Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control 9781479805778

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Spaces of Security

Spaces of Security Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control

Edited by Setha Low and Mark Maguire

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2019 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Chapter 1 was previously published as “Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya” by Zoltán Glück in Anthropological Theory 13(3) pp. 297–321. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Low, Setha M., editor. | Maguire, Mark, editor. Title: Spaces of security : ethnographies of securityscapes, surveillance, and control / edited by Setha Low and Mark Maguire. Description: New York : New York University Press, 2019. | Includes ibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018020936| ISBN 9781479863013 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479870066 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Internal security—Social aspects—Case studies. | Security sector—Social aspects—Case studies. Classification: LCC HV6419 .S72 2019 | DDC 363.32—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020936 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

To our children and grandchildren— Max, Sky, and Éabha— for a better future

Contents

Introduction: Exploring Spaces of Security Mark Maguire and Setha Low

1

1. Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya

31

2. Comparative Surveillance Regimes: A Preliminary Essay

57

3. Borderization and Public Security in Argentina

78

4. From Panopticon to Panasonic: The Architecture of Fear in Mega-Events

99

Zoltán Glück

Katherine Verdery

Alejandro Grimson and Brígida Renoldi

Carmen Rial

5. Securing Security: Recursive Security Assemblages in South Africa

122

6. Domesticating Security: Gated Communities and Cooperative Apartment Buildings in New York City and Long Island, New York

141

7. Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel

163

8. The Political Economy and Political Aesthetics of Military Maps

184

Thomas G. Kirsch

Setha Low

Nurit Bird-David and Matan Shapiro

Catherine Lutz

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viii | Contents

9. Enigmatic Presence: Satellites and the Vertical Spatialities of Security Stephen Graham

10. Re-Spatializing Social Security in India Ursula Rao

206 231

About the Editors

253

About the Contributors

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Index

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Introduction Exploring Spaces of Security Mark Maguire and Setha Low

This volume represents the efforts of anthropologists and others to explore spaces of security. Today, security is one of the most prominent topics in anthropology. A growing ethnographic literature explores its various dimensions, from studies of military action and everyday violence to research on specific infrastructures (e.g., Lutz 2002; Low 2003; Masco 2006). Some anthropologists are also exploring contemporary problematization of security by attending to new assemblages and sites of experimentation (e.g., Lakoff and Collier 2009; Maguire and Fussey 2016). Of course, the breadth of this ethnographic literature presents its own challenge. This volume arose from the simple observation that spatial metaphors and images saturate ethnographic research on security, and many of the theoretical devices used—assemblage, infrastructure, network, for example—are thoroughly spatial. Yet, anthropology has not developed a coherent approach to this important dimension of security. This volume draws together ethnographic research on spaces of security from different regions and scales (see also Glück and Low 2017). The examples discussed range from blast-proof bedrooms in Israel to biometric identification in India, and from border control in Argentina to counterterrorism in East Africa. Each contribution focuses on specific spatio-temporal configurations, infrastructural interventions, and shifts in discourse and practice. The different emphasis in each contribution shows the multiplicity of ways that one might grapple with the rascal concept of security. That said, our ethnographic research also demonstrates the power of a spatial lens to bring into focus the ways that security acquires its discursive content and concrete form. 1

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Our effort to explore how security is worked out in specific ethnographic examples is certainly an antidote to grand claims about our “age of security” (see Gros 2012, 2014). Today, some scholars grant “securitization” excessive power as an all-encompassing process. Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose even wonder if it is supplanting liberal democracy: [B]order controls, regimes of surveillance and monitoring, novel forms of individuation and identification, notably those based on biometrics, preventive detention or exclusion of those thought to pose significant risks, massive investment in the security apparatus and much more. Have the political rationalities of advanced liberal democracies been displaced by new rationalities and technologies of government animated by the telos of security? (Lentzos and Rose 2009, 233)

Here, we avoid grand theories and provide several examples that decenter the Western sociological imagination (in this volume see Verdery, and Grimson and Renoldi). This raises a key question: if one cannot gloss security as the latest iteration of late liberal governing, what exactly are we dealing with? There is an understandable temptation to retreat to the library and return with a comforting definition. Indeed, Holbraad and Pedersen (2014) propose that the varieties of security are understandable as the “reproduction” of “collectives.”1 To borrow a diagnosis from Fredric Jameson, this definition suffers from premature clarification, in part because of the complexity of the topic, but also because anthropology has yet to engage fully with adjacent intellectual traditions. As more and more anthropologists venture into the world of security, it is useful to explore a populous realm with several broad churches, a few syncretic movements, but only one truly revered figure.2 In 1983, Barry Buzan published the hugely influential People, States & Fear, a book that anticipates the end of the Cold War and promotes a new field of scholarly activity. He tracks a concept of security that has left the politico-military domain and becomes a mobile idiom for everything from the economy to the very nature of society. How does he define such an expansive concept? Buzan deliberately avoids hasty and superficial definitions when faced with a reality in flux. Instead, he draws from W. B. Gallie’s (1956) philosophical paper on “essentially con-

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tested concepts,” which argues that some popular concepts are powerful and evaluative—like art or freedom, for example—and yet they refuse definition and have little predictive capacity. Rather, they live off “endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users” (Gallie 1968, 169).3 Buzan concludes that security will always elude efforts to capture its essence and defines it as “an area of concern” rather than a precise condition.4 In later writing, Buzan attempted to put shape on his field by looking to the limits of security, only to realize that its object-referent is human life itself: The bottom line of security is survival, but it also reasonably includes a substantial range of concerns about the conditions of existence. Quite where this range of concerns ceases to merit the urgency of the “security” label (which identifies threats as significant enough to warrant emergency action and exceptional measures including the use of force) and becomes part of everyday uncertainties of life is one of the difficulties of the concept. (Buzan 1991, 432–433; cf. Foucault 2007)

Here a threat might be anything deemed as such—even change is potentially menacing—while security is the concept that renders life itself a matter of life and death. Buzan’s core position resonates with earlier concept work by Michel Foucault (2007)—which we will discuss below in some detail—by situating the problematization of security within the broader governance of “population” and indeed life itself. This is by no means a relativist position, because the key question is this: what are the precise conditions for the possibility of particular historical and spatio-temporal configurations of security, within and beyond liberal democracies? This question motivated our anthropological exploration of spaces of security, and we set out to find diverse ethnographic research that might help us think through this topic. This volume arose out of scholarly conversations at conferences around the world but, most especially, at a Wenner Gren Foundation workshop in Ireland. Many participants discussed security as a set of discourses and practices that arrived in their ethnographic field sites from elsewhere, often as a ready-made package of solutions and “mobile

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exemplars” available to respond to some real or imagined crisis. Indeed, many recalled “critical events” (see Das 1995) after which security somehow became the normalized approach to complex societal problems. Others spoke of security as something already present in field sites that went by a different name, “safety” or “peace,” for example, or as a set of discourses and practices that simply do not follow the trajectory implicit in Euro-American sociology. Still others documented it as something extant and operating recursively through demands for ever-increasing security. That said, we all acknowledged the ambiguity of the label, and the particular spatial qualities of a concept that could be simultaneously abstract and yet concrete. This is a broader problem, as Henri Lefebvre reminds us, because everything that arises from social production, indeed all “social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space, their underpinning is spatial. In each particular case, the connection between this underpinning and the relations it supports calls for analysis” (Lefebvre 1991, 440; our emphasis). But how might we approach space with more precision, if indeed a focus on space will give better picture of security?

Theorizing Spaces of Security All of the contributions in this volume, whether on the (in-)securitization of sporting events or the rise of gated communities, acknowledge a crucial issue, namely the curious dynamic between the security imagination and its infrastructural solidity. The example of gated communities is illustrative. During the past three decades, a significant proportion of the US population has engaged in a volitional migration in search of security behind private gates and walls. The infrastructure of a gated community is one of its selling points: walls, gates, and fences stop and search the flows of people, goods, and services, while private security enforces order and control. Moreover, security barriers and technological devices creep into homes and bodies in the form of poly-functional systems for seeing, tracking, or preventing mobility. This “hard” infrastructure is imbricated with the ostensibly “soft” work of the imagination—nostalgia for the imagined community life of some prelapsarian past, for example—giving it concrete form by spatializing

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it. The work of the imagination, therefore, has a crucial part to play in the story of gated communities. Urban theorist Simone Tulumello recently showed the critical role of images, the imagination, and fearful affects in the spatial form of cities. Commenting in particular on the role of the media, he notes, with evident shock, that “in the US, between 1990 and 1998, at the same time as homicide rates declined by 20%, the number of journalistic reports on homicide, not counting news on the Simpson case, grew by 600% (six hundred percent!) (Tulumello 2017, 22–23). The simple point here is that when one speaks of spaces of security, one is developing a relatively open and broad analytical category, one that is open to the powerful role of the imagination, affect (especially fear), the historical, material, and social context that obtains (especially structures of exclusion such as racialization), and the infrastructures and technologies in operation. In this volume, when we speak of spaces of security or “securityscapes” we are deploying a broad but robust ethnographic approach, one that attends to affect and the imagination but also to the specific ways in which discursive content takes on concrete form. In order to open out this approach further, we turn briefly to spatial theory. In recent years, several urban theorists have tried to frame urban transformations occurring in the name of security. Most obviously, Mike Davis (1998, 2006) explores new “geographies of fear.” He describes the emergence of an “urban apartheid” in which the wealthy are increasingly sealed off as “fortified cells” that are ringed by dangerous and criminalized classes (cf. Graham 2010). The deeper the process goes, according to Davis, the more security compounds, especially in the form of heavyhanded policing, the deployment of infrastructure and new technologies, and the rise of private security providers. The image that emerges is of a striated urban world in which security infrastructure partitions distinct social experiences along the lines of race and class. This is the central theme of Peter Sloterdijk’s In the World Interior of Capital (2013), which proposes a global “exterior” surrounding the secure and artificially climatized inner spaces for the privileged. Many such theories of security and the urban form either work off the assumption that conditions for the possibility of good city life has been dismantled or that such a good life is found only in the imagination as an alternative. Absent is what Henri Lefebvre described as the spatial “con-

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sensus” (1991, 57; see also Jacobs 1961). The work of Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacobs—with her well-known image of the bonds of existing sociality shaping public safety—and others is critical in attending to the possibility of vernacular security, security from below as an alternative (though a potentially problematic one) to the cold rationality of administrative order. Indeed, one could argue that much contemporary spatial theory involves explorations of the “politics of possibility” (see Appadurai 2013; e.g., De Certeau 1984; Deleuze 1992). But as Robert Tally (2013) shows in his review of current spatial theory, much of literature on spatial power and spatial possibility refers to or is in response to the work of Michel Foucault. It is important, therefore, to turn back to the fascinating interventions made by Foucault on the precise topic of space and security. In his late-1970s Collége de France lectures, Foucault (2007) briefly touched upon the spatial dimensions of security before abandoning the discussion in favor of governmentality and biopolitics (see Bigo 2008). During his lectures, he speculates about a coming society characterized by a powerful role played by “technology of security.” This technology, he suggests with a degree of caution, remains tied to sovereignty, disciplinary mechanisms, and the law. Yet, a “society of security” might appear rapidly and naturalize itself, as if it grew organically, because it emerged from and targeted population. Security would thus facilitate circulations and stand back from the effervescent emergence of freedoms, and yet operate along the lines of uncertainty, normalization, and “what could be called spaces of security” (Foucault 2007, 11; our emphasis). Foucault proposes that security tends to work on existing material spaces. For example, a bedroom can become a bunker (see Bird-David and Shapiro in this volume) or a local football stadium can be fortified for “mega events” (see Rial in this volume). However, one cannot read such changes as simply the outcome of some narrow-gauge process of “securitization.” While security often works from existing material spaces or licenses the building of new infrastructures, it just as often involves the production of near-future milieus in which to act—elusive spaces filled with possible threats that do not yet exist. This is the realm of anticipation, prevention, precaution (beyond risk, or even danger), and emergence. Importantly, moreover, because security affixes itself to population—something natural and therefore a “reality”—it does not have an ideal state. As Foucault pointed out, security does not “recon-

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struct to a point of perfection” (2007, 19).5 Whereas Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a prison-tower of steel and glass expressed panopticism, no such vision dominates the realm of security. Perhaps, instead of Bentham’s panoptic tower we have Kafka’s “Great Wall of China.” One of Kafka’s short stories describes the construction of an immense barrier to protect against barbarians (see Kafka 1961). However, the project always hinted at being more than a mere wall: planners attempted to sketch a tower to elevate the project to some higher ideal about humanity, but all the public got was an expensive wall full of holes. As literature and geography attest, Foucault was not the only theorist to explore spaces of security in a manner that exposes the infrastructural and the imagination. Recently, Wendy Brown noted the curious tension between the materialization and dematerialization of border security, the high-speed mobility and coterminous rash of wall-building by nation-states. This contradiction, Brown proposes, speaks to the vanishing “political imaginary” of “a global interregnum, a time after the era of state sovereignty, but before the articulation or instantiation of an alternate global order” (Brown 2010, 39). In other words, no matter how concrete a space of security might be, from the barriers that control access to a gated community to the surveillance infrastructure of the US military, there may well be an essential elusiveness. As W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz proposes, “it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity” (2001, 16–17). All of this is of critical importance to the study of security today. As more and more is invested in security infrastructure, and as security becomes the privileged idiom for discoursing on everything from environmental risks to terrorist threats, we must critically evaluate security as a productive force that constitutes and acts through space. We know that security infrastructure is connected to the imaginary, just as concrete effects are tied to affects such as fear. Moreover, we know that ethnographic research shows the varieties of these ties. How, then, do we explore spaces of security anthropologically?

Toward a Spatial Anthropology of Security As mentioned above, security has become one of the most salient topics in anthropology. This is itself important, because most nineteenth- and

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early twentieth-century anthropologists dealt with security in a rather offhand way. They recognized it as something necessary but usually only remarked upon it if struck by its visibility or by its absence. Safety and stability certainly merited discussion, but security, to borrow from Fernand Braudel, named “events not yet considered as such” (quoted in Maguire et al. 2014, 13). Even during the 1970s and 1980s, despite the menacing presence of the Cold War security apparatus across the globe, only a scattering of specific (though still inchoate) studies of security emerged (e.g., Hayano 1974; cf. Nader 1986). However, with the end of the Cold War and dramatic shifts in global governance, security became an obvious leitmotif in countless performances of political power (see Masco 2006). Moreover, especially since September 11, 2001, it has been hard to ignore the ways in which security discourses and practices have saturated contemporary politics and the media, just as it is hard to ignore the planetary projection of US counterterrorism (see Masco 2014). The risk in all of this is that anthropological theories of security are simply reactive. It is timely, therefore, to turn to the literature on the anthropology of security to draw out key theoretical trends, especially spatiality. Over the past two decades, anthropologists have explored the impacts of war, violence, and insecurity on vulnerable populations (e.g., Lutz 2002), while others explore shifting relations between public and private, gates and guards, state and non-state, often under the star of neoliberal reforms (e.g., Low 2003; Goldstein 2010, 2016). Taken together, all of this research points to but rarely makes explicit what Lefebvre (1991) terms a spatial “underpinning.” Whether one studies racialized exclusion through gatedness or shifting state-citizen relations by focusing on the privatization of security, spatial images and metaphors abound.6 This is also true for the large and well-known literature on the US military and processes of militarization. Catherine Lutz (2002) and Joseph P. Masco (2006), for example, explore the specific relationships between Cold War paranoia and the presence of military infrastructures—the often-occluded realm of critical infrastructure. Moreover, despite differences of scale, there are close ties between secretive military infrastructure and everyday experiences of insecurity, even during times of peace. Lest we forget, versions of the American dream, from the utopia of suburban family life to the freedom of highways, are products of Cold

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War paranoia and military structures. The suburbs allowed for dispersed population targets, while the highways allowed one to evacuate a city in the event of a nuclear attack (see Time 1947). Recently, Limor Samimian-Darash and Meg Stalcup (2016) proposed that too much of anthropological literature addresses insecurity rather security.7 In contrast, they attend to what they call “security assemblages,” the rhizomatic, temporary, and experimental formations that manifest themselves between large-scale apparatuses and specific problematizations (see Rabinow 2003). Security is certainly problematized in numerous contemporary settings, though this approach offers tools for specific circumstances. Despite the attractive air of emergence and creativity around the notion of assemblage, the challenge is, and has always been, to understand such novel formations in context, and context often means the mundane realm of security institutions. Marcus and Saka (2006, 102, 106 passim) sound a note of caution around “assemblages” more broadly: [Assemblage] offers an odd, irregular, time-limited object for contemplation. Whoever employs it does so with a certain tension, balancing, and tentativeness where the contradictions between the ephemeral and the structural, and between the structural and the unstably heterogeneous create almost a nervous condition for analytic reason. Indeed, one might argue that once relaxed in terms of the heightened tension it promotes, assemblage becomes something more sober like actor-network theory.8

Of course, there are other studies of security that one might also mention, from Didier Fassin’s Enforcing Order (2013) to Ruben Andersson’s scale-jumping Illegality Inc. (2014). Yet for all this theorizing of structural violence, infrastructure, assemblage, and borders, with the implied spatiality of the concept, the anthropology of security still has a significant spatio-temporal gap. We have yet to see an effort to foreground and explore how security is produced spatially, constructed by multiple actors, discourses, practices, and histories (also see Glück and Low 2017). Our ethnographic case studies demonstrate that we should consider spaces of security as ethnographic objects, as securityscapes. No matter whether one is discussing the securitization of home life in Israel or biometrics in India, the borders of Argentina or gated communities in the

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United States, it seems that securityscapes are in evidence. These spaces of security striate and break up our worlds, spaces in which the security imaginary meets the concrete reality of security technologies and infrastructures, a realm of affects and asymmetries. “Securityscapes” provides the anthropology of security with a useful native concept with which to explore spaces of security ethnographically.

Securityscapes More than two decades ago, Arjun Appadurai (1990, 2–4) argued that situated agents—nation-states, corporations, even groups of individuals— were producing imaginaries and “imagined worlds” but not necessarily “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). He responded with a series of well-known perspectival constructs to capture the emergent experience of global flows: ethnoscape, mediascape, finanscape, ideoscape, and technoscape. He aimed to show how the speed and scale of change were making disjuncture a fundamental characteristic of contemporary experience, such that politics and the work of the imagination involve the “disjunctive and unstable interplay” of different landscapes (Appadurai 1990, 7). Over the decades, the openness of Appadurai’s perspectival approach was lost to calcification due to too little engagement and too much citation. However, the image of multiple landscapes resurfaced in studies of security. In his work on nuclear weapons, Hugh Gusterson adopted the term “securityscape” to address “asymmetrical distributions of weaponry, military force, and military-scientific resources among nation-states and the local and global imaginaries of identity, power, and vulnerability that accompany these distributions” (Gusterson 2004, 166). Perhaps because of the precise nature of the topic, his formulation insisted on a rather monolithic understanding of state power, while foregrounding the important role played by expert communities that are often globally networked (Gusterson 2004, 166–167; cf. Gupta and Ferguson 2002). In short, he imagines a securityscape as a distinct landscape populated by professionals. Recently, however, anthropologists have opened the term to invoke a broader range of agents and agencies but have retained the focus on experts and knowledge circuits (see Albro et al. 2012, 11). It is clear, however, that to date anthropologists have deployed the term

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“securityscape” as a synonym for the US national security apparatus. Despite the gravitational attraction of US national security’s planetary power, it is important that anthropologists attend to a more diverse universe. Anthropologists are not alone in moving beyond state-centric approaches (see Wilson and Bakker 2016) and exploring “vernacular” and “every-day” security (Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2015; cf. Bubandt 2005). Indeed, some scholars attend to everyday security along spatiotemporal axes, focusing on its affective dimensions (see Lemanski 2012). However, as anthropologists, we must attend to security as an ethnographic object. Of course, security often manifests itself as asymmetrical and even elite discourse. Security may sometimes be the concern of effervescent and future-oriented assemblages of technology and expertise, but it then retreats into a landscape of older institutions and infrastructures. Moreover, security may be nothing more than a neighborhood gate or fence. Sometimes anthropological theories are nothing more than descriptions of how things are in field sites. However, through foregrounding the spatial dimensions of security, we are able to illuminate particular aspects of security that demand theoretical attention. If one thinks of security in terms of securityscapes, questions of temporality (including speed), vector, and scale spring to mind. This is useful because one of the more vexing questions in current social-scientific discussions of security is spatial. Researchers who explore the deployment of new technologies or the construction of new infrastructure note how they are folded into the mold of local life while being simultaneously partitioned or occluded, or serving the interests of other agents elsewhere (e.g., Klauser 2010). What are we to make of interventions in securityscapes that are non-local scape-shifters? Appadurai noted this exact problem some time ago. In a twist on Marx’s “fetishism of commodities,” he proposed that production now masks not only social relations but also the “complicated spatial dynamic” of globally dispersed forces driving production. Thus, what one can experience “locally”—such as a factory, stadium, or military site, for example—may be an outcome of processes at a different scale or in a different space. Thus, we propose that securityscapes, a frame inspired by Appadurai’s work, is helpful, and recent ethnographic efforts show this potential. Yarin Eski’s Policing, Port Security and Crime Control deploys

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the term securityscape to describe securitized ports as landscapes saturated with security wherein people still live their ordinary lives—where “precautionary measures reign over social life, where ‘security’ is both highlighted and made concrete” (Eski 2016, 86). Thus, the advantage of thinking about securityscapes is that it allows one to grapple with a hard-to-define spatio-temporal configuration that includes the affective and imaginary as well as the infrastructural and concrete. This is certainly in keeping with contemporary geographical theory, which is attending to territorial and border security as volume: beyond older images of frictions and flows, walls and wire fences, Stuart Elden (2005, 2007, 2013) discusses “volumetric” spaces, multidimensional landscapes wherein the vertical is as important as the more traditional horizons of geopolitics. Here we are suggesting that securityscapes can be individually contained (an airport, a stadium, a gated community, a bomb shelter) as well as ethnographically studied, but that they are part of a network of spaces and securityscapes that ultimately provide a cultural code for living as well as a material map of their social and political production. Let us consider three examples of how the term securityscape might operate at different scales: logistics, gated communities, and CCTVs. Deborah Cowen gives us a direct and accessible example with which to work through all of this from the problematization of circulation and control in the world of logistics. A US Coast Guard admiral tells her, “To sustain prosperity, we open the gates. To ensure security, we close the gates,” but the gates are not mere physical barriers. Rather, the US homeland is protected by “layered security,” and security “reorganizes space and scale” (Cowen 2010: 75–77; our emphasis). But when we consider the “gates” to an economy or nation-state as a securityscape, we also assume activity at other scales, from the geopolitical on one side, to the “homeland.” In many contexts, houses and communities are semi-professional securityscapes as residents attempt to master and make safe their worlds. More concretely, gated communities are designed as residential environments built to promote security and have quite specific architectural elements such as walls and gates, legal underpinnings based on corporate law and the loss of civic rights, institutionalized forms of governance

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encoded in Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions (CC&Rs), and an affective atmosphere of fear of crime and others (see Low in this volume). The point we are making is that, while a gated community is certainly a “space of security,” that is, a socially produced space that has evolved in response to the fears of residents and the racial capitalism of developers, it is also a contemporary fixture on the American suburban landscape. It reproduces racist social relations, institutional arrangements, architectural details, legal and symbolic encodings, and affective structures of feeling. This aspect of the gated communities renders them more than just “spaces,” but material features of a security-based landscape, a securityscape, that is transforming residents’ and their neighbors’ sense of place, safety, inclusion, and citizenship. In another, more technical and infrastructural example, a CCTV camera may simultaneously protect private assets while combating terrorism, it may be a platform for several moving technological parts and degrees of systems integration; elements of its functioning may be nonlocal, transparent, occluded, or secret even to its operator. One could argue that any CCTV camera creates a securityscape composed of these contradictions and inconsistencies. Yet if we examine the locations of all the CCTV cameras surrounding Union Square in New York City (about 240 cameras), we could begin to understand how the urban landscape has been crafted and reinforced by policing, legal regulations, corporate financial control, and specific behavioral rules that are changing New York City public space and civic life. Clearly, then, the challenge of understanding security today is both spatial and temporal; it includes the examination of infrastructural interventions and the discursive and symbolic practices that make up its paths, links, and trajectories. In this regard, security is an ethnographic object.

Security as an Ethnographic Object The chapters in this volume draw upon distinct imaginaries, infrastructures, governance strategies, social structures as well as various affects that characterize the spaces of security studied by our contributors. The volume opens with chapters by Zoltán Glück, Katherine Verdery, and Alejandro Grimson and Brígida Renoldi. Broadly, these chapters

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describe the ways in which security problematizes, distributes, and targets individuals, neighborhoods, and borders in contexts that are tremendously diverse. Glück’s chapter on Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya tracks the aggressive prosecution of the War on Terror in the wake of the 2013 Al-Shabaab attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall. This critical event led to Operation Usalama Watch, which involved roundups, demolitions, forced relocations, and a great many human rights abuses, all with little evidence indicating the successful countering of actual terrorism. Glück is interested in the multilevel transformations in governing that openly connect counterterrorism, military interventions, border walls, checkpoints, and a raft of legislation. People experience security as insecurity, though not always, as he patiently explains. His analysis certainly shows security becoming the preferred idiom of a state that is being renegotiated, re-territorialized, and re-scaled. However, people coproduce security in interesting ways. What they experience is an uneven “affective infrastructure,” a city perceived and lived as a series of safe or danger zones. But can security-sociality develop into an imagined community, he wonders? Nairobi’s citizens want security, but when they assemble to demand it, the state security forces give them clouds of tear gas instead. Readers will certainly find in Glück’s rich ethnography many of the salient themes in the broad anthropology of security literature. He tracks the rise of security as a preferred idiom for contemporary governance, coterminous with the rise of a peculiar affective infrastructure. However, while one can see striking parallels with ethnographic research carried out elsewhere (e.g., Fassin and Pandolfi 2010), Glück’s work insists that we attend to both the transnational flow of late-liberal governance and the unstable and unfinished cultural potentiality of securityscapes. It is important, therefore, to move from this analysis of uneven in-securitization in Africa to other examples that show the variegated history of security. Diverse and tangled histories are the substance of chapter 2. In Comparative Surveillance Regimes, Katherine Verdery gives a historical anthropology of labor-intensive surveillance by “formerly existing socialism” in 1948–1989 Romania, which she then contrasts with fearinspiring Nazism and contemporary dataveillance. When one reads

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Verdery’s work on communism’s unsophisticated listening infrastructure and the vast, always-emergent networks of informers, it is difficult to think in terms of “assemblages” without doing violence either to Deleuze’s concept or to Verdery’s ethnography. The communist regime certainly waded into anticipatory knowledge at the micro-affective levels, but it ended up drowning in waves of information. In this volume, Thomas Kirsch describes this as the “recursive” quality of security— its capacity to work upon itself. Certainly, in communist Romania the system referred to itself and choked on knowledge of itself. However, as Verdery notes, the surveillance project also lacked a realizable target. Security denoted socialist well-being, and thus the regime deployed a vacuous word to describe an impossible state. What of contemporary data-led security and surveillance? Verdery proposes that a full understanding of historical context helps to isolate the spatiotemporal features of the present while showing the context in which contemporary discourses and practices must operate. It is critical here to realize that Verdery’s chapter speaks of surveillance networks. Such networks illustrate a key attribute of security: sometimes they manifest themselves in concrete spatiality; sometimes they remain in the realm of connections, information nodes, or images of how the real or imagined world works. It is similarly useful to situate the work of Alejandro Grimson and Brígida Renoldi as contributing to anthropology’s understanding of the variety of contexts in which security is emergent. Like Verdery’s work in this volume, Grimson and Renoldi provide an antidote to the perspective that things are always entirely new. The military dictatorships that scarred Latin America during the 1960s and ’70s imagined themselves to be operating in a global war against communism. Today, the dictatorships are fading from memory, as are the major threats posed by radical enemies inside and outside. Contemporary Latin American regimes seem to suffer, instead, from what Ken Minogue once termed the St. George-in-retirement syndrome: having slain the dragon, ever-smaller challenges must suffice, eventually leading to hacking at thin air. Grimson and Renoldi thus write about “borderization,” which is ostensibly a security response to terrorism, crime, and illicit mobility, especially at the Tri-Border Area separating Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The border is, of course, where legal and illegal flows are separated, but with

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great attention to border sociality Grimson and Renoldi describe a zone of multiple discretions without which nothing would move. As different as each of these cases is theoretically and substantively, they offer insights into the many ways that security is produced in and through identifiable securityscapes. By applying this conceptualization to each, it is possible to reveal the impact of security temporally and at different spatial scales. Several contributors to this volume write about security by focusing on the level of architectural infrastructures (Rial, Kirsch, Low, and Bird-David and Shapiro) and the arc of this cluster of chapters reveals the complexity and compounding qualities of security. During the past several decades, major sporting events and their associated infrastructure have been designated as spaces of security. In chapter 4, From Panopticon to Panasonic: The Architecture of Fear in Mega-Events, Carmen Rial follows this vector in Brazil. Once, according to Rial, Brazilian football games attracted many tens of thousands of mostly peaceful fans in displays of demotic devotion to their local teams. Today, she tells us, the process of attending a game is strikingly similar to taking an international flight—during the 2014 World Cup one even walked from ordinary and everyday Brazil into a “free area” operated by the international football association, FIFA. What explains these scape-shifting transformations? Rial points to “critical events” (see Das 1995). The Heysel and Hillsborough disasters in Europe during the 1980s problematized large-scale (and very lucrative) football events as being vulnerable to threats from “hooligans.” The threat of organized though seemingly senseless violence from young men appears sufficient to rid the experience of sport of its earlier demotic quality—even the occasional profanity became a nuisance. Rial documents the different security infrastructures that now sanitize football stadiums, from CCTV and listening devices to “architectural individualization,” but the result may well be the draining out of the very experience that characterizes the sport, and it is experience that is, after all, its unique selling point. This tendency of security to turn on itself—the tendency of the object of securitization to be security—is central to the work of Thomas Kirsch. In chapter 5, Securing Security: Recursive Security Assemblages in South Africa, he explores the reasons behind the widespread sense that the world is witnessing “all-encompassing securitization” from the “intimacy of the domestic realm into the vast expanses of transnational

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space.” Kirsch warns against the dyad that places security in opposition to insecurity and instead looks at the limits of (in)security processes (see also Bigo 2008, 2014). Rather than follow the logic of endless expansion, Kirsch observes the ways in which “security needs to be secured.” He deploys a number of examples drawn from his ethnographic research on the South African “securityscape.” For example, Robert, a middleclass family man living in the Eastern Cape Province, purchased a dog to protect his home. The dog vanished from his front garden even though high walls surround the property. Robert replaced the dog and added barbed wire to the walls. However, he then felt compelled to purchase a CCTV system to protect the valuable barbed wire, which was protecting the guard dog. Moreover, Robert’s surveillance system depends on the wider electric infrastructure, and sometimes thieves target the electrical cables. Thus, Robert’s “scaled security assemblage” gives way to a broader, striated, and shifting securityscape. Specific interventions and infrastructures within scaled securityscapes are also the topic of Setha Low’s chapter on Domesticating Security. In chapter 6, Low turns to the embodied and affective infrastructure that connects “private” home security in the United States to class structure and the broader security apparatus. The ethnographic location—and battleground—is a middle class that seems beset on all sides by a seemingly disparate process of financialization, enclosure, surveillance, regulatory changes, and the ever-present fear of downward mobility. Drawing on more than 20 years of ethnographic research, Low recognizes that processes of in-securitization involve new assemblages and infrastructures within broader structures, and security-sociality— novel forms of sociality that are emergent around those assemblages and infrastructures. Sociality is sometimes emergent around the hardware— bollards, fences, and high walls—but Low is especially interested in the software of rules, regulation, and protocols (see also Deleuze 1992). Her analysis shows that security, though complex and elusive, often produces outcomes on other landscapes, such as that of social inequality. In her work, we see the instantiation of security and the reification of deep inequalities. But if Low’s securityscape offers a race- and class-based battleground, this image is rendered in even more dramatic form in chapter 7, Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel, by Nurit Bird-David and Matan

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Shapiro. They describe the effects of the post-1992 legal requirement to construct mamad or security rooms in Israeli homes. Here one sees the emergence of security-emergency within domestic life and its naturalization. Of course, this process involves a shift in the landscapes of public and private, and the already unstable line between civilian “peace” and soldier at war. Mamads, however, are not bunkers: they are generally ordinary-looking children’s rooms, designed to withstand missile attacks. Of course, Bird-David and Shapiro do not ignore the broader context, indeed their argument is that Israel’s routine emergency has become an intimate routinergency that reflects shifts in space and scale. After all, Israel’s military sometimes breaches the protective walls that surround the Israeli state in search of “terrorists” to assassinate. The argument here is that one might approach territorial space as volume filled by multiple scapes and networks, some real and some imaginary, from protective rooms at home to assassinations abroad. Bird-David and Shapiro emphasize the moral and other uncertainties in this example, together with the process of normalization, but they foreground space. Fundamentally, they explain, the mamads are more than security infrastructure: they are critical infrastructure. The final cluster of chapters in this volume (Lutz, Graham, and Rao) explore security infrastructure with a particular emphasis on technology. In chapter 8, on The Political Economy and Political Aesthetics of Military Maps, Catherine Lutz explores “transparent” maps, norms, and military institutions in Guam. Her work draws out the underexplored aesthetic dimensions in reports on the environmental impact of the US presence. Lutz describes the global archipelago of military infrastructure and its impacts on “strategic and disposable” island populations. US environmental law applies to Guam, thus environmental statements and some interaction with stakeholders must accompany expansive military plans. In common with other contributors to this volume, Lutz recognizes the layers of security available even in “transparent” maps. On the one hand, the maps jump scale frequently: the mapmakers frame the often-destructive local impacts of bases as necessary to the security of the Western Pacific Region or even to the projection of planetary force. On the other hand, the maps are scape-shifting “technologies,” situated in and between the multidimensional securityscape—an active and future-oriented milieu in which to act—and local environmental landscapes.

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Catherine Lutz’s discussion of the history of military maps shows an increasing emphasis on geographic information systems and efforts to know and act in multidimensional space. The US military, in particular, has foregrounded and funded investment in future-oriented technologies, and the high-tech infrastructures of the contemporary tend to emerge first in the military securityscape. Today, satellite infrastructures survey the planet, and the cartographic imagination must account for verticality and “volumetric” (Elden 2013). Of course, verticality is by no means new. In 1912, Italian aircraft dropped propaganda and bombs on Turkey’s civilian population; British airpower threated Ireland in 1916 and devastated Iraqi populations two years later. Indeed, by the 1930s, war was certainly vertical aesthetically. Here is Benito Mussolini’s description of his enjoyment of the Abyssinian war: We had set fire to the wooded hills, to the fields and little villages. . . . It was all most diverting. . . . The bombs hardly touched the earth before they burst out into white smoke and an enormous flame and the dry grass began to burn. I thought of the animals; God, how they ran. [ . . . ] After the bombing racks were emptied I began throwing bombs by hand. . . . It was most amusing. (quoted in Russell 2004 [1938], 18)

However, well before Mussolini had a chance to murder people from above, writers imagined a future of airpower. H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air (2004 [1908], 246) imagines a world composed of multiple “fabrics,” bending and giving, from the monetary and production systems to the scientific culture, held together by “the hallucination of security.” Verticality, volume, and the security imaginary are all themes in chapter 9 by Stephen Graham, Enigmatic Presence: Satellites and the Vertical Spatialities of Security. Graham opens with a dizzying proposition: in space, the vertical and the horizontal axes merge into the orbital. This multidimensional securityscape of nearly 1,000 active satellites is difficult to imagine let alone visualize, in part because of the number of clandestine “black” satellites, but also because of the occluded sites and infrastructure back on planet earth. It is also difficult to analyze the significant role of satellites in the contemporary global economy without referencing the military origins of digital communications, global positioning, and images, for example. Even the user-friendly and

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near-ubiquitous “scale-jumping” offered by Google Earth refers back to long-held military desire to hold the “high ground.” Graham refuses to relegate satellites as the panoptic gaze of a new imperialism. Instead, referencing Peter Sloterdijk, he attends to the possibilities in this “inverted astronomy,” the growing critical engagement, sous-surveillance activism, and even potential pleasure. Then again, he notes, even contemporary activism is reliant on scape-shifting “dual use” technologies and infrastructures. In the final chapter, Re-Spatializing Social Security in India, Ursula Rao brings together many of the salient themes in this volume. She adds to our understanding of the diverse securityscapes in the contemporary, exploring security’s unevenness in terms of infrastructure and technology. Indeed, her chapter is on one of the great examples of security in the contemporary moment: extraordinary rolling out of biometric identification in India. Rao foregrounds the “seamful” layering of the spatial imagination of paper-based Indian bureaucracy with the emergent spatial imagination of biometrically enabled governance. State bureaucracy in India, and elsewhere, problematizes the mobility of the poor who shift locations while following networks of support and opportunity. The older spatial logic of state verticality and encompassment (see Gupta and Ferguson 2002) necessitates the fixing of populations in a governmental terrain. Biometric security, however, promises a new era in which citizens can collect benefits by verifying identity rather than fixing location. This is a nontrivial transformation, because now populations can be managed in ways that allow circulation and flow. However, as Rao’s rich ethnographic chapter on the (in-)securitization of welfare unfolds, it becomes clear that older spatial imaginings remain like a palimpsest. The ways in which the state imagines and responds to the deserving poor, and undeserving “imposters,” certainly indicates an enduring asymmetrical landscape of power, access, and privilege. Nevertheless, the anthropological model of a state landscape of verticality and encompassment must open to a multidimensional governmentality whereby biometric security aims to free citizens from the fixity of the past, opening greater access to governance, but reinforcing older asymmetries while introducing new ones. What Ursula Rao shows is the emergence and institutionalization of biometric security in the bureaucratic landscape of India, the emergence and institutionalization of a biometric securityscape.

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Conclusion The number of anthropological projects on security is rising steadily. Ethnographic research is occurring at different scales, with different concepts and theoretical lenses available. However, the chapters in this volume clearly show that we must draw the spatio-temporal dimensions of security into the foreground. Each contribution attends to the production of security spaces by different actors, discourses, practices, and temporalities. No matter whether we are discussing the biometric security of the body in India or the satellite surveillance of the globe, we require a spatio-temporal framework in order to attend to powerful, pervasive, and yet elusive form of contemporary security. The contributions in this volume show us not only the recruitment of prior spatial regimes, the infrastructural interventions, and the production of near-future security milieu but also the particular ways in which security concretizes. Our use of the term “securityscape” is an effort to highlight the asymmetrical architectural, institutional, legal, and affective qualities of security that are available in the ethnographic contexts we write about. Therefore, when we discuss securityscapes, we are describing the security presence found in a contemporary landscape, the curious dynamic between the security imagination and its infrastructural solidity. And, we remain open to the possibility that failure is the predominant feature of a security imaginary—such that we are left with weapons, walls, and razor wire, but no vision of and for the society being protected. Throughout, we describe security as an elusive concept with dangerous potential, acknowledging that its conceptual vagueness is itself a danger. Our neighbors in disciplines such as international relations, political science, political sociology, and security studies acknowledge the vagueness of security and its extraordinary rise and spread. Indeed, Lentzos and Rose describe a vast horizon of “new rationalities and technologies” (2009, 233). But here, we go further than simply mapping contemporary shifts in governance. The chapters in this volume shift scale from the body and the intimate realms of home to the management of borders and global surveillance programs. We share a spatial lens in order to render security more visible by locating this elusive concept in a specific time and place. This volume shows the diverse global landscapes

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wherein security and insecurity are lived; security shows itself as securityscapes that striate the contemporary—interventions often in the form of infrastructures that give material content to security; interventions that also show the work of the often-partial security imagination. What we find most compelling about this approach is the way it cuts across the various ethnographic cases and enables a more grounded discussion of how (in)securitization processes work. By comparing the ethnographic cases, we have been able to identify commonalities that we offer as preliminary conclusions of the utility of our spatially oriented and landscape-based analysis. The first of our comparative findings focuses on how the infrastructures—biometric, architectural, GIS, satellite photography, policing, and many others—generally function through the processes of inclusion and exclusion. Usually the infrastructure focuses on excluding identified people from a particular landscape—such as Somalis excluded from certain neighborhoods in Nairobi (Glück) or poor and workingclass spectators from a soccer stadium (Rial). The infrastructures, however, are equally facile at including certain people within a secure zone, such as in the case of safe rooms in Israeli homes (Bird-David and Shapiro) or within the walls of a gated community or co-op apartment building (Low; also Kirsch). These infrastructural processes of inclusion and exclusion exercise power spatially, that is, by locating and containing a marked landscape, as well as temporally through fluctuations of control throughout the day, month, or even year as the infrastructure and related security apparatus morph and reorganize. While people identified as “risky” are most often targeted, other community resources such as land (Lutz), neighborhood stores and services (Glück), and recreational spaces (Rial) are also recruited, regulated, and restricted by the various infrastructures examined. The clearest ethnographic case is Grimson’s and Renoldi’s use of “borderization” to theorize how borders, walls, and other kinds of material and technological boundaries are basic components of any (in)securitizing process, especially with regard to the border areas between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Borderization, albeit developed as a way to theorize national frontiers, is equally foundational for understanding how infrastructures exclude and/or include in any of the securityscapes described in this volume. Borders are constructed by walls and guards

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in gated communities to include residents and exclude others; in fact, as is mentioned in a number of the chapters, if there were no borders, informants wonder how they would distinguish who is to be included or excluded. Borders are essential, whether drawn on a map to lay claim to land for US military use and to exclude local residents from their sacred and historic sites in Guam (Lutz) or employed through the biometric characteristics of individual bodies to determine whether a person and his or her family are to be excluded/included in securing the right to health care and a sense of citizenship (Rial). The second theoretical point that emerges from this comparative analysis is that infrastructures of inclusion and exclusion depend on people, land, and other kinds of goods being rendered “visible” in order to be securitized (and in other cases invisible to escape the infrastructural gaze).9 Again, Guam military maps are a useful example in the way that map lines create regions, and subsections are then brightly colored to make them “visible” to those who use the map to secure land for the US military—even though the brightly colored regions have an imperfect and often misrepresented relationship to the lived landscape. By making some sections more visible, they also become defendable and treated as requiring protection. Most often, however, the process of making people visible, readable, and intelligible takes the form of the social construction of race, gender, and class categories that are stereotyped, given “naturalized” physical/ biological characteristics, and enable profiling. Making people visible in some contexts may offer greater power and representation, but within the securityscape bodily visibility usually means that the security apparatus can more easily locate those to be monitored, followed, or excluded, as in the cases of the security police in Nairobi (Glück), private security guards in Brazil (Rial) or the United States (Low), or national informers in Romania (Verdery). Rendering people, land, and resources visible, whether through infrastructures of biometric technologies, social and behavioral cues, foreignness, racial profiling, or moving across border walls, is a critical component of spatial governance. Foucault’s (2007) initial formulation of a concept of spatial governance, however, requires a combination of enclosure and surveillance. While the cases presented in this volume do not always include enclosure as a means of making people and things

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visible, it does apply to a majority of the ethnographic cases: gated communities, policing of Somali neighborhoods, outlined areas on maps, soccer stadiums, and others, and the main securitizing process is a combination of surveillance and policing of those who have been identified. To follow the development of Foucault’s (2007) thought, security apparatuses allow “natural” processes to occur, facilitating circulations and controlling those circulations. Thus, as we show in this volume, spatial governance strategies are also deployed even when “enclosure” is not the main strategy for containment since spatial governance can be equally exercised through biometric markers, racial characteristics, class behavior, or simply not being “people like us.” The third finding, then, of this comparative project is that securityscapes and their securitization processes rely heavily on spatial governance employing an array of strategies of making people, places, and materials visible to control, exclusion, and—if not adequately controlled—expulsion (Sassen 2014). Our final concluding point focuses on the role of discourses that obscure the personal damage, societal violence, and landscape destruction of securityscapes as revealed in the various ethnographic cases. Not all of the cases included in this volume address the discursive power of (in) securitization processes, but at least a few chapters provide hints of how language works to keep the brutality of security power hidden. Why else would gated-community and co-op residents spend so much time talking about their fear of others and rationalizing their security strategies, which are often racist and exclusionary? Lutz offers excellent examples of how the discourse of military security for Guam and the protection of the island and its residents simply provide a cover for taking more land or contaminating yet another coast or valley. Because of the extensive literature on the discourse of fear and security, we have chosen to emphasize the infrastructural and affective dimensions of our ethnographic object and have set out to interrogate its materiality. We took this tack in the hopes of revealing how the ephemeral qualities of security actually take on concrete form and reproduce material landscapes of fear, violence, and enclosure. Looking across the chapters suggests that (in)securitization processes are promoted, enhanced, and reproduced by (1) infrastructures of exclusion and inclusion; (2) increased visibility through borderization, stereotyping, and “older” practices such as racial profiling; (3) spatial governance through

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enclosure and surveillance; and (4) discursive practices that obscure the violence and destruction potential of (in)securitization practices of the growing number of securityscapes proliferating in the global landscape. We hope that further ethnographic research will address these preliminary conclusions and examine them in other contexts and historical periods to begin to build a theoretical framework that emphasizes the spatial and temporal. Only in this way will we begin to pin down this elusive but dangerous concept that produces a reality that is changing the life chances of millions of people and destroying indigenous and environmentally sustainable landscapes. Acknowledgment

This book is the result of a Wenner-Gren Foundation workshop, “Spaces of Security: Local, National, Global” (Gr. COWF–697) organized by Setha Low and Mark Maguire. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Foundation.

