with Claudia Aradau). He is writing a book, with Casper Sylvest, on global political thought after the thermonuclear revolution. Elspeth Van Veeren is a lecturer in political science at the University of Bris-

tol. Her work explores the intersections of security, materiality, and visuality in relation to American politics and U.S. foreign and security policies. Her book Guantánamo and the Materialisation of Post-­9/11 Security is forthcoming.  Srdjan Vucetic is associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and

International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His research interests are American foreign and defense policy and international security. Juha A. Vuori is senior lecturer of international relations at the University

of Turku, Finland, and adjunct professor (Docent) of international politics in the School of Management, University of Tampere, Finland. He is the author of Critical Security and Chinese Politics: The Anti-­Falungong Campaign. Tobias Wille is a research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is

completing his PhD project on the history of Kosovo’s diplomacy.

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Contributors