Notes

1 Holbraad and Pedersen’s volume Times of Security (2014) deserves more attention as a venturesome effort by British social anthropologists to capture some examples of security for analysis. Interestingly, even within their project dissent is evident. Elizabeth Povinelli (2014, 33) questions their emphasis on the reproduction of collectives. “I worry,” she says, “that this definition of security may obscure the very thing it was meant to illuminate, at least in some quarters of security studies—namely, a specific historical modality of governance.” Of course, a definition that emphasizes the reproduction of collectives should at least make sense when it comes to “national security,” but even there it fails (see Baldwin 1997). 2 There are a variety of schools of thought on security and securitization. “Securitization” is often associated with the international relations focus and speech-act theories of the so-called Copenhagen School, as discussed briefly here. However, anthropologists working on security, especially those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, tend to see themselves as working adjacent to Critical Security Studies, the so-called Paris School (see Bigo 2014). With some exceptions (e.g., Rollason 2017), most anthropologists exploring security familiarize themselves with the scholarly literature and stake out a position accordingly. 3 Ernest Gellner was among W. B. Gallie’s earliest critics. A philosopher, he explains, relies upon the idea that a concept is one thing that refers to an original exemplar in the past. In contrast, an anthropologist, according to Gellner, is more comfortable with the notion that contestation and debate can stand only on belief—“the debate is its life, and not a contingent attribute of it” (Gellner 1974, 94). 4 It is useful here to compare to Michel Foucault’s description of a problematization. According to Foucault, “Problematization doesn’t mean the representation of

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a pre-existent object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the set of discursive or non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)” (quoted in Kritzman 1988, 255). Security, seen in this light, does not value the world in terms of good and evil, but rather as “natural.” However, this does not rule out new configurations of evil that arise from biopolitical interventions (see Maguire and Fussey 2016). There have been several efforts by anthropologists and ethnographers to use space to understand security, especially research on international relations (see Weldes et al. 1999), studies of the still-emergent field of “homeland” security (see Fosher 2008), and, more recently, explorations of the nexus between aid and security (e.g., Higate and Henry 2009). This volume brings ethnographically diverse examples together to delve further into the topic of space and security. Samimian-Darash and Stalcup state plainly that they aim to study security without insecurity in US counterterrorism. This is a striking ambition when situated alongside ongoing and contradictory efforts in Critical Security Studies. For example, Didier Bigo (2008) judiciously draws from the work of Michel Foucault to explore the rise of transversal “managers of unease” in the field of security, describing the “Möbius strip” of security and insecurity in this realm. It would be interesting to know more about the reasons for the extraordinary empirical distance between Samimian-Darash and Stalcup’s study of security policy and the Critical Security Studies literature. In Navigators of the Contemporary, David Westbrook gives us a clear-sighted view of assemblage from an ethnographic perspective: “Sometimes the word ‘assemblage’ is used to denote the specific set of relationships that the anthropologist seeks to address. Situation, constellation, assemblage—the words have slightly different associations, and sometimes one seems more appropriate than another. No matter: the task at hand is to imagine an ethnographic inquiry that fosters understanding of [ . . . ] hard-to-define locations in the contemporary global ocean” (Westbrook 2008, 42). Following Lefebvre (1991, 96), we take the “visible” to be processual and imbricated with the readable and intelligible.

References

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Lentzos, Filippa and Nikolas Rose. 2009. “Governing Insecurity: Contingency Planning, Protection, Resilience,” Economy and Society 38(2): 230–254. Low, Setha. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge. Lutz, Catherine. 2002. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press. Maguire, Mark, Frois, Catarina, and Nils Zurawski. 2014. “The Anthropology of Security: Retrospects, Prospects, and Aims.” In The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control, edited by Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski, 1–24. London: Pluto Press. Maguire, Mark and Pete Fussey. 2016. “Sensing Evil: Counterterrorism, Technoscience, and the Cultural Reproduction of Security.” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 75(3): 31–45. Marcus, George E. and Erkan Saka. 2006. “Assemblage.” Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3): 101–106. Masco, Joseph P. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Masco, Joseph P. 2014. The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nader, Laura. 1986. “The Drift to War.” In Peace and War: Cross-cultural Perspectives, edited by Mary LeCron Foster and Robert Rubinstein, 185–193. New York: Transaction. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2014. “Defining Security in Late Liberalism.” In Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future, edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, 28–33. London: Routledge. Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rollason, William. 2017. “Security, Otherwise?” Anthropology of this Century 19(May): http://aotcpress.com. Russell, Bertrand. 2004 [1938]. Power: A New Social Analysis. London: Routledge. Samimian-Darash, Limor and Meg Stalcup. 2016. “Anthropology of Security and Security in Anthropology: Cases of Counterterrorism in the United States.” Anthropological Theory 17(1): 60–87. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sebald, W. G. 2001. Austerlitz. London: Penguin Books. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the World Interior of Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tally, Robert. 2013. Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom). London: Routledge. Time Magazine. 1947. Time/Life Magazine. June 15. Tulumello, Simone. 2017. Fear, Space and Urban Planning: Critical Perspectives from Southern Europe. Geneva: Springer. Vaughan-Williams, Nick and Daniel Stevens. 2015. “Vernacular Theories of Everyday (in)Security: The Disruptive Potential of non-Elite Knowledge.” Security Dialogue 47(1): 40–58.

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Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall. 1999. Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wells, H. G. 2004 [1908]. The War in the Air. Hazleton: University of Pensylvania Press. Westbrook, David. 2008. Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Lee and Laurens Bakker. 2016. “Cutting Off the King’s Head: Security and Normative Order beyond the State.” Conflict, Security & Development 16(4): 289–300.

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Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya Zoltán Glück The city [is] not just the site, but the very medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux. —Eyal Weizman

Ibrahim tells me: “personally, I know about 30 people who lost their homes in the demolitions.” It’s early October 2014 and I’ve come to meet Ibrahim, an elder, community leader, an imam at a local mosque in Eastleigh where he teaches neighborhood children at his madrasa.1 Eastleigh is a predominantly Somali and Muslim neighborhood in Nairobi, home to a large refugee population of Somalis and Ethiopians who have fled war and conflict in their home countries. It is also at the epicenter of the Kenyan government’s counterterrorism policing operations. As Ibrahim describes to me: “The government decided that they wanted to remove all of the structures that were not ‘permanent’ in Eastleigh. . . . my madrasa was one of these semi-permanent structures, so it was demolished. It used to be made of mabati (iron sheets).” The official pretext for the neighborhood-wide demolitions was that the structures were built illegally, yet the police who carried them out were operating in the context of “Operation Usalama Watch,” the infamous counterterrorism policing initiative that swept the neighborhood in the spring and summer of 2014. Among neighborhood residents, the demolitions were understood to be a kind of retaliation and collective punishment for the terrorist attack carried out against the Westgate shopping mall by the Somali militant group, Al-Shabaab, in September 2013. There were no advance warnings before the demolition crews arrived in Eastleigh, and many people lost all of their belongings, either unable to get to them in time or forbidden by the police to retrieve them. As 31

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Ibrahim recounts, “people were crying about their property, but there were police everywhere and there was nothing you could do. . . . when I saw my madrasa, I sat in the street there for three hours. Three hours. All I could do was cry.” Yet Ibrahim tells me that he was lucky: with much community support and many donations, he was able to open the madrasa at a new location across the street from where his demolished school once stood. His rent is higher now and he struggles every month to stay open, but compared to what many people in the community have suffered his plight is, as he tells me, minor. In the hours that I spent talking with Ibrahim, he and his friends told me harrowing stories about what they had witnessed during the police raids. Under the auspice of rooting out “terrorists,” the Kenyan police engaged in widespread human rights abuses: beating, robbing, extortion, rape, and intimidating residents while destroying property (often smashing and stealing from people’s homes during the raids) (Balakian 2016). Operation Usalama Watch worked like a battering ram on Eastleigh. Semi-permanent mabati structures were torn down en masse, putting many people out of homes and work. Police roundups punctuated the days, placing thousands in jail cells, and draining family and community resources to pay off bail and bribes (Henry 2014; Human Rights Watch 2014a, 2014b). To date these operations have not led to any major conviction of suspects on terrorism-related charges, but they have deeply affected the communities and neighborhoods within which they were carried out. Within the first week of Usalama Watch, 4,000 people were arrested, caught in the seemingly indiscriminate dragnet of policing raids that pulled people out of their homes at night and swept up whole crowds from the city streets by day (Henry 2014). Over the next months, thousands of refugees were forcibly relocated from their homes in Nairobi to overcrowded refugee camps in the Northern desert region of the country. Deportation and forced “relocation” split up families, while hundreds were also kept for weeks under inhumane conditions at the now infamous Kasarani stadium in Nairobi. While such security operations have left their indelible physical and psychological marks on the neighborhood, they also stand as an index of the increasingly urban tactics and spatial strategies employed by the Kenyan state in its “war on terror.” This chapter looks at the socio-spatial impacts of Kenya’s War on Terror through the prism of the urban transformations it has pre-

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cipitated and what such processes may tell us about the changing nature of state power in contemporary Kenya. Over the past three years, the War on Terror has transformed and remade spaces across East Africa, pulverizing slums and marginalized urban areas, galvanizing the construction border walls, and precipitating larger international interventions in the Horn of Africa which are transforming regional governance and regional space (Anderson and McKnight 2015; Al Bulushi 2014). Building on Stephen Graham’s (2010) theorization of “military urbanism,” I offer an analysis of processes of militarization and securitization of urban space in Nairobi. I begin from the premise that as security increasingly becomes a dominant concept and discourse in political and social life in Kenya, it also becomes an important mechanism through which space is produced. By providing an analysis of the “production of security space” (Glück 2015) through the case of security practices and urban imaginaries in Nairobi, this chapter offers a grounded theorization of what I am here calling “security urbanism.” First I analyze the “state spatial strategies” (Brenner 2004) of counterterrorism, placing policing operations such as Usalama Watch in a broader context of how state space is produced. I argue that policing practices and urban interventions are pivotal moments in the formation of the Kenyan “counterterror state” (Masco 2014). In the second section I draw upon several ethnographic vignettes to illustrate how “security” has become a dominant urban imaginary in Nairobi, affecting the way securitized urban subjects articulate their fears and politics and experience urban spaces. Taken together, these arguments provide a grounded theorization of how security urbanism is co-produced by state strategies and the everyday practices of urban residents.

Spatial Strategies of the Counterterror State Each new form of state, each new form of political power, introduces its own particular way of partitioning space, its own particular administrative classification of discourses about space and about things and people in space. Each such form commands space, as it were, to serve its purposes. —Henri Lefebvre

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Counterterrorism operations have left many Eastleigh residents traumatized, fearful of the police and scared to even leave the neighborhood. As one woman who had been detained at Kasarani stadium told me during an interview: “Even last night someone called me and told me not to leave me house, because there were police men here [in the streets].” Meti is an Oromo Ethiopian refugee who has made her home in Eastleigh for the past ten years; she tells me that everything changed in 2014. Refugees had long faced discrimination and intermittent police harassment in Kenya, but the past year represented a dramatic shift in the scale and brutality of the violence. Meti fled Ethiopia after her father was killed ten years ago and, as she explains: “I can’t go home unless I want to be killed . . . but here [after this past year] my heart is so broken.” When I ask about how things have changed in her daily life in the city she replies, “I don’t leave Eastleigh if I don’t have to . . . I don’t feel safe other places.” This sentiment, which was echoed by other refugees that I met in the neighborhood, also stands as an index of some of the less visible ways that Nairobi is being transformed by the War on Terror. As whole groups of people become fearful of leaving their neighborhood, it is the affective and immaterial boundaries within the city that are hardening. Residents of Eastleigh are not only dispossessed of the homes in large-scale, highly visible demolitions. They are also excluded in less visible ways, as everyday harassment, trauma, and fears impact the way they move around the city. Urban counterterrorism interventions, such as Operation Usalama Watch, in Nairobi neighborhoods have become key spatial strategies of Kenya’s “war on terror.” As an extraordinary means through which the Kenyan state seeks to intervene in the social life of the city, counterterrorism policing both reshapes urban space and produces new relations between the state and its subjects. We may read such interventions as particular “state spatial strategies” (Brenner 2004) through which the emergent Kenyan “counterterror state” (Masco 2014) is actively constructing itself and through which state power makes itself visible and tangible in the everyday lives of citizens (Mitchell 2006). Counterterrorism can thus be understood as a set of material practices through which the state is spatialized and new forms of “state space” are constructed (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Brenner and Elden 2009). In this respect, urban security operations are key sites in which the Kenyan state spatial-

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ity is re-negotiated, re-scaled, and reconstructed under the auspices of the war on terror. While it has become an accepted theoretical axiom in the critical social sciences that urban space is “produced” through social, political, and economic forces (Harvey 2007; Smith 1984; Massey 2005), there is decidedly less consensus about how to understand the state and its spatiality (Jessop 2001, 1990; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Brenner 2004). Building on urban-focused theories of spatial production, critical geographers have begun to theorize “state space” as an outcome of conflicting social forces (Brenner and Elden 2009; Brenner 2004; Smith 1984; Cowen and Gilbert 2008). “Much like the geography of the city,” writes Neil Brenner, “the geography of state spatiality must be viewed as a presupposition, an area, and an outcome of continually evolving political strategies” (2004, 75–76). By viewing the state as a social process, a critical theory of state space focuses on the concrete strategies through which the state is materially articulated in social life. Rather than taking idealized spatial abstractions at face value—such as maps, laws, treaties, or policy documents—this critical state-space approach attends to the practices through which states constantly produce and reproduce their economic and juridico-political claims on space. Anthropological approaches to the study of states have often begun from similar theoretical points of departure: namely, that states can be studied through the practices and interactions in which they are made material in social life (Sharma and Gupta 2006; Aretxaga 2003; Das and Poole 2004). As such, the anthropology of the state has helped to give ethnographic flesh to the fairly abstract statement that the “state is a social relation” (Poulantzas 1978; Jessop 1990). Whereas critical geographers have been helpful in theorizing state spatiality, they have been less adept at studying the concrete social practices through which states enact such spatiality in everyday life. Ethnographers by contrast have successfully documented the social relationships and interactions through which states enact their power, yet their ambit of theorization has often been too modestly curtailed by the horizons of their ethnographic scope. In what follows, I strive to stitch together the insights of these two fields in order to develop an ethnographically grounded treatment of state spatiality through the case of the Kenya counterterror state and its urban security strategies.

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Just as it would be difficult to imagine a city existing apart from its material extension in space, states themselves can be analyzed through their spatial practices, projects, and material practices of reproduction. Such an approach understands states as unfinished projects of socio-political domination that are constantly in need of renewal. As Jessop writes: There is never a point when the state is finally built within a given territory and thereafter operates, so to speak, on autopilot according to its own definite, fixed and inevitable laws [ . . . ] Whether, how and to what extent one can talk in definite terms about the state actually depends on the contingent and provisional outcome of struggles to realize more or less “specific” “state projects.” (Jessop 1990, 9)

As projects of political domination, states must constantly reproduce themselves through material and symbolic practices (such as bureaucratic repetition, public spectacle, or violent intervention) which are often realized as attempts to organize, regulate, abject, or destroy facets of social life at given geographic scales. It is through such practices that relations of power and domination are institutionalized and organized spatially in society: put another way, states achieve and reproduce power through spatial strategies of domination. In its classic formulation, social theory has traditionally treated the “space” of a state as coextensive with its territorial boundaries (Elden 2013; Foucault 2004). Indeed, the production of national territories has historically been an important strategy and geographic scale at which states organize relations of power and accumulation. Yet territory is far from the only scale at which spatial strategies are enacted. Rather than the highwater mark of state’s capacity to control “sovereign” space, territory can be “analyzed as a historically specific strategy of spatial enclosure and as an evolving multi-scalar institutional configuration” (Brenner 2004, 70). From this vantage point, state spatiality is perhaps better thought of through Lefebvre’s image of a mille-feuille, that is, as a collection of overlapping layers and scales of social integration, with national territory being but one of the geographic scales at which states seeks to enclose and manipulate space (Lefebvre 1991, 86). Particularly with the rise of new forms of decentralized governmentality, inter-urban competition, global counterinsurgency, and everyday securitization, cities have become pivotal sites

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through which state spatiality is being renegotiated and re-scaled in the contemporary period (Graham 2010; Brenner 2009; Smith 1992). It is in this sense that the violent production of urban spaces as unevenly “securitized” zones of danger, variously targeted for intervention or fortification, can be read as part of a broader array of state spatial strategies employed by the Kenyan government in its ongoing War on Terror. Such spatial strategies have included: the partial construction of a border wall along stretches of its North Eastern border with Somalia, a new Security Laws bill which sought to remove all refugees from urban areas, attempts to close refugee camps, counterinsurgency operations in national parks and forests which are seen as potential terrorist havens, and a protracted military campaign in Southern Somalia which has grown into a de facto occupation of the region under the auspices of AMISOM (Anderson and McKnight 2015). Taken on their own such state actions seem to be a piecemeal set of events—or “worse” (as critics of Kenyan government often claim), they can be interpreted as symptoms of the government’s allegedly inept, inefficient, and chaotic response to terrorism. I would propose a different reading, namely, that such interventions can be read as part of a broader securitization of the state and the formation of a “counterterror state” which is currently taking place in Kenya under the auspices of its war on terror.2 This contemporary counterterror state formation stands in an important lineage of security formations in Kenya, each of which preserved and protected the elite class interests against internal and external “threats” in succession since the early colonial period (see, e.g., Branch and Cheeseman 2006; Berman 1990; Nyabola 2016). As present-day Kenyan state organs seek to reconstruct themselves around the imperatives of national security and counterterrorism, its spatial strategies and interventions reflect such changes. The contours of this broader securitization of the Kenyan state can be also be read in the statements and speeches of those at the apex of the state’s power, such as President Uhuru Kenyatta, most notably in a “high level seminar on national security strategy” which he delivered in October 2014 to members of his government, outlining a “national grand strategy” on security. Among the central tenets of Kenyatta’s talk was the notion that security must increasingly become a fundamental concern for all branches of government. According to Kenyatta, “for some, security is a matter for the security sector alone. . . . Nothing could be

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more defeating. And this is the reason of [our] attempt . . . to begin to infuse an all government approach to [security] programming” (Kenyatta 2014). Contained in this notion of an all-government approach to security is the idea that disparate sectors of government (e.g., immigration, health care, and military) should increasingly work hand in hand and be directed by an undergirding concern for national security. This extension of “national security” as a dominant logic throughout all branches of government embodies the logic of the securitizing of the state. As Kenyatta alleges, it is the “weakness in functions and capabilities of the state” that are “the leading cause of insecurity of all forms” (Kenyatta 2014). Building a state apparatus that has the capacity to respond, prevent, predict, and preempt all manner of security threats is at the heart of his government’s agenda. Or, as Kenyatta has succinctly put it: “Our day job, expressed in the simplest way, is to build a strong state.” When the government passed its new Security Laws (Amendment) Bill in December 2014, critics quickly pointed out that the bill violated several international human rights treaties of which Kenya is signatory, but perhaps more important, it set a dangerous precedent of eliding “counter-terrorism with immigration” policy (Henry 2014) and blurs the separation between the two. What went unnoticed at the time was that such elisions in fact perfectly embodied the all-state approach to security and counterterrorism that the government is intentionally building. The kind of strong state that is being constructed is best characterized as what Joseph Masco has called a “counterterror state,” that is, a project of consolidating state power around new and imagined security threats which can never be totally vanquished. To declare a “war on terror” is to declare a war against an emotion—it is also potentially a war without end as new threats to “national security” can perennially be found or invented, potentially extending the affective states of fear and terror in perpetuity (Puar 2007; Aretxaga 2001; Masco 2014). The counterterror state can best be thought of as a new state formation that seeks to transform institutions, territories, cities, state-subject relations, and cultural practices under the auspices of security. Moreover, it has become a dominant global logic of state formation and state-building in the twenty-first century. While in the United States, its inception is often traced to the protracted moment after the end of the Cold War when state power was reorganized around global policing and ultimately around the Global

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War on Terror, there is another genealogy of the counterterror state that has its roots in colonial violence, genocide, and the counterinsurgency campaigns of the late colonial period. In Kenya, the contemporary forced migration of refugees carried out under the auspices of counterterrorism finds perhaps its most important local analogues in the projects of forced “villagization” carried out by the British colonial government in its war against the Land and Freedom Army—called “Mau Mau terrorists” by the colonial regime (Elkins 2005; see also wa Thiong’o 2016, 67)—and continued by the post-independence regime of Jomo Kenyatta during the Shifta War (Whitaker 2015).3 When Kenyan police hunt down and kill presumed “terrorists” whose faces occasionally appear on billboards reading “Wanted Dead or Alive” (see figure 1.1), this too shares a direct line with British colonial practices of hunting down the presumed and real leaders of the Land and Freedom Army.4 But more importantly, undergirding these homologies of practice is an institutional history of the state’s security organs which have not been significantly reformed since colonialism. There is thus a direct genealogy between the British colonial counterinsurgency state of the mid-1950s and the present-day counterterror state in Kenya.5 Yet, while earlier moments of security intervention and spatial reorganization of society (through violence, viligization, camps, enclosure, and eviction) were often undertaken under the guise of “emergencies,” contemporary counterterrorism tactics are becoming progressively normalized as expected functions of state power today. As with other forms of state power, the counterterror state produces and reproduces itself through particular spatial strategies and practices. In this respect, such practices as border militarization, closure of refugee camps, and urban interventions (such as raids, demolitions, and assassinations) index how the Kenyan counterterror state builds power through the production of space. As these practices remake who belongs within Kenyan cities, camps, and national spaces, it is the very spatiality of the Kenyan state that is being renegotiated, re-territorialized, and re-scaled. Urban counterterrorism operations are therefore interventions not only into the urban fabric of the city, but also into the social fabric that holds together state and society. The kind of cities that are produced through such state spatial strategies take the form of what I am calling security urbanism. As counterter-

Figure 1.1. Image printed on billboards in Mombasa.

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rorism produces new forms of urban belonging mediated by experiences of security and insecurity, it reshapes not only the material spaces of cities but also the affective relations and experiences of residents. Cities have long been loci for the renegotiation of the relationship between states and their subjects. In the present moment, as urban imaginaries are progressively shaped by cultures of fear, terrorism, and security, the reshaping of urban space itself becomes a vehicle for the consolidation of state power.

Security Urbanism and Its Subjects Security produces fractured and divided urban space. As the “logic of security” seeks to spatially separate those deemed “undesirable” from the rest (Foucault 2004), it becomes a privileged idiom through which fantasies of safety and fears of terrorism are projected onto the spaces of the city. Over the past few years these fears and fantasies have transformed Nairobi. As electric and razor wire fencing is erected around malls, businesses, and homes, increasingly large swaths of the city come to resemble the fortified and militarized enclaves of Johannesburg or Sao Paolo (Caldeira 2000; Mbembe and Nutall 2004). In Nairobi, the physical walls surrounding homes in affluent neighborhoods like Karen or Gigiri are mirrored in the psychic walls of fear hemming in neighborhoods like Eastleigh, whose racialized and marginalized residents are scared to move around the city. The result is familiar—resembling many global cities in which the elite few fortify themselves against dispossessed masses behind increasingly militarized walls and fencing (Graham 2016; Davis 2006)—and yet what is taking place is also particular to the dynamics of counterterrorism in the region. As Nairobi becomes yet another “city of walls” (Caldeira 2000), it is also producing new kinds of “security affects” (Masco 2014) structured by the fears of terrorism and traumas of counterterrorist policing. As terrorist events catalyze public protests and political performances in urban public space, so too are new political imaginaries produced in and through the idiom of security. In what follows I offer several ethnographic vignettes which, taken together, are suggestive of some of the larger ways that the War on Terror is reshaping postcolonial urban space and political imaginaries in Kenya. As security becomes the privileged

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idiom for the articulation of social fears, existential anxieties, and political demands, so too is urban sociality being transformed in Nairobi. It is my contention that as the counterterror state mobilizes urban strategies to consolidate power, a parallel process is also taking place in which everyday urban residents internalize and perform fears, insecurity, and reactions to terrorist threats in their everyday lives. As Nairobi’s urban residents find themselves waiting in lines at checkpoints, donating blood for victims of terrorism, and investing in electric and razor wire fences to protect their homes, they are increasingly conscripted into a kind of securitized urban subjectivity produced by the War on Terror. In this respect, Nairobi’s security urbanism is produced as much by the everyday urban practices of securitized urban subjects as by the larger designs and interventions of the Kenyan counterterror state.

Checkpoints and the Formation of Anxious Subjects In the wake of the Westgate shopping center attack in 2013, Nairobi has seen a vast proliferation of security checkpoints. These new checkpoints are located primarily at entrances to elite and middle-class spaces of consumption, leisure, and labor: malls, restaurants, office buildings, housing complexes, and hotels.6 From speaking with a wide range of Nairobi residents, it became evident that very few people actually believe that these checkpoints are effective at preventing or deterring “terrorism.” As Karanja, a de-professionalized 35-year-old Kenyan friend of mine explained to me emphatically, “nobody actually believes that unarmed and underpaid security guards can stop a terrorist attack” similar to the kind that hit the Westgate shopping mall, where militants stormed the doors with automatic weapons and grenades.7 But there is also a deeper sense of doubt that many urban residents express when talking about the checkpoints that have become part of their daily life. The most common refrain is that security guards “don’t seem to know what they were looking for,” when they search your bag, or look under the hood of your car. At best checkpoints were an annoyance, slowing down your commute or errands, at worst the farcical incompetence of security guards was taken by some as a symbol of Kenya’s “security crisis” and its failure to respond substantively to the real threat of terrorism. In this latter interpretation, the checkpoints “accomplish nothing.”8

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On a Wednesday afternoon in September 2014, Karanja and I went to meet with Johnson in one of Nairobi’s plethora of fortified malls, this one in the Westlands neighborhood. Johnson is a white American expat who has worked for an international NGO in Nairobi for ten years, and we are meeting at a restaurant of his choosing. As we drive into the mall’s parking lot, Karanja remarks to me that this is the kind of high-end restaurant that he would never usually come to, because wananchi don’t come to these kinds of places.9 After passing through a checkpoint, in which a skinny, mid-20s security guard peered into the car, opened the trunk, and then waved us on, we all sit down and start making small talk about the security at the mall. When I ask how Johnson felt about the Westgate attack, he tells us that he isn’t so much afraid of being killed in a Westgate-style terrorist attack because “what are the chances of that”; rather, what he fears more is that “someone will just throw a grenade into a restaurant like this one, which could happen at any time.” Like Karanja, Johnson is skeptical about the efficacy of the new checkpoints. “I am never stopped when entering my office complex,” he explains, and this “doesn’t exactly reassure me about the security in my building.” Though Johnson’s racial and class privilege allow him to move through checkpoints with ease, and his fears are likely quite different from those of his Kenyan neighbors, I am struck by the similarities in the way that Johnson and Karanja evaluate the checkpoint and analyze its inadequacies. The prevalence of small talk about the annoyances of checkpoints and banter about the (in)efficacies and idiocies of various security procedures have become something of a common language for many Nairobi residents. In this sense, what the proliferation of checkpoints has accomplished in Nairobi is an expansion and normalization of security culture, as urban residents rehearse daily their evaluations of this or that checkpoint, share their annoyances, encounters, fears, and frustrations. What is produced is a shared social and affective environment in which security is a constant touchstone; and regardless of their technical inadequacies at preventing terrorist attacks, checkpoints do “accomplish something” important indeed. Namely, checkpoints and the conversations and anxieties they provoke are productive of a kind of “affective infrastructure” (Masco 2014) in Nairobi, creating a shared urban sociality saturated with security talk. Checkpoints are also daily reminders

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of the specter of terrorism and the ever-present possibility of an attack, fostering an everyday affective environment of fear and suspicion to accompany the more quotidian emotions of annoyance and frustration. As we have dinner, listening to Johnson’s fears, we picture his imagined grenade thrown “into a restaurant like this one” and what it might look like, where we would dive for cover, and what each of us might do if “any minute now” one were lobbed through the open window.

Everyday Counterterror as the Spatial Regulation of Race and Class Checkpoints also function to regulate mobility and relations of race and class in the city. While Johnson’s white-skin privilege allowed for much greater mobility in urban spaces and guaranteed him free passage through many of the city’s checkpoints, his anxieties about how well checkpoints worked revealed a stunning lack of understanding that his mobility through checkpoints was not granted to all. Despite their inadequacies in deterring terrorism, checkpoints do perform an important function of regulating racialized and class-based segregation in urban spaces, controlling who can be where. At Nairobi’s shopping malls, security guards regularly turn away anyone who looks like they “do not belong” or “do not have enough money” to shop. While whites and affluent-looking Africans are often ushered into buildings without much questioning, mall checkpoints can be much more contentious spaces for some of Nairobi’s less affluent residents. As Karanja explained to me while standing in front of one such high-end mall, “if they don’t like the way you look, or if you look like you can’t afford to shop here, they will turn you away,” which is one of the reasons that he has decided to wear a pressed shirt and tie today at Village Market, an upscale mall in the equally upscale Gigiri neighborhood of Nairobi. “Or if they do let you in,” he continues, “sometimes they will ask you what store you are going to, then they accompany you to that store to make sure that is really where you are going.” This hypervigilance about people who appear “poor,” and scrutinizing of anyone who looks like “they don’t belong,” is one of the chief functions of the city’s checkpoints. It is also the reason that many Somali residents of Eastleigh that I spoke with will flatly tell me: “I don’t go to upmarket malls, they give me too much trouble.”

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By contrast, such spaces are experienced very differently by those who look affluent or “important.” George, a 50-year-old Kenyan security expert, recounts transporting two guns from Nairobi to Mombasa for his firm. As he explains, “I arrived at the airport checkpoint and opened my trunk for the police officer to see. Inside were my two rifle cases for a high-caliber automatic weapon and a shotgun. The officer recognized the gun cases, of course, but he just looked at me and said ‘ok, you can continue.’” George says he half expected this, but still asked, “don’t you want to see my registration papers?” To which the guard responded: “No, they’ll look at your papers at the check-in.” George is tall and affluent looking, and always immaculately dressed in crisp suits and ties, and as he explains to me: “The officer probably thought I was some kind of VIP so he didn’t want to give me any trouble.” Of course, “letting me into the airport terminals with a high-caliber automatic weapon is crazy—you can do a lot of damage with that gun,” but the imperatives of security were evidently trumped by George’s perceived class position and potential power over the officer as a VIP. In such instances, checkpoints function to regulate urban mobility, sorting people by class markers, ethno-racial markers, and perceived “belonging.” Rich people carrying high-caliber automatic weapons are allowed to enter highly securitized spaces (like an international airport) without any questioning, yet the poor are harassed, questioned, and followed when simply trying to go to a supermarket. Checkpoints may do very little to actually prevent terrorism; however, as a kind of everyday counterterrorist infrastructure, they actively exacerbate and reproduce ethno-racial and class-based divisions, spatializing relations of inequality and entrenching them in the very fabric of the city.

Security as an Idiom for Middle-Class Fears and Their Spatialization In the affluent Nairobi suburb of Karen, a family friend is giving me and her sister a tour of the new house that she has built with her husband. The “American-style” home with its “open-format” kitchen and dining room, four bedrooms, a game room, and large backyard is surrounded by tall concrete walls topped with electric fencing and razor wire. The tour includes windows and doors reinforced with steel bars, the guard

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dog’s kennels, and a security guard booth at the gate (replete with its own bathroom but no bed, “because we don’t want them sleeping here”). Noticing a second-floor balcony, her sister asks, concerned, “But, Elizabeth, aren’t you scared that criminals can climb the walls and get onto that balcony?” After a thorough explanation of all of the security precautions that they have taken, including the width of the steel bars that reinforce all of the second-story windows and doors, Elizabeth says in collected but resigned tone, “but you know, if they really want to get in they will always find a way. If they are really coming for us there is nothing we can do to keep them out.” As upwardly mobile affluent Kenyans, their “dream home” was an “American-style” house in a neighborhood that has been steadily evolving (from plantation-style homes of the colonial era) toward an American McMansion aesthetic. While such forms of conspicuous consumption have been Americanized, the fear of crime and “dangerous others” seems to be a global phenomenon endemic to gated communities and fortified enclaves (Low 2003; Caldeira 2000). Nonetheless, in Nairobi’s gated communities, the universal fear of crime is also laced with fears of terrorism and the two discourses (criminality and terror) often blend together in a strikingly seamless discourse about insecurity in the city. For Elizabeth and her family, the home was also constructed as a “safer place” for socializing than going to the neighborhood mall. “After Westgate, I try to spend as little time in malls as possible,” Elizabeth tells me: “We’d rather have people over for lunch here than meet them at Java or Art Caffé.”10 As I’ve been told many times: for Nairobians of “a certain class,” everyone knows someone who was affected by Westgate. Elizabeth’s family was of this class, and they too had “friends of friends” who were there during the attack. The feeling that “it could happen to anybody,” was thus to a certain extent a highly class-based experience, which contrasted sharply with the sentiment shared by another workingclass friend who flatly told me: “I never went to Westgate, so I don’t really feel like it was part of me.” In contrast, for these residents of Karen, the Westgate attack affected a number of intimate aspects of their life, from their patterns of socializing to the schooling of their children. As Elizabeth explains to me, the international school that their seven-yearold attends is “very secure,” and new measures have also been put in place in the past few years. For example, only the child’s parents or “one

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other designated adult” are allowed to pick up the children. And “now you can only pick up your child between 3:30 and 3:40 pm,” therefore, “you have to be there exactly on time,” otherwise “the kids are taken to a classroom to wait, and when you arrive you have to get a signature from the principal to get them.” According to Elizabeth, these new measures were put in place because the international school has “high-value kids,” such as the children of diplomats, and “if they are kidnapped they could be ransomed by thugs or terrorists.” These upper-class fears have important material effects on the production of space in the city. On the one hand, the dystopian fantasy of criminals scaling the walls of your gated compound or terrorist blowing up your mall café produces a centripetal effect, concentrating psychological energies and fortifications inward toward the protection of the family, the home, and the micro-level production of secure enclaves. On the other hand, middle-class fears are also projected outward, coding the city as a series of safe zones and zones of danger. This helps to produce and reproduce forms of “territorial stigmatization” (Wacquant 2007) of marginalized “dangerous” neighborhoods within the city. As another middle-class Kenyan friend tells me, he used to go to Eastleigh semi-frequently, but has stopped going since “terrorism” and bombings started happening in the neighborhood: “you just don’t know who is or isn’t [a terrorist],” he says, “anything could happen to you there.” And then, after a long explanation of how easy it is to get guns or “any other kind of weapon” in the neighborhood, he tells me that when I go to the neighborhood I must be sure to roll up the windows of our vehicle, “so that someone doesn’t throw a grenade into the car.” The mutually reinforcing fears of middle- and upper-class Kenyans (who stay away from danger zones) and Eastleigh residents (who no longer feel safe leaving the neighborhood) are material articulations of the hardening boundaries between neighborhoods in Nairobi. It is not only razor wire fences and cement walls, but also stigma, affect, and fear that produce sociospatial segregation in the city.

Security as Imagined Community Immediately after the Westgate shopping mall attack, calls for “unity” emerged from all stripes of the political spectrum, blood drives for

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victims sprang up across the country and, on social media, the hashtag #WeAreOne began trending and was quickly seized upon by the government as a symbol of how Kenyans stood together. Politicians lined up with everyday wananchi to donate their blood in Nairobi’s public parks, and the tremendous symbolism of “Kenyans from all tribes” giving blood for one another in the face of a national disaster became a poignant image of national unity. A group of restaurant workers captured the ethos of this moment by posting a picture of their arms, on which they had written the words: “Now Our Blood Flows Through Each Other!”11 However, cracks in the edifice of unity emerged almost as quickly as these patriotic public performances. Politicians jumping the queue at blood drives for photo-ops became symbols of elitism and the selfserving opportunism of the political class (Harrington 2016). And as the scandal of looting by military and police during the siege of the Westgate emerged, the lack of answers about basic details of the attack and shock at the bungled police and military responses became part of a popular discourse of discontent. Within a week of the attack, a new subversive hashtag had emerged on social media: #WeAreOnedering took the place of #WeAreOne. As John Harrington has argued, the blood drive in the wake of Westgate was a powerful moment of national imagination, fostering a kind of imagined community forged through a pooling of the blood of the nation (Harrington 2016). However, the durability of such an imagined community built on calamity and charitable blood donations was always open to question. As a typical twitter post from the weeks after Westgate reads: “The only thing that unites Kenyans is disaster #WeAreOne and #WeAreOnedering.”12 Such expressions of ambivalence indexed something fundamental about this imagined community, namely that unity in disaster can be both fragile and enduring. Those left wondering about Westgate are quick to point to the many failures of the government in its handling of the crisis (albeit the demand that most frequently emerged was for more security forces as a solution to Kenya’s “security crisis”). Meanwhile, within a few months, Operation Usalama Watch was unleashed, leaving many in Eastleigh wondering about their own inclusion in this project of national unity. Youth in the Mathare slum used the hashtag #WeAreOnedering to ask why the government failed to pro-

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vide schools and basic infrastructure, and why the police continued to kill young men in the neighborhood with total impunity.13 In brief, the questions of who was to be included in the imagined community were articulated through critiques of endemic poverty, marginality, and the violent abjection experienced at the hands of Kenyan security forces.

Security as a Political Demand In the wake of the November 2014 terrorist attack in the Northern border town of Mandera, a series of street protests calling themselves #OccupyHarambeeAve arose in Nairobi, criticizing the government’s response to Kenya’s so-called security crisis. Hundreds of protestors descended on Harambee Avenue and gathered in front of the Parliament to protest the government’s handling of a recent wave of Al-Shabaab attacks. Using the hashtags #OccupyHarambeeAve and #MySecurityMyRight, protestors brought colorful signs, T-shirts, and even wooden crosses to symbolize the lives that had been lost. The signs read: “Tumechoka” (we are tired), and “Mr. President we need your action on security.” These signs and messages captured an important element of Nairobi’s security culture which also pervaded these protests. Namely, while protestors could vehemently criticize the management of particular attacks or crises, they nonetheless recognized the state as the legitimate entity with the responsibility to “provide security” and called upon government to “improve security” in Kenya. In this respect, the particular demands expressed on cardboard signs at the march were not surprising: “Uhuru, police cars have no fuel” and “Uhuru, pay cops well.”14 This latter sign referred to the common perception that the reason police are corrupt and use extortion is because they are underpaid. In both its particular and general demands, the undergirding aims of these protests were that of better funding for a “functional” security sector. For those using the trending hashtag #Mysecuritymyright, the message was also clear: security is a right that the state must deliver. Building on this popular outrage at “terrorist” violence, the Kenyan government did not let the crisis go to waste. In the weeks following the protests, the government passed its new Security Laws (Amendment) Bill—which promised, among other things, to remove all refugees from urban areas and threatened to severely curtail the freedom of the press.

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The government also placated the protestors’ demands by firing its two top security officials, replacing them with arguably more severe military personnel.15 Capitalizing on the protests and the perceived security crisis, the government thus deepened and consolidated its project of constructing a robust counterterror state. If protestors were asking for “more security,” then the government delivered—but perhaps not in the way that protestors had imagined. The unfortunate irony for the activists on Harambee Avenue was that the protest ended with Kenyan security forces dispersing the crowds with tear gas. And, indeed, this image perhaps captures the hegemonic place that “security” has attained in Kenya better than any other: that of passionate protestors, assembled before the seat of government, demanding more security as state security forces promptly arrive to disperse them with clouds of asphyxiating tear gas. It is an image of how dominant “security” has become in transforming the very terrain of political struggle, circumscribing the boundaries of political discourse and contestation with regard to issues of “terrorism.” In this respect, it is also an image of the limits of the political imagination, indexing the triumph of the counterterror state as “the rightful purveyor of security,” even as it uses this power to repress political expressions of dissent in public urban space.

Conclusion: Security’s Fragile Hegemony As counterterrorism reshapes Nairobi’s urban fabric, it is also reshaping urban and national imaginaries and transforming the way people experience and interact in the city. In this respect, security urbanism refers not only to state strategies of consolidating a project of counterterrorism through urban interventions, but also to the pervasive internalization of security and counterterrorism discourses in the everyday practices and affects of securitized urban subjects. As such, security urbanism may be thought of as the spatial expression of the rise of the counterterror state at the scale of the city: a kind of urban sociality forged in and through the spread of security ideologies, fear, classism, checkpoints, protests, and police interventions. Through such processes security both produces and unmakes the scales of social integration in the city, hardening previously porous boundaries (between neighborhoods and

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between social groups) and forging new spatialized solidarities (from a nationally imagined security community to local neighborhood security infrastructures). Security urbanism is thus a process through which the very relations of state and society are being reorganized. And yet, this ascendency of security urbanism already shows signs of its own fragility. Despite the seeming all-pervasiveness of security talk and the spectacular violence of police raids and demolitions, we also know that security states can be highly unstable systems. Signs of the fragile hegemony of security are evident in the deep uncertainties and anxieties that still linger over many of Kenya’s “terrorist attacks.” As the initial performances of national unity after Westgate faded into a cynicism of #WeAreOnedering, important questions are raised about the durability of an imagined community founded on security alone. Particularly, the kind of hegemony obtained through security is one highly dependent on coercion and fear. Walls and electric fences are infrastructures of coercion and containment, as is the expansion of counterterrorism policing and military operations; and while the promulgation of fear often succeeds in conscripting elites and middleclass consumers into a national security project, it remains an unstable interpellation for the endemically poor and marginalized who are themselves primary objects of fear for Nairobi’s affluent. In this respect the counterterror state operates through a kind of “selective hegemony” (Smith 2011) in which consent is increasingly solicited only from the few (mostly rich residents), while the rest are more often confronted with the coercive and repressive powers of the security state. In moments of great calamity, wananchi become reluctant conscripts of a securitized imagined community, but of course symbolic performances of patriotism never solve the material problems of the people. Neither symbolic gestures (such as blood donation) nor electric fences, tear gas, and targeted assassinations can solve the undergirding economic insecurity, food insecurity, unemployment, and social marginalization of Nairobi’s urban poor. This makes security urbanism a particularly volatile urban form. As the Global War on Terror transforms cities and state spaces across East Africa, it is thus also ushering in new forms of instability, insecurity, and volatility. As Nairobi becomes a premier site in which state spatial strategies and securitized urban subjectivities are enacted, it also

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becomes a major fault line in the fragile hegemony of the Kenyan counterterror state. Security urbanism may thus be thought of as an aspiration, an unfinished project, and an experiment in precariously binding together urban polities in the age of counterterrorism. Notes

1 Real names of interviewees and informants have been changed. 2 This notion of a “securitization of the state” intentionally turns the classic Copenhagen school’s notion of securitization on its head. In its classic articulation, the state is the primary actor which securitizes various problems out in the world through speech-acts which designate such problems as security threats. Here, through the notion of a securitization of the state, it is the state itself that is the object of its own securitization and reorganization. As the state is always an unfinished project, it is inevitably transformed through processes of securitization—hence instead of a static speech-act theory of securitization, this analysis uses securitization to mean a process of state spatial formation and institutional transformation. 3 Continuities of counterterrorism’s spatial strategies with those of colonial governance in Africa abound. The attempted closure of the Dadaab refugee camp, for example, which has forced many refugees back into the war zone of Southern Somalia, shares startling similarities with the German campaign of forcing the Herrero out of camps and into the Kalihari desert—precipitating death and immiseration for the evicted in both cases (Steinmetz 2007). Both are forms of genocide. 4 The material effects of such billboards and assassinations is that whole neighborhoods (such as Majengo in Mombasa, or Mathare and Eastleigh in Nairobi) are periodically treated as sacrifice zones in which the killing of perceived terrorists and criminals have become a normalized and expected practice of the Kenyan security state (see, for example, Price et al. 2016). 5 Though beyond the scope of this text, there is an important argument to be made about the genealogy of the counterterrorism more generally, in which the colonial state is analyzed as the true progenitor of the counterterror state. The groundwork for this argument work has already been laid out Derek Gregory in The Colonial Present (2004) among others. However, the central importance of colonial Kenya in the development of modern-day counterterrorist statecraft has not yet been fully appreciated. 6 Using the term “middle class” is not self-evident in a Kenyan context, where perceptions of who belongs in this elusive category are contested and never clear-cut. Despite the fact that the term middle class is used widely by Nairobi residents, it is always (and perhaps intentionally) under-defined. I use“middle class here in a loosely Weberian manner to designate a kind of status group, rather than to refer to a class in a strictly Marxian sense. In this respect, the inclusion into middleclass-ness often hinges precisely on the forms of conspicuous consumption that

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a given person or family is able to perform. By “middle-class spaces of consumption” I am thus describing the spaces in which middle-class-ness is performed through consumption—the spaces in which the status group is realized in its consumptive practice. (For more on middle-class Kenyan leisure, consumption, and self-perception, see Spronk 2012.) I use the word “de-professionalized” here to capture a socioeconomic reality that has affected many middle-class professionals in Nairobi in recent years. Karanja had a good job with a USAID funded project and had begun to build a middleclass life for himself and his family in the city. However, after funding was cut for the project (which Karanja blames on the current government’s disputes with the US government in 2013), he has been steadily unemployed for the past 4 years, unable to regain a foothold in a middle-class income position. The vicissitudes of international aid and tourism over the past 6 years have affected many highly educated Kenyan middle-class residents in this way, who after losing jobs have become de-professionalized and experience an acute decline in class and status. The notion that checkpoints “accomplish nothing” was also reinforced for me during an interview with the head of security at one of Kenya’s largest companies. This security specialist shared several anecdotes about performing surprise “security tests” at several major institutions, each of which failed in different ways (e.g., he successfully got a gun onto a plane at the Nairobi international airport). But perhaps the most glaring was the example of transporting “5,000 rounds of ammunition in the trunk of my car as a civilian” when he was helping run a shooting range in the city. Upon instruction, he opened the trunk of his car at a checkpoint at one of Nairobi’s major business headquarters, the guard looked at the boxes in the trunk, which read “DANGER! Class One Explosives,” then without asking any further questions allowed him to enter the building’s parking garage. For this security specialist, this provided absolute proof that guards have no idea what they are looking for. Wananchi is the most common Swahili phrase used by Kenyans to refer to “everyday people.” Its literal translation would be “citizens,” but it often translates more accurately as “the people.” Java and Art Caffé are two of Kenya’s most ubiquitous upscale coffee shops, which middle-class and affluent Kenyans and expats alike tend to visit quite frequently. They are also the two most common restaurants at Kenya’s upscale malls. Photo is available at David Okwembah, “#weareone—How Westgate United Kenyans,” BBC News, September 2013, www.bbc.com. This twitter post from October 2, 2013 is merely one of hundreds that used the hashtag #weareonedering in the wake of the Westgate debacle. Thanks to Naomi van Stapele for pointing out this use of the #WeAreOnedering hashtag to me. “Uhuru” is the first name of the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta. Such signs then were directing their demands at the head of the state, asking the president himself to solve the problem of police pay.

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15 Particularly, the appointment of Joseph ole Nkaissery, former major-general in the KDF, to the post of Secretary for National Security (replacing Joseph ole Lenku) is in line with a trend within the Kenyatta regime of appointing military personnel to high-ranking civilian posts. Nkaissery is also famed for his antagonistic attitude toward human rights, police reform, and civil society organizations. In this respect his appointment, although presented as an appeasement of protestors, actually represented the deepening of a repressive security state project.

References

Al-Bulushi, Samar. 2014. “‘Peacekeeping’ as Occupation’: Managing the Market for Violent Labor in Somalia.” Transforming Anthropology 22(1): 31–37. Anderson, David and Jacob McKnight. 2015. “Kenya at War: Al-Shabaab and Its Enemies in Eastern Africa.” African Affairs 114(454): 1–27. Aretxaga, Begoña. 2001. “Terror as Thrill: First Thoughts on the ‘War on Terrorism.’” Anthropological Quarterly 75(1): 138–150. ———. “Maddening States.” 2003. Annual Review of Anthropology 32: 393–410. Balakian, Sophia. 2016. “‘Money Is Your Government’: Refugees, Mobility, and Unstable Documents in Kenya’s Operation Usalama Watch.” African Studies Review 59(2): 87–111. Berman, Bruce. 1990. Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination. Oxford: James Currey. Branch, Daniel and Nicholas Cheeseman. 2006. “The Politics of Control in Kenya: Understanding the Bureaucratic-Executive State, 1952–78.” Review of African Political Economy 33(107): 11–31. Brenner, Neil. 2004. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. “Open Questions on State Rescaling.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2: 123–139. Brenner, Neil and Stuart Elden. 2009. “Henri Lefebvre on State, Space and Territory.” International Political Sociology 3: 353–377. Caldeira, P. R. Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cowen, Deborah and Emily Gilbert, eds. 2008. War, Citizenship, Territory. New York: Routeledge. Das, Veena and Deborah Poole. 2004. Anthropology at the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Elden, Stuart. 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elkins, Caroline. 2005. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Owl Books. Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing States: Towards an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002.

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Foucault, Michel. 2004. Security, Territory, Population. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Glück, Zoltán. 2015. “Piracy and the Production of Security Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 642–659. Graham, Stephen. 2010. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso. Graham, Steven. 2016. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso. Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Harrington, John. 2016. “Sacrifice and the Nation: Blood Donation in the Aftermath of the Westgate Attack.” Talk given at the British Institute of East Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, December 1. Harvey, David. 2007. Limits to Capital. London: Verso. Henry, Jeanne. 2014. “Kenya’s Outlaw Police.” Open Democracy, September 16. www. opendemocracy.net. Human Rights Watch. 2014a. “Kenya: End Abusive Round Ups.” Human Rights Watch, May 12. www.hrw.org. ———. 2014b. “Kenya: Plan to Force 50,000 Refugees into Camps.” Human Rights Watch, March 26. www.hrw.org. Jessop, Bob. 1990. State Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2001. “Bringing the State Back in (Yet Again): Reviews, Revisions, Rejections, Redirections.” International Review of Sociology 11(2): 149–173. Kenyatta, Uhuru. 2014. “Kenya: President’s Speech on National Security Strategy.” All Africa, October 31. http://allafrica.com. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Low, Setha. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge. Masco, Joseph. 2014. Theater of Operations: Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications. Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nutall. 2004. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis.” Public Culture 16(3): 347–372. Mitchell, Timothy. 2006. “Society, Economy and the State Effect.” In Anthropology of the State. Edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta. Oxford: Blackwell. Nyabola, Nanjala. 2016. “Decolonize da Police: How Brutality Was Written into the DNA of Kenya’s Police Service.” African Arguments, July 19. http://africanarguments.org. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. London: New Left Books. Price, Megan, Peter Albrecht, Francesco Colona, Lisa Denney, and Wangui Kimari. 2016. “Hustling for Security: Managing Plural Security in Nairobi’s Poor Urban Settlements.” Plural Security Insights, June. http://riftvalley.net. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta. 2006. “Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in and Age of Globalization.” In Anthropology of the State. Edited by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Gavin. 2011. “Selective Hegemony and Beyond Populations with ‘No Productive Function’: A Framework for Enquiry.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18(1): 2–38. Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Smith, Neil. 1992. “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale.” Social Text 33: 54–81. Spronk, Rachel. 2012. Ambiguous Pleasures: Sexuality and Middle-Class Self-Perception in Nairobi. New York: Berghan Books. Steinmetz, George. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qindao, Samoa and Southwest Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wacquant, Loic. 2007. “Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality.” Thesis Eleven 91: 66–77. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 2016. Birth of a Dreamweaver. New York: New Press. Whittaker, Hannah. 2015. Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya. Leiden: Brill.

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Comparative Surveillance Regimes A Preliminary Essay Katherine Verdery

“Security” grabs people in different places in myriad ways. Imagine the “security” experienced by people living in a communist state like, say, Romania or Hungary in the 1950s and ’60s, terrified at the prospect of security police knocking on the door at midnight to arrest and take away the family’s beloved father or brother. Then imagine the ever-present but invisible surveillance of one’s phone calls or Internet purchases, carried out today on a scale so enormous that most people cannot begin to comprehend it. What different notions of security inform these two imaginings? To what different forms of society do they belong, and what are their consequences? This chapter describes three different forms of “surveillance regime,” noting some of their characteristics, benefits, and drawbacks.

States and Surveillance Regimes In the introduction to their book, The Anthropology of Security, Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski write, “depending on the breadth of one’s definition, security may refer to everything from war to structural violence, and from cutting-edge technology to barbed wire fences. Today, security is everywhere. Today, the concept of security is fashionable yet elusive, elastic yet operational” (2014, 1). Noting the difficulty of defining security in the face of its relentless expansion in the present, with concomitant expansion in how it is understood, they propose to shake up conventional understandings of security by going beyond the customary focus on states, official institutions, and authorized speakers (2014, 4). They and the contributors to their volume find myriad spaces of security, revealing the extent to which ever more 57

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“securitized societies” are now humanity’s lot. Among the security policies they cover are public video surveillance, the expulsion of migrants and surveillance of the urban poor, counterterrorism in airports, and high-tech surveillance of communications and technologies for identifying people by their eyeballs or their gait. We can engage with security at several different scales, ranging from its experiential dimensions in the everyday life of workplace and household, to the various organizations and institutions charged with maintaining one or another aspect of security (such as the local police, connected with state police and intelligence services, for instance), to the state and even international apparatuses—the National Security Agency and Homeland Security Department (for the United States), Interpol, etc.—that direct global flows of security-making. Security examined at these different scales differs in its spatial-organizational extension, with attendant differences in processes of coordination. (With ever-increasing use of the Internet, however, such differences of coordination as a function of space may be diminishing.) We can also engage security as a process and talk of processes of securitization (or, following Bigo [2014, 202], of in-securitization) that tie together many of these scales and instances of security-making. This processual orientation seems to me a fruitful move, one that enables us to see forms of inter-organizational competition that may be pushing the steady expansion of security concerns. Scholars studying these phenomena often see them as signs of the consolidation of “security states.” Being critical of the assumption that states exist in this active way (see Abrams, Bourdieu, and Foucault for like-minded skeptics1), I prefer to use the term “regime,” which more readily points us away from seeing “the state” as an actor and opens toward comparative study of the institutions, groups, and practices that are generating “security” as a major political preoccupation of the twenty-first century. Whereas speaking of security states invites us to create unhelpful typologies of kinds of states (weak states, failed states, narco-states, security states), to speak of regimes brings us closer, I think, to a unified study of security politics that encompasses diverse past and present examples. Security regime is a heuristic concept, then, that may help us think comparatively about security. What might it mean? I use the word re-

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gime not to mean a governing cabal in a political system, but in the sense of a regular pattern of co-occurrence of certain variables within a sociopolitical process. It might participate in the same family of concepts as “security assemblage,” used by scholars such as Peter Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000) as well as Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon (2013), in their writing on the “surveillant assemblage,” though I have not yet done the work to make that conceptual shift. As for security, Joseph Masco has said, “Everything and anything can be done in the name of security, but the term is never actually defined.”2 I will use it provisionally in the following way: as measures that ostensibly contribute an increased sense of certainty about access to well-being. There is plenty of room for ethnography here to get at variations in what “certainty” consists of, as well as “access” and “well-being,” and whose sense of certainty is at issue: that of the government? the police? some segment of the populace? the “whole people”? As the literature on security has already made clear, measures in its name in fact often increase people’s sense of uncertainty about access to well-being, so I make no assumption that security is actually being produced in security regimes. I note, as well, that the definition of security underpinning security practices largely protects governments and their citizens from attack by actual or potential “enemies,” such as terrorists or criminals. But such practices do nothing to mitigate the far greater danger to “national security,” such as the neglect of infrastructure that now makes it perilous to drive across a bridge or drink the water from one’s own faucet, and the constantly advancing economic insecurity of the general population, especially its more marginal groups, control of whom is increasingly understood as a matter of policing that takes on continually more militarized dimensions. Just as I have written of “property regimes,” then (Verdery 2003), I will speak here of “security (or surveillance) regimes,” specifically that of formerly existing socialism as I encountered it in my fieldwork in Romania prior to 1989, and later in the file the Romanian secret police kept on me during those times. I focus on the less inclusive rubric of surveillance instead of the more inclusive security regime of which it is a subset, since my research is specifically about a surveillance regime different from that of the volume’s other chapters that address one or another aspect of security. Surveillance can be exercised at a number

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of scales: for instance, between individuals, by firms over persons, by governments on citizens, travelers, and organizations. It can be done in forms that are more labor-intensive or more technology-intensive, and the technologies of both modalities can be more or less complex. The forms can rely on different kinds of sensory input, of which the most common are visual—e.g., following people, reading their correspondence, tracking them on computers—and auditory, which include eavesdropping either in person or by remote technology, telephone wiretaps, and so forth. In the remainder of this chapter I will briefly describe the surveillance regime of socialist Romania, then offer a tentative comparison with two other forms, which I label “modernist”—the kind Foucault described in Discipline and Punish (1979), for instance—and what I will call, for lack of a better term, “postmodern,” the form we are experiencing now. (Like Paul Amar [2013] I resist use of the term “neoliberal” to describe present processes of securitization.) My goal is to indicate some variables we might usefully employ in thinking about security regimes.

Security and Surveillance in Socialist Romania, 1948–1989 In thinking about security in socialist Romania, I focus on two sets of institutional actors—the Communist Party and the Secret Police, or Securitate—as well as on certain segments of the population in the countryside, where I have done research. Although the Party and the Securitate worked hand in hand, there was some specialization in what they did for security. Both, however, made it their business during the early years of communist power to break up lower-level village solidarities, especially kinship and community institutions, which had borne much of the burden of managing “access to well-being” in the past. These were gradually replaced by the Party organization and its collective property forms, such as factories and collective and state farms. Although local institutions of kinship and community continued to play a role in ensuring the well-being of families, their scope was vastly restricted. So were the definitions of well-being they served. In a 2014 conference paper, Joseph Masco asked why the US security state does not categorize basic forms of everyday insecurity—forms such as poverty, homelessness, and lack of employment—as national security

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problems requiring emergency action (Masco 2014a). It is an excellent question, which has a lot to do with living in the era of late capitalism. “Formerly existing socialism,” however, as manifest in the Soviet Union and its various client states, was concerned among other things with precisely those forms of insecurity. Understanding security (though they did not use the term except for the name of the Security Police, the Securitate) as the opposite of poverty and exploitation, they enshrined in their constitutions some “basic rights” absent from constitutions like that of the United States: the right to work, to rest, to acquire an education, to earn equal pay for equal work without respect to sex. . . . Although these rights were often not observed, they oriented thought in the direction of state concern for people’s well-being and, thus, to matters of security. During the 1950s, Party policy reversed the conditions of security for rural social groups, aiming to increase the well-being of the poor and diminish that of the well-to-do peasantry. Toward this end the Party employed the police and—especially—the Securitate to harass and destroy the rural elite, who were branded “enemies” and “saboteurs.” They were beaten and jailed, their land was confiscated or burdened with enormous taxes, and their children’s access to education was obstructed, all in the name of ensuring greater well-being for the poor. As we might guess, these moves to increase security for some ruined it for others, primarily the village elite. I will not further elaborate on the Party’s economic meaning of security, which indeed improved well-being considerably for many for a time but ended in immiserating much of the population by 1989. The Securitate’s work in destroying the class enemy brings me to the second sense of “security” in socialism’s security regime. In part from their training under Stalin’s Soviet Communism and the KGB, the Romanian Communist Party and Securitate saw the world communist movement and their own supremacy as continually under threat from enemies and subversives bent on destroying communism. The Party was obsessed with “enemies” [duşmani]: the job of “cleansing” the polity of them became the Securitate’s special task. Adding to the need for internal vigilance was a sharp increase in the numbers of visitors from Western countries, as superpower détente began in the late 1960s; with it, concern grew that these visitors had come to spy and to corrupt Ro-

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manian citizens. The definition of “enemy” was complex and varied over time. Initially it referred to the “class enemy” (the former bourgeoisie and wealthy peasants, who were suspected of sabotaging the communist experiment), and later to other kinds: national-minority (Hungarian) irredentists, spies from the west, and so on. The entire raison d’être of the Securitate was bound up in the purification of such pollutants from the body politic: this would serve the goal of security for the population seen as a whole, not just the deserving poor. The principal means by which people in the countryside sought to ensure their security during this upheaval was through relying on networks of kinship and patronage, as they had in the past, although the communists struck at some of those means in order to promote their own ideas of security. Destroying the well-to-do peasantry, for example, deprived many poorer villagers of the local “patrons” they had gone to for assistance in difficult times, forcing them to turn for help to Party activists and leaders of local People’s Councils. Although the mechanisms remained the same, the people available for them were now quite different, and the resources for well-being that they represented, as well as its definition, had also changed. Let me turn now specifically to surveillance, briefly describing its main forms in Romania, as exercised by the Securitate. I will divide them according to the modality involved—ranging from labor-intensive to highly technological—and the principal kind of sensory input used— visual or auditory. Although these variables are best seen as continuous, they can be provisionally arrayed in a table, as shown in table 2.1. Table 2.1. Forms of Secret Police Surveillance in Socialist Romania Modality

Form of Input Primarily Visual

Mixed

Primarily Auditory

Labor-intensive

Shadowing target

Use of informers

Officers overhearing conversation in a crowd

Intermediate

Censoring and translating target’s correspondence

Transcribing wiretaps

Technology-intensive

Photographing target Computerized archival index

Telephone wiretaps Taping public conversations Long-distance eavesdropping

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Unlike the search for enemies in today’s United States, the Securitate’s search for enemies as of roughly 1960 was largely labor-intensive. It was not that they lacked sophisticated surveillance technology, it was just too expensive to be made available everywhere that enemies might be found. For this reason, surveillance files frequently include requests by one or another officer for installation of a piece of listening or audiovisual equipment, specifying the number of days for which it would be used: there was not enough of it to go around, and other officers might need it elsewhere. Moreover, as my own surveillance file shows, the equipment occasionally failed, or was improperly installed.3 The technology was the usual kind of gadgets with which we are familiar from spy movies: telephone wiretaps and bugs, minicassette recorders, devices that could listen remotely to a conversation elsewhere in a room or through walls, cameras or video cameras for photographing the target (the person under surveillance)4 in compromising situations, and so on. Auxiliary technology included transcription machines and typewriters for listening to and recording the tapes or wiretaps. During the 1970s, however, changes in the availability of surveillance technology made these kinds of modalities increasingly prevalent (Vatulescu 2010). This required that larger numbers of officers engage in transcribing what was recorded, thus adding a new dimension of labor-intensiveness. It is possible, though I have no evidence, that the increase in material gathered by eavesdropping pushed transcribers in the direction of summaries rather than verbatim transcripts (I find both types of transcription in my documents). In the early 1970s, Romania obtained an IBM computer system and indexed some of its archive in this way, but although significant portions of the archive were microfilmed, it remained largely in paper form right up to the changes of 1989. That is, although the labor process became more technology-intensive over time, it did not significantly displace the use of human flesh. The principal forms of labor invested were that of ordinary Romanians recruited as informers, and that of officers who retrieved informers’ reports as well as organizing and carrying out the surveillance, generating numerous reports and transcriptions. Securitate docu-

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ments emphasize that throughout the communist period, the “spinal column on which are grafted and supported all the actions and measures of the Securitate” was the network of informers, which remained at the top of the list of tools utilized throughout the communist period.5 As I indicated above, it was not only the work of the informer himself that was labor-intensive:6 the extensive use of informers increased labor-intensiveness for officers as well. Informers had to be recruited, requiring considerable effort on the part of the officer, and then “handled” through regular meetings that might last an hour or two every 2–4 weeks. The two informers among my close friends who were willing to discuss this matter with me both recounted frequent and fairly lengthy meetings with their officers, confirming our sense of this as a highly labor-intensive modality of surveillance for both informer and officer. As time passed, starting in the mid-1960s the numbers of informers that officers were expected to manage gradually increased from roughly 15–20 informers per officer in the period 1948– 68 to as many as 50 or more in the 1980s, with inevitable effects on the amount of time an officer could spend with each of them. During the 1980s, it became more difficult to recruit informers, owing to widespread alienation from both Party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu’s increasingly repressive tyranny and the Securitate that upheld it. (Probably as a result of this, efforts were redoubled to recruit informers among schoolchildren and in the countryside, where they had always been underrepresented.) Securitate documents envision the officer-informer relation as pedagogical: the officer educates his informers, molds and develops them, shapes their personal qualities, responds to their problems beyond just those related to informing. Clearly, as their numbers increased, he would have less pedagogical time to invest in them. The relationship was also exclusive: the officer insisted that the informer swear an oath to never tell anyone about it, not even close kin. Informers might do more than simply report on the movements and conversations of the friends or kin they were engaged to follow. They might be instructed to actually shape the target’s attitudes and behavior through exerting what was called “positive influence.” In my own case, for example, the instructions given to academic informers repeatedly emphasize

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that they are to influence my work in a positive direction, away from the negative and hostile interpretations they fear I am generating, by giving me things to read that would set me on the right path. That might have been more common with foreigners than with Romanian citizens, but even there, an informer might be asked to encourage his target/friend away from bad habits or warn him about untrustworthy associates, thereby potentially shaping the target’s trajectory through social space. Securitate work rested above all on social relations, which tended to be localized in space. To begin with, one of the main goals of work with informers was to identify the target’s circle of relations, or “entourage”—the basic analytical unit with which the Securitate operated. Knowing the entourage would help them to neuter the target by “penetrating” or “destroying” his circle and, by insinuating their informers into it, to distort it to their own advantage. Romanian ethnographer Smaranda Vultur sees in this pursuit of the entourage a means for exponentially amplifying the number of people brought into the “mechanism of fabricating culpability, as the simple interception of a letter expands the circle of suspects and thus the potential for surveillance at the societal level. It functions on the ‘snowball’ principle; along the trajectory of this surveillance, more and more people become targets of pursuit” (Vultur 2010–2011, 357). In this sense, surveillance of foreigners and of Romanians may have had different spatial coordinates, as foreigners were more likely to develop connections in multiple locations (as I did—three major cities and two villages), while Romanians were more closely tied to locality of their work and residence. The space of surveilling a foreigner, unlike a local, would thus involve officers’ interactions across several locales and organizational levels. In the second place, the officer also organized informers and targets into networks. What was important was not the informer’s relation with the target or how many reports he wrote, but the breadth of the social space he covered.7 The informer himself could influence this, making his relationship to the officer a two-way street. As I learned from research in the Securitate archive for an earlier book, for example, one informer from the 1960s in the village where I worked gave

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numerous reports on his own initiative (rather than through the officer’s specific directions, which was the usual basis for filing a report). He took great care to expand his range, to make himself indispensable to the Securitate and thus influence his relationship with them rather than simply being their tool. Officers could implicitly help informers to do this, as well, instructing them to go after X, Y, and Z, people having different positions in social space, and thereby enlarging the informers’ sphere of action. The final point concerning social relations is something that distinguished Romania from all the other East European secret police: it was the only service to have an unmediated relation of officer to informer (that is, the informer had only one officer he related to, until such time as that officer moved on and another might inherit his informers). In the other secret police organizations, informers were known to anyone in the service, but in Romania the case officer was (in theory) the only person who could say decisively, “This pseudonym refers to X informer.” If X is inherited by someone else, his pseudonym might change.8 A corollary of this was that an officer’s informers did not know each other. Thus, the officer’s network consisted of dyadic relations insulated from one another; it became a network only in his imagination and in how he deployed the people in it. Through its informers, then, the Securitate invested political power in local networks of social relations, turning those to new purposes. In order to gain knowledge, officers manipulated those relations in very specific ways, both in their recruitment of informers and in using them to change the shape and character of the target’s own social relations, so as to create networks that would have certain desired effects. This sort of surveillance is a far cry from the security regime of the National Security Agency in the postmodern security regime of the United States. It is even different from other security regimes that similarly relied on humans rather than on technology, such as that of Nazi Germany. Historian Robert Gellately, who has worked on both the Nazi Gestapo and the East German communist secret police (the Stasi), states that both regimes relied on external help from the populace (that is, informers), cultivating citizen participation to enable disciplining others in society. The Gestapo, however, numbered only

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32,000 informers for the entire German population of 80 million and was far too small to have actively cultivated all those informers that the communist secret police did. What maintained the atmosphere of terror and fear aroused by the Gestapo, rather, was “denunciations” from ordinary Germans concerning any suspected “anti-Nazi activity.” Whereas the communist secret police such as the East German Stasi recruited specific people to write informers’ reports, the Gestapo created a climate that encouraged any German citizens to write letters denouncing their fellows spontaneously. The Stasi was highly suspicious of such people, however, seeing them as possible enemy agents; it trusted only those agents it had formed itself. In a word, the Gestapo presumed the support of the populace—and they got it—whereas the Stasi presumed people’s hostility. Thus the need to shape people, using surveillance in the manner I have described. Here, then, are two contrasting labor-intensive security regimes (that of the Gestapo and of the Securitate/Stasi) for us to set against the capital-/technology-intensive one people in the United States live under now. Such exercises may help us to sharpen our sense of the world of security and the forms of regime in which (in)securitization is proceeding.

Comparative Surveillance Regimes How can we compare the surveillance regime of socialist Romania, which I am using to stand in for a class of such regimes in the formerly socialist world, with the surveillance regime that has been expanding in the United States and beyond since the turn of the millennium? In this section I offer a brief comparison, based on work by Bauman and Lyon (2013), Haggerty (2009), Haggerty and Ericson (2000), and others on what all of them refer to as the “surveillant assemblage.” As this term indicates, they take their inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I will use the terms “Postmodern Surveillance Regime” (or PSR) for what they describe, and “Socialist Surveillance Regime” (or SSR) for the Romanian oneassemblag, both contrasted with the “Modern Surveillance Regime,” or MSR, made famous by Foucault (1979). My comparison is impressionistic and incomplete, inviting emendations. The points I describe are summarized in table 2.2.

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Table 2.2. Preliminary Comparison of Three Surveillance Regimes Variable

Surveillance Regime Socialism’s SR

Modern SR

Postmodern SR

Relation of target(s) to Embedded territory

Embedded

Abstracted

Institutions of surveillance

Primarily state

State and some non-state

State and non-state

Modality

Labor-intensive early, → more technologyintensive later, hardware-based

Labor- + technologyintensive, hardware-based

Very technologyintensive, software-based

Low Integration of databases across sectors (e.g., medical, financial, consumer)

Medium

High

Self-transformation of targets a goal? (Foucault)

Medium

Medium-high

Low

Form of data

Corporeal

Corporeal, some virtual

Virtual

Form of monitored body

Corporeal

Largely corporeal

Cyborg

Agent of data collection

Human

Human+ machine

Machine

Aim of informationgathering

Find subversives

Monitor criminals

Find terrorists and sell consumer products

Form of control exercised

Largely vertical, some horizontal

Largely vertical (?)

Increasingly horizontal, top-down+bottom-up

Focus of attention

Individual + some network

Individual

Individual + network

Whereas Securitate surveillance in the socialist surveillance regime, like that of the modern one, presumed integral bodies attached to a specific territory, surveillance in the postmodern surveillance regime operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating those bodies into a series of discrete flows (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 606). Precisely where a body is located is less important than converting it into information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and comparable (p. 613). While the integration of data from different sources (state, financial, consumer, medical, etc.) was low in the SSR and somewhat higher in the MSR, it is extensive in the PSR. Haggerty and Ericson quote a 1997 paper by Norris and Armstrong to explicate this idea:

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Phone conversations, reports, tip-offs, hunches, consumer and social security databases, crime data, phone bugging, audio, video and pictures, and data communications are inputted into a seamless GIS [geographic information system], allowing a relational simulation of the time-space choreography of the area to be used in investigation and monitoring by the whole force. The Chief Constable states: “what do we class as intelligence in my new system in the force? Everything! The whole vast range of information that comes into the possession of a police force during a twenty-four-hour period will go on to my corporate database. Everything that every person and vehicle is associated with.” (Norris and Armstrong [1997] quoted in Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 610)

In the nearly 20 years since that paper was published, this data integration has increased exponentially. Moreover, the treatment of data has changed, moving from corporeal to virtual. “First it is broken down by being abstracted from its territorial setting. It is then reassembled in different settings through a series of data flows. The result is a decorporealized body, a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 611). Another framing comes from Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgs (1991), which suggests that the monitored body is increasingly a cyborg: a flesh-technology-information amalgam, an interface of technology and corporeality, “comprised of those surfaces of contact or interfaces between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of information, or between organs/ body parts and entry/projection systems” such as screens and keyboards (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 611). The integration effect renders things visible that had not been rendered in informational and visual form before: “The surveillant assemblage is a visualizing device that brings into the visual register a host of heretofore opaque flows of auditory, scent, chemical, visual, ultraviolet and informational stimuli. Much of the visualization pertains to the human body, and exists beyond our normal range of perception” (ibid.). This reminds us of the distinction I made earlier for Romanian surveillance between labor-intensive and technology- (or capital-) intensive modalities. Over time, even in the SSR and MSR, surveillance forms globally became more and more technology-intensive at the expense of human observation, with ever-increasing reliance on machines, chips,

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and other devices. The resulting “data double” multiplies the person into additional selves that are then used to target specific markets in promoting greater consumption. Although the same “doubling” effect has been noted by targets of surveillance in the SSR (see Verdery 2018), this use of the data to expand consumption distinguishes it from the “doubles” of socialism. Moreover, Haggerty and Ericson see these data doubles as distinctive by comparison with postmodern surveillance in that, although they supposedly reference specific individuals, They transcend a purely representational idiom. Rather than being accurate or inaccurate portrayals of real individuals, they are a form of pragmatics: differentiated according to how useful they are in allowing institutions to make discriminations among populations. Hence, while the surveillant assemblage is directed toward a particular cyborg flesh/ technology amalgamation, it is productive of a new type of individual, one comprised of pure information. (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 614)

Indeed, they suggest, much of the expansion of surveillance in the PSR is itself driven by the profit motive and “the financial imperative to find new markets for surveillance technologies which were originally designed for military purposes” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 615). This shift invites us to note an important similarity between the socialist and postmodern modalities. Vatulescu observes (2010, 32) that Securitate officers, unlike police in modern crime-solving contexts, did not simply look for evidence of a specific crime but rather scrutinized the details of a person’s entire biography, searching for suspect tendencies. Finding these required identifying telltale patterns, a task for which no detail was insignificant; therefore, they recorded as much as possible—something that modern surveillance avoided. Now, however, the pendulum is swinging back: legal scholar Daniel Solove describes the comprehensive pictures that emerge from data collection by online marketers, producing “digital dossiers” that combine digital data on various subjects in order to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make decisions about their targets (2004, 2). These data aggregators combine data points to generate a comprehensive picture of the person who will then tend toward certain behaviors, such as buying certain kinds of products or voting for certain parties. That is, whereas

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the prevalent form of surveillance in the modern surveillance regime was to gather data in proof of a person’s deeds, postmodern surveillance aims—rather like Securitate officers—to discover whether the target is likely to behave in a certain way. Finally, these authors propose, the form of control itself has changed, going from hierarchical to horizontal and “rhizomatic.” For both Orwell and Foucault, surveillance is part of a regime where comparatively few powerful individuals or groups watch the many, in a form of top-down scrutiny. Contemporary studies of surveillance continue to emphasize this hierarchical aspect of observation. . . . [But] surveillance has become rhizomatic, it has transformed hierarchies of observation, and allows for the scrutiny of the powerful by both institutions and the general population. All contemporary institutions subject their members to forms of bureaucratic surveillance. . . . While poor individuals may be in regular contact with the surveillance systems associated with social assistance or criminal justice, the middle and upper classes are increasingly subject to their own forms of routine observation, documentation and analysis. The more institutions they are in contact with, the greater the level of scrutiny to which they are subjected. (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 617–618)

To this they add “bottom-up” forms of surveillance in which regular citizens using (for example) hand-held video cameras can monitor the powerful in unprecedented ways, as we know from the effect of such photography on the practices of police forces, such as in the Black Lives Matter movement. “While not a complete democratic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance, these developments cumulatively highlight a fractured rhizomatic crisscrossing of the gaze such that no major population groups stand irrefutably above or outside of the surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 618). Table 2.2 roughly indicates how this postmodern surveillance compares with what I have indicated for the socialist form and what Foucault as well as our own experience indicate about the modern form. As the table suggests, socialist surveillance and modern surveillance regimes resemble one another more than either of them resembles the postmodern “surveillant assemblage.” The socialist and postmodern regimes differ in the extent

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to which state-based institutions are the principal agents of informationgathering: in the socialist form, the agents are primarily the Securitate and to a lesser extent the regular police, whereas in postmodern surveillance they are innumerable institutions of state, economy, and society: alongside the state and local police and state intelligence organizations including the FBI, CIA, NSA, and so on we have the medical profession, consumer industries, the financial industry, communications industries, educational and cultural institutions, and many more, most of them not specifically state-based. This is consonant with the relative reduction of state functions in the “neoliberal” state compared with its predecessors but also with the extraordinary possibilities for information-gathering that computerized information technologies afford. Despite their differences, all these forms focus on the individual as the site of surveillance; what that “individual” becomes, however, varies from one regime to another: inscriptions in a nominal archive processed by personnel reading files, as in socialism, or streams of interchangeable virtual data processed largely by machines, today. Yet both socialist and postmodern forms also privilege the network as a unit: the basis of conspiracies, in the socialist quest to eliminate subversives and the postmodern quest to uncover terrorist threats.

The Recruitment of Affect I wish to mention one final area that is the focus of Joseph Masco’s fascinating treatment of postmodern security systems: the place of affect (Masco 2014b). What kinds of affect are recruited in these different regimes, and how is that accomplished? To speak of affect brings us all the way down from the level of state institutions to the inner being of the targets of surveillance. The (in)securitization each regime pursues appears to rest heavily on the recruitment of fear and anxiety, but by different mechanisms. My Romanian associates uniformly described the Securitate in terms of their fear of it, especially in the 1950s, when it earned its reputation for beating people up and sending them to forced labor camps. That the recruitment of fear was intentional is made clear from the following conversation, which took place in the early 1950s between Princess Ileana of Romania and Ana Pauker, one of the top leaders of the Com-

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munist Party. Princess Ileana asked her why the communists were using so much violence, when it would never convince anyone. She reports this as Pauker’s reply: “It is not intended to convince, but to frighten. When one replants, one first destroys everything that grows, root and branch. Then one levels the earth. It is only afterwards that one can plant successfully.” The Princess went on, She said that it was not possible, unfortunately, to destroy a whole generation and have only the young left to train. A certain amount of physical work had to be done . . . to support the children in their youth. It was for this that the older generation had to be left alive, but they must be too frightened to dare to interfere with the Communist training of the children. Moral and physical threats of every possible variety were used to produce this condition. (Ileana, Princess of Romania, 1952, 245)

Romanians who spoke with me about being recruited as informers told of their fear at the time of recruitment, as well as in their subsequent meetings with the officer. Although officers I spoke with claimed that as of the 1970s the organization’s behavior had significantly changed, removing fear as a factor, this was not reflected in the attitudes of Romanians I knew. Indeed, one friend recruited as an informer confided that the officers had told her, “We aren’t the same Securitate as in the past, the ones who arrested your grandfather [he was never seen again]. Our methods are different now.” But this did not keep her from being terrified and enduring many sleepless nights thereafter. In brief, the secrecy of their surveillance tactics, their past reputations, and their unsettling ability to know seemingly everything about a person produced fear as a result. The principal conversations in which people did not express such fear to me occurred after the communist government fell. One man, for instance, suggested that I should try to meet his neighbor, a Securitate officer who was very pleasant and friendly and not at all fearsome. Even then, however, such attitudes were in the minority. None of this applies to postmodern surveillance regimes, where fear is a result less of the exercise of surveillance than of techniques that foment fear so as to justify the exercise of surveillance. In this, the media have exceptional importance, whipping up public concern about the possibilities of terrorist attacks, as well as all manner of other things

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such as crime, epidemics, the weather, and the 2016 US elections, thereby producing a state of generalized anxiety and fear. In this system, fear precedes surveillance and rationalizes it; in the other, fear is the outcome of surveillance practices. This difference is perhaps only apparent, however, for socialist surveillance too included careful efforts to cultivate fear of something or someone (such as a “spy” like me) through careful planting of disinformation and rumor. One assumes that the intentionality underlying these practices is absent from our own media reports, but the effect is similar: the arousal of fear and anxiety. In the postmodern case, however, these feelings support the exercise of surveillance, whereas things do not seem to have worked that way in socialism because of people’s alienation from the government.

Conclusion In his usual provocative manner, Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written of what he calls “Liquid Modernity,” contrasting the heavy and solid, hardware-focused modernity of before to the light and liquid, software-based modernity of now (my “postmodern”). In his dialogue with David Lyon (Bauman and Lyon 2013), the two discuss the properties of “liquid surveillance,” the “liquid” metaphor justified by the way in which forms of surveillance seem to leak into new places all the time, or spill out all over, their convergence forming what they too call, following Deleuze and Guattari, a “surveillant assemblage.” Securitate surveillance, by contrast, was “solid”; moreover, it was fleischlich, resting on the bodily labor of informers and their handlers, rather than on the whir of computer drives. Each of these means of surveillance had its benefits and drawbacks. A benefit of using informers, for instance, was that the apparatus of surveillance entered into direct contact with the citizenry, and that general knowledge of this fact helped to propagate anxiety and fear among citizens for whom reliance on other people was the greatest form of wealth and source of security. On the other hand, Securitate colonel Cristian Troncotă notes one of the drawbacks of the use of informers: The technique of working with informers was brutally replaced, in the practice and mentality of the Securitate organs, with the “technique” of

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setting up informers’ dossiers, which brought—along with a useless volume of bureaucratic work—a true disaster in regard to preserving the confidentiality of their secret human sources. And this is because, as the history of secret services fully demonstrates, bureaucracy in work with informers means infinite possibilities for the leakage of information. (Troncotă 2003, n.p.)

As for the benefits of computerized postmodern surveillance, they are obvious in the extraordinary range of data that can be obtained and processed in the search for “enemies.” The principal drawback comes from that very benefit: the amounts of data are too vast to be reliably processed. As Tara McElvey put it in her review of Apuzzo and Goldman’s Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, just as the Stasi was overwhelmed by the amount of information it obtained, so are the NYPD: “[T]hey end up not with a database of potential terrorists but with a collection of jumbled, useless notes.” Although the technology for finding patterns in enormous quantities of telephone or CCTV data is improving, it is still far from adequate, relying on that all-too-limited form of data processing: the human being. This fact alone gives hope for keeping in check the vertiginous expansion (Haggerty 2009) of postmodern surveillance. Notes

1 See Abrams 1988; Bourdieu 2014; Foucault 1978. 2 Personal communication at the conference that produced this book. 3 At the suggestion of an archivist at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive in Bucharest, I requested to see the file that had been kept on me during my research in the 1970s and 1980s. It consisted of four separate files totaling 10 volumes and 2,781 pages. This file further stimulated my working in the archive and becoming interested in surveillance. 4 The most common word used to refer to people under surveillance was obiectiv, objective, in the sense of a military objective. They were also referred to as “elements.” 5 See Hulubaş 1976, 56; Anisescu 2011, 67. See also the list in Anisescu et al. 2007, 669, of “specific means” for accomplishing operative surveillance, where “the informers’ network” is first, followed by technological means, shadowing, etc. 6 Both informers and officers of the Securitate were predominantly male. In my own file, of the roughly 70 people who provided some kind of information on me, only 12 were women, as were a very small number of the officers who pursued me. 7 Cristina Anisescu, personal communication.

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8 Information from Romanian historian Virgiliu Tarau.

References

Abrams, Philip. 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 58–89. Amar, Paul. 2013. Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anisescu, Cristina. 2011. Comunicarea conspirativă în reţeaua informativă a securităţii: Aspecte psiho-sociale [Conspirative communication in the Securitate’s informer network: psycho-social aspects]. PhD dissertation, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University (Iaşi, Romania). Anisescu, Cristina, Silviu B. Moldovan, and Mirela Matiu. 2007. “Partiturile” Securităţii: Directive, ordine, instrucţiuni (1947–1987) [The Securitate’s “scores”: directives, orders, and instructions,1947–1987]. Bucharest: Nemira. Apuzzo, Matt and Adam Goldman. 2013. Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt and David Lyon. 2013. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bigo, Didier. 2014. “Afterword: Security—Encounters, Misunderstanding and Possible Collaborations.” In The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control, edited by Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski, 189–205. London: Pluto Press. Bogard, W. 1996 The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2014. On the State. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon. ———1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage. Haggerty, Kevin D. 2009. “Ten thousand times larger . . . : Anticipating the Expansion of Surveillance.” In New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy, edited by Benjamin J. Goold and Daniel Neyland, pp. 159–177. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. 2000. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51: 605–622. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hulubaş, Constantin. 1976. “Ce motive a avut informatorul să accepte colaborarea?” [What reasons did the informer have to agree to collaborate?] Securitatea 36: 56–59. Maguire, Mark, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski. 2014. The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control. London: Pluto Press.

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Masco, Joseph. 2014a. “Anticipatory States and Planetary Perils.” Paper presented at the panel “Producing Security States: Histories, Futures, and Ethnographies of Securitization,” organized by Setha Low and Zoltan Gluck, American Anthropological Association Annual meeting, Washington DC, December 5. ———2014b. The Theatre of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McElvey, Tara. 2013. “Spies Like Us: Inside the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit.” New York Times Book Review, October 13, p. 26. Moss, Emanuel. 2015. “Property in One’s Person: Personal Information in the Digital Age.” Unpublished manuscript. Solove, Daniel. 2004. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. New York: New York University Press. Troncotă, Cristian. 2003. “Securitatea—Techniques and Methods of Work.” Ziua June 14, n.p. Vatulescu, Cristina. 2010. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Verdery, Katherine. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— 2018. My Life as a “Spy”: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vultur, Smaranda. 2010–2011. “Viaţă cotidiană şi supraveghere în anii 1970–1980: Dosarele de urmărire personală ca sursă memorială” [Daily life and surveillance in the years 1970–1980: surveillance files as a source of memory]. Anuarul ICCMER 5–6 (2010–2011): 345–363.

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As part of her ongoing research, Brígida Renoldi recorded her experiences of a river patrol along the Parana River with the Argentine Naval Prefecture. During previous conversations, the commander emphasized to her the risks and challenges of such operations. Nonetheless, he invited her onboard the naval helicopter. The engine roared and the aircraft took off, staggering at first, but then soaring upward while the noise from the engine increased dramatically. Noise-canceling headphones with microphones allowed communication with the crew, who watched her facial expressions during takeoff. The helicopter followed the invisible border that separates Encarnacion (Paraguay) from Posadas (Argentina). From the sky, the growing cultivation of soy crops was clearly visible in Paraguay. This is just one economic shift that reflects the need for new sources of income among the poor, just one element in the broad context facilitating the expansion of the illicit drug trade. Above the noise of the helicopter, the pilot explained the enormity of the challenges in trying to control small-scale traffic across the frontier. Indeed, he explained that his job is more about discovering fires or rescuing people lost in the woods than finding “drug-traffickers.” He also described the difficulties in attempting to control the airspace at the Argentine-Paraguayan frontier, where the limits of nation-state sovereignty appear solid on a map, but organized crime can easily cross them. The helicopter arrived at its destination, and the prefects welcomed Brígida according to protocol. A prefect guided her around the facility, highlighting the investments made in equipment and the improvements achieved in work conditions. Nevertheless, he confessed that there are not enough men to perform the required 24-hour rotations, and that during a shift change, “Anything can happen.” 78

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Brígida boarded a naval boat in order to travel along the river. Three prefects steered the boat along the river, slowly turned their heads from left to right, glancing from one coast to the other. They swept the surface of the water with their gaze. Skill and experience told them that everything was calm. They recognized a known path, which smugglers use to convey different merchandise into Argentina. They stopped the boat at a nice beach and everyone disembarked at a point that allowed access to the woods along a path. Real-time control is their real problem. Most of the time they arrive too late: they sometimes find cigarettes, sometimes marijuana, partial or complete shipments, but the smugglers are generally nowhere to be found, and there are few prosecutions. This border-security scene recorded by Brígida Renoldi suggests complexity and lack of control. The extension of power and the resulting performances seem distant from the image of security conveyed in the media. For the mass media, crime and drugs are an unstoppable epidemic devastating Latin America. Anyone can be a victim of a crime at any time. The media disseminates a broad perception of “insecurity.” When you see a victim, you see a crime. Therefore, you see insecurity; it is something that everybody sees all the time. Bars, alarms, armored cars, private schools, and gated communities are all efforts to construct a sense of security. And what do these things have in common? They construct borders, small-scale and everyday borders that the Other cannot cross. When you feel reasonably confident that you can regulate who can and who cannot cross a border, you feel different, though not necessarily better. In contrast, when you cannot manage the movement of people and things, uncertainty and even fear arise. The media presents insecurity as a defining feature of our time, as something new or at least qualitatively different. In this chapter, we discuss the border areas between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Of course, metropolitan (internal) borders and nation-state (external) borders now seem to share many of the same features, especially because the contemporary, redefined security paradigm targets the “global threat of drugs.” And, in the case of the Tri-Border Area, the threat of “global terrorism” adds another level of real and imagined threat. These complex and imbricated elements constitute the contemporary problematization of security, which rests on a specific historical context.

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As the other side of insecurity, security also becomes that which we have a right to. Moreover, security is now a commodity, something that one can buy and sell in the form of private security in the so-called protection market. In this chapter, we will discuss certain events historically, in order to understand what we mean when we say security, especially public security in Argentina, and particularly at the borders. We will identify specific features that are present today in the way we limit or face problems. We will also work with the concept of “borderization,” a tool that allows us to elicit the formation of limits and differentiations, and a tool that allows us to think about securityscapes that emerge in metropolitan and geopolitical nation-state borders.

Border as Process Latin American military governments of the 1960s and 1970s adopted the National Security Doctrine. What was “national” in this Security Doctrine? As is well known, each state collaborated with its neighboring countries as part of US geopolitical strategy during the Cold War. Argentina regarded Brazil and Chile with suspicion, but it also understood “international communism” as both an external and an internal threat. Military dictatorships were themselves instruments of a global security strategy. Clearly, communism, as a global threat, did not have clear borders. However, borderlines blurred for many reasons. First, in Latin America, the Soviet threat was concentrated in Cuba. Second, the military regime perceived the threat within every country, in the form of social movements, guerrillas, intellectuals, or unions. During the recent past, then, the international border was already an internal one. However, a different and more complicated matter was the racialization of borders. The Argentinean military employed instructors with experience gained during the Algerian war. These instructors spoke of war in terms of race. The Argentine military officials held a different line, explaining that in the Argentinean case anyone of any color might well be the “enemy.” The National Security Doctrine entailed an always-tense collaboration with Brazil and Chile in order to effect political repression or, stated more accurately, state terrorism. On yet another level, there was also the persecution and expulsion of immigrants from neighboring countries.

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The specificity of the National Security Doctrine is our first point of reference with respect to the processes of borderization and securitization. We are working with the term borderization in order to unpack the historical process through which the many elements making up a border shape and are shaped by the interactions between central nation-state governance and those constituted as border populations. The term also serves to highlight how, from a sociocultural perspective, the border is never a fixed “fact” but, rather, remains as an unfinished and unstable process. The border is an object—a target for intervention and a site of security infrastructure—that often looks solid and immutable but is the result of historical processes, contestation in the face of human action, open to change over time (see Grimson 2003, 2012). From this perspective, all political borders, we argue, have four constitutive elements influenced by the action of different social groups: the lines of demarcation and the territories they divide; the population settled on either side of it; the succession of different sociocultural regimes in the border area; and, finally, the different meanings the border acquires. Thus, one may characterize a border by the networks of human, material, and symbolic movement across it, together with a great variety of economic, political, social, and cultural relations that variously flow and encounter friction. The joint effect of these elements (territory, population, and material and symbolic movement regimes), all embedded within and emerging from sociohistorical relations, is what creates the meanings that the border comes to acquire for social actors. Any of the elements can become the basis for disputes between nation-states and those who form border populations. In other words, territorial disputes have counterparts in such things as trade wars, media disputes, and diverse conflicts concerning identities and settlements. All of these disputes are about the border, and the border in turn is shaped by those disputes. Historically, one can divide the borderization process in Latin America into distinct stages. Processes of expansion characterized the colonial period. Clashes between Spanish and Portuguese explorers resulted in a series of treaties that aimed to trace the territorial limits between the two empires. The colonization of the so-called New World was, in many ways, accompanied by a proliferation of border processes, including the re-bordering and oppression of indigenous populations conceived as

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a threat to “white” population’s security. The consolidation of nationstates marked the territorial stage of border-building. Once political borders dividing nation-states took on legal and political solidity, there were no longer overt disputes over territories. This did not conclude the borderization process, however, but merely transformed it. In the Southern Cone, up until the mid-1980s, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile considered the possibility that they might invade or be invaded by one of their neighbors. Strategic plans and projects include the exercise of politico-cultural influence over neighboring populations. The foremost feature, then, of the borderization process during most of the twentieth century is the shift from a struggle over border territories to one over border populations. One of the battles is the “nationalizing” of border people and spaces. The first stage of borderization ended with the onset of one of the longest sustained democratization processes to date in the Southern Cone. States (especially Argentina, Chile, and Brazil) left behind the obsession with wars and threats of war, turning gradually to projects for regional “integration.” These projects were characterized by a discourse proclaiming the disappearance of interstate borders. This has only been realized, in part, in the area of interstate trade. In any case, however, “the end of borders” was proclaimed by commercial agreements such as Mercosur—signed in 1991 and coming into effect in 1995—or by the general rhetoric of globalization, and the borderization process during this time was once again transformed, not concluded. Today, states focus not on territory or populations but rather on things and mobility, cross-border trade and migration in particular. Nation-states regard mobility as a potential risk with multiple dimensions and interconnections. It seems that the risk of mobility, from a state-centric viewpoint, is associated with establishing relations of alliance and filiation that can legitimize the right to regular circulation and establish the right to gain access to civil rights in a given country. Interstate struggle can therefore manifest itself in strategies to maximize the exporting capacity of a nation-state while limiting the capacity of its neighbors. This affects not only cross-border movements, but also the ways in which one perceives the border. This, in certain cases, could become an obsession of the nation-state, and could be related to security in terms of illegal traffic of weapons and drugs, or “terrorism,” but

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also in food security (which is related to sovereignty), health security (big states’ strategies in global commerce are often based in arguments of hygienic wars), and so on. To be safe implies to continue the borderbuilding process through new stages. A broad historical analysis of the borderization process in the Southern Cone shows how the focus has gone from territory to population and now to trans-border flows. To underscore the significance of historical changes, we quote Marco Aurelio García, the most influential international counselor of the Lula and Dilma governments in Brazil. He has stated that militaries who governed Brazil from 1964 to 1984 perceived three different threats: communism, which eventually fell; the Argentinean threat, which has diminished as today Argentina is a strategic partner; and the threat of the (leftist) internal enemy, which has been governing Brazil from 2003 to 2016 with the electoral victories of Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). This shows a change in the security agenda, not only in Latin America. Here, we focus on the so-called new threats, though we observe certain continuities with the old repressive paradigm. Covered by this matrix, “terrorism” and “the drug trade” are today the main engines of public security, and, curiously, renew the interventionist aesthetics, especially at the borders (see Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski 2014). Security and borders, then, are concepts that presuppose connections and meanings that derive from worlds they create and where they display themselves. People often talk about “security in the borders,” combining terms as if they had something in common, something objective, and if they could only differ in location in space. Both security and borders refer to worlds built within the experience of “dwelling,” in the sense of perception and production of environment (see Ingold 2000). However, we do not just mean living with and circulating through borders and close territories. We also reference the state’s bureaucratic and technocratic apparatus, where public policies to control population and territories are set. In this chapter, we are interested in how states constitute spaces of security as active milieus in which the movement of things and people becomes the movement of naturalized objects. Processes of borderization, then, become objectifying processes that anthropology can study through ethnography. Our ethnographic ap-

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proach aims to understand that which borderization gathers in the name of security—but in so doing security also calls into being general fears, mainly associated with the loss of material goods and even life. That said, one can also imagine the border as a space where the nation-state is absent, despite the proliferation of nation-state institutions. We have already identified different dimensions of borderization, from the cartographic demarcation of a territorial border—always imperfect when compared to live experience and movement in territory—to the institutionalization of the border, where security forces and customs control circulation, and the cultural and symbolic representations and experiences. However, we must expand on the cultural identity dimension of borderization. If a person “belongs” to a space (because they live there or are a citizen there) they can feel like a stranger in other spaces. These identity criteria operate to define “the others,” and this links to rights. Moreover, fear and insecurity exist with regard to the unknown or the stigmatized. Van Gennep, in his classic text Rites of Passage, shows how, in the passage from one territory to another, one finds a neutral zone. Whoever wants to go from one territory to another “floats between two worlds,” at least temporarily. One can identify the existence of interstitial spaces between people, houses, temples, villages, cities, and nation-states. Crossing the threshold is always entering a new world. There are aggregation rites about thresholds and doors that can be sorted out “violently or with the consent of those living in the world one is entering.” In the contemporary Tri-Border Area, since the eighteenth century, rivers were used as marks of separation for kingdoms or countries. Only after the return of democracies were bridges set. Those bridges do not always link both sides. They do articulate them, and are a liminal zone themselves. According to the different contexts, they can be contact points for communication, tension, or conflict zones.

International Borders At present, one of the most sensitive places in Latin America among international borders is the confluence of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, known as the Tri-Border Area. The Argentine province of Misiones alone has a 20-kilometer dry border and a river border of 1,100 kilometers, a political and environmental border that modifies the exchange,

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Figure 3.1. Tri-Border Area. Map drawn by Arch. Pablo Maestrojuan.

transit, and control of people and goods. Different intergovernmental initiatives set out a legal framework for the movement of people and goods. In 2002, for example, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay entered into an agreement on Tránsito Vecinal Fronterizo (Border Neighbor Transit) to streamline processes for the transit of people and common products, and to give inhabitants of bordering areas residence documents. According to the agreement, a residence card “will allow its holder to cross the border and stay in the territory of the neighbouring country for a maximum of seventy-two hours.” However, as Benedetti and Bustinza point out, “it is not clear what ‘border’ is: if it is a line, a zone, which is its extension and which are its characteristics” (Benedetti and Bustinza 2016, 14). Such loose definitions and ambiguities allow needed flexibility, yet we also see the discretion granted to those authorities controlling the movement of people and goods.1

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Figure 3.2. Cross-border transit, 2013. Passenger boat, traveling from Wanda (Misiones, Argentina) to Itá Verá, the neighboring village across the Paraná River, located in Domingo Martínez de Irala (Alto Paraná, Paraguay), a few kilometers to the south of Puerto Iguazú along the National Route 12. The buildings visible in the image, on the ravine, make up the commercial center of regional and imported products. Photo: Brígida Renoldi.

The Tri-Border Area is a zone of contact, circuits, and circulations. Cigarettes, medicines, agrochemicals, and legally controlled substances circulate. Alongside this, illegal goods, such as cannabis or some agrochemicals and medicines that are legal in one country but not in the other, also circulate. On every border, people live through and think about different forms of transit and perception, which they express in language and symbols. A study conducted on the Polish border with Ukraine, for instance, analyzes the use of metaphors of life and death (Byrska-Szklarczyk 2012). People express their different perceptions and experiences of the border in numerous ways, from the idea of a meeting point, to an end-of-world, to a battlefront, and these expressions can be significant even in frontiers that seem to be homogeneous, as in the case of the Tri-Border. The terms used refer to the specifics

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of moments, agents, and roles. Guillermo Ursini’s (2014) documentary Chiveros, Paquitos y Paseros explores the Tri-Border at Misiones (Argentina), focusing on the informal economy. He documents the work of chiveros, paquitos, paseros, and bagalleros, the people who pass goods in small quantities, a modality also known as “ant traffic.” In the city of Foz do Iguaçu, the “cuerdero” denotes a person who raises the goods with strings from the ravine of the river toward the roads or from the head of the bridge; the “carretero” carries the load over short distances by means of trolleys, while the “laranja” passes goods in several trips. These roles are based on trust, and the knowledge that success is rooted in networks of lived relations. In Foz do Iguaçu, “donos de porto” (owners of ports) control the circulation of goods through informal entry points, also known as “clandestine ports,” on the Paraná River. The adjective “clandestine” draws from a state-centric perspective and stamps certain practices as illegal, negative, and even immoral.2 In contrast to the state-centric perspective, anthropologists take the perspective of lived experience to explore exchange dynamics, social networks of family and friendship, and the personal choices made according to the opportunities available and to the logics of help received in exchange of favors. Reciprocity emerges from personal bonds, and affections are key elements in sustaining those bonds. That is why this activity can be interrupted in the same way it was started, that is to say, due to interpersonal conflicts derived from the unfulfilled expectations among the interested parties. This applies both to civil inhabitants and to security providers. The actions of the police and the customs officers occur within a security milieu that depends on what is considered legal and illegal officially and on the ground in everyday practice. In other words, when the police intervene with the stamp of authoritative neutrality, they risk destabilizing the dense bonds of quotidian circulations, exchanges, and personal relationships. If, then, the security forces are to prevent “illegal practices,” they must ponder the condition of people and goods involved in such practices in order to understand the field action. In this sense, it is not at all helpful to consider the illegal practices as a separate universe from the legal ones and to attribute negative moral connotations (see Heyman 1999). They are illegal because the law forbids them and not because they are “naturally” pernicious. In this regard, we want to

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understand the environment in which public policies operate, and to explain the connections among people, things, borders, and security. When talking about public security we should refer to what the state considers to be a threat to society and the rule of law. The principle that guides the logic of public security is recognition of the rule of law. Although this principle is explicit in democratic states, there is a difference between the written law and the law as it is practiced. Ethnographic research on judicial practices tell us much about the rule of law in actual practice (Renoldi 2013; Barrera 2012; Gupta 1995; Herzfeld 1992). One may speak of official administration, of legal processes, and of statecraft involving “corruption” as a necessary component, or even describe the “camouflage state,” to borrow the debatable term used by Ieva Jusionyte (2014). However, from the perspective of those communities located in international borders, the legal system in the form of prosecutions, legal processes, and judgments, and the actions of security forces on borders, roads, and transit points, all appear together along the blurred borders of the legal and illegal, formal and informal as performances. Of course, the border is a place of many real and imagined threats. The point of confluence between Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina), and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil) is often described as the cradle of terrorism and drug trafficking (Renoldi 2014). The ethnic Arab population in Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este, and also in Encarnación (a city located in the border with Posadas, the capital city of Misiones province), were the focus of suspicion following terrorist attacks like the one against the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires (1992), the one against the AMIA in Buenos Aires (1994), and the one perpetrated against the Twin Towers in New York in the year 2001. Today, the security forces perceive terrorism as a threat that is combined with a number of other threats, from the illegal drug trade and trafficking to smuggling, and money and asset laundering. Recently, especially in Argentina, efforts are being made to enhance the training of police in order to deal with this complex world, and discussions are ongoing about the role of the armed services (tainted by their performance during the 1976–1983 dictatorship). Some of this training involves building in human rights compliance for routine patrolling, investigations, record keeping. At the borders, Argentinians have also see the armed forces deployed in secondary and supporting roles, which has aroused political arguments

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about constitutional principles in force deployment (Frederic 2013; Soprano 2013). In an effort to combat drug trafficking, ostensibly at least, Argentina declared a state of emergency in public security and issued decree 228/2016, which authorized the use of force through the Aerospace Defense System. The decree allows for the downing/destruction of aircraft “declared hostile” on the grounds that they are not authorized to fly in national air space and have failed to land when requested (similar laws exist in countries such as Brazil, though the legitimacy of such measures is contested). The decree is unconstitutional because the death penalty is applied without due process, but it remains because of the emergency caused by the drug trafficking industry.3 This stands in contrast with the initiatives carried out by the Ministry of Security during the government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, which aimed at the renewal of the basis for police and military actions, historically influenced by the guidelines of the last military dictatorship. Previously, the laws of National Defense (1988), Domestic Security (1991), and National Intelligence (2001), which delimit public and citizen security from national defense, define the legitimate principles of investigations based on secret information obtained without the consent of those who are the object of such inquiry. Following the change of government in 2015, the Ministry of Security renewed its commitment to tackle the trafficking of people and illegal drugs (and associated crimes). Security experts now approach the control of borders through a sanitary-based epidemiologic theory, which one could easily describe as a biopolitical approach (Rosanvallon 1990; Foucault 2006). Recently, the government launched the Plan Argentina Sin Narcotráfico, which pushes for greater enforcement of security policies oriented to the trafficking and use of illegal drugs on national roads and at borders. Instead of further guaranteeing the human rights of users and dependents, the new policy re-instantiates the old paradigm of the War against Drugs. International borders are a clear focus of controls and interventions, as is the transit by roads, and in urban public spaces (especially for young people). The Ministry for Security claims that their actions target the “georeferential location of gangs in routes, borders and rivers” and anticipates the construction of new infrastructure and the need for greater invest-

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ment in technology.4 Of course, increased investment in law enforcement will result in impacts on criminal justice, adding to the burden on already overcrowded prisons. We can suggest a reasonable hypothesis: the emphasis on law enforcement will require more prisons to alleviate overcrowding, thus leading to incarceration as a core element of policy. It is also possible to argue that borderization involves the militarization of international borders, and a blurring of security and of defense. The line between security and defense used to limit the field of action for the police in matters of domestic security and for the armed forces in matters of national defense. This line is now blurred, following the principle of eradicating the evil perceived as the “new threats.” However, even a superficial glance at what commentators say about criminality in the political and mass media spheres is enough to indicate the poor quantitative and qualitative basis for these policies. Instead, we find the construction of criminality and delinquency, a construction based on the porosity of borders and blamed on the criminal tendency of people traveling through and living on the border. The observation of security policies at the international borders, especially from the perspective of local crime, gives us the opportunity to rethink some basic assumptions in the political imagination about legal and illegal, real and imagined threats. The two most active security forces in the northeast border of Argentina are the Naval Prefecture and the National Gendarmerie, the latter having trained in the military tradition. There are enormous tensions in the actions of these security agencies. The democratization process and the principles of the declaration of human rights are reflected in the Federal Criminal Procedural Code. Security forces that take part in an investigation of a federal crime do not participate in the arraignment proceedings, and the crime must be recorded in front of two civil witnesses. Security agencies consider this a disadvantage in investigations and intelligence activities. They claim that the more guarantees are given to the suspects, the less freedom of action is given to the public agents. This tension is especially acute at the international borders, where the absence of evidence-based policy means that agencies fight amorphous enemies—drug trafficking, organized crime, terrorism, and people trafficking. One of the executive measures in 2011 was Operación Escudo Norte— which later became Operativo Fronteras—that took part in seizing drugs

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and involved itself in other types of criminal investigations. The Federal Operations Special Group, which was relevant in the attack on the AMIA in 1994, is composed of agents of the Argentine Federal Police who are trained specifically to act in missions against terrorism and drug trafficking. However, Misiones Province, for example, depends on all the security forces: the national and provincial police, the army and intelligence agencies. And, alongside the specific actions of each country’s security forces, there are also joined cross-border initiatives. The Tripartite Command of the Tri-Border Area is an agreement that coordinates the Ministry of Domestic Affairs of Argentina and Paraguay with the Brazilian Ministry of Justice. In this initiative, justified by the suspicion that terrorist cells are acting in that region, representatives from the three countries cooperate. This command operates through monthly meetings, and its headquarters rotates per country every four months. The main task is the exchange of information resulting from on-going investigations and intelligencegathering activities. According to the representatives involved, this command’s main achievement is coordination, which strengthens the trust bonds; that in turn simplifies the exchange of relevant information that is useful to prevent or interrupt federal crimes.

Making Security In an interview, members of the Gendarmería Nacional and the Prefectura Naval Argentina declared that they “make” security. The emphasis on the word “make” signals the daily creativity of the agency, quite different from other great models of public action. “Making” security implies being aware of the local environment ignored by the broader models. When explaining that the local reality at the border is a particular merger of cultures and habits, a member of the Prefectura had this to say: All of us, who come to work at the border are not polluted with what is happening here, I am not argepy (hybrid of Argentina with Paraguay) . . . In argepy, you get used to what you see, you are not surprised as if you were an outsider.

The key here is direct experience; one cannot gain experience from distance. With this assertion, the agent expressed the difficulty in “training”

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security agents to work at the border if such training is not performed at the border. In addition, he pointed out the “flaws” of local agents who could be corrupted. That assumption results in a complex system of staff rotation, in order to prevent such personnel from making an eventual transformation into a “local” or “argepy.” According to both forces’ security agents, the regional geography, modified by rivers and jungle areas, encourages people to start some illegal ventures, and conditions the tasks of prevention and investigation. “Controlling” the uneven coast of the Paraná River is a task that requires technical expertise and a great deal of discernment. “The best technology is useless without intelligence,” asserts a higher officer of the Naval Prefecture while watching at night through the thermal camera, discerning the hot bodies of the surroundings that resembled bones in an X-ray photograph. Moreover, when talking about “intelligence,” he did not mean only the human capability to understand and the physical and behavioral predisposition to “make” security; he was referring as well to the set of techniques and practices used for secret investigations that provide the clues to know what and where to look when performing prevention tasks. By saying that “all the technology in the world cannot replace the police ability of putting together one clue with another to generate a line of investigation,” this Prefecture member was sharing his opinion about the regional investments in border technology. Thus, he emphasized the fact that technology by itself, even when used correctly, does not replace the human ability that results from the combination of acquired knowledge and special preparedness. “The camera is an extension of your eyes, and if you cannot distinguish a thing from an animal, an animal from a human being, a smuggler from a fisherman, the camera cannot do it by itself.” He clearly bet on the “sense of smell,” a natural readiness, and “organic” skill, according to many security agents, but acquired in the work contexts. The sense of smell is highly valued as an “intuition-based” technique, almost animal-like (Renoldi 2007); it captures what technology cannot. Indeed, it optimizes technology. It establishes connections throughout the body. “The dog can be wrong, it can bark at a cannabis block and at a sausage as well, but only a well-trained person knows what to look at, when the dog is barking.” All of this is significant in a border context with a broad technological deficit, and, at the same time, with important investments in the

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area. Most agents talk about the need for troops; and even though they value the weapons, vehicles, and field equipment, they insist on the importance of well-trained staff, without which proper public security is impossible. What is at stake here is that technology, although valued as a fundamental component for border control, loses centrality when situated in the broad context of security provision. When considering “experience” beyond (and including) what one gains through “training,” security staff discuss principles and simulation-based practice (dispute situations, environmental barriers, shooting focus, etc.). To become skilled in security matters, the body must be situated in “real” contexts and the senses must be activated as part of the environment and not as external to it. Thus, the native concept of “smell” could be described as a perceptive complex resulting from a creative combination of technical knowledge, materials, body, life, and worries that are, to a certain extent, set by state policies. Although in native descriptions “the smell” is underlined by the intuitive dimension, you can see that when at work such an opinion is the result, and even effect, of coexistence and combinations such as the ones we have already mentioned. Even though the initiatives targeting terrorist activities at the TriBorder Area could be considered to be well founded, their prominence in security practice and in the environment of public policies is not easy to explain. Argentine and Brazilian federal police forces often confirm that they cannot prove the existence of terrorist cells based on evidence available locally. Most of them observe family networks whose members send money to their home countries in the Middle East, as a way to help them: “In the same way Paraguayan and Bolivian people do when working in Argentina,” stated an agent during an interview. From the point of view of agents and senior police officials, terrorism is not a concrete phenomenon, and neither is it a visible one, which makes them doubt its real existence. On the Argentine side, gendarmes, police personnel, and prefects agreed on the existence of smuggling activities involving legal and illegal goods. However, one cannot include these activities within the category of “organized crime.” This may be because “evidence” may present itself that is suggestive of a fragment of some much bigger organization or network, or it may be because one cannot easily discriminate different “criminal” activities from everyday (but illegal) trade. In this environment, security staff may categorize ordinary activities as “new threats.”

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The perception of the security agents says much about public security policies. In practice, they are the real assessors and critics. And, there is a noticeable dissonance between speech and practice, which is never a surprise to anthropologists. On the contrary, within the contradictions it is possible to recognize concepts gestating in the securityscape that have the capacity to invent worlds and cultures. Such concepts have the capacity to redirect public investments and police action in the name of security.

Conclusion Borderization processes result in securitization processes. Limits between sovereignties and jurisdictions are built; institutions and processes are established; cultural, civil, or moral Otherness is manufactured; speeches and practices about “the Others” are legitimized, about our own border and about “our” area. In some historical contexts, consistencies between international borderization and intra-urban processes are established, and security policies are guided by similar objectives and paradigms. At present, the definition of insecurity based on the new threats of terrorism and drug trafficking has several implications (none of which are innocent). Critics warn that the redefinition of security has the capacity to undermine entire populations, corrupt agents, buy protection, alter the consciousness of consumers, promote common urban criminality, encourage kidnappings and homicides. However, we are not seeing public scrutiny of new measures that aim for vigilance, control, and repression. Instead, security discourses and practices infiltrate daily life. Importantly, although we are discussing security vis-à-vis new global threats, one may also see history repeating itself to some degree. They are renewed speeches that follow the style of reasoning found in the securitarian repressive matrix in public and civil life some decades ago. This is certainly how the immigration question appears in the agenda, at the borders, and in the urban cenetrs of the metropolis. Remember, Samuel Huntington calls immigration “the greatest threat” to “societal security,” the ability of a society to preserve its essential nature and identity under changing and adverse conditions. The real issue is not immigration per se, but immigration without “assimilation.” If “national

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security” is related to sovereignty, this other concept refers to the ability of a people to preserve “their culture, their institutions and their lifestyle.” When the threat is in the form of cultural Otherness, a new way of linking borderization and “insecurity” is in front of us. Making immigration the Other is making a new risk, a cultural risk. Evidently, borderization processes produce clear effects in space and border segregation: Bolivians suspected of being drug dealers, Colombians of being FARC members, Mexicans of being part of the cartels, and these suspect categories legitimize the intervention of the state through different security agencies. In this way, in spatial, national, or ethnic terms, the limits that separate us from the Others are radicalized. And so, realities that become easy to intervene in are thus created. Even investments in control technology are reinforced, which in the end is the new component added to the old repressive paradigm to defend property and capital. Where this construction of insecurity and otherness ends is where anthropological inquiries begin. Crime, war, drugs, revolution, food, land, health, strange bodies, economy, cultural difference, dangerous neighborhoods—all of this and more—are captured by a term, by a word: insecurity. Insecurity is all-encompassing, and, thus, it has power. In March 2016, President Barack Obama visited Argentina for two days. The Tri-Border Area was one of the agenda items for the Argentinean and American administrations, and it was included in the signed agreements because of drugs and terrorism concerns. Borderization processes always change, but, apparently, they never end. Notes

1 It is important to clarify the difference between the historical use of discretion in Latin America and the category of discretion used in the US judicial system. Kant de Lima (2011, 52) says that in Latin America, preventive and repressive discretion are based on systematic suspicion and secrecy, a heritage of inquisitorial tradition that as ex-colonies the countries received from the European continental right. In Latin America, the term discretion has an ambiguity in its definition that gives place to a permanent threat to the instituted order. In the United States, on the other hand, the category of discretion is placed within the political system founded in the dualist principles (accusatory) of the American judicial process according to the egalitarian and individualist bases of the democratic constitutional model. This ambiguity also generates a space for law enforcement without nuances, and for extra-legal negotiations as a way of repairing a fault.

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2 Nicholas De Genova has developed a wise analysis of the attention state categories receive in public discourses, that is to say, on the discursive formation of illegality. His reflections focus on the analysis of movement practices in contexts where the key of reading is strongly juridical, as is the case in the concepts of “illegal migrations” and “deportability.” The author points out that there is epistemic violence in these processes and proposes to analyze illegality as a sociopolitical condition. 3 See the 2015 Report on Human Rights in Argentina, CELS, Siglo XXI, Argentina. 4 Diario La Nación, August 31, 2016; www.lanacion.com.ar.

References

Abinzano, Roberto. 2014. “Procesos transnacionales en las regiones de frontera: la triple frontera en el sistema mundo.” Idéias, Campinas (SP) n. 9 nova série 2° semestre. Barbosa, Antonio Rafael and Brígida Renoldi. 2013. “Introducción.” In Barbosa, Renoldi, and Verissimo, I) Legal: etnografias em uma fronteira difusa. Niterói: EdUFF. Barrera, Leticia. 2012. La Corte Suprema en escena: Una etnografía del mundo judicial. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Benedetti, Alejandro and Ignacio Bustinza. 2017. “Estudio comparado de las definiciones sobre frontera en la normativa Sudamérica (especial énfasis en las décadas de 1980 a 2010).” In Sergio Braticevic, Constanza Tommei, and Alejandro Rascovan, eds., Bordes, límites, frentes e interfaces, pp. 37–65. CONICET/FILO: UBA/GEFRE. Byrska-Szklarczyk, Marta. 2012. “Borders from the Perspective of ‘Ants’ Petty smugglers from the Polish-Ukranian Border crossing in Medyka.” In Dorte Jageic Andersen, Martin Klatt, and Marie Sandberg, The Border Multiple: The Practicing of Borders between Public Policy and Everyday Life in a Re-Scaling Europe. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 97–117. Carísimo Otero, Adriana Leticia, and María Carolina Diez. 2013. “Estado, mercado y sociabilidades en las fronteras de Paraguay, Argentina y Brasil.” In Gustavo Villela Lima da Costa and Vanessa Dos Santos Bodstein Bivar, eds., Fronteiras em questão: múltiplos olhares. Campo Grande, Brazil: Editorial de la Universidad Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–444. Diez, Carolina and Adriana Carisimo. 2012. “Chiveros, paseras y paquitos: intercambios en los bordes. Economía y frontera en Misiones, Argentina.” Trabajo presentado en la 28ª Reunión de la Asociación Brasileña de Antropología, 2 a 5 de julio, São Paulo, Brazil. Foucault, Michel. 2006. Seguridad, territorio, población. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Giménez Béliveau, Verónica and Silvia Montenegro. 2010. La triple frontera: dinámicas culturales y procesos transnacionales, Buenos Aires: Espacio Editorial. Grimson, A. 2000a. “Introducción: Fronteras políticas versus fronteras culturales.” In Alejandro Grimson, ed., Fronteras, naciones e identidades. La periferia como centro. Buenos Aires: Ciccus, 9–39.

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———2000b. “Frontera, Nación y MERCOSUR para los periodistas de Posadas.” Avá. Revista de Antropología Social, Editorial Universitaria, Universidad Nacional de Misiones y CONICET. ———2003. La nación en sus límites. Buenos Aires: Gedisa. ———2012. “Nations, Nationalism and ‘Borderization’ in the Southern Cone.” In Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds., A Companion to Border Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 194–213. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heyman, Josiah M. (ed.). 1999. States and Illegal Practices. Oxford, New York: Berg. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skills. London and New York: Routledge. ———2015. “Epilogue: Toward a Politics of Dwelling.” Conservation and Society 3, 2 (December): 501–508. Available online at www.conservationandsociety.org. Jusionyte, Ieva. 2014. “States of Camouflage.” Cultural Anthropology 30(1): 113–138. Kant de Lima, Roberto. 2011. Ensaios de Antropologia e de Direito: acesso à justiça e processos institucionais de administração de conflitos e produção da verdade jurídica em uma perspectiva comparada. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris. Maguire, Mark, Catarina Frois, and Nils, Zurawski, eds. 2014. The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control. London: Pluto Press. Misse, Michel. 2014. “Mercadorias políticas” y “Sujeição criminal.” In José Luiz Ratton, Renato Sérgio Lima, and Rodrigo Ghiringhelli de Azevedo, eds., Crime, Polícia e Justiça no Brasil. São Paulo: Contexto, 198–212. Montenegro, Silvia and Verónica Giménez Béliveau. 2006. La Triple Frontera: Globalización y construcción social del espacio. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila. Rabossi, Fernando. 2007. “Árabes e muçulmanos em Foz do Iguaçu e Ciudad del Este: notas para uma re-interpretação.” In Giralda Seyferth et al., eds., Mundos em Movimento: Ensaios sobre Migrações. Santa Maria: Editora UFSM, 287–312. ———2008. En las Calles de Ciudad del Este: Una Etnografía del Comercio de Frontera. Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica. ———2011. “Como pensamos a Tríplice Fronteira?” In Lorenzo Macagno, Silvia Montenegro, and Verónica Giménez Beliveau, eds., A Tríplice Fronteira: Espaços Nacionais e Dinâmicas Locais. Curitiba: Editora UFPR, 39–61. Renoldi, Brígida. 2007. “El Olfato: Destrezas, experiencias y situaciones en un ambiente de controles de fronteras.” en Anuario de Estudios en Antropología Social 2006, IDES, Editorial Antropofagia, Julio, Buenos Aires, 111–127. ———2013. Carne de Carátula: Experiencias Etnográficas de Investigación, Juzgamiento y Narcotráfico. La Plata: Al Margen.

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———2014. “Organización, crimen y acción: relatos policiales de la Triple Frontera.” In César Barreira, Jânia Aquino, and Leonardo Sá, eds., Violência, Ilegalismos e Lugares Morais. Campinas: Pontes de Campinas, 479–507. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 1990. L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Soprano, Germán. 2013. “Ser militar en la argentina del siglo XXI: entre una vocación, una profesión y una ocupación.” Avá [online] n.23 [citado 2016-02-23]. Available online at www.scielo.org.ar.

4

From Panopticon to Panasonic The Architecture of Fear in Mega-Events Carmen Rial

It was agreed that the best way to deter suspected trouble-makers was . . . [one] that would leave no doubt in their minds they were under continual close surveillance. (Comité d’organisation des Jeux Olympiques, Official Report of the XXI Olympiad, Montreal, 1976, 559)

The text above could perfectly integrate the classic Discipline and Punish (1991) where Foucault magnificently explores the passage from direct punishment over the body—torture in prisons and dungeons, food reduction, physical atonement, and various forms of cruelty—toward a form of scrutiny based on a specific architecture of prisons, the panopticon, which produces a self-control, an internalization of surveillance by the individuals being scrutinized.1 With the panopticon, punishment was no longer an “art of unbearable sensations”; it became an “economy of suspended rights.” If justice must still handle and touch the body of transgressors, this should be done at a distance, properly, according to strict rules and aiming at a higher goal: the soul, not the body, should be changed. A society of discipline was born. Some decades later, in 1978, Foucault pointed out another major change: the rise of a more flexible form of control, based on security, not on discipline, on the control of the population’s movements rather than on its confinement. Foucault asked: “Can we say that in our societies the general economy of power is becoming the order of security?”2 In this chapter, I explore current forms of controls created for, tested, and applied during mega-events such as the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups, and football games in general, attempting to show that new technologies of control are a step forward in Foucault’s disciplin99

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ary society, in a new “order of security” that better serves the “general economy of power.” It is suggested that security at sport sites may anticipate security strategies in other spaces (such as airports) and may lead to segregations of class, race, religion, gender, and age. This may also create securityscapes, i.e., globalized transnational forms of control of zones that surpass regulations of nation-states and temporarily suspend their sovereignty. I used ethnographic observations in stadiums and critical discourse analyses of documents from the Olympic game Organizing Committee, FIFA, and press articles to understand the fear that leads to segregation, and the strategies applied to guarantee “security,” which as we will see could lead to social cleavage, exclusion, and therefore social homogeneity. The initial assumption is that whenever the nature of fear evolves, there is a corresponding change in urban and architectural design. Adopting a defensive architecture and urbanism, the sport sites (as well as shopping malls, train stations and, above all, airports) are included in an urban network of safe spaces that has its private nodes in gated communities (see Maguire 2014). As Setha Low points out: “The growing emphasis on security has certainly transformed the architectural structures of many urban centers that are now marked by bollards, fences, high walls and a range of technologically sophisticated gadgets. But these technologies are reinforced based on the politics of security and the social processes that sustain these politics and architectural changes” (Low 2017).

Going to Stadiums: Ethnographic Notes One of my pleasant memories of youth, in the 1970s, was going to the football stadium of the Internacional club in Porto Alegre, in Southern Brazil, with my father and uncle. We would leave home hours before the game to get the best places and to enjoy the performance of the fans in the stands, the music, the singing, and the flags waving high on their masts. We would purchase tickets at the official ticket windows or from a scalper to avoid a line. After entering, we would negotiate a place in the stands of the Beira-Rio Stadium—the seating was on long open benches where people could always squeeze together to fit one more. We sat on

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pillows in the team colors, brought from home, because the bench was made of cement. With a transistor radio glued to the ear, we listened to the spectacle before the game and bought snacks from the hawkers. Stadiums at the time were large buildings, much larger than today’s arenas, and at important games more than 100,000 people crowded inside.3 There were different spaces for different social classes, divided by ticket price: the most expensive in the Beira-Rio were individual seats; the cheapest, in a space known as “Korea,” were for the poorest fans who watched standing up in a trench below field level, with journalists and equipment obstructing the view, and a dry moat to prevent undesirable entrance on the turf. 4 We usually stayed in the sector for club members, at the center of the field, throughout the game, but it was interesting to observe the migration of the mass of fans in the stands during the interval, as they tried to sit closer to their team’s attack. Policing, despite the large number of people, was scarce; even on the day of a derby, the rival fans could freely mix when leaving the match, the winners jeering the losers with a jocularity that included paying off bets by pulling the winner in a cart as if the loser was a mule, or being forced to wear the rival team’s cap. Today, the routine is quite different. To watch a game at the BeiraRio, I buy a ticket in advance on the Internet; the ticket is in my name and non-transferable. I cannot arrive early because the gates open only one hour before the game. And if I did enter, there would be little to see: there are no more musical bands in the stands because the instruments are considered potential weapons and flags with poles longer than 40 inches are seized at the gate. Since FIFA safety regulations prohibit spectators to stand in the stadiums, the seating is now predetermined, as in a theater, and individual plastic seats have replaced the communal benches. It is no longer possible to change seats during the game, unless asked by a security guard. There are no more places reserved for the poor, the capacity of Beira-Rio has been reduced by nearly half, and there is no more “Korea.” Once in the stadium, I would be filmed by many of the 286 cameras that are monitored in real time by the Operational Command Center, my image is stored for 30 days, and the 600 human security guards who work there would also watch me. “Any suspicious attitude is quickly identified and a group of security guards sent to see what took place,” as

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the club website explains.5 What a “suspicious attitude” would be is not clear (as it is also not clear in airport control centers, as Maguire (2014) indicates) but we know that other public spaces have futuristic cameras with software that detects “strange behavior,” determined by algorithms. If an important event is taking place, such as the 2014 World Cup, by determination of FIFA there would be a security checkpoint 300 feet from the entrance, consisting of movable railings that corral spectators toward agents and equipment that examine everyone’s body and personal objects.6 Passing this point, I would enter a territory separate from Brazilian territory, the so-called free area, governed by FIFA, with its own laws. In a clear violation of national sovereignty, anyone suspected of an infraction is sent to a room located in the Command Tower at the top of the Beira-Rio stadium, where “judges” who respond to FIFA and not to the Brazilian Constitution can ban them temporarily or permanently from this or other stadiums. But let’s imagine that the security cameras did not detect me making suspicious gestures. I could then enjoy the goods allowed in the “free zone,” as FIFA prefers to call it—not forgetting that this is a public space territorialized by FIFA—which, as in parks like Disneyland, only offers products from event sponsors. A large white tent would perhaps catch my attention: could it be the chemical detoxification unit loaned by the United States for the 2014 World Cup and once again for the 2016 Olympics, because Brazil still does not have this decontamination technology? Since in the event of a bioterrorist attack the tent only has capacity to serve about 1 percent of the spectators, it is located close to the VIP entrance and of course only the VIPs would be taken there. Routine and excessive control is not new in Brazil. High-tech equipment has been used for many years by an ever-growing private security industry to separate and exclude the subalterns from the elite and their residential areas (see Rial and Grossi 2002). What is new is the placement of these apparatus in public spaces. This creates, as Fassin (2014) indicates, a general climate of insecurity: security itself creates insecurity. *** This description of “free-zones” and checkpoints at football-related events could be applied to facilities for other sports, with local

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contextual differences. At an NBA match (held in the Barclay Center, in Brooklyn, for instance) the controlled zone would be just a small area in front of the entrances. And the sale of food and merchandised products takes place inside the arena, not in the privatized public space. Is there a reason, other than a global standardization of procedures, to justify such extreme controls in countries, like Brazil, where the terrorist threat is low? This question emerges every time I watch scenes of fighting between fans, which occupy hours of television sports programs, even though they involve only a small number of fanatics. Indeed, one of the forms of “violence” most commented on by the Brazilian media is that related to football, especially when perpetrated by members of organized fan clubs. Hooligans, as these supporters were first called in the United Kingdom, can be violent. And although their aggressive behavior had been perceived as a recent phenomenon, it dates to the primordial times of that practice (see Elias and Dunning 1986). There are, however, two considerations that often come to my mind when I watch these programs. Although football-related, the fights and assaults covered by the media usually occur far from the stadiums and are not directly linked to the football spectacle. Nerveless, they sustain the narrative that “football events provoke violence,” which leads to the placement of an impressive security apparatus in and nearby stadiums. The statistics about sport violence in Brazil show that it is quite low compared with other forms of violence, such as the physical violence against women or murders committed by the police or rival gangs in the favelas.7 Indeed, on average, in only four days in Brazil more women are murdered than in 17 years of football-related conflicts.8 Thus, as in the case of global terrorist attacks, it is not the number of casualties that explains the media attention or the extent of the social grief.9 Actually, the violence on the pitch, among players, is an important part of the football spectacle (see Rial 2003). Cameras show rough contact between players, insults, fouls, aggressions, and bleeding in close-up and slow motion. These images receive the same visual treatment from video editors as do goals and dribbles. So, although some degree of violence is acceptable in the match as part of the show, which apparently makes it more attractive to spectators, it cannot occur in the stands.

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Looking Back For Elias and Dunning (1986), one of the central characteristics of modern sport is its distance from physical violence. According to these authors, modern football matches mimic war, and real wars among nations tend to be replaced with mega-sport competitions like the World Cups or Olympic Games. Even if we do not agree with Elias and Dunning on this point—and I do not, given that violent sports are still very popular in our late Modernity, as demonstrated by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)—we must admit that, unlike Medieval games, violence is not an essential part of football, and the institution of an external arbiter has controlled physical excess among participants in football and other sports.10 Since the nineteenth century, when football became a popular sport and was exported from the UK to its colonies and countries where the British Empire had business, thousands of people gathered every weekend to play or watch, and the normal quality of this assembly was pacific sociability. While the first football matches were played on fields with the fans nearby and no fences to separate them from the players, since the mid-twentieth century, stadiums have created segregated areas. This is the passage from what geographer John Bale called the second stage in the evolution of football stadiums (when the playing field is defined but there is no clear physical or symbolic separation between the spaces for spectators and players) and the third and fourth stages, when places were designated according to a class logic and at which a disciplinary logic prevails with a fully segregated public.11 Gates, iron fences, and even trenches soon became ubiquitous at sites where football was popular. Gender-related changes also occurred (see Almeida 2013). The female population was welcome to stand at the side of the pitches and continued to be accepted until the mid-twentieth century, as shown in the pictures of the 1950 World Cup disputed at the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Their presence became increasingly undesirable after 1970.12 In Brazil, during the military dictatorship (1964–1979), along with its conservative ideology, the repression of free expression, and income concentration, giant stadiums were constructed around the country, as powerful propaganda for the so-called economic miracle. There was a

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common slogan: “Onde a ARENA vai mal, faça um estádio” (“Where Arena [the political party allied to the military] is not popular, build a stadium”13). Maracanã, which like other stadiums mimic Roman arenas, was the model. It was built in the 1930s (when the country was under a civil dictatorship) and is viewed as a monument in concrete that expresses the ideology of the time which emphasized the importance of physical activities and large-scale civic manifestations (see Holzmeister 2014). These stadiums were built for more than 100,000 spectators, with architecture that facilitated class segregation (in a country where class and race are strongly linked): the poorest fans, predominantly blacks, had standing-room-only spaces with poor views. The middle class had seats on collective concrete benches, and a small elite sector was reserved for the wealthy, white upper class, with cadeiras cativas, special individual seats often bought for the fan’s entire life. With minor local differences, stadium architecture in the twentieth century was characterized by these standards that segregated bodies by class at different levels, but gave them all some space inside the stadium in terraces, tribunes (often the only sector to provide shelter), grandstands, and special seats or boxes. A turning point in this model of space construction (which led to specific corporal practices) was the tragedy at England’s Hillsborough Stadium, in April 1989, when 766 football fans were wounded and 96 died, crushed against iron bars. “They were treated like animals, they behaved like animals,” said one police officer. Indeed, bars were common elements in British stadiums during the Thatcher period—unlike stadiums in Latin America, which instead of bars had fences (probably because fences are less expensive) that yielded to the weight of the bodies pushing against them. Another huge transformation followed a tragedy at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985, when 39 fans died and more than 600 were wounded.14 Even if this level of violence has been rare, fans began to be presented with a new face, that of potential criminals. Following the Heysel disaster, clubs from England were forbidden to play in the European championship for years, and a new criminal category, the hooligans, became the main target of security measures. Several devices were employed to avoid them. Some are hard, like the blacklisting of individuals with previous behavioral transgressions, who were denied access to football stadiums.15 Other measures were soft, like the individualization of the

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internal space of the stadiums and their embellishment and sanitation (clean toilets, more “organized” bars), which also contributed to the sense that workers were out of place in spaces designed with other class tastes (see Bourdieu 1979). Other soft tools for exclusion were new regulations on behavior that imposed rigid body control. The 2016 Stadium Guide for Wembley, in London, for instance, determines that fans must remain seated: “Nobody may stand in any seating area whilst play is in progress. Persistent standing in seated areas during an Event is strictly forbidden and may result in ejection from the Ground.” Smoking is also prohibited (“Smoking at the Ground is strictly forbidden and will result in ejection from the Ground. Use of e-cigarettes is also forbidden within the stadium”). The consumption of alcohol is also banned in Brazilian and UK stadiums. In the latter, regulations prohibit “attempting to enter the Ground or being inside the Ground whilst drunk.” Alcohol is sold in Europe and at FIFA World Cup matches because a particular beer brand is a major sponsor of the games. Excess—profanity, taunts, physical contact—that are part of a class habitus are prohibited, and the habitus of subaltern classes was thus conflated with unwanted behavior (Bahktin 2010; Bourdieu 1979). To avoid “hooligans,” this new architecture has been disseminated globally, along with increases in ticket prices in all of the major leagues in the world, which economically selects who can enter the stadiums. The tragedies of Hillsborough and Heysel can be viewed as what Veena Das would call “critical events” (see Das 1995), which provoked profound changes in the way police treat supporters and security was handled in the stadiums, first in the UK, then in Europe (UEFA), and now increasingly globally (FIFA). They functioned as the 9/11 attacks for football. Being a global sport under the aegis of FIFA, football is connected with other (distant) places in a system that regulates stadium architecture and the security apparatus deployed. Despite local specificities, both architecture and security have been greatly transformed in recent decades, with the global shrinkage of large stadiums and the installation of high-technology security systems. The architectural design, technological tools, and intelligent ID control, even when they replicated existing devices and were not absolutely new, were disseminated and used in

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a large number of sports facilities, serving as a test and anticipating their use in other public or private spaces. In the name of security, closedcircuit TV (CCTV) surveillance and other measures were deployed in Europe and then globally.16 Over time, the entirely separate CCTV systems became integrated into a meta-network. There was thus a shift from low-tech forms (for example, controlling pedestrian flows by enhancing sight lines, removing or creating obstacles such as hedges) to more sophisticated ones (like CCTV, mechanical sniffers, or anti-drone shields). During the past half-century, security at mega-sporting events became the “largest security operation in peacetime” (Thompson 1999), shaping global security strategy. To assure this “safety and well-being,” UEFA organizes an annual conference that brings together the security officers from its national associations, stadium safety managers, club safety officers, and police representatives from the cities of all the European clubs that participate in the UEFA Championship.17 “Over 350 delegates review the past season, exchange good practices and discuss arrangements,” which has been followed by a pan-European strategy shared by all key European partners. “UEFA, the European Union and the Council of Europe work together on a host of strategies and funding initiatives in the field of football safety and security. UEFA is a founding partner of the joint UEFA/EU working program in operation since 2007 [ . . . ] In this way, UEFA promotes and ensures that all venues and clubs maintain the high standards required to host European football.” As stated by Jo Vanhecke, the chairman of the Council of Europe’s standing committee on spectator violence, “The EU Think Tank, UEFA and the Council of Europe standing committee have developed, over the past years, a joint integrated and multi-agency approach on service, safety and security at football matches” [ . . . ] “We no longer blame each other, because we are convinced that only together can we move forward.” Part of UEFA’s work concerns measures to avoid incidents or disasters, like keeping the evacuation gates open and avoiding overcrowded stands. “Expect the unexpected” is a slogan that summarizes its goal. As part of this approach, for example, each stadium in England must, under new regulations, receive a safety certificate indicating compliance with the norms of the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds issued by the

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government. The objective of the Guide is to provide guidance to ground management, technical specialists such as architects and engineers, and representatives of all relevant authorities, in order to assist them in the assessment of how many spectators can be safely accommodated within a sports ground.18 Of course, these new security strategies go far beyond determining “how many spectators can be safely accommodated.” They may include the appointment of a full-time counterterrorism manager, as did the English club Manchester United, along with significant additional procedures already introduced at its famous stadium Old Trafford on match days.19 These security measures have impacts on citizenship, national autonomy, and the reconfiguration of urban public spaces for business and leisure. Let’s examine three of these possible outcomes more carefully.

The End of Anonymity? One of the central characteristics of urban life as presented by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians is anonymity. Although unanimously considered a main trait in the life of the metropolis, the thinkers of modernity have had different evaluations of this anonymity. Considered negatively by Simmel and the Chicago School—as a loss compared with the experience of community found in folk life— anonymity was praised by Baudelaire and Benjamin, who describe the feeling of being part of a crowd, anonymous, as a new and pleasant experience of modern life. One of the pioneers of urban anthropology in France, Collete Petonnet, reinforced this idea, pointing out how anonymity can be a “protective shield.” It seems that shield is about to be broken.20 Current security strategies deployed in stadiums imply the end of anonymity for spectators, as is already the case in other strategic public spaces (like airports) or private spaces (like gated communities that request identification at the visitors’ entrance). Stadiums are beginning to care more about who is attending an event, and not just whether a ticket is being sold. It is going to become increasingly difficult to buy tickets to sporting events anonymously (and after the bombing in the concert house in Paris, probably for buying tickets to events in general). When

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fans are no longer anonymous, their names can quickly be checked on a security list, as they are when consumers purchase plane tickets and travel through airports. Anonymity is also lost for the participants working at the sporting event, and under more complex systems. For example: Coverage of a match at the Champions League demands dual credentials from journalists, one from UEFA and the other from the local Federation. When a journalist shows credentials at the main gate, they go through a scanner to confirm the ID by exhibiting a photo on a screen, a procedure that is used in a variety of realms. Indeed, immediately after the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972, an identification system was put in place, initially with the requirement of previous accreditation for site workers (Montreal 1976), followed by the accreditation of athletes (Seoul 1988).21 The focus on security was expanded to include the general public following the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and the massacre at the Heysel stadium. And more sophisticated security apparatus began to be implemented as well.

The Multiplication of Panasonic I first became interested in football stadium security after a narrative from a friend involved in organizing the World Cup and Olympic Games in Brazil, who visited the Wembley Stadium and its secure control. The use of acoustic surveillance particularly caught my attention. She told me that microphones were placed beneath seats in the stands, and the voices captured were analyzed at the stadium’s Central Command Secure Control. That voices (and not only images) could now be the object of surveillance evoked for me the worst authoritarian scenarios. The fact that this happens every week in a football stadium, where a multitude of shouts and endless noise are expected, left me terrified. According to my friend, the microphones installed at Wembley Stadium serve to identify any possible “criminal disruption” by acoustic surveillance: the microphones feed footage to a control room for human operators. In case of “criminal disruption,” the central command would contact a security office near the incident, using a two-way radio with GPS, and can give the precise location of the potential offender. Indeed,

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what can and cannot be said on the ground is the subject of three items in the Stadium’s safety regulations that does not mention the presence of the microphones: “Threatening, abusive or violent behavior, and foul or abusive language [ . . . ]; Racial, homophobic or discriminatory abuse, chanting or harassment [ . . . ] The chanting of anything of an indecent or racialist nature.” All of these are “strictly forbidden and will result in arrest and/or ejection from the Ground. WNSL may impose a ban from the Ground as a result.”22 As a matter of fact, Wembley is not the first place to use hidden microphones. Security listening devices appeared at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games (that followed Munich 1972), and were installed at the Olympic Village, along with other preventive measures like the visible presence of unprecedented on-site security forces, the accreditation of site workers, and the first widespread deployment of CCTV. Innovations included the surveillance of mobilities as well as geographies: Athletes needed to carry ID cards embedded with coded magnetic strips that could be checked by sensors across Olympic sites.23 The use of microphones, as instruments of vigilance, is not unprecedented. The Israeli army has deployed them to control the nocturnal movements of Palestinians in certain regions, with limited results (because they also capture the movements of animals, like rabbits and squirrels).24 Such practices of control through audio monitoring have had unexpected developments, particularly the possibility to access microphone jacks in personal computers, which allows hackers—as well as government agencies and large companies (Google has already admitted to this use)—to transform PCs or mobile phones into devices for listening into the private lives of users, by surreptitiously turning on microphones (and webcams). In March 2017, Wikileaks released documents from the CIA that reveal the agency’s hacking of iPhones, Android devices, Windows operating systems and, what is most new, the use of Samsung TVs as covert microphones, a process called “zero day.” Another device (“Weeping Angel”) makes audio recordings through smart TVs and sends them over the Internet to a CIA server.25

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Technological Fetishism As we have seen, the technological surveillance of football grounds has been constant in the UK since the Hillsborough Stadium tragedy in 1985 and employs mechanisms beyond those used at previously fortified spaces. “Football supporters are probably more accustomed to being subject to camera surveillance than most other groups in society” (Middleham 1993). The 2012 Olympic Games in London brought further innovations in the form of biometric and wireless technologies, including facial recognition CCTV, monitored control of behavior and Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance’ as well as second-generation approaches designed to filter and avoid noise from oversupplied data.26 More recently, a major improvement in image control was put in place: “cameras that have analytics allow you the ability to discern certain behavior. Computerized searching has also made it possible to find things almost instantaneously in hours of recording” (Schwarz et al. 2015, 308). The monitoring of Facebook and Twitter posts is another intelligence strategy that yields information about security threats. In São Paulo, the police often monitor the social media before, during, and after football derbies to locate sites of conflict among hooligans. Security devices are continually being improved and the global biometric business grows at an astonishing pace.27 There is no magic solution for providing on-site security, and the lofty promises of sophisticated technology are rarely confirmed. Complex technological apparatus also has limitations: we should not forget that the Hillsborough tragedy was provoked by a misinterpretation of video footage. Too much information generates noise, as communication studies have demonstrated. On many occasions, traditional low-fidelity surveillance measures can be more efficient at sporting events, although humans have failed to make proper use of surveillance as well.28 Moreover, audits conducted in North America show a very high percentage of errors in databases, reaching 40 percent (see Brodeur and LemanLanglois 2004). The deployment of CCTV has been criticized by those who point out the excessive criminalization of football fans, and in some countries, like France, its use is still forbidden. Moreover, to be observed by a camera

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is not a passive situation. The subjects observed react to the camera, and certain behavior can be encouraged rather than restrained, as much ethnographic research in Visual Anthropology has shown. We seem to be experiencing an escalation of vigilance at mega-events with the use of new tools, devices, and methods or the diversion of other measures from their original use—like the use of army soldiers to patrol alongside police and private security agents, snipers (employed on the roof of the Stade de France after the failed attack of April 2016) and, more recently, the use of anti-drone shields during the Euro 2016.29

FIFA’s Buffer Zone: A Global Regulation above National Law? Today, an important football match radically changes the public space around the sports arena. As we have seen, prior to admission to a stadium or to fan zones, spectators must pass checkpoints and enter the “free zone.” Many spectators are probably unaware or unconcerned, but passing this border is like leaving the national territory and entering a no-place land, a territory withdrawn from public space and privatized by the event organizers with the consent of national authorities. We could call these territories buffer zones. Buffer zones at sports events are imposed over an existing urban space, for a determined time—ephemeral, they can be rapidly dismantled. In general, public areas transformed into buffer zones are traffic-free and have controlled entrances. These territories may have a radius of 300 to 650 feet, but in some cases, as at World Cups, the radius can be much larger, and usually with several checkpoints for ticket holders. In addition to traffic around the stadium, commerce and other normal street activities are subjected to the strict control of FIFA regulations, or by other regional or national federations that compose FIFA. Thus, besides sealing off the football ground from perceived threats, the security operation establishes a new order for the surrounding areas. It is formatted by the introduction of an externally defined process for onsite security and externally defined rules that prevail on local, regional, and national laws. Entry into the buffer zone implies acceptance of the security measures and the exclusivity of commerce and advertising that are also strictly controlled inside. The marketization of the zone around

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a stadium—integrating facilities like shops, museums, hotels, casinos, movie theaters, and even graveyards (as the one I visited at Vicente Calderón, in Madrid)—have led some observers to call them tradiums. The stadium becomes much more than a sporting arena. We cannot forget that stadiums are surrounded by communities composed of people and businesses that are affected by the security measures. “Policing around the grounds imposes costs on the local taxpayer and specially on the substantial number of urban residents with no interest in football” (Bale 2000). The alleged purpose of the buffer zones around football stadiums is to keep out opportunist criminals, responding to the culture of fear that characterizes late modernity. But there are other consequences: national sovereignty over the territory is suspended in favor of a transnational organization (FIFA or the Olympic Committee). And the buffer zone creates its own citizens and its others, those who are and are not allowed to enter it. It differentiates people by their level of power (visiting dignitaries, authorities, celebrities) and wealth (ticket purchasers)—which, in the case of Brazil, also involves segregation by color, since blacks are often absent in wealthy realms—but not by gender or sexual preference as we can observe in other occurrences of this form of territorialization. The ideal situation is not to transform the others into strangers, in the sense of Simmel, because as such, they would still be part of the group. The goal here is to place them not far but out, and thus efface them.30

Final Considerations Terrorism, even if it is defeated, is not without consequences. The dynamics of political competition, the structures of the state, and the relationship between citizen and political-economic bodies will be changed to an extent that has thus far not been assessed.31

On-site security operations have become increasingly globalized and standardized, and not only in the realms of sports. Echoing Augé (1995), we could call these sites non-spaces where human connectedness is not lost but redirected to social-class-gender-race equals, keeping infamous bodies out. The tendency is for these spaces to multiply in coming years,

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since, as in gated communities, they respond to the users’ “desire for safety and security, as well as status” (Low 2017). At some point in history, football (and other sports) became a major business, which cannot be solely dependent on the public in the stadiums. Income from television rights is more than double the financial gains from the ticket office; thus, the spectacle must be clean, colorful, and cheerful.32 Is this fear justifiable? As of 2017, there were no bombing victims in football stadiums, except for the terrorist who blew himself up in front of the Stade de France in November 2015.33 The excessive control at stadiums (like that found at airports and shopping malls) is a response to September 11, part of the so-called war on terror in which bodies have acquired differentiated values. For Western societies, the unbearable seems to be the killing of an elevated number of middle- and high-class persons, attacked in cities, in urban social spaces. For that reason, we observe extreme control in realms inhabited or frequented by the elites, whose bodies carry value, and a silence about and abandoning of unsafe realms occupied by “infamous” bodies, as Foucault (1977) called them. Contrasting with the overwhelming media coverage after the Brussels terrorist attack in March 2016, no details were provided and almost no images circulated in the global media after the US bombing of an Afghan wedding party.34 This is understandable given the difference in value assigned to bodies from the “global North” and “South,” as I have discussed elsewhere (see Rial 2007). An inmate is killed by other inmates every day in Brazilian prisons, institutions that by their nature should be under absolute control.35 A woman is beaten to death every day in Brazil, most often in her home. But the media spotlights and the technology of control of violence are elsewhere, near and inside stadiums and elite neighborhoods, with devices that control but do not prevent the circulation of users. According to Foucault, biopower is based on the concepts of security and discipline. Discipline operates in an artificial space built entirely for this urge while security is used to respond to a reality by confronting the hazard and existing material data. Discipline regulates everything, whereas security monitors activities while allowing them to continue because there is a level at which a laissez-faire attitude is essential. Circulation—in airports, in stadiums, on the streets—remains crucial.

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Indeed, fans may complain about delays, but in general seem satisfied and do not object to repetitive search procedures at various checkpoints. Since in many cases it is impossible to carefully search each person, this ritualized procedure has more of a symbolic effect (responding to the culture of fear) than a pragmatic one. At the sports stadiums, a buffer zone helps to erect a protective bubble for those who are allowed to be inside the “free zone” in total security. But we can easily think of similar procedures in smaller spaces, like neighborhoods or condominiums, and in larger ones, like countries, through the exclusion of immigrants. In both cases, the unwanted, the infamous bodies, must be kept away. Borders (checkpoints, buffers) are among the several apparatuses employed: Financial exclusion, cameras and microphones, architectural individualization, and space “sanitation” inside and outside stadiums create a sense of security. But they have a price; they create spaces of exception, selective visions of order and exclusion. One of the slogans of FIFA and the Olympic Organizing Committee emphasizes the “legacy” of each mega-event, their lasting positive effect on the local communities and cities. As we saw above, there is another, rarely mentioned legacy: the legacy of fear that leads to the development of standardized globalized, sophisticated security systems. Being part of a crowd was an important part of the experience of urban human beings, as we can see at the defiant gatherings just after the terrorist attacks at the Place de la Bourse, in Brussels and at the Place de la Repúblique, in Paris, despite discouragements from government authorities. Football stadiums respond to this, providing an experience of companionship, even if this is now restricted to a certain social class. Increased security comes at a high cost to clubs, municipalities, and supporters, and the added lines and waiting time can turn away spectators. In the future, fans may prefer to stay home or get together in pubs to watch the matches on television. Foucault revealed how direct punishment of the body—torture in prisons and dungeons including food reduction, physical atonement, and diverse forms of cruelty—gave place to a self-internalization of control. Today, the tendency seems to be toward the “prevention” of imaginable deviances by keeping unwanted bodies at a distance, using various restrictive mechanisms, the border being one of the most common. The

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objectives have changed. Rather than arresting offenders, the aim is now to prevent the entrance of supposed lawbreakers, and the shortcuts taken to achieve this aim involve classifying subjects by class, gender, and ethnic origin. Notes

1 A better word, to correspond to Greek Panopticon (multiple vision), would be Panakoúw (multipleaudible). 2 “Peut-on dire que dans nos sociétés l’économie générale de pouvoir est en train de devenir de l’ordre de la sécurité?”: Leçon du 11 janvier 1978, p. 12 (Foucault 2004, 12). 3 The final of the 1950 World Cup was watched by more than 200,000 spectators in Maracanã, where the maximum capacity is now just over 78,000. 4 I never quite understood the nickname, a clear negative stereotype of Asians. The name Korea was likely chosen because it was viewed as a distant barbarian place. 5 Sport Club Internacional, “Com tecnologia de ponta, Beira-Rio oferece máxima segurança aos torcedores.” www.internacional.com.br. 6 There can be more than one—during the Euro 2016, to access the fan zone of the Eiffel Tower I had to pass through no less than three checkpoints, and six checkpoint were in place for a Champions League game that took place in Paris in 2017. 7 Every 12 seconds a woman is aggressed, every 11 minutes a woman is raped, every day 13 women are killed (Waiselfisz 2016). In the first ten months of 2015, there was a total of 63,090 complaints of violence against women. 31,432 corresponded to complaints of physical violence (49.82%). Compromisso E Atitude, “Dados nacionais sobre violência contra as mulheres,” http://www.compromissoeatitude.org. br/. The rate of homicides of women per 100,000 inhabitants was 4.8 in 2013. Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, “Mapa Da Violência 2015,” Compromisso E Atitude, http:// www.compromissoeatitude.org.br/. Half of all deaths among youth between ages 16 and 17 in Brazil are caused by homicide. The rate of homicides for 16–17-year-olds per 100,000 inhabitants was 54.1 (2013) and 54.9 (2015). Ten teenagers are murdered every day in Brazil, which has the third highest homicide level among teenagers of 85 countries (following only Mexico and El Salvador). These data mean that Brazil has 275 more homicides of teenagers than Austria, Japan, or the United Kingdom; 183 more than Germany or Egypt (WHOSIS, World Mortality Databases). Retrieved from Waiselfisz, “Mapa da Violência 2015: Adolescentes de 16 e 17 anos do Brasil,” http://www.mapadaviolencia.org.br/. 8 Only 3% out of 303 deaths related to football in Brazil (1988–January 2017) occurred in a stadium. That is, less than one death each month, in various spaces and not all on match days. In São Paulo we found the highest figure: 47 deaths related to football events from August 20, 1995 (date of the “Battle of Pacaembú”) up to 2017. Alexandre Alliatti, Martin Fernandez, and Rodrigo Faber, “Mãe, hoje

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é jogo de criança, não tem perigo,” Globoesporte.com, http://app.globoesporte. globo.com/. The Battle of Pacaembú occurred in the major public stadium in São Paulo, when the fans of local teams invaded the pitch at the end of a youth championship. 102 were injured and one 13-year-old boy was killed. The fight was broadcast. Reis 2006. We can recall: since ISIS began its operations in 2013, terrorist attacks conducted by ISIS “soldiers” and Al Qaeda soldiers or sympathizers have killed no more than 1,200 people in Europe, the United States, and North Africa (and the great majority of casualties were in North Africa). As Orwell remarked: “I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles . . . If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.” Orwell 1945. The folk football would be the first stage, with football being played in an open field with no defined lines and no distinction between players and spectators (Bale 1993). It is valuable to remember that a law enacted in Brazil in 1950 forbade women to play football until 1979. Many European countries had similar prohibitions. Rial 2015. Another version of the saying: wherever the ARENA party isn’t doing too hot, send in their team to the national championship. Wherever the ARENA party is doing well, send in a team as well. The coup d’état of 1964 switched the preexisting political parties and installed a two-party system a year later, composed of the Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA) and the Movimento Democrático Brazileiro (MDB). The two-party system lasted until 1979. It involved fans from Liverpool and Juventus. The stadium’s capacity of 50,000 was exceeded, when 58,000 people were allowed inside. It was the final match of the European Cup, and before the game English fans reacted to taunts from the Italian fans by charging through the lines of Belgian police. The Juventus fans retreated back to a wall, which collapsed. The match took place as if nothing had happened. In the UK, some hooligans on this list must present themselves at a designated police station hours before the matches. CCTV are cameras that observe a defined site and feed footage to a control room manned by human operators. As Fussey correctly observed, “today CCTV is perhaps more accurately characterized as operating an open circuit rather that a

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closed circuit. Increasingly, once-bounded networks are not only breaking open to assimilate other extant CCTV schemes (for example, hitherto closed surveillance systems such as those in hospitals, schools and universities are progressively becoming connected to city-centre schemes) but can now be accessed from remote sources such as the Internet. As such, ‘open circuit television’ (OCTV) is probably a more accurate description. However, to ensure parity with existing literature, and research on surveillance, the term ‘CCTV’ is used” (Fussey et al. 2011). “Each week, thousands of supporters travel to UEFA matches to be entertained by exciting football matches. These fans are the lifeblood of football. They should be able to enjoy the festive atmosphere and celebration of football without any concerns about their safety or well-being. [ . . . ] Upholding this principle depends on UEFA working together with national associations, clubs, stadium owners and managers, national and local authorities and police to ensure safe, secure and welcoming conditions for all football matches hosted across Europe.” “Stadium & Security,” UEFA.org, https://www.uefa.com/. Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds 2008, 13. “Manchester United to Employ Full-Time Counter-Terrorism Manager,” The Guardian, January 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/; or Simon Stone, “Manchester United Appoint Full-Time Counter-Terrorism manager,” BBC Sport, http://www.bbc.com/. Simmel 1950; Baudelaire 1964; Bejamin 2006; Petonnet 1987. In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes, one German police officer, and five terrorists were killed in a raid by “Black September,” a Palestinian group that scaled the fence around the Olympic village and entered the Israeli compound. Wembley, “Rules and Regulations,” http://www.wembleystadium.com/. Fussey et al. 2011, 179. About Israel, personal communication of Captain Alan Kearney, April 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/. In March 2014, the activist Edward Snowden denounced the existence of a software developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) that is able to make records using webcam hacked computers and send photos and videos to the American security agency. See Kim Zetter, “How to Keep the NSA From Spying through your Webcam,” Wired, March 13, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/. In the same year, the British government went public with an alert on a Russian website that broadcast live footage of hundreds of webcams around the world. See Matthew Weaver, “UK Moves to Shut Down Russian Hackers Streaming Live British Webcam Footage,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/. Biometrics refers to the introduction in identification instruments of various advanced technologies originally under the scientific sphere (biology, medicine, physics, optics, communication, computer, etc. [ . . . ] The aim is to build a non-linear and multi-dimensional system to monitor shifting people, locally or remotely, through reading their body parts and their “fingerprints” of connection

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bases data. Monitoring can then be effected by identification from the determination of biometrics and through monitoring tools itineraries and individual movements (in territorially and computerized spaces) capable of storing any information and consider situations to infinity using mathematical and statistical methods. Therefore a special feature of this system is the establishment of a close link between identification and monitoring, the latter acting increasingly both in terms of what individuals and what they do. (Ceyhan 2005, 61–62) According to the Biometric Group, global biometric revenues were projected to grow “from $3.42 billion in 2009 to $9.37 billion in 2014, driven in part by government identity management and border management programs.” Fingerprinting was expected to gain 45.9% of the non-AFIS biometrics market in 2009, followed by facial recognition at 18.5% and iris recognition at 8.3%. Iris recognition revenues were projected to approach $500 million in 2012. http://findbiometrics. com/. The French police failed to detect the terrorists in April 2016 at the Stade de France, who were identified by the German agents at the second checkpoint. The work conditions explain some failures: during the Euro 2016 in France, the security agents of private firms had only 12 seconds to perform the body search, in order to maintain the flow of fans. “In October 2014, a drone had also flown over a stadium during a qualifying match for Euro between Serbia and Albania, carrying a flag in favor of Great Albania. The security forces are prepared. A training exercise that took place last April in Saint-Étienne imagined that a drone poured chemicals on the crowd of the stadium, which will host three matches of the Euro. To avoid this nightmare scenario, ten stadiums and 24 training centers will be equipped with no-fly zone and equipped with anti-drone system during the Euro football. The police had already developed a UAV ‘sniffers’ system able to locate unmanned malicious drones thanks to infrared technology sensors.” http://www.lefigaro.fr/. “The inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any social logically relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near.” Simmel 1950. Pat Caplan, “Terror, Witchcraft and Risk,” in AnthroGlobe Journal, www.anthroglobe.info. For example, the Euro Cup, which is the third most watched sporting event in the world (after the World Cup and the Olympic Games), in 2016 paid 1 billion euro to UEFA/FIFA for the television rights, which represents double the box office seats. It had 5,000 products released with the Uefa-Euro brand with 400 million euro gains from sponsorships to UEFA/FIFA. The sponsors also bought 40 million euro in tickets to be offered. The same day that I wrote this sentence, a suicide bomber from ISIS killed 26 people and wounded 50 others at al-Shuhadaa, a small and precarious stadium south of Baghdad, negating my affirmation. CNN TV, March 25, 2016. See http://futbol.as.com/.

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34 “US Bomb Kills 30 at Afghan Wedding,” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/. 35 “Uma pessoa é assassinada a cada dia em presidios no Brasil,” Folha de São Paulo, February 5, 2017.

References

Almeida, C. S. 2013. Boas de bola: Um estudo sobre o ser jogadora de futebol no Esporte Clube Radar durante a década de 1980.” Unpublished thesis, Federal University of Santa Catarina. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 2010. Cultura popular na idade média e no renascimento: o contexto de François Rabelais. São Paulo: Hucitec. Bale, John. 1993. Sport, Space and the City. London: Routledge. Bale, John. 2000. “The Changing Face of Football, Stadiums and Communities.” In Jon Garland, Dominic Malcolm, and Mike Rowe (eds.), 91–101. The Future of Football: Challenges for the Twenty-first Century. London, New York: Frank Cass. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life. New York: Da Capo Press. Originally published in Le Figaro, in 1863. Beck, U. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction; critique social du jugement. Paris: Minuit. Brodeur, Jean-Paul and Stephanie Leman-Langlois. 2004. “Surveillance totale ou surveillance fiction?” Les Cahiers de la sécurité intérieure, “Reconstruire la sécurité après le 11 septembre,” no. 55, premier trimester. Ceyhan, Ayse. 2005. “La biométrie: une technologie pour gérer les incertitudes de la modernité contemporaine. Applications américaines,” Les Cahiers de la sécurité, no. 56, premier trimester, pp. 61–89. Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Eckert, C. and A. L. Rocha. 2014. “The crisis in industrial and labor arrangements in urban everyday life: ethnography in Porto Alegre, Brazil.” Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the IUAES Commission on Urban Anthropology, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY. Elias, Norbert and Eric Dunning. 1986. Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process. London: Basil Blackwell. Fassin, Didier. 2014. “Petty States of Exception: The Contemporary Policing of the Urban Poor.” In Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski (eds.), 118–138. The Anthropology of Security. London: Pluto Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. La vie des hommes infâmes. Cahiers du chemin, no. 29, janvier. ———1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. ———2004. Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Paris: Gallimard. (Security, Territory, Population, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.)

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Fussey, Pete, Joan Coafee, Gary Armstrong, and Dick Hobbs. 2011. Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City: Reconfiguring London for 2012 and beyond. London: Routledge. Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds. 2008. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. London: Stationary Office. Holzmeister, Antonio. 2014. “A Brief History of Soccer Stadiums in Brazil.” Soccer & Society 15(1): 65–80. Low, Setha M. 2017. “Security at Home: How Private Securitization Practices Increase State and Capitalist Control.” Anthropological Theory 17(3): 365–381. Maguire, Mark. 2014. “Counter-Terrorism in European Airports.” In Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski (eds.), 118–138. The Anthropology of Security. London: Pluto Press. Middleham, N. 1993. Football: Policing the Supporters. Home Office Police Research Group, London. Orwell, George. 1945. “The Sporting Spirit.” Tribune, London. December. Petonnet, C. 1987. “L’anonymat ou la pellicule protectrice dans la ville inquiète.” In Chemins de la ville. Enquêtes ethnologiques. Paris: Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques. Reis, Heloisa Helena Baldy. 2006. Futebol e violência. Campinas: Autores Associados. Rial, Carmen. 2003. “Futebol e mídia: a retórica televisiva e suas implicações na identidade nacional, de gênero e religiosa.” Antropolítica 14: 61–80. ——— 2007. “Guerra de Imagens, imagens da Guerra.” Revista de Estudos Feministas 15(1): 131–151; www.scielo.br. ——— 2015. “Marta is better than Kaká”: the invisible women’s football in Brazil. Labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas 28; www.labrys.net.br. Rial, Carmen and Miriam Grossi. 2002. “Urban Fear in Brazil.” In Aygen Erdentug and Freek Colombijn, Freek (eds.), 109–125. Urban Ethnic Encounters: The Spatial Consequences. New York: Routledge. Schwarz, Eric C., Stacey A. Hal, and Simon Shibli. 2015. Sport Facilities Operation Management: A Global Perspective. London: Routledge, p. 383. Sennet, Richard. 2002. The Fall of Public Man. London: Peguin Books. Simmel, G. 1950. “The Metropolis and the Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press, pp. 402–408. Trans. Kurt Wolff. Thompson, A. 1999. “Security.” In R. Cashman and A. Hughes (ed.), Straging the Olympics—The Events and Its Impact, 106–120. Sydney: University of New South Walles Press. Vidler, Anthony. 1991. On Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waiselfisz, J. J. 2016. Mapa da Violência. Adolescentes de 16 e 17 do Brasil. Brasília: Flacso.

5

Securing Security Recursive Security Assemblages in South Africa Thomas G. Kirsch

Early one morning in 2005, as I arrived at the premises of the private security company in East London (South Africa), where I conducted participant observation, one of the company’s mid-level managers invited me to join him for a spontaneous visit to the home of a staff member. On the car ride to Mdantsane, an adjacent township established during apartheid and still the place of residence of the majority of the region’s “black” workers, the manager explained to me that home visits are an established component of his job intended to signal respect to employees. This explanation took me by surprise because, during previous weeks, I had noted the military-style hierarchy between staff and management. And, I was even more surprised when we reached the employee’s home and started chatting with him over tea and cookies. Children played around us and occasionally interrupted the conversation, the manager engaged in small talk, casually laughing along with everyone present and showing interest, seemingly, in the most trivial details of family life. On our way back to the company headquarters, I asked him whether home visits would engender personal relationships that might later interfere with the formal requirements of professional cooperation. He chuckled, slowed down the car, pointed out the window and said, Look around you. This is Mdantsane. This is a place full of gangsters and thugs. But it’s also where our employees live, and so we have to make sure that they stay on track. If people around here have too much influence on them, there is a danger that they will switch sides. But, who wants a 122

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security officer who is friends with criminals? So, it’s important for us to know what’s going on in the private lives of our employees. (Field notes, March 2005)

He continued by explaining to me that, from the perspective of management, the ideal situation was for staff to live in nuclear families. Extended families, in contrast, had a reputation for potentially promoting crime. For security managers, home visits thus aimed at background checks of staff. They were a strategy to assess whether the personnel entrusted with the provision of security for the company’s clients were trustworthy themselves. Following this episode, I became increasingly aware of the fact that background checks like the one described above are common in the security industry and elsewhere. What is more, and most important for this chapter, I came to learn in the further course of my research that social actors concerned with security issues are often not content with simply checking backgrounds. In many cases, they also purposely act upon this background to change it according to the premise that security is not self-sustaining; rather, security itself demands protection. In other words, this example illustrates a profoundly important topic that anthropological treatments of security have thus far neglected: that security needs to be secured. I explore this topic with a particular emphasis on security’s recursive and spatial dimensions.

Recursive Security It is clear that discourses and practices relating to “security” have begun to play an increasingly important role in more and more spheres of life, thus contributing to momentous sociocultural reconfigurations on different scales that extend from the intimacy of the domestic realm into the vast expanses of transnational space (see Bird-David and Shapiro, and Graham in this volume).1 Given this situation, there is presently no shortage of conceptual models to account for this process of almost all-encompassing securitization, several of which are discussed below. However, most of these explanations rely on a figure of thought in which security is freshly brought to bear on something that has not previously been a target of security.2 In other words, the proliferation of security is

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conventionally depicted as an expansionist activity through which previously “normal” aspects of life are becoming securitized. I do not doubt that this approach can provide useful insights, since it reflects much of what is happening in the contemporary world, such as the securitization of refugees in the borderlands of the European Union, or the widening of security policies in the global context of the so-called War on Terror. Yet, while applying this approach makes visible specific aspects of the empirical realities we are trying to understand, certain other aspects inadvertently remain invisible. In contrast, I aim to develop an alternative approach to the proliferation of security agendas that aims to complement existing ones. My approach starts out from the observation that, once it has been established, security needs to be secured if it is to be maintained in the face of potentially adversarial forces. Thus, what I am exploring here is a particular logic of security in which security becomes its own reference object. Drawing on my ethnographic research in South Africa, I argue that this logic gives rise to security linkages of a particular kind, linkages that are not based on a forwarddriving expansion of security agendas but, rather, on protectively backing up already existing measures.3 By attending to security’s recursive dimensions, we can address some of the ways in which the “rooting” of security agendas occurs in sociocultural contexts. I share Samimian-Darash and Stalcup’s (2017, 61) concern to show “the heterogeneity of security objects [ . . . ] and forms of action.” However, I also note that heterogeneous security assemblages are themselves objects requiring certain forms of securitizing action. A brief ethnographic example will clarify the importance of this point. As part of my research on non-state crime prevention in South Africa, I tend to understand my research participants and interlocutors as “lay criminologists.” That is, I am interested in how they come to an assessment of the crime situation and the deeper causes and consequences of criminality. This allows me to explore the connections between such assessments and crime prevention and control action on the ground. For instance, many people in Eastern Cape Province voice the opinion that one cannot explain the prevalence of criminal behavior among the youth by only referencing sociological factors such as poverty, unemployment, boredom, or peer group pressure. People also reference the lack of education among the youth. For this reason, many people actively support

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or at least welcome initiatives to broaden access to formal school education. In other words, people regard the provision of school education as a crime-prevention measure that contributes to general security. Yet, they are also perfectly well aware that criminal gangs frequent schools to recruit new members and target potential victims. Therefore, for my interlocutors, the anticipated crime-prevention effects of schooling demands that a secure environment be facilitated through strict access controls and the construction of fences around school premises. However, a Ward Counselor from Mdantsane Township pointed out to me that this in itself was insufficient, because the material infrastructure of school buildings, such as door frames, burglar bars, and fences, is a target for criminals aiming to dismantle, reuse, or sell on valuable infrastructure. When one constructs a new school building, therefore, it is necessary to secure the security measures. The Ward Counselor explained that he involved local residents in the construction of a school building in order to engender “a sense of ownership.” This, he hoped, would act to recruit residents as informal anti-crime agents. In this empirical example, one can trace the sequence of security linkages and the recursive logic at stake. First, there is the idea that school education has a crime-prevention effect and thus is an appropriate way of making the community more secure. Second, in order to provide the students with security while they attend school, the material infrastructure of the school premises is fortified. Third, by implementing participatory community approaches, it was hoped that the integrity of the school’s security infrastructure would be maintained. Taken together, each of these three steps was aimed at providing security for something while simultaneously being secured by something else.4

The Proliferation of Security Agendas There is an implicit assumption built into many approaches to security that the world consists of a patchwork within which certain parts, domains, or areas of life are “secure” while others are “insecure.” Consequently, security is presented as an expansionist activity through which, in a manner of speaking, the blank spaces on the security map are being filled. For example, in classic definitions of security, there is a conceptual juxtaposition between “threats” and the “absence of threats,” the

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latter being associated with a state of security (cf. Wolfers 1962). In the recent past, this logic of security has taken shape around the “preemption” of threats, as with the American idea of “homeland security” (e.g., Fosher 2008) or in the so-called War against Terror. In cases like these, security is actively brought to bear on social contexts that are perceived to be characterized by insecurity. Yet, as scholars working in the newly emerging “critical anthropology of security” (e.g., Diphoorn and Grassiani 2016; Goldstein 2010, 2012; Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski 2014a; Samimian-Darash and Stalcup 2017) have pointed out, this approach tends to naturalize the existence of insecurities and disregard the fact that the power-driven “global public discourse of fear” (Linke and Smith 2009, 3) also leads to a systematic production of insecurities (see Gusterson and Besteman 2009). Besides this explanation, which is premised on the idea that security spreads socio-spatially, it has been argued that “security exhibits a flexible, adaptive quality, enabling its discourse and practice to spread virally through the varied domains of social life, infecting the quotidian realities of ordinary living with its governing logic” (Goldstein 2016, 149; see also Bajc and de Lint 2011). This leads to a situation where there now exists hardly anything in the world that has not been labeled, in one way or another, a security concern, such as “human security,” “environmental security,” “social security,” “economic security,” and “health security” (see also Eriksen et al. 2010). This permeation of always newer domains of life with security concerns can be said to be an effect of acts of appropriation by which more and more organizations and social actors are embracing the notion of security to endow their agendas with a sense of importance and urgency, while at the same time striving to foreclose potential criticism of their work, because “anything in the name of security [ . . . ] appears as a greater good” (Neocleous and Rigakos 2011, 59). The elasticity of the notion of security allows it to be used in different contexts and for different purposes. It turns security into a “boundary object,” here defined as concepts or objects that are “plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393; see also Timura 2001). The notion of security can thus be employed to establish links between fields of social practice that are otherwise dis-

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connected from each other, giving rise to the formation of security assemblages that are more or less loosely coupled together.5

Security and the Logic of Recursiveness The explanation for the proliferation of security agendas proposed in this chapter takes as its point of departure a seminal observation by Lucia Zedner, who highlighted the fact that “Security is both a state of being and a means to that end” (Zedner 2009, 155). According to Zedner, security is both what is aimed at (namely, a condition of being devoid of threats) and the actions undertaken to achieve this condition (that is, activities aimed at the neutralization of threats). At the same time, for those planning and implementing them, security measures are presumed to be subject to challenge by subversive forces. As a consequence, security measures are not only aimed at neutralizing threats endangering the reference object(s) they are supposed to be securing; they are also assumed to be “threatened” themselves. An apt illustration of the strategies adopted to work against the latter is the physical location of CCTV cameras, most of which are installed in such a way that they are kept out of the reach of the very people they are surveying (of course, height is also important for broad surveillance coverage). In many cases, however, protecting security measures by making them physically inaccessible is not considered sufficient to fend off potentially subversive forces. As mentioned above, additional protection is therefore sought, such as CCTV cameras being fenced by barbed wire or encased in some material infrastructure. For those in favor of the idea that CCTV cameras are a suitable means to attain security, such forms of security assemblage are a reassurance that everything possible is being done to sustain the cameras’ security value. In order to gain a better understanding of assemblages like these, where security itself is being secured, it is analytically productive to distinguish between the “subjects” and “objects” of security. A subject of security is an element that plays an active role in securing something else; an object of security is something that is passively being secured by something else. There exist countless examples worldwide where security measures, irrespective of whether they are of a material (e.g., walls) or an imma-

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terial (e.g., patrolling) nature, can simultaneously be a subject and an object of security in the above sense. I suggest that this double aspect of security can produce wide-ranging linkages between security interventions that have not yet been described in the social-scientific literature. These linkages are constituted through the logic of recursiveness, that is, through repetition in a self-similar way, so that an element that serves the security of something is itself secured by some other element. Increased attention has been drawn to the concept of recursiveness in social and cultural anthropology in recent years. On the one hand, there have been arguments to the effect that the findings of ethnographic research should have a recursive bearing on the anthropologist’s own analytical apparatus. For instance, in Martin Holbraad’s (2012) study of Cuban Ifá divination practice, the ontological lens of divinatory truthmaking is used recursively to enrich, even transform, anthropological theories of truth. Similarly, in his work on the role of anthropological expertise in legal proceedings in South Africa, Olaf Zenker advocates a “recursive anthropology,” that is, an anthropological position “whose central theoretical tenets about social reality are also applicable to its own acts of observation as part of that same reality” (Zenker 2016, 295). On the other hand, and most important for my argument here, the notion of recursiveness has been useful in developing new conceptual perspectives on long-standing problems in the social sciences. For example, the linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal has applied this notion in outlining her semiotic approach to the public/private distinction. Gal argues that “the public/private dichotomy is best understood as a discursive phenomenon that, once established, can be used to characterize, categorize, organize, and contrast virtually any kind of social fact: spaces, institutions, bodies, groups, activities, interactions, relations” (Gal 2002, 80–81). Furthermore, according to Gal, the private/public distinction follows the logic of “fractal recursion,” meaning that the same distinction is repeated at different scales. As a consequence, she continues, “in any public/private contrast one can always focus on only one ‘side’ and make the same distinction within it. There can always be a public imagined or projected to exist within any private, and privates can be nested inside publics” (Gal 2005, 27). In the study of security, the concept of recursiveness can help us acknowledge that, in sociological reality, a given security-relevant element

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should not be seen as belonging exclusively and alternatively to the category of either the subjects of security or its objects. Instead, it can be both. Seen from a wider perspective, then, this logic of recursiveness can thus be demonstrated to contribute to the formation of wide-ranging security assemblages (see also Samimian-Darash and Meg Salcup 2017), resembling Thomas Hughes’s concept of “socio-technological networks” (Hughes 1983) that are constituted through recursive back-ups, meaning that one security measure represents the safeguarding condition of possibility for another.

Securityscapes in South Africa Starting in the mid-1990s, the first post-apartheid government in South Africa saw itself confronted with a series of challenges: a deeply divided society, a general lack of trust among its citizens, and public perceptions that the rate of crime was increasing drastically. It also had to build on a state apparatus whose legitimacy had been greatly undermined during the apartheid years, and it was faced with the existence of a variety of generally informal groupings involved in whatever they defined as “crime prevention” and “crime control” (see also Kirsch and Grätz 2010). Given this strained situation, post-apartheid governments in South Africa have devised and implemented policies aimed at consolidating police accountability (Hornberger 2011; Marks 2005), while also enhancing the effectiveness of policing and crime prevention. An important aspect of these policies is the creation of interfaces between the police and local “communities” through so-called Community Policing Forums (CPFs). Based on an organizational model that has been instituted in several countries worldwide, the establishment of CPFs in South Africa has been acclaimed for representing a shift from “authoritarian” and “reactive” to more “democratic” and “proactive” policing (cf. Davis, Henderson, and Merrick 2003), and thus for both expressing and being a catalyst for post-apartheid transformations (Kirsch 2010). Aside from such links between police reform and political selflegitimation, the increasing involvement of private individuals in acts of policing and crime prevention can be seen in the context of neoliberal policies that endorse public–private partnerships and the outsourcing of what previously have been the functions of state agencies. Yet, what

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is regularly overlooked is that this development entails not only a shift from the public to the private sector, but also the increased official acceptance of volunteering activities by citizens in ensuring their own security and that of other South Africans who are perceived to be particularly vulnerable to crime. As I came to learn during my fieldwork, this finds expression in the fact that present-day South Africa has a great number of non-governmental organizations, non-profit companies, social clubs, faith-based organizations, and associations of different sorts that, in one way or another, are seeking to contribute to crime prevention. Some of these organizations are professional, highly formalized, single-purpose bodies, such as Business Against Crime South Africa (BACSA), which describes itself as “a non-profit Company [ . . . ] [that] was established by business in 1996 in response to a request from then President Nelson Mandela who invited business to join hands with Government in the fight against crime.”6 Other organizations, such as certain boxing and soccer clubs in Mdantsane Township in Eastern Cape Province, have included crime prevention as a part-time addition to their usual portfolio of activities. Still others represent more or less informal associations of people sharing a particular profession who have decided to do something to fight back against crime and violence. In the area of my research, Taxis Against Crime and Hawkers Against Crime were two groupings of this kind. While the latter monitored streets where informal traders were active, the former aimed to increase the security of spaces that had for a long time been considered among the most dangerous in South Africa’s urban areas, namely taxi ranks (cf. Dugard 2001). Last but not least, there exist a large number of charities and nongovernmental organizations whose main objective is social work and social welfare, but which also try to make a contribution to crime prevention by, for example, taking care of street children or facilitating the social rehabilitation of offenders. What this brief overview of the South African non-state and nonprofit “securityscape” shows is the variety of social actors and civic organizations that deploy the notion of security when engaging in crime prevention activities of different sorts (Albro et al. 2011; also see introduction to this volume). As a “boundary object,” security allows people to use a shared language irrespective of the fact that they are actually

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pursuing different policies and strategies, and the elasticity of the notion of security allows it to be appropriated in diverse contexts, some of which are at first sight irrelevant for crime prevention. The brief ethnographic descriptions that follow provide examples of how lay criminologists, as defined above, construct recursive security linkages in order to secure security.

Dog–Wall–Cameras–Cables During my fieldwork in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, I was in regular contact with the father of a middle-class family, who, together with his wife and two children, lived in Trenton, a desegregated district in the town of East London bordering the Indian Ocean.7 Following a spate of burglaries in the neighborhood of his home, this man—I will call him Robert—decided to get a dog to be kept in the front garden and to guard the house and its inhabitants. However, one morning in 2005 he found that the night before someone had secretly climbed over the shoulder-high wall surrounding the premises and sedated the dog in order to steal it. During the days that followed, rumors began circulating that the dog had then been taken to the neighboring township of Mdantsane to be slaughtered and have several of its body parts magically converted into protective “traditional” medicine. Despite this, and still convinced that a watchdog was a sensible solution to his family’s security concerns, Robert soon acquired a new dog. But having learned his lesson, he decided to upgrade the perimeter wall around his house with a coil of barbed wire to make sure that the dog could safely perform its job of guarding the house. However, in conversations with friends and colleagues, Robert was also made aware that this barbed wire might not only deter, it might also, as an unintended effect, attract people interested in illegally dismantling material infrastructure in order to sell it to scrap dealers, a practice that was rampant in many parts of South Africa at that time. Thus, having his feelings of insecurity reinforced, Robert steeled himself and had CCTV cameras installed overlooking the wall and, most importantly, the barbed wire. While all of this was an expression of Robert’s efforts to attain selfsufficiency in establishing security arrangements for his family, he was at the same time painfully aware that his CCTV cameras and the public

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streetlights in front of his house, without which the cameras were useless at night, were dependent on Eskom, the major South African electricity provider, supplying electricity. Robert had decided against the purchase of a petrol-operated generator and thus had to count on the reliability of the public power supply. However, since the theft of electricity by means of illegal connections to the electricity grid (Kirsch 2005) and the illegal dismantling of electric cabling have also become rampant in many parts of South Africa, blackouts were a regular occurrence. What is more, power cuts in Robert’s neighborhood were not a purely local phenomenon because networked infrastructure such as electricity grids create wide-ranging relational spatialities between otherwise segregated urban areas. As a result, the theft of electric cables in one location often has effects on spatially distant locations and communities elsewhere. Due to this interconnectedness and interdependence, Robert found himself in the awkward position where his personal security arrangements were highly dependent on whatever security measures were being taken in other localities by the South African police, companies like Eskom and a variety of other organizations. To get a sense of what such measures can look like, I shall now broaden my focus and include examples from different parts of South Africa. For instance, in 2007, the City Council of Cape Town decided to leave street lights turned on in the daytime in order to deter potential cable thieves, on the basis that “thieves rarely risk their lives by hacking into live wires.”8 This is just one example of the great efforts made by state and civil-society agencies, as well as the business sector, to reduce infrastructure theft. Measures have included using private security companies to protect cable network systems, as well as the establishment of new police units specialized in such crime. At the same time, efforts have been made to involve local residents in the investigation and prosecution of infrastructure theft, with rewards offered for relevant information.9 For example, a publicity campaign has been launched in order to increase public awareness of how ordinary people are being affected by the illegal theft of infrastructure and why the materials involved should not be purchased.10 A poster distributed by Eskom as part of the “Izinyoka” deterrent campaign depicts electricity and cable thieves as a demonic hybrid between human beings and snakes.11 What is more, there have been legislative proposals to reduce copper-cable theft by legally

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categorizing copper as a precious metal, so that stronger penalties can be imposed on perpetrators.12 Finally, there have been attempts to reduce infrastructure theft by modifying an object’s physical properties so that its resale value is diminished, for example, by reducing its metal content or replacing it with alloys that are much harder to melt down.13

Surveillance–Unemployment–Christianity The township of Mdantsane, where I conducted part of my fieldwork, was established during the apartheid era as a dormitory township for the labor force employed in the industries in nearby East London, from which it was otherwise segregated on the basis of racial classification. Statistical data on its present-day population are unreliable due to the informal settlement strategies of many of its residents, but it is very probable that the actual figure is substantially higher than the 156,835 residents mentioned in the 2011 census.14 Besides pockets of informal shack settlements inhabited by the poorest of the poor, Mdantsane now comprises middle-class residential areas that, like the rest of the sprawling township, are almost exclusively inhabited by people who, under apartheid, would have been classified as “black.” For most inhabitants of Mdantsane, especially the poor, crime in its different forms, like mugging, assault, burglary, robbery, rape, and murder, is something that they are confronted with on a regular basis, whether in the form of personally having been targeted, as witnesses, or through hearsay accounts. Yet, in contrast to the middle-class suburbs in adjacent East London, the majority of residents cannot afford sophisticated security technologies like electronic alarm systems or CCTV cameras. In addition, as I came to learn during fieldwork, many who in principle could afford to purchase such technologies have deliberately decided against doing so because, for my interlocutors in Mdantsane, their use tends to be interpreted as a morally problematic indication of distrust among neighbors. Even where someone had installed material security devices like burglar bars, this was usually explained apologetically as a formal requirement on the part of the insurance companies and consequently as not reflecting the householder’s social attitudes more generally. That technological security systems are widely associated with a problematic form of distrust is connected to the fact that, in Mdantsane, the

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security of one’s home and family is usually reliant on reciprocal relationships between neighbors involving mutual low-key surveillance and the reporting of undesirable behavior of non-locals. Under apartheid, this practice held political connotations and was formalized and performed by members of what were then called “street committees.” By keeping an eye on non-resident visitors to the area, these committees were entrusted with protecting the local community against “spies” (impimpis) working in the service of the oppressive apartheid regime. But they were also conceived as a vital necessity for the well-being of the community because, like the situation in other townships, the South African state had long neglected the policing of everyday crime in Mdantsane, largely leaving its inhabitants to their own devices in this regard. In post-apartheid South Africa this situation has changed markedly, since the police can now be seen regularly in many parts of the township. All the same, the ideal of good neighborly relations that also pertains to security issues still retains much of its moral strength. Indeed, it is sometimes invoked to mark a difference symbolically between the supposed “community spirit” of the township and the walled, self-segregating neighborhoods of the “white” suburbs of East London, where, it was claimed, residents hardly knew those living next to them. As I realized in the course of my research, for people in Mdantsane reciprocal security relationships of this kind are highly valued. At the same time, they take time to develop and consolidate. Consequently, it is perceived that increased residential mobility, which constantly changes the social composition of one’s neighborhood, poses a threat to one’s own security arrangements. For instance, in 2006, a family living in a crime-ridden area close to Mdantsane’s central market (Zone 2) became deeply concerned about the fact that two of the “matchbox houses” (cf. Ginsburg 1996) next to their own had recently seen changes in occupancy and that another neighbor—I will call him Steve—was experiencing financial problems due to unemployment. Given this situation, members of the family explained to me that they had arranged with a shopkeeper they knew for Steve to do some piecework for him. They understood neighborly assistance of this kind to be a Christian obligation in and of itself. But what is more, they also wanted to make sure that Steve would continue living in their neighborhood because they were unsure whether they would be able to establish a reliable personal relationship with a new tenant

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should Steve one day be forced to move away. At the heart of it, putting Steve in contact with the shopkeeper thus partly served the purpose of maintaining what they perceived to be a mutually beneficial situation of reciprocal low-key surveillance. What struck me when I witnessed how the relationship between the family and Steve developed after he started to work in the shop was that the family put a great deal of effort in intensifying religious interactions with Steve, who at that time was a non-practicing Christian. They regularly visited him in his home on Sunday morning when they were on their way to the church service, and they were quite insistent that he should join the weekly Bible classes at their church. This was no coincidence. Members of the family told me in confidence that Steve had a recent history of spending money in shebeens, that is, Mdantsane’s informal drinking venues. Just days before I talked to them, Steve’s wife had complained bitterly to them that he had not brought any money home from work. Yet, they had no real leverage to oblige Steve to spend his earnings on rent and not on alcohol. The only option they felt was available to them was to strengthen Steve’s commitment to the Christian values promoted in their church.

Conclusion The historian Thomas Hughes developed the concept of “sociotechnological networks” as far back as the early 1980s (Hughes 1983). Taking up the example of Thomas A. Edison’s role in the development of electric systems in the United States, he noted that technologies are not self-supporting, but always and necessarily embedded in the complex sociohistorical configurations that enable and sustain them. I have drawn inspiration from this perspective and suggested that security measures are likewise not self-supporting stand-alones but embedded in, sustained by, and—most important for my argument— recursively backed up through further security linkages. In the ethnography from South Africa I have used to demonstrate my approach, different combinations of such linkages can be identified, encompassing material security technologies, as well as various aspects of “human security.” Both case studies took one specific security concern as its starting point to trace the recursive logic behind the securing of security. If

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I had had the space to do so, I could have chosen many other security concerns as the starting point, which would then have revealed alternative sets of security linkages, and I also could have gone much further by exploring security linkages beyond those discussed above. Concerning the first ethnographic account, despite the wryly amusing aspect of the chain of events that eventually led Robert to buy CCTV cameras, we can draw important analytical insights from it. First, Robert’s efforts to come up with a reliable security solution for his home were systematically undermined by the fact that many material technologies and entities used to provide security against crime in South Africa, such as barbed wire and watchdogs, have sufficient economic value in themselves that they also need protection against criminals. For instance, the theft of barbed wire generates value if the technical object (the wire) is reclassified as a secondary raw material (steel) to be sold in the shadow economy of South Africa’s scrapyards. With regard to the theft of Robert’s watchdog, economic value was purportedly created by “transforming” the body of a living creature into powdered substances to be used for magical purposes. Second, the dog, the barbed wire, and the CCTV cameras were deliberately grouped together in the form of a sequenced and scaled security assemblage, each element of which encompassed those preceding it, thus resulting in what can be called a “security upscaling.” The watchdog was there to protect the house, the barbed wire to protect the watchdog and the house, and the CCTV cameras to protect the barbed wire, the watchdog, and by extension the house. In that sense—and most pertinent to my argument in this chapter—these security linkages were not merely an assemblage of elements that functionally complemented each other but rather an assemblage in the form of sequenced recursive linkages. In other words, apart from the house and the CCTV cameras, each of the interlinked elements was at the same time a subject of security (that is, each played an active role in securing something) and an object of security (that is, each was being secured passively by another element). Third, while the security arrangements at Robert’s house were in and of themselves local in nature, they were at the same time recursively linked to the existence of security measures on regional mesoscales and national macroscales because their culmination, the CCTV cameras, relied critically on a functioning electricity grid. And the grid was beyond

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Robert’s control, while still having a crucial influence over whether he and his family could actually feel secure. In addition, as we have seen, while some of the measures taken in South Africa to protect the electricity grid are concerned with its physical qualities as infrastructure, others, like the Izinyoka awareness-raising campaign, clearly belong to the sociocultural domain in that they aim at educating people in how to participate in safeguarding a less crime-ridden—and by implication, more secure—socio-technical environment. The second ethnographic account shows that recursive security linkages are not always and necessarily technological in kind. Instead, in this case the security of one’s home and family was revealed as being backed up by human security. More particularly, given the widely shared perception in Mdantsane that the security of one’s home is dependent on the existence of reciprocal low-key acts of surveillance between neighbors, the sequence of security linkages can be traced as follows. First, residential stability in the immediate neighborhood was secured financially by assisting a potentially rent-defaulting neighbor (Steve) to find paid work. Second, efforts were made with reference to religious values to ensure that Steve would prioritize spending his earnings on rent payments and not alcohol. This was done by attempting to strengthen his commitment to Christian values and exposing him to the peer group pressure of his own church. To my knowledge, social-scientific work on security has up to now neglected the fact that one and the same element of a security assemblage can be both the subject and an object of security and, related to this, that elements employed to provide security can be ordered in the form of a sequence. This is noteworthy because the dynamics of the security linkages described in this chapter are not adequately captured by diffusion models or concepts of translation. These latter approaches assume that securitizing moves are diffused or translated from somewhere to somewhere else and that they are therefore informed by the idea of a forward-facing directionality. In contrast to this, the perspective I propose here starts out from the assumption that security assemblages are often constituted through recursive back-up arrangements whereby one security measure is implemented as the condition of possibility of another. In the present chapter, I have illustrated this perspective by drawing on my ethnographic research findings from South Africa, concentrating

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for the most part on the question of how local security concerns give rise to recursive security linkages on the microscale. But my ethnographic findings also indicate how such local security concerns are connected to security agendas on the meso- and macroscales as well. Forthcoming work will broaden this perspective and show how the proliferation of globalized security assemblages result from securitization as a recursive practice that institutes security back-up arrangements in ever more domains of life, thus setting up new security regimes by securing security. Notes

1 As Mark Maguire rightly pointed out, “the concept of security is fashionable yet elusive, elastic yet operational” (Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski 2014, 1). Although it therefore seems advisable to put the word consistently in quotation marks, in what follows I will refrain from this practice for reasons of readability. 2 In what follows, the phrase “security agenda” is used to refer to the combination of securitization as a speech act and the corresponding policies that aim to implement security. 3 Fieldwork in South Africa, in particular in Eastern Cape Province, was conducted between 2003 and 2008 and was supported financially by the German Research Foundation. The data presented in this chapter were collected through narrative interviews, informal conversations, and prolonged periods of participant observation. 4 When seen from an abstract point of view, the socio-spatial distributedness of these security measures bears some resemblance to what Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2008) have called “distributed preparedness” in their analysis of domestic security arrangements in the United States. 5 As suggested by securitization theory (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998), appropriating the notion of security in such ways is often accompanied by acts of naming, meaning that security is performed through illocutionary speech acts involving a securitizing actor who publicly declares a specific reference object to be under threat in order to convince a wider audience, first, that this particular threat exists, and second, that something needs to be done about it urgently. While differing in many respects from the approaches mentioned above, securitization theory shares with them the fact that security is portrayed as having a forward-facing directionality: through securitization, aspects, domains, or areas of life that were previously seen to lie outside of the realm of security are classified as belonging in it, thus semantically “colonizing” them in an expansionist movement. 6 Business Against Crime South Africa, www.bac.org.za. 7 The names of the municipal area and of my interlocutors have been kept anonymous.

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8 “Cape Town Keeps Lights on to Deter Cable Thieves,” Mail & Guardian, August 8, 2007. 9 “Brave Bid to Stop Cable Thieves in their Tracks,” Sunday Times, June 30, 2001; “Theft Costs Spoornet R140-Million,” Mail & Guardian, March 3, 2008. 10 “Mayor Seeking Residents’ Help in Crack Down on Cable Theft,” Sunday Times, September 15, 2002. 11 “Commuters Fight for Space on Remaining Trains,” Mail & Guardian, November 18, 2006. 12 “Stop Copper Thieves, City Power Tells Govt,” Mail & Guardian, May 5, 2010. 13 “Telkom Paying R6,6m a Month for Monitoring,” Mail & Guardian, May 28, 2010. 14 Census 2011, www.census2011.adrianfrith.com.

References

Albro, Robert, George Marcus, Laura McNamara, and Monica Schoch-Spana. 2011. Anthropologists in the SecurityScape: Ethics, Practice, and Professional Identity. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Bajc, Vid and Willem de Lint. 2011. Security and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Collier, Stephen and Andrew Lakoff. 2008. “Distributed Preparedness: The Spatial Logic of Domestic Security in the United States.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(1): 7–28. Davis, Robert C., Nicole J. Henderson, and Cybele Merrick. 2003. “Community Policing: Variations of the Western Models in the Developing World.” Police Practice and Research 4(3): 285–300. Despard, Erin. “Cultivating Security: Plants in the Urban Landscape.” Space and Culture 15(2): 151–163. Diphoorn, Tessa and Erella Grassiani. 2016. “Introduction: Security.” Etnofoor 28(1): 7–13. Dugard, Jackie. 2001. From Low Intensity War to Mafia War: Taxi Violence in South Africa (1987–2000). Johannesburg: Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, Oscar Salemink, and Ellen Bal. 2010. A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Fosher, Kerry B. 2008. Under Construction. Making Homeland Security at the Local Level. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gal, Susan. 2002. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13(1): 77–95. Gal, Susan. 2005. “Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 23–37. Ginsburg, Rebecca. 1996. “‘Now I Stay in a House’: Renovating the Matchbox in Apartheid-Era Soweto.” African Studies 55(2): 127–139.

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Goldstein, Daniel M. 2010. “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security.” Current Anthropology 51(4): 487–517. Goldstein, Daniel M. 2012. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldstein, Daniel M. 2015. “Some Thoughts on the Critical Anthropology of Security.” Etnofoor 28(1): 147–152. Gusterson, Hugh and Catherine Besteman. 2009. The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Hornberger, Julia. 2011. Policing and Human Rights: The Meaning of Violence and Justice in the Everyday Policing of Johannesburg. New York: Routledge. Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880– 1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kirsch, Thomas G. 2005. “‘Illegal Connections.’ Conflicts over Electricity in Soweto, South Africa.” Soziale Welt 16 (Special Issue): 193–208. Kirsch, Thomas G. 2010. “Violence in the Name of Democracy: Community Policing, Vigilante Action and Nation-Building in South Africa.” In Thomas G. Kirsch and T. Grätz, eds., Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa, 139–162. Oxford: James Currey. Kirsch, Thomas G. and Tilo Grätz. 2010. Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa. Oxford: James Currey. Linke, Uli and Danielle Taana Smith. 2009. Cultures of Fear. New York: Pluto Press. Maguire, Mark, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski. 2014a. The Anthropology of Security. London: Pluto Press. Maguire, Mark, Catarina Frois, and Nils Zurawski. 2014b. “Introduction.” In Maguire, Frois, and Zurawski, The Anthropology of Security, 1–23. London: Pluto Press. Marks, Monique. 2005. Transforming the Robocops: Changing Police in South Africa. Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press. Neocleous, Mark and George S. Rigakos, eds. 2011. Anti-Security. Ottowa: Red Quill Books. Samimian-Darash, Limor and Meg Stalcup. 2017. “Anthropology of Security and Security in Anthropology: Cases of Counterterrorism in the United States.” Anthropological Theory 17(1): 60–87. Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939.” Social Studies of Science 19(3): 387–420. Timura, Christopher T. 2001. “‘Environmental Conflict’ and the Social Life of Environmental Security Discourse.” Anthropological Quarterly 74(3): 104–113. Wolfers, Arnold, ed. 1962. “Discord and Collaboration. National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol.” In A. Wolfers, 147–165, Essays on International Politics. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Zedner, Lucia. 2009. Security. New York: Routledge. Zenker, Olaf. 2016. “Anthropology on Trial: Exploring the Laws of Anthropological Expertise.” International Journal of Law in Context 12(3): 293–311.

6

Domesticating Security Gated Communities and Cooperative Apartment Buildings in New York City and Long Island, New York Setha Low

Prologue The first gated community I visited was in San Antonio, Texas, located in the northern suburbs of that city and built as one of many gated enclaves within a large-scale master-planned community where my sister lives. Six-foot stucco walls define the neighborhood (within external wooden fences that define the master-planned community) and a cattlestyle gate with an electronically controlled entry system prevented my entering. Upon pushing the button on an intercom next to the gate a male security guard answered, told me to wait, and contacted my sister for permission to let me through. I don’t know exactly what would have happened if she had not been home. The guard did not get out to inspect my car, however it happened multiple times during subsequent visits. Once through the gate, I saw winding streets with sidewalks lined by similarly decorated and landscaped large houses sited close together, surrounding a golf course. Some of the houses had four-foot walls with intercoms to limit entry. I learned by opening the kitchen door the following morning and setting off an alarm that my sister’s house was locked and armed 24 hours a day. Most of the houses were similarly alarmed and locked regardless of the time of day. This gated community is located in an area with little to no crime and was in its second round of development in 1992, when gated communities were built as “Leisure Worlds” for seniors or as lifestyle communities in Florida, Arizona, California, and Texas (Blakely and Snyder 1997). By 2000, gated communities with homeowner associations had increased to make 141

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up 6 percent of US housing stock and currently are estimated to comprise 10 percent of all new housing (Sanchez, Lang, and Dhavale 2005). These early gated communities became the template for increasingly sophisticated forms of securitized residential environments now equipped with video surveillance technology, Internet connectivity to private security firms, as well as GPS tracking devices placed on entering cars and visitors. In some regions of the United States, gated communities were a byproduct of municipalities strapped for money that began offering private developers bonuses to provide the physical infrastructure—streets, electricity, water and sewers, sidewalks, open space, and architecturally designed houses—to attract new taxpayers. Even though financial benefits for the municipality were ultimately limited, the attraction of private neighborhoods grew rapidly in response to economic restructuring, changing neighborhoods and increasing uncertainty about the world expressed as “fear of others.” The first time I encountered a New York City co-op building was through a friend who was involved in the lengthy process of trying to convince a co-op board that a single woman was a financially (and socially) reliable homeowner. She succeeded and then encountered a series of uncomfortable social interactions as she learned that living in a co-op also meant that the doormen, maintenance crew, and other residents functioned to control her behavior and affect. It was a surprise to both of us, but as I learned from my research, it was not at all uncommon. The security of the co-op building is provided through gatekeepers, surveillance cameras, co-op board rulings, and residential social sanctions that are equally as effective as the walls and limited-entry strategies of gated communities.

Introduction Examining security and its associated material formations and social processes reveals how contemporary domestic security regimes in the United States often target middle-class preferences, political actions, shared feelings, and daily movements. The saturation of the home environment with fear and insecurity, combined with anxieties about investment value, mounting debt, and job insecurity interact with the profitability of the private housing sector for developers, construction companies, and local governments. These economic and affective forces

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are intensified by a national climate of growing inequality, unending war, militarization of everyday life, as well as imaginaries of lurking terrorists and illegal immigrants—images that are exploited by the media to create a “culture of fear.” Private residential developments (co-ops, condominiums, and gated communities) domesticate these broader security concerns and local fears through a residential package designed to ameliorate these risks and provide physical, social, and financial protection. In this chapter I explore the dynamics that redirect middle-class home life in these private housing regimes in New York City and Long Island, New York. I speculate that various kinds of security practices are bundled together in “securityscapes” that inscribe security spatially and materially in the landscape. These securityscapes are produced by a combination of: (1) imagined risks and threats such as downward social mobility, terrorism, or local workers; (2) infrastructures that include architectural, social, and technological elements; (3) governance systems based on corporate law and institutionalized rules and regulations; (4) social structural systems of exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and ability; and (5) affective atmospheres of fear, anxiety, and vulnerability that pervade the built environment. The domestication of security through private housing regimes addresses bodily and neighborhood threats and personal financial risks, and insures greater penetration of profit-driven private development in municipalities, but at the same time creates a fortress landscape that is being reproduced globally. In the first section of this chapter, I situate my approach to security in relation to recent anthropological approaches. In the second section, I briefly return to the theory of securityscapes developed in the introduction and apply it to gated communities and cooperative apartments. I then examine the imaginaries, infrastructures, governance strategies, social structural systems, and affects that contribute to the creation of a securityscape to illustrate how these emergent landscapes work as everyday disciplining spaces.

Security, Processes of Securitization, and Securityscapes By security and the processes of securitization I am referring to the practices of individuals searching for safety within an insecure state, state militarization, and production of fearful citizens, and financial

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securitization of mortgages and other monetary instruments that are attempts to reduce monetary risk at multiple scales. My use of these terms initially emerged through the ways interviewees employ security and insecurity discursively. Ethnographic research on gated communities suggests that the fear talk and fear of crime reported by residents is not necessarily due to imminent danger but to the imagined threats of downward mobility, increasing neighborhood diversity, and the inability to maintain a middle-class lifestyle (Low 2003), or concerns about being able to live with “people like us,” that is, of the same class and race, in New York City (Low, Donovan, and Gieseking 2012). Neoliberal practices that place financial risk and security responsibilities on the individual rather than the state have contributed to the increase in insecurity and fear (Low 2017a). For this reason, I prefer Røyrvik’s (2010) security concept that draws upon both economic-financial and political-military aspects of securitization processes. He identifies two major trends: the “securitization of the social” and the “sociality of securitization” that create distrust and distancing, cultures of fear, militarism, and deep patterns of inequality. These characteristics of securitization—the inequality, culture of fear, social distrust, and distancing as well as the financialization and militarization of everyday life, reflect Goldstein’s contention that the security state is the logical counterpoint to neoliberalism’s privatization of civil society, its attempt to devolve onto civil institutions, local communities, and individuals the tasks of governance that had once been considered the responsibility of the welfare state. (2013, 13)

While there are certainly other configurations of how security is produced, some of which I identify in this chapter, I agree with Goldstein’s (2010) contention that the rise of the security paradigm for organizing social life was not a reaction to international terrorism and in the United States predates the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Private gating and enclosed, “secured” communities proliferated during the late 1980s and through the 1990s, and the transition from rental to cooperative housing in New York City expanded in the late 1970s–1980s. Such evidence is instead indicative of a longer genealogy of security concerns located in neoliberal changes in urban governance, taxation, service provision, and forms of social control.

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Indeed, Amar (2013) argues that since 2009, “human securitization” and “humanized security discourse” have been replacing neoliberalism and the subjectivity of the rational-liberal individual who was marketinvestor, consumer-chooser, and entrepreneur-innovator” with a new kind of governance based on “a node of four intersecting logics of securitization (2013, 6). He identifies these four logics as moral security, territorial security, individual security, and social security that resonate with the underlying logics of the securityscapes I am examining. While my argument about the increasing role of securitization in the control of individual lives and the moral geographies of those lives is more modest and focused only on housing regimes, neighborhood surveillance, and private security guards, Amar (2013) provides a broader perspective of what these micro-practices might become when employed politically and at the city or state level. A number of other scholars identify security concerns as only one aspect of rising neoliberalism rather than securitization replacing neoliberalism or as the sole trigger. O’Neill and Thomas (2011) analyze postwar security in Guatemala as a part of neoliberalism, arguing that the practices and politics of security are a way to understand inequalities in this phase of late global capitalism. They call attention to three interrelated themes: “the devolution of law enforcement to communities and private enterprises, the formation of community associations, and in the most extreme cases, vigilantism” (2011, 2). The focus of their work is on what strategies citizens employ to protect themselves, examining private security services, urban renewal projects, charity and organized religion, and the many ways that private citizens take on policing and other state functions. Similar to my findings, they trace this shift in security concerns in the mass media as well as in everyday conversations and feelings of distress. For Fawaz and Akar (2012) security concerns originate when everyday experience is constantly interrupted by new threats and risks. They focus on “security as lived” and unravel both the performance power of security and the personal narratives that capture its meaning (Fawaz and Akar 2012, 106). Fawaz, Harb, and Gharbieh identify the “securities” and “threats” of living in Beirut, Lebanon and find that an “architecture of security is an integral element of the city that works to entrench sociospatial divisions and shapes the daily experience of dwellers” (2012, 187).

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This architecture of security made up of walls, guards, restricted areas, and no-go (as well as no-drive) zones creates securityscapes comprised of transportation infrastructures of streets and barricades (Monroe 2016). Of course, gated communities are expanding in Beirut and Cairo as well, in some cases as copies of US designed spaces, with different religious, political, and class configurations and constructed by the same companies. Molotch (2012) also queries how security is experienced in everyday practice, particularly in specific built environments such as airports and subways in the United States. He views security as a “massive, social moral, and political thing” (2012, 1) that allows us to study “how normal life operates,” and how it can engulf the world through worries about one’s body, bombs, and bastions. Similar to people who live in gated communities and co-ops, Molotch finds that security is an important metaphor used to talk about other life issues such as social mobility, fear of losing one’s job, and the speculative value of property. His emphasis on airports and subways where security can be “felt” adds to my argument that these architectural and affective formations are re-creating everyday experience within new design forms and materialities. While Molotch (2012) focuses on the hardware of security found in the built environment, I am also concerned with the institutions, rules and regulations, and securitization processes that architectural and design analyses do not address. The politics of security, the social relations that create a sense of insecurity and therefore the perpetual need for more security apparatus, are often not discussed when focusing on the built environment, nor are the trade-offs of security versus liberty, privacy, freedom, and costs that lurk in the background of many studies (Monahan 2006). The growing emphasis on security has certainly transformed the architectural structures of many urban centers that are now marked by bollards, fences, high walls, and a range of technologically sophisticated gadgets. But these technologies are reinforced by the politics of security and the social processes that sustain these politics and architectural changes. In my research, I focus mainly on how interviewees employ security discursively to rationalize their attempts to keep others out, and in previous publications I have referred to this process as securitization (Low 2017a). At the same time, I use the term theoretically to describe the

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interlocking and overlapping spatial, legal, institutional, governmental, and financial strategies of producing “security” that resonates with the work of Goldstein (2013), Fawaz, Harb, and Gharbieh (2012) and Amar (2013). What distinguishes my work from these other studies is that it is embedded in 25 years of ethnographic research on middle-class residential developments in the United States and Mexico, and the theoretical framework emerged as a grounded theory from these findings. In this chapter, however, I move from a discussion of security and the processes of securitization that create security spaces at various scales (Glück and Low 2017; Low 2017a) to “packaged” securityscapes that are replacing other kinds of housing and urban designs with fortress-like and security-minded features. The importance of thinking about spatialized security formations as substantive and material landscape components rather than ephemeral feelings and imaginings is discussed in the introduction to this volume, where we elaborate on Appadurai’s concept and reconfigure it for our use (Maguire and Low, this volume). I define a securityscape as made up of particular kinds of imaginaries (“others” in gated communities and “people who do not belong” in co-ops), infrastructures (architectural in gated communities and social in co-ops), governance systems (homeowner associations in gated communities and co-op boards in co-op buildings), social structures (race and class in both gated communities and co-ops), and affect (fear of others in gated communities and people like us in co-ops). In the remainder of this chapter I present a short review of the two research projects that form the basis of this analysis and then provide five ethnographic sketches to illustrate my contention that these socio-spatial formations constitute a new landscape feature that inscribes security in the physical and social environment (see Glück and Low 2017 for a discussion of socio-spatial formations).

Securityscapes in Everyday Life: Gated Communities and Coops The data for the following analysis are drawn from two studies. The first is the ethnography of gated community residents in upper-middle, middle-, and lower-middle-income gated subdivisions in New York City, Long Island, New York, and San Antonio, Texas completed during 1994–2005. Utilizing family contacts and real estate agents to gain entry,

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the research group employed a snowball sampling technique using each interview respondent to lead to the next. It was a slow process to recruit interviewees: a total of 25 households were interviewed for the New York– based part of the study. The majority of the interviewees were 21 through 74 years of age, heterosexual European Americans, and native-born couples; however, four interviews were conducted in households in which one spouse was from Latin America, West Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. The absence of minority residents is indicative of the class and racial composition of these gated communities. The self-identified men interviewed were mostly professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers and those working in industry as businessmen, managers, and foremen; or retired from these pursuits. The majority of the self-identified women were stayat-home mothers and those that worked were employed part-time. Of the three single, widowed, or divorced self-identified women, two worked full-time and one was retired from full-time employment (Low 2003). The second study was completed 2006 through 2008 in New York City by interviewing 24 co-op residents in 23 buildings in New York City to compare with the 25 gated community residents interviewed in the New York area. A second study of three buildings (small, medium, and large) with multiple interviews in each complex was completed in 2012. The sample included only participants who owned and resided in market rate co-ops. Participants ranged in age from 27 to 71 years of age; seven of the interviewees identified themselves as men. Eighteen of the participants identified as white or Caucasian and six identified themselves as African American, Latino, Filipino, and Asian. Occupations included lawyers, professors, artists, graphic designers, computer programmers, corporate vice presidents, and research directors. In the first study we found that gates increased fear and anxiety about “other” people entering. Gated communities respond to residents’ desire for safety and security, as well as status and privacy, by using spatial enclosure, surveillance, and collective private property arrangements that promote a socially exclusionary and disengaged residential neighborhood. But some of the findings—such as sparse neighbor interaction, restriction of civil rights, and minimal participation and sense of representation—could not be explained adequately by spatial enclosure. Instead, they appeared to be due to the articulation of the walled space with the legal structure (Common Interest Development, CID, or con-

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dominium) that organized the collective ownership of the facilities and the governance structure of the homeowners’ association that regulates and monitors it (Low 2003; Low, Donovan, and Gieseking 2012). Since there are other kinds of collective private housing schemes, such as market-rate cooperative apartment buildings in New York City, known as “co-ops,” we completed the second study to compare to the gated community research. Although co-ops are explicitly committed to democratic practices and non-discrimination, in reality they are less than democratic and utilize numerous exclusionary practices similar to gated communities. Exactly how this social exclusion works varies by size of the building, neighborhood, and social composition of the residents, but we noticed that gated communities and co-ops have features in common such as the creation of a securitized environment that is partly due to urban neoliberal policies, especially in New York. Specifically, the similarities appear to be the result of the comparable legal and governance structures, not just the spatial configuration, and in the case of co-ops, an additional financial screening component. Both forms of collective private housing schemes evolved from a history of deed restrictions, restrictive covenants, and selective mortgage lending in the United States. In 1948, the US Supreme Court ruled that enforced racial covenants violated the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution and hoped that the case of Shelley v. Kraemer (334 no. 1, 1948) would end racial segregation, since these covenants would no longer be enforceable (Rose 2009). Of course, strategic mortgage lending, red lining, and real estate collusion continued in force (Hayden 2003), but other more invisible forms of social control also began to be used to spatially monitor and limit who belongs within a housing project. First developed in 1928, CIDs created collective private property regimes with homeowners’ associations, while existing residential cooperatives used by the wealthy and artists since the early 1900s increasingly became a means for organizing and limiting residential membership (Hayden 2003). Gated communities gained impetus in states where the rollback of income and property taxes strained cities’ and towns’ ability to provide new housing, residential infrastructure, and other amenities. City planners and municipal administrators solved this economic shortfall by loosening density requirements for proposed Planned Unit Develop-

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ments (PUDs) and offering bonuses for residential developments built without public financing. Gated communities were seen as a win-win solution for both the municipality and the developer. The municipality added taxpayers without public expense, while private developers made greater profits through increased density and obtained valuable open space as an amenity for homeowners. The impetus for the conversion of rental buildings into private co-ops and condominiums (condos) occurred with the economic crisis of 1976– 1977 in New York City and the desire of landlords to recapture profits from their deteriorating buildings. This trend has continued even with the improving economy now visible in towering luxury condos being constructed for speculative investment and the very rich in Manhattan. The major difference between cooperative housing and gated communities is the structure of ownership. Co-op residents purchase shares in a corporation and do not own their units. Gated community residents retain ownership of their unit and common ownership of facilities usually through a condominium governance system. This means that gated community residents can sell or rent their units without the approval of the homeowners’ association board, while a co-op board must approve buyers or renters and has the power to grant or withhold approval based on an extensive financial review. Co-op boards are notorious for refusing prospective buyers who may have already qualified for a mortgage. Although they are not allowed to discriminate by race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual orientation, they can refuse those they feel are a financial risk. Comparing residents of these two kinds of housing regimes and how they deal with different aspects of insecurity provided a number of insights into how securitization processes work in housing regimes (Low 2017a). In this chapter, I employ this comparison to tease out how these security practices produce securityscapes that reform and monitor residents’ physical, social, and emotional worlds.

Imaginaries Securityscapes such as gated communities (or fortresses, border walls, safe rooms, military installations, and even sports stadiums) are envisioned in response to a real or imaginary threat or risk that rationalizes

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and legitimates the building and maintenance of a fortress-like environment. In the case of gated communities, it is the threat of “others” defined in various ways. Gated community advertising, the discourse that developers use to convince towns to accept their plans, and the fear talk of residents focuses on an imagined other who is trying to enter one’s home, steal personal goods, and at the most extreme, kidnap a child or pet. I was particularly struck by the urban imaginary of Carla, who describes her vision of the city and her rationale for why “kids” would target her home: There are gangs. People are overworked, they have families, they are underpaid, the stress is out of control, and they abuse their children. The children go out because they don’t like their home life. There’s too much violence everywhere. It starts in the city, but then the kids get smart enough and say “oh, gee, I need money for x, y or z, but it’s really hot in the city, let’s go out and get it someplace else. We’re the natural target for it. So being in a secure area, I don’t have to worry as much as another neighborhood that doesn’t have security.

Most gated community residents worry about the world outside the gates that they characterize as dystopian, dangerous, and full of “kids” coming to take what they don’t have. Other imaginaries include the fear of not being able to provide one’s children with the same financial and social benefits in the future, or that job instability or a financial crisis would force them to downsize and lose their social standing. In co-op buildings, the imagined threat is those who do not belong— whether defined by income, class, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual preference, religion, profession, or any other social factors. When residents talk about whether applicants “belong” in their building or should be “vouched for,” it is not just about their financial ability to pay the mortgage and carrying costs. The discourse references deeper concerns about norms that residents want protected for their own sense of security. The imaginary threat of “social impurity” helps to explain why the co-op application process and the financial vetting of potential residents is so important once a resident has passed through this rite de passage. Vanessa explains:

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There is a certain feeling like knowing that everyone else had to go through the same agony to get by the co-op board . . . that my next-door neighbor isn’t this ex-murderer or that they are not paying their rent by selling drugs [laughs].

Similarly, Patricia adds, “I really trusted the homogeneity of that building, that I was not going to find someone so very different from me.” The power of this imaginary threat is so strong that even though some residents begrudge the financial vetting as an invasion of privacy and question it, in the final analysis residents like Kerry, a young woman, suggest it is probably “a good thing”: First I’m thinking . . . oh, that’s a drag. Who are they to say? . . . But—but how do you know how to vet people? . . . if you’re vouched for by an employer or two and you have the money to pay for it, you should be in no matter who [you are] . . . unless you’re clearly on—like a freaky, you know, person—although I don’t know who’s supposed to be the judge of that. . . . I think that’s . . . a good thing, probably.

Infrastructure Gated communities are spatially enclosed residential developments surrounded by walls, fences, or earth banks covered with bushes and shrubs, with a secured entrance. The houses, streets, sidewalks, and other amenities are physically enclosed by barriers and entrance gates operated by a guard, key, or electronic identity card. Inside the development there are professional security personnel who patrol on foot or by automobile. The architectural infrastructure restricts access not just to residents’ homes, but also to the use of public spaces and services— roads, parks, facilities, and open space—contained within the enclosure. While the infrastructure of gated communities—walls, gates, and guardhouses reinforced by security guards, electronic id entrances, and video cameras—are perceived as comforting symbols of protection by residents, they are seen by outsiders as “fortresses.” It is a unique form of residential development in which walls and gates, not just distance and street patterns, are used to separate communities by race and class. The infrastructure of the walls, gates, restricted and surveilled entrances with

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guards, creates an environment where residents and especially children feel safe, but only inside the gates. One of the first indications that a gated community was experienced differently than most suburban developments was when I spent an afternoon with a group of children playing on a neighbor’s driveway. We were talking about life within the neighborhood when one of the young boys commented that he would never live outside a gated community because he would be too afraid. He said that he always felt a sigh of relief when he entered through the gates with his parents, knowing that he was safe and at home. In another conversation in which I was trying to probe how the architecture of the gated community was perceived and experienced by residents, a mother tried to explain: When I leave the area (the gated community) and go downtown [little laugh], I feel quite threatened, just being out in normal urban areas, unrestricted urban areas. . . . Please let me explain. The north central part of this city, by and large, is middle-class to upper middle-class. Period. There are very few pockets of poverty. Very few. And therefore if you go to any store, you will look around and most of the clientele will be middle-class as you are yourself. So you are somewhat insulated. But if you go downtown, which is much more mixed, where everybody goes, I feel much more threatened.

Other residents simply said that they would only live in gated communities because the infrastructure would discourage robbers who would be more likely to disturb neighborhoods without walls, gates, and guards—similar to Carla’s statement about kids who live in the city. But even these residents worry about cars tailgating them when entering through the gate or finding other ways to get inside. Co-op residents, on the other hand, seemed less concerned about their safety and attribute this partially to the protection of the monitored building and the doormen. As Yvonne explains, “I’ve seen them stop people at the door whom they don’t recognize and so you feel kind of safe. You know you’re going to be in the building with people that are supposed to be here.” But at the same time there was extensive discussion of whether the doormen could be trusted to pay attention to who

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entered the building (“he let them right in and didn’t even tell me”), and similar to the gated community residents, there was concern about domestic workers who enter the building and spend the day. In a co-op apartment building the security infrastructure is made up of a restricted entrance and a doorman. While not as architecturally imposing or extreme as the walls, gates, and guards of gated communities, co-op buildings with doormen do provide some sense of safety, but do not completely reduce the fear of others entering for residents. Instead, tactics such as stopping people at the door are part of a more complex system of governance practices.

Governance Gated communities are governed by homeowners’ associations (HOAs), a special kind of residential association created by the covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs) of a common interest development (CID). Elected boards oversee the common property, and each home is purchased with the CC&Rs as part of the deed. An extensive set of rules and regulations is mandated by the CC&Rs, and homeowners’ associations as private entities also can make their own rules. These rules are unassailable legally as constitutional private property rights and have been upheld by the US Supreme Court. Private enforcement of covenants replaces municipalities in regulating the built environment by zoning, and new ground rules—voting rights determined by property or home ownership, not citizenship—are put into place. The greater flexibility of private governance arrangements, it has been argued, has many advantages, and there are land-use planners, developers, and economists who feel they should be made available to existing neighborhoods to replace zoning controls. But this flexibility comes at a price in terms of the loss of First Amendment and other civil rights, as well as control by a board that is often driven by worries about the owners’ financial investment. A concern for physical security is also important and can drive capital improvement decisions, but it is the securing of the house or apartment as an investment, and in some cases real estate speculation, that determines the board’s decision making. Homeowners’ association boards have the ability to make decisions that affect every aspect of community life. Ideally these decisions and

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the functioning of the board are monitored by residents and evaluated in terms of how decisions resonate with the values and preferences of individual households. The reality, however, is usually not transparent, much less democratic. George, who lives in a gated community, explains why. There’s a board of directors. We run this as a corporation, and there are bylaws and meetings. Apathy runs rampant in a homeowners’ association like this. People just don’t show up for meetings. So people who do [show up for meetings] become caretakers for the community. Because [it is a] volunteer board of directors, there are always questions like “why are they doing that?” Well why aren’t you there to say anything? It’s kind of like you snooze, you lose, type of approach here. So . . . you have to go along with what the majority of the board rules. And are we always happy with it? No.

The impact of indifference and board control becomes greater in coops since the securing of owners’ investment is collective and the scope of board control is larger. Co-op residents often refer to the chair of their boards as “little dictators” who are only interested in their own power. However, the same apathy that occurs in gated communities with HOAs also transpires in co-ops with co-op boards. Very few people are interested or even willing to take on the work involved, and usually it is individuals with special skills, such as lawyers, accountants, and developers, who can address co-op board questions or individuals who like to be in control. Thus, people who do run for the board often have an agenda, such as Lincoln, for example: my concerns would be different than other people in the building . . . I think the, um . . . décor . . . the floor’s looking a little dated. You know it just helps if you’re on the board, to get what you want . . . Plus, it’s good to know, being in real estate, how a board works.

The physical and social conditions of a locale including unregulated public behavior, diminishing quality or maintenance of property, and lack of capital investment have been shown to contribute to an increased sense of community disorder and fear of crime for these residents. Rapid neighborhood changes and incidence of decay result in heightened se-

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curity concerns. Residents perceive and read physical changes in their local environment as part of an ongoing assessment of their social worth as well as the stability of their housing market. It is therefore not surprising that subtle visual cues are closely attended to and in some cases, escalated to crisis proportions. One strategy for minimizing neighborhood deterioration is to live in a residential development with strict rules and regulations. Many gated community residents say they have found the perfect place to live, and include the gates, walls, and guards, as well as the CC&Rs, as part of this vision. They make trade-offs to live in these restricted environments and negotiate their personal, social, and economic values to fit their new home environment. For example, Laurel says: One thing I don’t like about condominium living is that everything has to be cleared [by the board]. The committee that’s going to run the development, who decides things like whose house gets painted, or what color, you know [does not even represent the community].

Co-op residents face an even stricter regiment of rules and regulations, since individual residents own their apartments as a collectivity. The board can make rules about the interior as well as the exterior of their apartments including deciding when to fix a leak, peeling paint, or a fallen ceiling. These kinds of decisions and delayed responses make up the bulk of co-op board complaints. But one resident points out that it is “in everybody’s self-interest to sort of upkeep everything.” The securitization of loans on co-ops and ensuring that the building maintains its investment value is crucial for most owners. As Larry comments: The importance is for re-sale [laughter] . . . resale is absolutely important. The average in New York is three to four years. [Interviewer asks: average what?] Uh, the average between when people buy and sell. So, I’m not going to be here forever.

Thus, governance in the form of private corporate boards and strict rules and regulations related to the upkeep of the property help to create an environment where a resident’s investment as well as safety is safeguarded.

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Social Structure Surveillance of bodies socially constructed as different and racially marked is another aspect of how securityscapes function. Collective spaces such as lobbies, elevators, and halls in a co-op and the roads, parks, and amenities of gated communities are watched by guards and residents as part of everyday security practices that reinforce race-based exclusion and immobilization of people of color who enter. Whether it is surveillance by guards and neighborhood watch groups in gated communities or by doormen and video cameras in the hallways of coops, the aim is to identify people “who should not be there” and quickly investigate or remove them. The desire for even more security in co-ops has encouraged video camera surveillance of hallways by doormen “to prevent theft thought to be perpetrated by workmen,” but also has been used to threaten residents who participate in socially unacceptable activities (Bearman 2005). Gated communities and co-ops and their use of surveillance to create a securityscape function to racialize the space. For example, Helen and Ralph offer a vivid description: Ralph comments that without the gates anybody could come knocking on your door and put you in compromising situation. Helen then recounts what happened to a friend who lives “in a lovely community” outside of Washington, DC. She said, “this fellow came to the door, and she was very intimidated because she was white, and he was Black, and you didn’t get many blacks in her neighborhood. She only bought it [what he was selling] just to hurry and quick get him away from the door, because she was scared as hell. That’s terrible to be put in that situation. I like the idea of having security.”

Racist fears about the “threat” of a visible minority are found in both gated communities and co-ops. This is because most co-op buildings in New York City and gated communities are racially homogeneous so that the physical space of the neighborhood and its racial composition become synonymous. This racialized spatial ordering and the identification of a space with a group of people is a fundamental aspect of how a domestic securityscape is produced by reinforcing—and allowing for the open expression of—racial prejudice and discrimination.1

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Affect Most gated community residents say that they are moving because of their fear of crime, and indirectly express a pervasive sense of insecurity with everyday life in the United States. It is a psychological fear, but residents attempt to use the built environment, governance, and social exclusion strategies to feel safe. Their fear is exacerbated with increased media coverage and national hysteria about urban crime. News stories chronicle daily murders, rapes, drive-by shootings, drug busts, and kidnapping–often with excessive media coverage. Not surprisingly, then, fear of crime has increased since the mid-1960s, even though there has been a decline in all violent crime since 1990. Unfortunately, the gates and guards remind gated community residents of the vulnerability. For example, Donna’s concerns focus on her child: Donna: You know, he’s always so scared. . . . It has made a world of difference in him since we’ve been out here. Setha: Really? Donna: A world of difference. And it is that sense of security that they don’t think people are roaming the neighborhoods and the streets and that there’s people out there that can hurt him. Setha: Ah . . . that’s incredible. Donna: . . . That’s what’s been most important to my husband, to get the children out here where they can feel safe, and we feel safe if they could go out in the streets and not worry that someone is going to grab them. . . . we feel so secure and maybe that’s wrong too. Setha: In what sense? Donna: You know, we’ve got workers out here, and we still think “oh, they’re safe out here.” . . . In the other neighborhood I never let him get out of my sight for a minute. Of course they were a little bit younger too, but I just, would never, you know, think of letting them go to the next street over. It would have scared me to death, because you didn’t know. There was so much traffic coming in and out, you never knew who was cruising the street and how fast they can grab a child. And I don’t feel that way in our area at all . . . ever.

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The resulting affect of gated communities is defined by the symbolic polarization of the meanings of walls, gates, and guards. On one hand, they are understood as protection, the castle walls of one’s home, but on the other hand, they also remind residents of those who they are walling out, and exacerbate a fear of others. Thus, the affective atmosphere of living in a gated community is made up of these contrasting structures of feeling. The affect of co-ops is produced in some of the same ways as in gated communities; however, they differ in their degree of fear of others. In fact, it seems that the co-op application procedure creates a greater sense of security due to the belief that residents will be living with “people like us.” The desire to live with “people like us” does reinforce the infrastructural and governance aspects of the securityscape but not to the degree of the gated community. And the affective atmosphere is characterized by careful monitoring of socially acceptable forms of expression that are appropriate to “being a friendly building” and suppressing conflict and anger through the use of the co-op board. For example, Larry says: I think the best way to live in a co-op in New York City is to maintain as friendly a relationship with people, with pleasantries and so forth, but live your quiet life because I don’t know—what’s the Italian expression— “Don’t shit where you eat.” You shouldn’t, you know, have a very involved life with people.

Vanessa worries about ever bringing anything up with her neighbors because of how they might perceive her, as she told us, “I don’t want to be the one to make waves, I rather like report it [a problem] anonymously.” While Yvonne simply says, “I always feel like someone’s watching over my shoulder and I don’t like that feeling you know and I think this building is particularly strict.” It is only when there is some financial threat to the building’s economic viability that fear and anxiety were publically displayed. Then social interactions at the elevator, the tenor of board meetings and expressions of anger at those thought to have caused the crisis are mentioned in the interviews. For example, when one woman who lived in the co-op passed away, her older women friends continued to sit on the steps of the building. These older women were believed to be “hurt-

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ing the value of the building,” and the doormen and residents tried to discourage them by questioning them about where they lived and what they were doing there. Residents spoke about how anxious it made them feel for these women to be associated with their building, and they worried that realtors might think they actually lived there.

Conclusion Since I am concerned about the elusiveness of security as a concept and its hegemonic power to reproduce fear of others, hidden techniques of social control, and social inequality, I think it is important to ground it in the everyday and the material. For this reason, I continue to write about gated communities and other private housing regimes as relatively transparent and graspable prototypes of how domestic life is captured, reorganized, and redirected by security and its accompanying affective and governance demands. With neoliberal redirection, a home becomes a fortress, emotional retreat, and political location from which homeowners secure the world only for themselves, reinforce class relationships, and create a “haves” and “have-nots” moral geography. Even more disturbing is the way that these prototypical and mundane securityscapes, ostensibly purchased to protect one’s family, re-inscribe and reinforce racism and fear of others. For this reason, I find the concreteness of the concept of securityscapes useful for uncovering the social and psychological damage they perpetuate as well as for understanding their permanence and ability to influence contemporary and future residents as well as those who construct, plan, and design them.2 Thus, the impact of US security concerns is not only seen in political and spatial restrictions on public space or inscribed in militarized borders, but also in the increasing penetration of the private realm of home. This domestication of security through the architecture, urban design, and management of private residential communities addresses homeowners’ sense of social and financial security through socioeconomic segregation, controlled physical environments, and racist discourses. The impact of these securityscapes is only beginning to be documented, yet the imaginary fear of others, corporate forms of governance, and design and planning infrastructures are already traveling around the globe, reproducing their affective atmosphere and social structural patterns of exclusion.

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Note on the Text This chapter draws upon sections of a previously published article that focused on securitization processes found in gated communities and cooperative apartment buildings (Low 2017a). In this version, while I employ a similar literature review and some of the same ethnographic examples, I am attempting to illustrate the production of securityscapes that are the outcome of the previously theorized securitization practices. There is considerable overlap in some sections of this chapter and I apologize to readers who might have read the earlier version; however, I feel that the point that I am making here is that a securityscape is much more than the practices and that it is much more than an assemblage in terms of its continuity and ability to restructure the landscape in permanent ways. Also, these securityscapes expand and are rapidly reproduced in some environments. Gated communities have grown in number and size throughout the United States and especially the South and Southwest; however, the co-op as a governance type has not had the same success, due, I think, to its complicated ownership structure and the difficulty of buying and selling in a speculative real estate market. Notes

1 In other kinds of securityscapes what I am defining as the social structural dimensions might focus on other socially constructed identifiers such as ethnicity/ religion, class, gender, age, or ability. For gated communities and co-ops, however, the main social structural variable controlled and surveilled is race. 2 This theorization is not intended to disregard how securityscapes provide an architectural “package” used by municipalities to provide housing through profit-driven residential developments. I discussed this trend including gated community incorporation and the production of whiteness in earlier work (Low 2008, 2009). In this chapter I turn to considering private housing regimes as securityscapes that reproduce fear and a sense of threat through materially and financially altering the residential landscape.

References

Amar, Paul. 2013. The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bearman, Peter. 2005. Doormen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blakely, Ed and Mary Gail Snyder. 1997. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Fawaz, Mona and Hiba Bou Akar. 2012. “Practicing (in)security in the city.” City & Society 24(2): 105–109.

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Fawaz, Mona, Mona Harb, and Ahmad Gharbieh. 2012. “Living Beirut’s security zones: An investigation of the modalities and practice of urban security.” City & Society 24(2): 173–195. Glück, Zoltán and Setha Low. 2017. “A sociospatial framework for the anthropology of security.” Anthropological Theory 17(3): 281–296. Goldstein, Daniel. 2010. “Toward a critical anthropology of security.” Current Anthropology 51(4): 487–517. Goldstein, Daniel M. 2013. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayden, Dolores. 2003. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000. New York: Pantheon Books. Low, Setha. 2017a. “Security at home: How private securitization practices increase state and capitalist control.” Anthropological Theory 17(3): 365–438. Low, Setha. 2017b. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York: Routledge. Low, Setha M. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge. Low, Setha M. 2008. “Incorporation and gated communities in the greater metroLos Angeles region as a model of privatization of residential communities.” Home Cultures 5(1): 85–108. Low, Setha M. 2009. “Maintaining whiteness: The fear of others and niceness.” Transforming Anthropology 17(2): 79–92. Low, Setha, Gregory Donovan, and J. Gieseking. 2012. Shoestring democracy: Gated condominiums and market-rate cooperatives in New York.” Journal of Urban Affairs 34(3): 279–296. Low, Setha and Neil Smith. 2006. Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge. Molotch, Harvey. 2012. Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Monahan, Torin. 2006. Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York and London: Routledge. Monroe, Kristin. 2016. The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis and Kedron Thomas. 2011. Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Carol M. 2009. “Liberty, property, environmentalism.” Social Philosophy and Policy 26(2): 1–25. Røyrvik, Emil. 2010. “The sociality of securitization: Symbolic weapons of mass deception.” iNtergraph: Journal of Dialogic Anthropology 2(2): 1–16. Saegert S., D. Fields, and K. Libman. 2009. “Deflating the dream: Radical risk and the neoliberalization of homeownership.” Journal of Urban Affairs 31(3): 297–317. Sanchez, T., R. E. Lang, and D. M. Dhavale. 2005. “Security versus status? A first look at the census gated community data.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 24(3): 281–291.

7

Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel Nurit Bird- David and Matan Shapiro

Sarah and her husband lived in a small two-room apartment in Haifa, memories still fresh in their mind of the hundreds of sirens blasting through the town during the Israel–Hezbollah War (2006), alerting town residents to take refuge in bomb shelters from approaching rockets. The room they used as their bedroom was a fortified protected area, their apartment one of the 40 percent of residential homes in Israel that already integrated a protected room within the home in compliance with the law and building regulations. Sleeping in her bedroom, one night Sarah heard a huge blast and quickly ran out of the apartment to a bomb shelter. It turned out to be just loud wedding party fireworks but, bemused by her response, Sarah explained to her husband, who was away that night, that she simply forgot that their bedroom is fortified and doubles as an emergency bomb shelter. This incident introduces our field study and the question we particularly pursue in this chapter: what happens when spaces of security become an ordinary part of the domestic home? We examine this through ethnography of the Israeli case, focusing on the blurring distinctions here between spaces (and times) of security and insecurity. Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb shelters as an integrated room within every residential unit throughout the country. Initially, this room was known as heder bitahon (security room), and now overwhelmingly as mamad (acronym of the technical Hebrew term merhav mugan dirati, apartment’s protected space). The mamad replaced earlier bomb shelter forms, especially neighborhood underground bunkers and communal shelters located in the basement floor of towering apartment blocks. With its relocation to the private residential unit, it has become simultaneously a space for mundane activity, especially since the revised law in 2007 allowed en163

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larging the mamad to a normal room size. It is commonly used now as an ordinary room (a children’s room, extra bedroom, home office, etc.), one of the 3–5 rooms of the majority of apartments in Israel, and is currently embedded in about 40 percent of Israeli homes. Our research into mamad’s culture, narratives, and practices, is based on 12 months of fieldwork (January 2014 to January 2015) and 65 semi-structured interviews with Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, including professionals from the planning and construction industries and military officials. We combined observations in houses and other relevant sites (e.g., house marketing fairs and domestic security exhibitions) with snowball sampling of 48 Jewish-Israelis and 11 ArabPalestinian-Israelis, both men and women, across different age groups and income levels. We also interviewed professionals from the planning and construction industry (5) as well as current and former civil and military officials involved in the implementation of mamad planning policies (5). We analyzed related visual and textual material published in blogs, social media, newspaper articles, television commercials, and state-sponsored propaganda (e.g., Home Front Command television awareness campaigns). During the Israeli-Hamas 2014 war in Gaza— known in Israel as “Operation Tzuk Eitan”—one of us (Shapiro) conducted fieldwork in localities close to the Gaza Strip, and later returned for follow-up interviews with main research interlocutors.1 Last but not least, we draw on our daily experience as residents in Israel since the mamad is part of our everyday life and that of our families, friends, students, and most people we meet. The mamad’s instantiation of neoliberal privatization of national security and preparedness has attracted scholarly comments (Cohen and Amir 2007), and so too has the putative conflation of home-front and military-front (Tzuk 2009). Elsewhere, we examined the ethnonational dimensions of the emergence of mamad as a universal property of Israeli citizenship, a feature of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian-Israeli homes alike (Shapiro and Bird-David 2016). In this chapter, we focus on the new ontology of dwelling that the mamad introduces into Israeli life, with special emphasis on the domestication of security spaces. We ask whether and how spaces of security within the home blur the distinction between emergency and routine as concepts and experiences. Our discussion is oriented toward expanding cross-cultural and cross-scalar

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ethnographic comparison of spaces of security, by bringing into the discussions the intriguing case of domestic spaces in Israel. We comparatively approach this case with special reference to Cold-War America’s atomic bunker, a subject of inspiring anthropological attention in recent years (see among others Masco 2009, 2014; Lutz 1997a, b).

Routine and Emergency United An Israeli Home Front Command (HFC) video released during Operation Tzuk Eitan in the summer of 2014 features a female army officer, in Israeli Defense Force (IDF) uniform, holding two puppets in her hands: one is a happy-looking gveret shigra (Mrs. Routine), and the other a bearded, threatening-looking mar heirum (Mr. Emergency). Mrs. Routine calmly relaxes on the beach. Mr. Emergency suddenly appears and casts a dark shadow that blocks the sun. He says: “Madam, we have to get ready! We must think how to protect ourselves! For, in a minute a siren will blare!” Mrs. Routine defies him: “But what is the point of constant alertness? Why stress so much? You could use some wading [in the water]!” The IDF officer then announces: “Mr. Emergency realized what Mrs. Routine has been trying to say; it is impossible to be vigilant forever! Sometimes it is important to breathe-in and let go.” Mr. Emergency and Mrs. Routine, then, combine hands and come closer, and the officer concludes: “And now, when the shadow is gone, it is possible and even recommended to enjoy the sun again.” Sinister as it may be, this HFC video is analytically interesting because it interconnects emergency and routine as close partners, a couple, the core of family life. (This video clearly also raises gender issues, as does, generally, the domestication of securitization in Israel—issues deserving full attention that we, however, leave to future work.) The video presents security preparedness and everyday leisure activity as conjoined, needing each other and enjoying their romantic relationship. When Mrs. Routine and Mr. Emergency hold hands, their union constructs the intrinsic interconnectedness of routine and emergency as mutually inclusive ontological states of being in the world, rather than opposite and mutually exclusive. The video communicates that emergency and routine are inseparable spatio-temporal configurations making up Israeli social order.

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This video animates the apparent oxymoron “emergency-routine,” a widely heard phrase in Israeli media during the 2014 war. This formal expression refers to four State-imposed levels of civilian activities at times of emergency, each with its respective restrictions on movement and public gathering (HFC Report 2015). They range from “routine policy” to “highly restricted policy”: the former representing orderly everyday movement to and fro while on the declaration of the latter only “vital services” may be allowed to operate. These levels that are activated by the state during periods of instability and exception (Agamben 1995, 22ff.) also refer to allowed size of public gatherings (for example fewer than 300 people), and recommended walking distance from a bomb shelter. The video signals a significant move from these formally defined modes of action to a new state of unified experience of routine and emergency that we elsewhere termed “routinergency” (Shapiro and Bird-David 2016). Here, routine and emergency do not figure as binary states of civilian activity, i.e., either routine or emergency. Nor, however, do they simply form a hybrid, i.e., both routine and emergency, a simple instantiation of routines during emergency. The cinematic visualization of Mr. Emergency and Mrs. Routine holding hands and “beginning a wonderful friendship” suggests a conceptual marriage of sorts—each of them participates in the other’s experience and, to exploit the metaphor to its end, they begin to look alike as they continue to grow old together. Put in other words, normalcy and exception share the same space that embodies the conditions of it becoming the site of one or the other. Normalcy and exception are spatially inseparable—and temporally one or another while each state continues to encompass the other. The mamad erases clear boundaries between spaces dedicated for ordinary civilian life and spaces of intense securitization, in private and public domains alike. The mamad looks and feels (almost) like a regular room. Its main differences from other rooms in the home are: (1) walls made of 20–40-centimeter-thick cast fortified concrete; (2) thin layers of plaster coating on the concrete structure; (3) steel shock-resistant door that opens outward (as opposed to standard door opening inward); (4) a large, square anti-blast window; and (5) indoor ventilating system in mamadim (plural of mamad) built after 2012. Hence, the mamad can, and ordinarily does, function as a daily-use room, e.g., children’s room,

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music room, office, storage room, etc. In the high-cost Israeli property market, where middle-class young families can barely afford to buy or rent small apartments, the mamad is often used as a child’s room. Imagine such a mamad accordingly decorated: for example, with soft purple walls, flowery curtains, toy shelves lined with teddy bears and other furry friends, dolls and doll houses. This room at once provides the perfect setting of a putative secure happy childhood and family life, and the hardware for protection from bomb shells, missile rockets, and other life-threatening attacks. Compared with the domestic Cold War American underground bunker shown in contemporaneous advertisements as a parallel universe of happy family life, a capsule in time until danger passes and life renews above (Masco 2009), and compared with its discursive association with unknown, secretive, “beyond the surface” psyche (Lutz 1997a), the mamad is a site of continuous, everyday open ordinary life. Members of the family step in and out of the mamad innumerous times a day. Parents of young children, who we asked whether this state upset them, asserted that, to the contrary, it was easier to run to the mamad cum child’s room at times of emergency, and let the child continue to sleep undisturbed in his own room (rather than wake up the child and take him to a protected room). Mamadim have become so naturalized in Israeli domestic material culture that some building contractors no longer even market them as mamad but refer to them by the intended ordinary use as “bedroom,” “cupboard room,” etc. The mamad is familiarized as an ordinary room through its everyday use. It embodies—and socializes children into—lived reality of mutually inclusive emergency and routine.

Historical-Cultural and Economic Roots of the Mamad The mamad enters an historical-cultural semantic field mapped by two key Hebrew terms—mishlat (command post) and miklat (bomb shelter)—both key symbols of sorts in Israeli history, and both concern securitized spaces. Mishlat refers to military outposts overseeing their surroundings during Israel’s independence war; some of them were later the core of frontier civilian settlements inhabited by young idealist ex-soldiers. Mishlat connotes a bygone idealized era in Israeli history, and Israeli folklore nostalgically regales how soldiers positioned in it

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regarded it as home, and how it later became an esteemed part of the body of the Jewish homeland. On the other hand, miklat connotes an inner haven of safety, a place of refuge into which to withdraw when one is persecuted. The land of Israel is described as miklat country for persecuted Jewish people anywhere in the world.2 Shelters and military posts have become intrinsic hardware in a Jewish-Israeli universe premised on the myth of Shivat Tzion—the Return of the Jews to Zion—wherein controlled centralized planning was seen as “Zionist spirit itself, emanating from layers of fictional prose, ideological manifestations or programmatic protocols and printed on the landscape over and over again with every new spatial move or architectural object” (Efrat 2004, 77). In this universe the entire land was to be progressively covered with solid concrete, and time organized into recursive ceremonial sequences encoding the rhythm of collective resurrection: from destruction through national revival to redemption (Handelman 2004, 134–142). Shelters and military posts have become quintessential to the aesthetic feeling of this rhythm in civilian and military realms respectively because they facilitated what Don Handelman calls “the relationship between a closed and an open society, and of the dependence of the latter for its survival on the former” (2004, 141). Zionist Zeitgeist itself opens to the bursting vigor of civilian life, but it is totalized and temporarily encapsulated in the liminality of shelters when military escalation threatens the integrity of the national body (Kimmerling 1999). “The only alternative offered,” as Handelman puts it, “is the descent into chaos and absence” (Handelman 2004, 141). Mamad enters this field as a form of miklat, succeeding earlier forms that had no other names besides miklat. The Israeli Civil Protection Law enforced the construction of communal public shelters (miklatim, plural of miklat) as early as 1951, only three years after the establishment of the state. Communal shelters for the public were built in every Jewish locality across the land, while in urban areas, protected, shared service areas were built in the basement of every apartment building. Municipal authorities were required to maintain the public shelters in a state of preparedness, while residents were responsible for the semi-communal shelters in private and shared buildings (Cohen and Amir 2007). Colonel Eli Ratzon explained in 1963 the underlying rationale of the law in an Israeli Defense Authority (hitgonenut ezrahit, or haga) guidebook:

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It is not mere eventuality, let alone abundance of resources, which lead us to emphasize . . . the question of shelter and refuge. There is no other country like ours, which has been for years in a constant state of alertness (and may well remain in this condition for many years to come). Likewise, there is almost no other country which is as reduced and narrow in its surface, surrounded by enemies, and exposed throughout most of its land area to bombardment and shelling, with such a small alert [sic], and all of it is essentially a “front” and a “battlefield.” [Therefore], years ago we have already reached the conclusion that every building must contain a bomb shelter. (Ratzon 1963, 15; brackets and quotation marks in original)

With the deployment of ballistic missiles in Iraq in 1991, the Israeli Civil Defense Authority has nonetheless revised both its planning policy and securitization doctrine, enforcing the construction of indoor residential protected spaces, mamadim in every new residential unit (Bitzur 2009). Following a series of detonation experiments code-named “Demolition” and “Demolition 1,” the Israeli Civil Defense Authority defined a Standard Association Stamp on the required strength of the concrete walls, steel windows, and anti-blast doors. In order to encourage homeowners in older buildings to add a mamad room, the legislator has also defined that planning authorities must automatically approve applications for mamad additions and that municipalities were not allowed to raise council tax on the extra areas gained (Civil Defence Regulations 1994). Until 2007 the law had approved only five square meters for this extra space, and mamadim were thus often used as mere storage rooms (Cohen and Amir 2007, 135). After the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006—which proved the inefficiency of such small storage-cumshelter rooms—the extra-space allowance was increased to 9–12 square meters, a modest bedroom size in Israeli standards. This entailed a more pragmatic approach to domestic securitization, effectively turning those shelters into an extra room fit for everyday activities as well as providing protection during war (Tzuk 2009). Given Israel’s extremely high-priced property (the price of a threebedroom flat in Tel Aviv can reach NIS 2–3 million, equivalent to US$500,000–750,000), the Israeli legislators’ allowances constituted a significant stimulus for adding mamadim to new and existing residential units. Though mamad is an expensive domestic artefact (building it

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costs roughly NIS 80,000, about US$20,000), its addition is often the only means to increase property size and number of rooms, in both new and existing buildings. Especially in the case of existing buildings, obtaining municipal permission for adding new rooms is a complicated business, subject to strict regulations on floor-surface size and neighbors’ objections. Applications for adding mamadim, by state law, cannot be municipally denied. Integrating mamadim in new buildings is strictly enforced by the state through a simple bureaucratic measure. New residential units without approved mamad are not legally recognized as habitable. Home Front Command engineers must physically test and approve these fortified structures on-site before proceeding to supply homeowners with “form six” (permission to wire into state-owned electricity system) and “form four” (house occupation certificate). The effect of those regulations is that mamadim become a standard residential feature that is embedded in a rapidly growing number of Israeli homes (already over 40%, CBS 2015; cf. Yaniv 2011). Moreover, any new residential unit built in the country has a mamad, regardless of location, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. All new homes whether in Tel Aviv or frontier zones, Jewish and Arab-Palestinian villages, small apartment-units or large mansions, equally include this protection hardware. Although building mamadim has economic motives, our data suggest that the securitization of domestic space in Israel cannot be reduced to narrow socioeconomic questions. Rather, mamad culture denotes the workings of large-scale cosmology on individual minds (cf. Douglas 1996 [1970]). Especially for the dominant Jewish-Israeli population, the very concept of mamad generates an experience of space that pragmatically interconnects normalcy and emergency, and a history of persecution coexisting with optional place of refuge.

The Mamad’s Multidimensionality At once bomb shelter and mundane space, the very materiality of mamad attaches the experience of threat and the experience of protection onto a continuous physical plane. We can examine this quality of the mamad through what is known as a reversible image. An optical illusion image (in two classic examples, rabbit/duck and Vase/two heads),

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it exploits graphical similarities, and other properties of visual system interpretation, between two or more distinct image forms, and induces the phenomenon of multistable perception: you can shift between “seeing” in the same image one of two figures (a rabbit or a “duck;” a “vase” or “two heads”) by training your attention to perceive one or the other.3 In the same way, the mamad reversibly registers as a security room or an everyday functional room, on national and domestic scales. On a national scale, the risk and actuality of missile attacks are not evenly experienced. Thus, during attacks in Southern Israel, when citizens stay there in mamadim, citizens in Northern Israel continue to inhabit the mamad as an ordinarily functioning room. For instance, in the North a mother would sing a lullaby to her baby in the mamad-cum-child room, then step into the living room to watch the TV news coverage of people in the South occupying mamadim under missile attacks. On a domestic scale, in each household, the mamad-cum-child room would appear one day as a security room and the next as a child’s room; indeed, sometimes, one moment as the former and the next moment as the latter. The mamad functions in a multiscalar world, where actors can choose and shift between different scalar perspectives on the same phenomenon affecting what they “see.”4 These perspectives are articulated with different horizons of imaginations: in the above example, for instance, as they watch the TV news, one parent dwells on the children’s safety at home, and the other on the country’s safety. Another aspect of the mamad’s multidimensionality is this: the mamad retracts and normalizes the ideological overlap between citizens and soldiers in Israel (cf. Ochs 2011, 122–124). At the same time, the mamad is also the site of critique, disobedience, and escapism. For example, 70-year-old Uri, a resident of a kibbutz located three kilometres from Gaza, published after Operation Tzuk Eitan a manifesto to kibbutz members, calling them to transform the bulky mamad extensions of their houses into elegant playgrounds or bird-spotting roof-balconies; and thus “make lemonade from the lemon.” A security warden in a high school in Haifa said in an interview that mamad ultimately encourages teenagers to sidestep authority. When students run away from class, he explained, they often hide in one of the bomb shelters in the school, where they smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol. Such civilian acts involving subversion, doubt, and play are not at all marginalized in pop-

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ular discourse, but rather enhanced with humorous pragmatism. As 24-year-old Einat bluntly confessed in one of the interviews: “mamad is a great invention because you can have the noisiest sex without anybody hearing you!” One young child we asked about a bunker’s function—we were with her in a Kibutz’s grounds where an old communal outside bunker was decorated and used as a structure for child-play, and we asked her about that—solemnly stated that, of course, she knows what a bunker is for: it is a room for doing school homework. Sarah, whose story began this chapter, told us that she rushed out of her bedroom in search of miklat because she completely forgot that she was actually sleeping every night in a mamad. Mamad, thus, can numb a sense of insecurity and stimulate a sense of security—and equally, the reverse. On the one hand, it makes routine life possible even under heavy missile attacks (we return to this below), and on the other it literally embeds conflict in the material hardware of the house. The mamad so instantiates a direct relationship with violence rather than merely representing it. By this simultaneity, the mamad sustains a political cosmology of fear (cf. Ahmed 2010; Massumi 2010, 59; Lutz 1997a) right at the heart of everyday life, which, in turn, justifies and legitimizes exceptional security measures (Ochs 2011, 73–77). Under these terms, the ambiguity of the mamad not only reinstates the fuzzy, often non-existent boundary between civil society and military state in Israel (Ben Eliezer 1998). It also entails a distorting effect on the moral level: a sense of continuous normal civilian life coexistent and interchangeable with that of emergency. Emergency is intermittent, situational, imminent, and inevitable yet also naturalized as part of routine life. Mamad consequently associates routine life with the moral suppression of hope for viable peace, which will enable Israelis to discard those protected spaces. Rather than striving to resolve the conflict, mamad inherently makes conflict manageable and a political option. It is precisely this epiphenomenal cosmological horizon that emerges from the simultaneity, disorientation, and distortion of the mamad that makes it a very particular vector for emotional resilience.

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Mamad during War Following the war in 2006, the HFC had taken measures to increase civilian resilience in Israel (Baum 2011). This included the establishment of Yaklar (yehidat kishur la-rashut, meaning Municipality Connection Unit), an IDF unit dedicated to sustaining linkages between civilians and the municipality personnel working in war rooms during periods of crisis. It also included the formation of Locality Emergency Teams (Tzevet Herum Yeshuvi, abbreviated as tzahi) in villages and towns located close to the northern border with Lebanon and the southern border with Gaza. Governmental budget reform has enabled local municipalities in these areas to increase the number of therapists, social workers, and mental health professionals they employ directly or through charities such as the Israeli Trauma Coalition and Resilience (hosen) Centers. The municipalities regularly hold stress alleviation workshops for children and the elderly, as well as one-on-one therapy for persons diagnosed with security-related traumas (Friedman-Peleg 2014). Finally, in 2010, the government authorized and funded the construction of mamad in every residential house located up to a perimeter of 7 kilometers from Gaza. These measures were activated virtually overnight in localities surrounding Gaza when Operation Tzuk Eitan broke out in July 2014. Yaklar reserve officers were immediately enlisted and the five local municipalities in the area transferred all governance activities (e.g., logistics, education, welfare, etc.) to underground fortified shelters. Emergency teams (tzahi) were inducted, while mental health professionals and social workers employed at the five Resilience Centers of the region offered 24-7 attendance, both in person and over the telephone. Two Home Front Command reserve units were also drafted and deployed in the various localities. The soldiers were instructed to offer moral support and further report to health-care professionals at the municipality war room about residents’ requests and needs. Additional steps taken to strengthen resilience included free concerts by prominent Israeli artists, the maintenance of a social club open at all times in all localities belonging to the different municipalities, and fun-days for the youth and the elderly in water parks, beach resorts, other kibbutzim or nature reserves in other parts of the country.5 All in all, transition from “routine” working mode to an “emergency-routine” mode was swift and efficient; how-

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ever, residents considered them far less effective than the mamad, even redundant if financial means were limited. Less than a week later after the war broke, one of us (Shapiro) began fieldwork in the municipality of Hof Ashkelon.6 He accompanied Yaklar reserve officer Eli and social worker Doron—an employee at the local Resilience Center—on their daily visits to different localities in the area. Their job was to sustain ongoing contact with Emergency Teams, register and report any urgent needs surging “from the ground” in real time, and provide mental health first aid to families and individuals that contacted the Resilience Centers. Sirens in the area blared frequently, allowing 15–30 seconds to find shelter. They were followed by lurid explosions of Grad missiles shot from Gaza, Israeli Iron Dome rockets trying to intercept them, and constant Israeli artillery barrages. Shapiro left the area when the situation escalated due to Israeli ground invasion into Gaza and returned for follow-up interviews a month after ceasefire was declared. Virtually all interlocutors in the area had something to say about protection hardware. Yaklar officer Eli, for example, claimed that statefunded installation of mamadim have “revolutionized” life in the region, causing real estate prices to rise and consequently making local communities more attractive to young families (but see also Friedman-Peleg 2014, 133ff.). In those localities that did not benefit from state-funded mass construction of mamadim, authorities also deployed provisory protection hardware: some miguniyot (thin concrete boards attached to form a square) and some gliloniyot (concrete tubes normally used for the construction of sewer canals). And an HFC media campaign entitled “the most protective available” (hakhi mugan she-yesh) went on air, instructing citizens living up to 100 kilometers from Gaza on how to choose safe spots in their houses. In Hof Ashklelon and nearby municipalities, HFC officers physically passed through each of the houses in those localities, rendered most vulnerable, to help residents locate the safest spot. Thirty-five-year-old Eitan from Kibbutz Nihumim, for example, told us how every time an alarm went off he took his eight-month-old baby to that spot and kneeled above him for extraprotection, awaiting to hear the missiles fall. Fifty-three-year-old Ariel, a social worker from Kibbutz Tikva, further emphasized how mamad changes the lives of local residents:

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People here use mamad on a regular basis . . . Since they were built (in 2012) the amount of calls we get [at the Municipality Resilience Center] was reduced by three or four times . . . There is also a reduction in panic attacks and I can even tell you more than that: the very action of running to the mamad is therapeutic. Most children around here run to the mamad these days . . . the heart beats and you run. And then you go out and do some process of relaxation.

Running to the mamad was not possible everywhere. In Kibbutz Nihumim, for example, which is located about 18 kilometers from Gaza, only a few mamadim were built privately by local residents. There were several public shelters, but none could be used either because the stairs were too steep or because they were not wired with electricity. Most crucially, these shelters were located too far away from residents’ houses. People simply could not reach them within 20 seconds, and the elderly had no hope of making it there. Kibbutz emergency team members were consequently furious with the local municipality. In a meeting that took place during the war, they told Eli and Doron that long before the war they alerted the municipality about the protection problems in the kibbutz and have not been answered. They also asked them to renovate the old underground public shelters and this has not been done either. Several local residents accordingly claimed that mental resilience is simply impossible to sustain when the “basic need for protection” is lacking, as one interlocutor put this. Sixty-two-year-old Sandra reiterates this view: People here complain all the time they have no security and that they want [the state] to finance the construction of mamadim. . . . But there is a big waste of money here. If you ask me, the Hosen [Resilience] Centre is a waste of money, and also the stress-reduction days (hafagot). If the municipality has money it should primarily supply protection [rather than spend it on resilience activities]. The mamad is the best solution because it is in the context of the house and it protects you from what you cannot control.

Although Sandra must have been thinking of the financial advantages in having the state finance your mamad, she also expressed a profound sense of helplessness amidst the sound, smell and sight of war. Since the

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old public shelters in the kibbutz were practically useless, and since the provisory protection hardware the state deployed across the region were mocked as a joke, people felt as if they had no protection at all. Routine in localities without mamad infrastructure has in fact become almost impossible to sustain under constant shelling, and some were effectively abandoned as soon as the war began.7 They relocated to homes of family and friends in Center and North Israel, where ironically they were sometimes accommodated in mamadim that were used as spare bedrooms. Although routine life was also severely affected in those localities where the State funded the construction of mamadim, life was more easily manageable there as residents were less dependent on external services. Although such technologies as mamad and Iron Dome cannot completely overrun anxieties, in this context, they nonetheless seem to hold the cosmos together from within when a serious crisis threatens to break it apart.8 This became clear when at some stage during the followup interview with Ariel from Kibbutz Tikva—in which Doron the social worker also took part—Doron uttered that “during the war there was energy of chaos in the region.” Ariel replied: I wouldn’t say chaos because at least here in Tikva, I swear; the sun rose every day and set in the evenings. The [communal] dining room remained open throughout the war, and everything was open. There was much uncertainty, but this is a different thing to chaos. The world was organized; it was just unclear where it is heading. [And] I became depressed. I could not sleep well, I lost my livelihood. I did not want to wake up in the morning and go to work.

Ariel poetically demonstrates the ontology of dwelling in a shaken Zionist cosmos. On the one hand, having mamad in the house allows persons to go on with their mundane activities despite a security emergency that lasts for months. Yet, on the other hand, they cannot prevent an existential depression that negates the very routineness of daily life in this state of affairs. While mamadim transform the chaos of war into organized uncertainty, they nonetheless disorient and distort space to the extent that dwellers can no longer differentiate routine from emergency. Mamadim swap chaos for uncertainty because they conjoin routine and emergency in a way that allows one to reversibly perceive one

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or the other. And as Operation Tzuk Eitan was the longest military conflict Israel has fought since 1982, it is precisely this mamad quality that produced national resilience. As former high-ranking IDF officer Zvika said: From a military point of view, mamad is so good because it allows us to move from routine to emergency in a very short time . . . We can today focus the threats as they happen and alert people on time so that they can get to their mamad quickly. Combined with Iron Dome, this gives us a maximum protection casing for the civilian population (oref) in times of war, which is a strategic asset, because it allows the government to run the war cautiously. When civilian population is vulnerable there is less time to consider alternatives, both in the diplomatic and military levels. [With mamadim] we can decide if we are interested in prolonging the war, or shorten it, how to manage it, and so on, without having to attend to the economical and psychological effects associated with the mental burnout of the population.

The shelter-cum-room mamad, thus, assists in producing a type of dwelling-in-the-world that resurges from and is contingent upon incessant crisis, while taking Zionist-Israeli evolving forms of fortification and self-encapsulation to a new level. Under these terms, collapsing the boundaries between normalcy and emergency is itself normalized, rather than provoking moral or emotional judgment, revision, or breakdown. The mamad fits in with other Israeli practices that routinize the articulation of mundane civilian activities and prevention of military and terrorist threats (Ochs 2011; Shir-Vertesh and Markowitz 2015).

Mamad Society In an edited volume evocatively entitled No Peace, No War, Paul Richard (2005) argues that in geopolitical contexts, where violent conflicts persist for decades, war and peace should be understood as social conditions that implicate one another, and not as distinct phenomena. Richards urges scholars “to locate war within the precise social contexts from which it springs” (2005, 4) through a cross-cultural ethnographic and historiographic comparison, which illustrates subtleties and mundane

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paradoxes that macro-level assumptions about the localized politics of securitization in different conflict zones across the globe often miss or evade altogether. As a variant of the “No War, No Peace” thesis, Daphna Shir-Vertesh and Fran Markowitz (2015) show that everyday life in Israel must be understood as a continuous or “fluid” reality of “Almost Peace, Almost War,” a reality that always anticipates securitization measurements (viz. Ochs 2011). In this chapter, we suggest that the mamad constitutes an additional—and especially productive—ethnographic site for pursuing discussions on securitization in Israel, especially by moving toward viewing the mamad within a comparative framework. Wartime and nuclear shelters constitute a distinctive part of the Euro-American dwelling environment, the idea first appearing during the Cold War years, in the United States, and in a few European countries, i.e., Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, and Austria.9 (In Switzerland, the program of national fallout shelters is still active.) These bunkers migrated from their military origin to sites of civilian dwellings, and from being means of averting eminent risk to evidence of national preparedness to uncertain, even unknown, future eventualities. Cold-War America’s “atomic bunker” especially has drawn inspiring attention, albeit a small part of growing scholarship on America of the 1950s (and since) that, with rich historical detail subjected to anthropological analysis, examines the changing subject, society and culture produced or projected by the period’s politics. The broad body of literature “centers on questions of culture, and attempts to characterize the period in terms of favored narrative styles, privileged affects and emerging epistemologies” (Lutz 1997a, 135–136). It examines how real and imagined threats are harnessed through politics and policies of securitization to “a conceptual project” (Masco 2014, 1) that reshapes everyday life in the country and its understandings of itself and the world. The scholarly broad panorama lies outside the scope of this chapter, in which we instead focus on two particular works (Lutz 1997a; Masco 2009) that touch on the Cold War American atomic bunker as institution and idea, sign and metaphor, and a window on contemporaneous popular culture and understandings of self and society.10 Surely, 1950s Cold-War America and 2000s rocket-bombarded Israel are worlds apart. However, across the sea of time, technology, ideology, and objective reality, we suggest that the American Cold War “epistemology of the bunker” (Lutz 1997a, b) and

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“bunker society” (Masco 2009) are concepts that constitute a productive foil for sketching the almost opposite course that neoliberal postmodern Jewish-Israeli “mamad society” has followed in recent years. We begin with Masco’s “Life Underground: Building the Bunker Society” (2009) that expands on the materiality of the bunker, and uses it as iconic of 1950s America, a “bunker society.” Aside from the state’s large atomic bunkers, private citizens were encouraged to build small underground bunkers in their outside house grounds, equipped as a miniature home. The advertised bunker was depicted as space stocked with stateof-the-art technologies and commodities; it was presented as a utopian vision of a happy consumer family’s home. America had astoundingly succeeded to culturally transform this underground, windowless room into a site of both “global power and social dreaming” (2009, 13). The underground bunker harbored fantasies of “order, self-sufficiency, and insulation from the universe of danger above” (14); it was a refuge until the world was again ready for renewal of normal social life. The bunker set the terms for “a long-running American fantasy about achieving an absolute and total form of security” (13; see also Masco 2014). In embracing the bunker as the future of the nation, a new kind of national security emerged—one that reorganizes everyday life as permanent warfare. The mamad architecture, certainly, stands in radical contrast to the Cold-War American windowless underground bunker, the former metonymically connected to home and the latter metaphorically. Located within the home, the mamad is a constant reminder at once of security and insecurity, as reversible permanent existential states. The mamad affords living through momentary peaks of insecurity, in the security of ordinary home life, and so understanding security and insecurity as interchanging states of life, or rather the same existential state as reversible images of security and insecurity. If the American bunker embodies the “long-running American fantasy about achieving an absolute and total form of security” (ibid., 13), the mamad embodies the Jewish longrunning anticipation of continual periodic attacks and threats, and at the same time the fantasy of security at home, with the family, regardless of what unfolds outside. Both the American and the Israeli projects involve “the emotional training of the populace” (ibid., 19), though in different ways: total security or insecurity in the first case, and somewhat multidimensional security-within-insecurity and insecurity-within-security,

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in the second case. The mamad normalizes continuity of life despite, and throughout, recurring rocket attacks. Our findings that mamadim are locally thought to have led to rising property prices in the southern zones of Israel, and to a reduced rate of turning to the state’s psychological support during times of emergency, speak to their normalizing effect. For Lutz (1997a, b), the American underground bunker is a powerful metaphor for the emergent “epistemology” of Cold-War America. Examining at great depth debates and discourses of the time, Lutz points to the discursive production of “psychological” subjectivity and a “psychologizing” national security state, a “militarization of the self ” and psychologizing state’s social and political discourse. There developed in 1950s America (Lutz argues) public and secret governments, overt and covert psychological sciences, and an open and subversive self. The underground bunker symbolizes these emergent hidden, unseen dimensions of self and governmentality, an “epistemology of the bunker.” Clearly, the mamad represents an entirely different position, with its location within the house, as one of the house’s rooms in everyday use; furthermore, given its discursive and institutional association with property interests, as an added useful space in Israeli small apartments. Had we wanted to approach contemporary Israel as “mamad society” with “epistemology of the mamad” (paraphrasing Masco and Lutz), these terms would have pointed to the economic neoliberalization of Israeli self, security, and the state. Moreover, mamad would stand for multidimensional security/insecurity existential states that one enters into and out of as part of ordinary life.

Conclusions Running out of her bedroom-cum-mamad toward a protected area outside her home was for Sarah an amusing anecdote to tell a researcher interviewing her on this unique Israeli institute. Yet for us as part of our research material, her story started this chapter’s inquiry into the collapse of clear distinctions between spaces of security and spaces of everyday domestic life. We examined the cultural and historical context of the mamad, a protected space within the private home, and how this turn-of-the-millennium hardware expresses a deep-rooted sense of security-within-insecurity and insecurity-within-security. We suggested

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that because of the mamad’s multidimensionality as a security room and as an ordinary everyday domestic room, it reinforces a political and social discourse that is not one of “No War, No Peace” or “Almost War, Almost Peace” as much as one of “Always War-within-Peace and Peace-within-War.” Comparatively viewing the mamad as a cultural option vis. protection hardware options elsewhere can continue to bring into relief singularities of it, and also enrich the cross-cultural discussion of securing places within a multiscalar perspective right down to the domestic scale. The mamad attests to security work across and through spatial scales; it demonstrates how the home becomes an everyday extension of national security and concerns, and, at the same time, a space of everyday family life. Notes

1 Israel launched a military offensive in Hamas-controlled Gaza on July 8, 2014. Its official aim was to stop sustained Hamas missile attacks on the Israeli civilian population. The Hebrew words Tzuk Eitan literally mean “firm cliff ” but the English term used by Israeli authorities is “Operation Protective Edge.” Here we use the Hebrew term in order to maintain its contextual ethnographic sense as it was conveyed by research interlocutors. 2 In Zionist spatial imagination, mishlat and miklat stand for hyper-visible and hyper-invisible places, while both refer to fortified spaces with securitizing orientations, constituting contested cultural sites for the Israeli project of nationbuilding (Weizmann 2007). 3 See Shapiro and Bird-David 2016 on using the “Mobius effect” concept for exploring this mamad’s quality. The Mobius effect refers to the Mobius-strip loop-effect: a single plane of reference that nullifies the distinction between the “inside” and “outside” layers from which it is composed (Lury et al. 2012, 17). 4 On multiscalar perspective see Bird-David 2017a (esp. pp. 8, 203–204, 227) and 2017b. See also Ferguson and Gupta 2002 and Low 2016. 5 Concerts were funded by state-owned Mif ’al-Ha’pais, the national lottery monopoly. Clubs were set up in bulky concrete structures regularly used as dining halls and stocked with toys, board games, and DVDs. War-time leisure activities are called hafagot, which means “easing” and connotes with “stress alleviation” (hafagat metahim). 6 Hof Ashkelon is home to 16,500 residents in 21 rural settlements, mostly kibbutzim, some experiencing economic hardships. 7 Some of the localities that did have mamads were deserted as well only after weeks of constant shelling. 8 Iron Dome is a high-tech missile interception system deployed across Israel during Operation Tzuk Eitan.

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9 See Masco’s (2009, 28–29) “Suggestions for Further Reading” for an annotated list of relevant references. 10 See Lutz 1997a: 136n1, 137n for an annotated list of references.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, Sarah. 2010. “The politics of fear in the making of worlds.” Qualitative Studies in Education 16(3): 377–398. Althuser, Louis. On Ideology. London: Verso. Baum, N. 2011. “‘Emergency routine’: The experience of professionals in a shared traumatic reality of war.” British Journal of Social Work 42: 424–442. Ben Eliezer, Uri. 1998. “State versus civil society? A non-binary model of domination through the example of Israel.” Journal of Historical Sociology 11(3): 370–396. Bennett, Luke. 2011. “Bunkerology—a case study in the theory and practice of urban exploration.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 421–434. Bird-David, Nurit. 2017a. Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———2017b. “Before nation: Scale-blind anthropology and foragers’ worlds.” Current Anthropology 58(2): 209–226. Bitzur, Avi. 2009. “The role of the home-front in the Israeli security doctrine.” Maarachot 426: 12–19. Borowski, Thedeusz. 1997. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Proszę państwa do gazu). London: Penguin Books. Civil Defence Regulations. 1994. http://www.oref.org.il/11193-he/Pakar.aspx. Civil Protection Law. 1951. https://www.nevo.co.il/law_html/Law01/125_001.htm. Cohen, Shelly and Tula Amir. 2007. “From public shelter to mamad: The privatization of civilian defense.” In Cohen and Amir (eds.) Living Forms: Architecture and Society in Israel. Tel Aviv: Xargol Books and Am Oved Publishers. Pp. 127–143. Douglas, Marry. 1996 [1970]. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Routledge. Efrat, Zvi. 2004. “Mold.” In H. Yacobi (ed.) Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse. London: Ashgate. Pp. 76–88. Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta. 2002. “Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality.” American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Friedman-Peleg, Keren. 2014. The People on the Couch: The Politics of Trauma in Israel. Jerusalem: Magnes. Friedman-Peleg, Keren and Yehuda Goodman 2011. “From post-trauma intervention to immunization of the social body: Pragmatics and politics of a resilience program in Israel’s periphery.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Cross-Cultural Health Research 34(3): 421–442. Handelman, Don. 2004. Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford and New York: Berg.

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Holbraad, Martin and Morten Pedersen. 2012. “Revolutionary securitization: An anthropological extension of securitization theory.” International Theory 4(2): 165–197. Home Front Command Internet Site. http://www.oref.org.il/ (in Hebrew). Kimmerling, Baruch. 1999. “Religion, nationalism, and democracy in Israel.” Constellations 6(3): 339–363. ———2005. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lubkemann, Stephen. 2008. Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lury, Celia, Parisi, Luciana, and Tiziana Terranova. 2012. “Introduction: The becoming topological of culture.” Theory, Culture and Society 29(4/5): 3–35. Lutz, Catherine. 1997a. “The psychological ethic and the spirit of containment.” Public Culture 9 (2): 135–159. ———1997b. “Epistemology of the bunker: The brainwashed and other new subject of permanent war.” In J.P.a.N. Schnog (ed.) Inventing the Psychological: Toward Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Masco, Joseph. 2009. Life underground: building the bunker society. Anthropology Now 1(2): 13–29. ———2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2010. “The future birth of the affective fact: The political ontology of threat.” In Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 52–70. Ochs, Juliana. 2011. Security and Suspicion: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.  Peletz, Rami. 2009. “Home front coping with prolonged conflict.” Maarachot 426: 20–29. Ratzon, Eli. 1963. Shelter and Refuge: Security Construction. Tel Aviv: Maarachot IDF. Richards, Paul. 2005. “New war: An ethnographic approach.” In Richards (Ed.) No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts. Athens: Ohio University Press. Shapiro, Matan and Nurit Bird-David. 2016. “Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, pp. 1–19. Shir-Vertesh Daphna and Markowitz Fran. 2015. “Entre guerre et paix: Israël au jour le jour.” Ethnologie française 45(2): 209–222. Tzuk, Ido. 2009. “National Defence-Mechanism in Apartment Protected Space: Dual-Purpose Practice of Domestic Emergency-Routine.” Masters Thesis, Tel Aviv University. Yaniv, Ronen. 2011. Shelters and Mamads in Israel: Numbers and Conditions. Israeli Parliament Research Center. Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.

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The Political Economy and Political Aesthetics of Military Maps Catherine Lutz [I]n innumerable wars since the sixteenth century it has been . . . easy for the generals to fight battles with colored pins and dividers rather than sensing the slaughter of the battlefield. (Harley 1989, 13)

As we drove toward their ranch along Guam’s northwest shore, Rita and Felix1 pointed out some of the more or less obvious signs of how their island had been reshaped by the US military, which currently controls one-third of its land surface. On one side of the road, an Anderson Air Force Base fence snaked far into the distance, announcing all manner of boundaries between insiders and outsiders, higher purpose and lower, protector and protected, threat and safety. As we rounded a curve to descend from the plateau down toward the sea, we passed what were once dramatic limestone cliffs over which the air force for years had bulldozed all manner of toxic trash and expired equipment. The once perpendicular landscape had become a hundreds-of-yards-wide and sloping hill. And, along with many other locations on the island, a Superfund site. While not all maps of Guam show US bases, those that do represent the base’s land area in the sharply distinct colors that aptly suggest there is another nation besides Guam on the island. They do not mark, however, the areas of toxic danger, or the areas of the last remaining limestone forest that Rita and Felix pointed out, or the old villages whose names are now overlain with military labels. It is a standard principle of critical geography and cartography that a map is a powerful object with the ability to remake the world for its viewers, both representationally and socially. The power of maps consists, like that of photographs (even with the erosion brought by digital 184

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photography), in the assumption or appearance of objectivity, that is, in the common perception that each map is a straightforward and scientific representation of “facts on the ground” (Pickles 2004). Their beauty and invitation to imagine voyages give them additional sway over audiences, replacing place and territory with exotic location (Massey 2005). Maps, used to familiarize viewers to a place, are at once defamiliarizing, because in their two-dimensional form they fail to communicate the ether of the environment they delineate. Maps of security spaces have yet another form of power that derives both from the ideological and physical supremacy of the institutions of violence that create them and, particularly in highly militarized societies, from the extensive financial investments that can and do go into their production, investments that can pay strong public relations dividends. In this chapter, I examine the maps in voluminous sets of documents produced by the US government with regard to its military activities on Guam (Chamorro: Guåhan). I ask about the projects, institutional contexts, and investments within which these documents and their maps emerge and I focus on the rhetorical work done by the maps, or more generally their aesthetics. In line with arguments from critical cartography, I ask what has not been but ought to be mapped (Harley 1989). I then examine the political aesthetics of the maps themselves. By political aesthetics, I mean those choices of design, craft, or art which can be seen as the essence of any ideological system, per Sartwell (2010). As he has argued, a political system (such as the combination of democratic and militarist norms and institutions that organize the production of these maps) is not simply found in texts like environmental laws or constitutions or political ads, but also in “imagery, architecture, music, styles of embodiment and movement, clothing and fibers, furnishing, graphic arts” (Sartwell 2010, 2). Additionally, to see the aesthetics in political practice is not simply to see something that embellishes or “sells” an ideology with beauty or design, but to see that “an ideology is an aesthetic system, and this is what moves or fails to move people, attracts their loyalty or repugnance, moves them to action or to apathy” (1). The content and style of a document or some part of a document like these maps are inseparable, and so are the affects and the propositions that the politics proffers. In looking at the maps, I examine how they variously: (1) frame an affecting narrative about what kind of security is being provided by the

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larger project in which they participate or how they define the problem that the US military is solving in that location, (2) declare what counts as data and what does not, (3) enable particular kinds of action and as a result, disable others, and (4) locate and define the ignorance in relation to which they constitute knowledge. Also crucially important is the question of public responses to the maps and the documents in which they appear, although that is taken up elsewhere (Lutz 2019). The following explores the case of the multi-thousand-page report of the Department of the Navy related to the required Environmental Impact Statement for various new facilities to be built on the island of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas in the western Pacific, already home to a significant number of US military facilities (US Marine Corps Force Pacific 2015; Naval Facilities Engineering Command 2015). The new facilities will accommodate the transfer and activities of 5,000 Marines and more than 1,000 dependents from Okinawa to those islands; expansion of Apra Harbor to allow berthing of aircraft carriers; and the construction of army missile defense systems. This chapter places the documents within the context of their production, distribution, and reception. Here I use Stoler’s notion of imperial formations and imperial projects to understand the documents and their maps as “technologies of rule” which do particular kinds of work and are part of larger projects of which the documents form a part. This includes the projects or potential projects on which, in a sense, the document and the map lie, in this case, those of the people and diverse interest groups of Guam.

Imperial Context of the Department of the Navy Environmental Impact Statement The island of Guam came under the control of the United States in 1901 as territorial loot from its victory in the Spanish-American War. The global—rather than merely continental—ambitions of the United States are often dated to this period, although its territorial claims would not truly expand until its victory in World War II. It was at the end of the war that the United States acquired many of its now approximately 1,000 military bases around the world, replacing retrenching or defeated nations, particularly Britain and Japan, on the sites of their former military bases

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(Lutz 2010; Vine 2015). Decolonization was intended to shrink the US presence in a limited number of places, but fear that this would eventually push them out of Guam led the United States to unilaterally make Guam’s residents US citizens of a limited sort in 1950 (rather than following United Nations protocols for the process of self-determination). The fear that the decolonization movements would curtail US overseas basing also prompted the United States to adopt what Vine (2009) has identified in the archive as an “island strategy,” for maintaining global military positions. First articulated in the early 1960s, strategists argued for basing in places of small population, power, and international visibility: islands would allow maximally unrestrained US military use of the land and of the air and sea around those islands, particularly for both the navy and air force. Their lack of political heft and public visibility would mean less risk of the kind of push-back that came in other places in which US bases were claimed in Turkey, Spain, and the Philippines, for example. The islands were spread around the world—from the Azores in the Atlantic to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to various Caribbean bases and the Pacific’s Okinawa and Guam. Military power— both on account of decolonization and of the nuclear missile—was no longer to be found in vast territorial capture, but in the ability to “project power” by air or sea from island or floating bases. The global map was divided comprehensively into zones which were patrolled and surveilled 24/7. Bases were relatively small territorial claims, but their spatial impact was and remains global as wars in Vietnam were fought from Guam or Iraq invaded from Diego Garcia. The initial US plan for Guam when the island was retaken in 1944 after a relatively brief Japanese occupation was to move the local population, which at that time was majority indigenous Chamorro, to a small reservation in the southeast corner of the island and to turn the rest of the island into a US military facility. The map of this plan still circulates today among activists on the island as an icon of the US view of the islanders. As it was, approximately 50 percent of the island was fenced off for the US military, including a significant amount of its arable land. Some land was eventually returned after protests, but the military now controls almost one-third of the island (Natividad and Kirk 2010). At the same time, a similar story was unfolding on the island of Okinawa, which the United States took from the Japanese in 1945, retaining

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Figure 8.1. Guam’s military bases, 2013. Source: Government Accountability Office, GAO-14-82, 2013.

full political control until 1972. In that year, the island was returned to Japanese sovereignty, except for many square miles of US military base (now 20 percent of the island’s landmass) and additional large areas of nearby seas claimed for US military use. There, the marines in particular have been deeply unpopular, and a long-term mass social movement (Inoue 2004) eventually succeeded in pushing the Japanese and US governments to agree to move the marines off the island.2 President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” (from the Middle East) added political impetus to not only move the marines while nonetheless acquiring a new base in Okinawa, but to amass a more general buildup of US military forces, equipment, and activity in both Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. This buildup was also a build-out in which the United States claimed the need for additional territory on Guam and the NMI.

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US strategic thinkers have often described Guam as providing a crucial “forward” location for US forces but, when arguing for the importance of bases in Okinawa or the Philippines, they have also treated it as “too far” to adequately project force into Asia. Some of those strategists see Guam as less an asset than a highly vulnerable burden insofar as it lies within the range of missiles from any number of actual or potential adversaries. I have heard a number of Asian security experts refer to Guam as likely to “become glass” in the first days of any future conflict with China or North Korea. This is the updated version of a long-standing joke on the island: it notes that Guam’s location is known by few people in the United States but by all the nuclear targeters in the Kremlin and, now, Pyongyang. Paradoxically, however, most of Guam’s military assets are lightly defended. Guam is both strategic and disposable.

Figure 8.2. US armed forces facilities on Okinawa. Source: www.nippon.com.

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The pivot to Asia, and US military presence virtually everywhere around the globe and especially US Navy presence, is increasingly legitimated as a security guarantee for international trade. The flow of goods through space, so accelerated and complexified in recent decades, is a central concern of the variety of agents of global capital (Cowen 2014). The land takings in Guam—and the violence of that taking—can be seen in this context as well. At stake is not simply the control of space for a firing range or military housing complex on the island, but the wider global control of space to facilitate these economic activities and profit streams. As Cowen argues, military logistics has come over recent decades to dominate military strategy where it once was that strategy’s handmaiden, in no small part because of the privatization of those logistics and the profits to be made. The EIS and its maps suggest that the move to expand Guam’s military footprint is demanded by military strategy, including the need for “forward presence” and training “readiness.” Pyongyang’s missiles, Guam’s unhardened facilities, and the lobbying by those who stand to profit from the building of massive new military infrastructure on the island suggest otherwise, and provide evidence for the value of Cowen’s thesis. US environmental law applies to US federal activities on Guam, requiring the Department of the Navy to submit an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before the new construction, which would accommodate the 5,000 marines and 1,300 dependents from Okinawa.3 The navy made plans to build housing, firing ranges, and new roads, and to conduct a massive dredging and coral removal from Apra Harbor to accommodate aircraft carriers and increased cargo traffic to supply the expanded bases. An EIS has also been drafted for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas’ planned Joint Military Training facilities and uses of the land, sea, and air particularly around Tinian (the site from which US bombers took off for Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and Pagan. There is not space here to detail the complex public review process (defined in a US military flyer circulated to the public as “opportunities to provide input and assist the decision maker in making an informed decision,” but the draft EIS in the case of Guam was contested legally, revised, resubmitted, and approved in reduced form, and vehemently protested as an “existential threat” to the islands in the case of NMI by its governor and sent back for revision to the navy, in the case of Tinian

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and Pagan. Suffice it to say that the documents I examine here were presented to the public on Guam and CNMI through a website and public meetings in a larger concerted public relations effort by the US military to gain acceptance of its expansive plans.4 This included the use of “cultural advisors” to manage the island’s human terrain, especially strong objections from many Chamorro residents, now minoritized on their own island. The EIS and its maps can be seen in this context. They are items of a colonial archive, meriting attention not just for their content but for “their peculiar form or context” and because they transcend the widespread “conviction[s] that access to what is ‘classified’ and ‘confidential’” is most important, and “that such guarded treasures are the sites where the secrets of the colonial state are really stored” (Stoler 2002, 90). Such colonial documents are, in Stoler’s terms, “technologies of rule,” that is, not simply the utile products of a colonial state but the means by which it works to accomplish or assert its very state-ness. They are examined as ethnographic evidence not so much of imperial intentions (e.g., to justify the taking of this or that part of the island of Guam for military purposes), but as evidence of the “grids of intelligibility” (91) that the colonial power here lays across a people and their land. The EIS document is a colonial technology in these several senses: (1) with every highly detailed, precise map (and chart and textual description), it presents the United States as a patron and practitioner of scientific dispassion in its decisions about the use of Guam’s land, sea, and air; (2) in every set of alternatives presented per the format of EIS documents, it performs a care-taking attitude, at each turn considering several alternative locations for a marine family housing complex, for example, in order to choose a site presented as least damaging/most healthy; (3) in the massive scale of the document (it is 7,804 pages with appendixes, with 163 figures and 303 tables, and with a predecessor EIS document of 11,000 pages), it mirrors, reinforces, and amplifies the sense of power behind the document, challenging any opponent to state authority to rebut the claims in equal or larger scale;5 (4) in the use of color in the maps and the often beautiful photographs of local ecologies, the military presents itself as a patron of beauty and an admirer of the islands, even as the activities evaluated include massive coral destruction, primary and secondary forest demolition, and lawn installation with

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associated higher nitrogen and fossil fuel use and even as Chamorro histories, language, and indigenous rights are ignored or trampled on; and (5) in the depiction of fixed boundaries for the bases, environmental protection zones, and new use areas, and in the flat, terrainless composition of many of the maps, it utilizes “instruments of fixation” that make putatively immutable and obstacle-free claims on land and power (Herb et al. 2009), and, like other items of the colonial archive, “comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment” (Stoler 2002, 92), that is, with a colonial historiography. In addition, as previously stated, the functions of the documents are to (6) frame a narrative about what kind of security is being provided by the larger project in which they participate or what the problem is that the US military is solving in that location (“fulfilling U.S. national security obligations to provide mutual defense, deter aggression, and dissuade coercion in the Western Pacific Region,” p. ES-2); (7) say what counts as data (e.g., soil types) and what does not or is only footnoted (e.g., existing toxic spills or sites as a result of previous military environmental impact); (8) enable particular kinds of action as a result (choosing Alternative 1 or Alternative 4) and disable others (having the US military operate from within the 50 states); and (9) locate and define the ignorance (of human sentiment and political life) in relation to which they constitute knowledge.

Political Aesthetics of the EIS Maps I begin by looking at the form, style, and aesthetic of several of the document’s maps. The rhetoric of any map consists in what it selects for representation, what it foregrounds and what it omits, what it simplifies and what it draws in some complexity, the proportional sizes/ significance given to items within a map, the categories it uses, and the symbols and colors chosen to represent those categories. The first map, figure 8.3, shows one of several alternative plans that were being considered for additional live fire ranges for the marines. Figure 5.1.8-2 in the EIS is titled “Special-Status Species [or threatened species] Observations.” Overlaid on a satellite image of a dimly seen civilian neighborhood and DOD base property, a cheerfully bright green area stands out. In very small print in the inset, we read that it is the

Figure 8.3: Figure 5.1.8-2. Special-Status Species Observations—Route 15 LFTRC Alternative. Source: Guam and CNMI Military Relocation EIS Final, 2010.

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“Land Acquisition Area,” or the location of proposed new land takings. With prominent and fully written callouts, we find an existing quarry and a raceway, suggesting that the firing ranges will mainly head out across already degraded areas, although the area is primarily one of significant jungle wildness. Many parts of the affected area are shown as blank spaces, abstractions within which we are not encouraged to imagine a complex and rich nature or human existence. The blank space of this and many other maps has the effect of suggesting that acting on those areas has no importance or social consequence. Cross-hatching shows the area of approach to, and operation of, a variety of kinds of firing ranges: given acronyms that make the guns invisible, we struggle to interpret the map and finally see separate hand gun, rifle, machine gun, and hand grenade ranges. What is defined by the cross-hatching as the “impacted area” is in fact only part of the story. A warm yellow line—a low-impact color—definitively if mildly outlines the SDZ, or Surface Danger Zone, or area in which a person might be shot and killed by stray ammunition. Two foci appear, splashes of neon colors that identify the location of an endangered butterfly and its host plants, as well as an attentiongrabbing red area marking the habitat of an endangered plant given only with its distancing Latin name. One can imagine, but not find, an icon of machine guns and hand grenades as well to mark their location. The symbology does not let us know how many of each species are found in that place—the number could be 1 or 1,000. The butterflies look impacted but just barely so, we are likely to think, as their circles skim along the edge of the cross-hatched impact area. And what touches the butterflies in the map, after all, is a line, not wing-shredding ammunition. In the bottom left segment of the map hides another small yellow circle, of similar size to that of the butterflies but of perhaps greater significance for many local viewers of this document. That circle marks Pagat Cave, an ancient Chamorro village site that also holds spiritual significance for many Chamorro. In a first version of the navy plans, the Live Fire Range was located farther west such that the area of the cave was in the surface danger zone and would not be accessible much of the time. After much protest and a legal battle, that version of the EIS was ultimately rejected and a supplement required.

Figure 8.4. Figure 5.1.9-1 Overview of Sensitive Marine Biological Resources. Source: Guam and CNMI Military Relocation EIS Final, 2010.

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Finally, an inset in the upper left shows Guam’s land in its entirety, simultaneously making the area of concern appear a tiny fraction of the island and making the island appear insignificant/minimized next to the military development plans. It locates the area of detail as well as existing DOD property. It omits other areas of DOD impact beyond the technical base boundaries, including areas of air, water, and noise pollution, areas of heavy traffic between the bases and of personnel from offbase housing to home, and extensive areas of naval and air operations. Finally, it does not show the military land takings and operations just north of Guam in the Northern Mariana Islands. In figure 8.4, the EIS’s figure numbered 5.1.9-1, we see that the limited Surface Danger Zone of the previous map extends 10,000 feet out across the adjacent Pacific Ocean, which remains an undisturbed blue. The legal and logistical complexities of who will be or who is allowed to fish, recreate, or otherwise transit in this area are not represented. It looks like a simple warning sign, suggesting (particularly through the use of a dashed line) that any individual will be able to transverse this area after making their own risk assessments. The overlapping of several polygonal SDZs also gives a sense both that the area is compact and that the designers have attempted to overlap and thereby minimize the area impacted. The area of Pagat has disappeared from this map. An important aspect of both maps is their temporal stance, which is both presentist and future-oriented. Each alternative presented asks us to imagine a future island in which one or all of those five things has happened. No historical information is given about the past environmental impact of the US military on the island, and no information is given about the ongoing impact of existing military facilities and operations established in decades past. Neither does the report map any of the many transnational pathways by which the toxins or discarded weapons now on the island came from US or other factories. More fundamentally, missing is a mapped sense of the island’s indigenous settlements and farming uses through the centuries and up to the moment of massive US military building that began in the immediate wake of the post–World War II chaos and dislocation. It is possible as well to imagine future-oriented maps that show in detail which parts of the militarily captured island might be returned first to local control, which remediated when, etc. As Masco (2014) points out, the erasure of military

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history—through security classification or the kind of amnesia or disinterest shown in this document—has been a key contributor to the “affective infrastructure” of threat perception that supports militarization. Just as empires rewrite historical narratives of their colonies, modern military maps erase and rewrite in a similar way. The military mapping of Guam reveals an island that has been not as much found as made. In the hands of the EIS documents’ writers, Guam’s landscape is, as Carter (2010) puts it in reference to Australia’s English place-namers, “not a physical object: it is an object of desire” (81).

Political Economy of Map Production The proposed new security spaces of Guam will be expensive. Massive earth-moving and coral removal, high-quality mass housing construction, and complexly engineered firing ranges meant to manage the high-impact weaponry contracted from US arms manufacturers will all have corporate contracts and price tags. The preliminary planning of these spaces by engineers and architects has already been purchased, as has the EIS. The EIS maps made their way into public view rather than remaining in navy engineers’ offices because of the legal requirements of the 1970 National Environmental Protection Act, itself the result of an environmental movement in the United States that was in response to the visible health and landscape impacts of US corporate (and some military) activity. The EIS and its maps were produced in such detailed profusion as the result of a $25 million contract to a Virginia company, Tec-Aecom. An additional $5.6 million was paid to Tec-Aecom for a joint operation with an Australian environmental consulting firm, Cardno. Previous contracts were awarded to the same company for earlier iterations of the EIS on Guam, with the spending benefiting Virginia and Australia, more than Guam. The navy’s perception of the success of these companies in their Guam work helped them garner later multi-million- dollar contracts for similar kinds of environmental assessments for US Navy bases around the United States and the world.6 The Guam maps, in other words, were also forms of business reputational capital. To the extent that the EIS serves more as a public relations device than a mechanism to prevent harm to Guam and its people, the maps can be seen not so much as environmental road maps as business and military advertising.

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The power of these maps to persuade, that is, to suggest the competence, authority, and veracity of the mapmaker while at the same time suggesting the land has written itself without human intermediary, is fundamentally established by the level of detail in each map, the precision they suggest has been used in identifying items in space, and the sheer profusion of maps that have been produced. This quality and quantity of mapping is at the core of the political aesthetic of the EIS document more generally. That aesthetic is one of reassurance or faith in the project the maps represent, and it is made possible by the massive investment in their making, that is, in the more than $30 million spent for the labor hours and expertise to create this level of detail and authoritative power.

Afghanistan: Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction Annual Report It is helpful, before concluding, to briefly outline a case where a document related to US military activities differs from the Guam document in the conspicuous absence of maps. This other multi-thousand-page set of reports was produced by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), and they, like the Guam EIS, have both a political aesthetic and a political economic foundation.7 SIGAR is charged by Congress with ensuring careful use of dollars—which are construed in most reports as “US taxpayer dollars” rather than as the budget dollars of the concerned agencies, including DOD, State Department, Treasury Department, and others. In quarterly, annual, and special reports, it engages mainly in exposé of individual and corporate malfeasance in particular cases, assessing the degree to which dollars spent on the military campaign there have been well spent, that is, the degree to which fraud, waste, and abuse are occurring as the monies are disbursed. The reports focus specifically on reconstruction, which is primarily an aspect of US counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and includes a range of endeavors from the most central, which include training Afghan security forces, counter-narcotics efforts, and infrastructure building, to the less central, which include building schools and humanitarian aid for refugees. The amount allocated to these purposes now totals $115 billion.8 The Inspector General’s office is relatively extensively funded at $57 million annually and

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has 195 employees.9 These resources enable SIGAR to write highly professional, very detailed reports and to regularly deploy significant amounts of publicity labor as well. In what are now tens of thousands of pages of these reports, maps are rare. This budget and the office’s access to vast amounts of government data might have produced numerous, highly detailed maps. There are many occasions for which mapping would be informative, such as mapping the locations of police training facilities, jails, schools, roads, or the poppy eradication efforts that the congressional appropriations have purchased. Instead, there may be one or two maps at most per report which provide, for example, the location of a particular program very generally within provincial boundaries, or the general location of mineral resources or pipelines within the country. The most obvious explanation for the absence of maps is the military’s “security concerns,” that is, their argument that virtually any warzone locational information might be used by US or Afghan government enemies to target such facilities. The more valuable explanation, given the extensive geographic range of the Taliban and other anti-government forces and their ability to see these facilities for themselves, is that the political aesthetic of these reports reflects two aspects of SIGAR’s role. The first is that it remains a government agency acting as a booster for the US project of nation-building in Afghanistan. Given the failures and contradictions of that project, less visibility is more. The second is that it has the assigned role of financial watchdog, protecting the public in the United States and to some extent in Afghanistan from having their funds lost to theft, incompetence, or corruption in the reconstruction process. To do this, the reports use not maps, but over time have included thousands of tables, bar charts, and line graphs that account for where money has been spent. Photographs are also used to do this documentary work, with most of them in the reports showing Afghans and Americans optimistically at the work of building a new society. The aesthetic of the reports is, however, increasingly critical and less optimistic over time, showing, for example, police training buildings riddled with cracks in their walls or stained with the mildew or sewage from inadequate construction work. In a more recent year, some additional, and newly critical, cartography emerges. This map is used to argue that SIGAR cannot properly fulfill its mission given the “de-

Figure 8.5. Afghanistan Possible Oversight Access 2014. Source: Report by John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Administrator, US Agency for International Development, 2013 (unclassified).

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teriorating security situation” in Afghanistan, leaving four-fifths of the country unavailable for oversight and mapping. The absence of critical mapping in the Guam EIS report is in part the outcome of the denuding of the EIS process everywhere, but especially in this colonial context, of its critical function more generally. What the civil society opponent there must not see is also not mapped, as in the SIGAR reports.

Conclusion: What Is Not Mapped The Guam EIS and its maps can be seen as constituting a “dead zone of the imagination” (Graeber 2012). That is, despite its great detail, this document remains oblivious to what is happening on the ground that it so meticulously pictures.10 Quite simply, it erases any trace of humanity, even while picturing landmarks, natural resources, geological details, housing plats, and airfields. It is a bureaucratic product whose creators have not done the interpretive labor or had the interest necessary to understand the land and people of Guam, even as the navy requires significant emotionalinterpretive labor from island people in asking them to understand the jargon-laden expansion plans and to imagine their current world radically undone. This latter labor is evidenced in the years of civic organizing against the buildup11 and by the number and intense nature of the public comments submitted in response to the EIS, as well as by the further affinity work being done between people on Guam and other Pacific islanders undergoing similar militarization (Davis 2015). The public comments solicited in the EIS process often reiterate the common and anxious knowledge that many on Guam have about relatives and friends who they worry have become sickened or died from exposure to various military toxins in shipbuilding yards in which they worked, in numberless toxic dumps around the island, or in the fish they consume, and the deep experiential knowledge and concern they have about the areas of the island for which the military does not currently have plans. The worries about physical health and land are paired with the psychological condition of being a not-full-citizen, a deep sense of loss felt by people whose land is being exploited not even for its beauty but for its geographical positionality. Many supportive comments focus on the purported economic benefits that the buildup will bring, and the

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“colonial debt” (Dalisay 2014) common to such situations, in this case often articulated as debt for being “liberated from the Japanese” in 1944. US military activities, particularly from World War II through to the present, have been extensive and have left highly significant impacts across the entire island, including carcinogenic PCBs from discarded equipment, dioxin in the forms of Agent Orange from its storage and use during the Vietnam War which was fought by air from Guam, chemical weapons prepared for use in a projected invasion of Japan during World War II, and radioactivity from washing down ships in Guam’s waters that had been exposed to above-ground nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. The Department of Defense was ultimately pressured to take responsibility for such land degradations across the United States, as well as in its colonial holdings through what is known as the Formerly Used Defense Sites (or FUDS) Program. However, the program is too deeply underfunded to truly take responsibility; its approximately $100 million budget over the next six years is expected to make but a dent in the estimated $1.4 billion cost for remediating Guam and other Pacific FUDS sites.12 Guam’s FUDS sites contain buried ordnance and equipment from World War II, the Vietnam War era, and contemporary military activities (Haw 2013). An entire small peninsula near the capital city of Hagatna did not exist until American Navy bulldozers in 1945 pushed the rubble of the bombedout capital into the sea. A B-52 bomber was recently discovered buried under debris and jungle growth in an area where military equipment and their associated toxins had been bulldozed for years (Vine 2015, 146). The maps also do not draw attention to the pattern of suburban land use that many US military bases indulge in (Gillem 2007) or the invisible landscape of previous American wars, the graves of the war dead, the locations of Guam’s profusion of 70 massage parlors and additional adult entertainment sites, the education apartheid.13 The EIS maps imagine neither these problems nor alternatives to them. What goes without mapping is any knowledge that cannot be mapped or “scientized” via Euclidean space (Crampton and Krygier 2006, 18). It is also what goes without saying: the argument for the necessity of a profusion of offensive US military facilities. The interpellation of US and some Guam citizens into a world of threat and instability that requires this particular kind of preparedness has been identified by Masco (2014)

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as a systemic in which the United States has “produce[d] the conditions for its own instability . . . and then mobilize[d] the resulting vulnerability of its citizens and systems to demand an even-greater investment in security infrastructures” (2). Guam becomes a location which requires, first, that mapping expertise be brought to bear on delineating where security fencing will be laid down rather than where water and sewage systems might be upgraded for communities or where local cultural resources are located. It becomes a place where what is mapped is military needs, not a place of human habitation. On August 29, 2015, the EIS and its maps moved from proposal to executable plan with the navy’s signing of a ROD (Record of Decision) allowing the Guam Marianas buildup to go forward, including the taking of additional island land, an existing wildlife refuge, and areas of Chamorro ancestral heritage, and the closing off of waters and beach access at the northern shore of Guam. It allows clearing more than a thousand acres of limestone forests, and destruction of habitat for a number of rare species of flora and fauna. Most importantly, it says that the mapping of a colonized space is usually prelude to land or resource grab, and in this the US military has followed in that long history of colonial imagining of native spaces as terra nullis. The response includes the vigorous objecting sounds of the humans beneath the map (Lutz 2018), lawsuits, a direct-action movement, and renewed energy for the independence movement on Guam. Notes

1 Pseudonyms are used here. 2 This also involved the promised closing of Futenma Air Base, which has yet to happen, as well as the building of a replacement base elsewhere on Okinawa which has begun and has prompted an intense, long-term physical resistance. 3 Local protests and legal action resulted in a downsizing of the new marine base from an originally proposed 8,600 marines and approximately 9,000 dependents. 4 The documents were distributed in hard copy to a variety of civil groups and agencies, but they mainly circulated online. There is not space here to consider the interesting questions of the varying aesthetic politics of these two forms (paper and digital), or of the difference between the traditional static form of the map-making in the EIS in comparison with the more complex, layered, and exploratory form of more recent digital map-making. 5 The proliferation of maps here can be seen as an outcome in part of the continued military hyper-reliance on maps as representational devices, the scale of funding

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available to do the work of the EIS, and the radically increasing ease of mapmaking in the era of GIS and the digital revolution (Herb et al. 2009). Cardno TEC-AECOM Joint Venture Lands $50M Navy Contract—February 23, 2016. http://blog.executivebiz.com/2016/02/cardno-tec-aecom-joint-venturelands-50m-navy-contract/. SIGAR. Annual Report to the United States Congress. July 30, 2016. www.sigar.mil. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 57. Graeber’s treatment of bureaucratic “stupidity” tends to focus on the spare, unelaborated, and uninteresting form or process. He argues that anthropologists have tended to think that the interesting part of a social setting is the important part, and “to assume places of density are also places of power” (2012, 111). While I have chosen to look at what in fact is the more interesting part of the EIS document—its maps—it is clear that its text, while more boring than the maps, is equally significant as a cultural artifact of the dead zone. This includes the powerful women’s group, Fuetsan Famaloa’an (“Strength of Women”), Peace and Justice for Guam and the Pacific, Prutehi Litekyan, Manhoben Para Guåhan, and numerous regular critical bloggers and long-standing Chamorro cultural and self-determination groups. As estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers in a July 2015 “Information Paper,” www.poh.usace.army.mil. No projects are listed under way in Guam as of that date. The EIS notes that a 4–6 housing units per acre pattern will be used without modeling how a denser housing pattern of apartments would require less forest destruction. The range of possibility/alternatives for the development/destruction of the island is set by the navy within a very restricted range.

References

Carter, Paul. 2010. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crampton, Jeremy W. 2001. “Maps as social constructions: power, communication and visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25(2): 235–52. Crampton, Jeremy W. and John Krygier. 2006. “An introduction to critical cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4(1): 11–33. Dalisay, Francis. 2014. “Colonial debt, resistance to U.S. military presence, trustworthiness of pro-U.S. military information sources, and support for the military buildup on Guam.” Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology 8(1): 11–17. Davis, Sasha. 2015. The Empire’s Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Dortch, Mark S., Billy E. Johnson, and Jeffrey A. Gerald. 2013. “Modeling fate and transport of munitions constituents on firing ranges.” Soil and Sediment Contamination: An International Journal 22(6): 667–88.

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Frain, Sylvia C. 2016. “Resisting political colonization and American militarization in the Marianas Archipelago.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 12(3): 298–315. Gillem, Mark. 2007. America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graeber, David. 2012. “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 105–28. Harley, J. B. 1989. “Deconstructing the map.” Cartographica 26(2): 1–20. Haw, Jim. 2013. “Military buildup’s environmental takedown.” Scientific American, June 25. Herb, Guntram H., Jouni Häkli, Mark W. Corson, Nicole Mellow, Sebastian Cobarrubias, and Maribel Casas-Cortes. 2009. “Intervention: Mapping is critical!” Political Geography 28(6): 332–42. Inoue, Masamichi. 2004. “‘We are Okinawans but of a different kind’: new/old social movements and the U.S. military in Okinawa.” Current Anthropology 45(1): 85–104. Lutz, Catherine. 2010. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts. New York: NYU Press. Lutz, Catherine. 2019. “Bureaucratic weaponry and the production of ignorance in military operations on Guam.” Current Anthropology, in press. Masco, Joseph. 2014. The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Natividad, LisaLinda and Gwyn Kirk. 2010. “Fortress Guam: resistance to US military mega-buildup.” Asia-Pacific Journal 8(19): 1–22. Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific. 2015. Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. Guam and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Military Relocation (2012 Roadmap Adjustments). Washington, DC: Joint Guam Program Office. Pickles, John. 2004. A History of Spaces. Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the GeoCoded World. London: Routledge. Sartwell, Crispin. 2010. Political Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial archives and the arts of governance.” Archival Science 2: 87–109. United States Marine Corps Forces Pacific. 2015. Draft Environmental Impact Statement/Overseas Environmental Impact Statement for Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Joint Military Training. Washington, DC: US Department of the Navy, April. Vine, David. 2009. Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vine, David. 2015. Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.

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Enigmatic Presence Satellites and the Vertical Spatialities of Security Stephen Graham We live in a satellite enabled age. The satellites flying above us are not abstract agents of science but part of the critical life support system we all depend on, every day. UK Government’s Satellites Application Catapult1

There comes a point, as one ascends into the sky from the Earth’s surface—and the largely upright human experience of living on it— when the conventions that surround the human experience of the vertical dimension must inevitably break down. At the margins of the Earth’s atmosphere and the threshold of the vast realms of space we enter a world of orbits. At this point we start to encounter the crucial but neglected manufactured environment of satellites and space junk. “Verticality pushed to its extreme becomes orbital,” multimedia artist Dario Solman reflects. At such a point, “the difference between vertical and horizontal ceases to exist.” Such a development brings with it profound and unsettling philosophical challenges for a species that evolved to live upright on terra firma. “Every time verticality and horizontality blend together and discourses lose internal gravity,” Solman (2001) argues, “there is a need for the arts.” The Earth’s fast-expanding array of around 950 active satellites—more than 400 of which are owned by the United States—are central to the organization, experience—and destruction—of contemporary life on the Earth’s surface. And yet it remains difficult to visualize and understand their enigmatic presence. Mysterious and cordoned-off ground stations dot the Earth’s terrain, their futuristic radomes and relay facilities directed upward to unknowable satellites above. Small antennae lift 206

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upward from a myriad of apartment blocks to silently receive invisible broadcasts from transnational television stations. Crowds might even occasionally witness the spectacle of a satellite launch atop a rocket. Once aloft, however, satellites become distant, enigmatic and, quite literally, “unearthly.”2 At best, careful observers of the night sky might catch the steady march of mysterious dots across the heavens as they momentarily reflect the sun’s light. Such a small range of direct experience fails to equip us easily with the skills to disentangle the politics of this huge aerial assemblage of circling and (geo)stationary satellites. It doesn’t help that the literature on satellites in the social sciences is startlingly small. Communications scholars Lisa Parks and James Schwoch suggest that this is because scholars, too, struggle to engage with satellites because they lie so firmly beyond the visceral worlds of everyday experience and visibility. “Since they are seemingly so out of reach (both physically and financially),” they point out, “we scarcely imagine them as part of everyday life” at all (see Parks 2007, 207–208). The continued tendency of many scholars of the politics of geography to maintain a resolutely horizontal view compounds our difficulties in taking seriously the crucial roles of orbital geographies in shaping life (and death) on the ground. Only very recently have critical geographers started to look upward to the devices circling our Earth in their first tentative steps toward a political geography of inner and outer space. Such a project emphasizes how the regimes of power organized through satellites and other space systems are interwoven with production of violence, inequality, and injustice on the terrestrial surface.3 But it also attends to the importance of how space is imagined and represented as a national frontier; a birthright of states; a sphere of heroic exploration; a fictional realm; or as a vulnerable domain above through which malign others might stealthily threaten societies below at any moment. The invisibility of the Earth’s satellites and their apparent removal from the worlds of earthly politics has made it very easy to remove their organization and governance far from democratic or public scrutiny. Such a situation creates a paradox. On the one hand, widening domains of terrestrial life are now mediated by far-above arrays of satellites in ways so fundamental and basic that they have quickly become banal and taken for granted—even when they are noticed or considered at all.

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Global communication, navigation, science, trade, and cartography, in particular, have been totally revolutionized by satellites in the last few decades. Military GPS systems, used to drop lethal ordnance on any point on Earth, have been opened up to civilian uses. They now organize the global measurement of time as well as navigation of children to school, yachts to harbors, cars into supermarkets, farmers round fields, runners and cyclists along paths and roads, and hikers up to mountain tops. Widened access to powerful imaging satellites, similarly, has allowed high-resolution images to transform urban planning, agriculture, forestry, environmental management, and efforts to NGOs to track human rights abuses.4 Digital photography from many of the prosthetic eyes above the Earth, meanwhile, offers resolutions that Cold War military strategists could only dream of—delivered via the satellite and optic fiber channels of the Internet to anyone with a laptop or smart phone. A cornucopia of distant TV stations is also now accessible through the most basic aerial or broadband TV or Internet connection. Virtually all efforts at social and political mobilization rely on GPS and satellite mapping and imaging to organize and get their message across. Satellites, in other words, now constitute a key part of the public realms of our planet. The way they girdle our globe matters fundamentally and profoundly. And yet satellites are regulated and managed by a scattered array of esoteric governance agencies. They are developed and engineered by an equally hidden range of state and corporate research and development centers. When the obsessive secrecy of national security states is added to this mix, it becomes extremely hard even to pin down even basic information about the ownership, nature, roles, and capabilities of the crucial machines that orbit the Earth. Such a situation has even led media theorist Geert Lovinck to suggest that it is necessary to think of the figure of the satellite in contemporary culture in psychoanalytical terms—as an unconscious apparatus that lurks away from and behind the more obvious or “conscious” circuits of culture.5 “Publics around the world have both been excluded from and/ or remained silent within important discussions about [the] ongoing development and use [of satellites],” Parks and Schwoch stress. “Since the uses of satellites have historically been so heavily militarized and corporatized, we need critical and artistic strategies that imagine and suggest ways of struggling over their meanings and uses” (Parks 2007).

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“Ultimate High Ground” Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny . . . Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.6

Even a preliminary study of the world of satellites must conclude that they have contributed powerfully to the extreme globalization of the contemporary age. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the murky and clandestine worlds of military and security surveillance satellites. Not surprisingly, the idea of colonizing inner space with the best possible satellite sensors has long made military theorists drool. Their pronouncements revivify long-standing military assumptions that to be above is to be dominant and in control in the subjugation of enemies. The extraordinary powers of globe-spanning military and security satellites are only occasionally hinted at by whistle blowers or leaks. By communicating details about the Earth’s surface to secretive ground stations—its geography, communications, and attributes—and by allowing weapons like drones to be controlled anywhere on Earth from a single spot, military and security satellites produce what geographer Denis Cosgrove called “an altered spatiality of globalization” (Cosgrove 2001). German thinker Peter Sloterdijk stresses the way the increasing dominance of the view of the Earth from satellites since the 1960s has revolutionized human imagination about the Earth through a form of what he calls “inverted astronomy.” “The view from a satellite makes possible a Copernican revolution in outlook,” Sloterdijk writes. For all earlier human beings, gazing up to the heavens was akin to a naive preliminary stage of a philosophical thinking beyond this world and a spontaneous elevation towards contemplation of infinity. Ever since the early sixties, an inverted astronomy has . . . come into being, looking down from space onto the earth rather than from the ground up into the skies. (Quoted in Sachs 1999, 111)

This sense of global, total, and seemingly omniscient vision from above allows military satellite operators in particular to render everything on the Earth’s surface as an object and as a target, organized

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through near-instantaneous data transmission linking sensors to weapons systems.7 Crucially, such “virtual” visions of the world, wrapped up in their military techno-speak, acronyms, and euphemisms, are stripped of their biases, selectivity, subjectivity, and limits. The ways in which they are used to actively and subjectively manufacture—rather than impassively “sense”—the targets to be surveilled—and, if necessary, destroyed—is, consequently, denied. A further problem, of course, is that satellite imaging efforts also completely ignore the rights, views, and needs of those on the receiving end of the technology on the Earth’s surface, far below satellite orbits— the people who are most affected by the domineering technology above. This imperial trick works powerfully. It manufactures the world below as nothing but an infinite field of targets to be sensed and destroyed, remotely, on a whim, as deemed appropriate by operators in distant bunkers. “All the various aspects of satellite imagery systems . . . work together,” writes communications scholar, Chad Harris. They do this, he says, to create and maintain “an imperial subjectivity or ‘gaze’ that connects the visual with practices of global control” (Harris 2002). To deny how constructed and subjective satellite visioning is, militaries and security agencies represent it as an entirely objective and omniscient means for a distant observer to represent the observed. The God-like view of satellite imagery is often invoked by states as evidence of unparalleled veracity and authenticity when they are alleged to depict weapons of mass destruction facilities, human rights abuses, or nefarious military activities. It does not help that many critical theorists mistakenly suggest that contemporary spy satellites effectively have no technological limitations or that a hundred Hollywood action movies—erroneously depicting spy satellites as being capable of witnessing anything—do the same. All too often, critics depict satellite surveillance as being totally omnipotent and omniscient—a world of complete dystopian control with no limits to the transparency of the view, and no possibilities for resistance or contestation (Kingsbury and Jones 2009). In suggesting, for example, that “the orbital weapons [and satellites] currently in play possess the traditional attributes of the divine: Omnivoyance and omnipresence” (Virilio 2002, 53), French theorist Paul Virilio radically underplays the limits, biases, and subjectivities that shape the targeting of the terrestrial surface by satellites.

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Instead of invoking satellites as an absolute form of imperial vision, it is necessary, rather, to see satellite imaging as a highly biased form of visualizing or even simulating the Earth’s surface rather than some objective or apolitical transmission of its “truth” (see Pickles 1995|). It is also, as we shall see shortly, necessary to stress the potential that satellites offer for those challenging military-industrial complexes, environmental and human rights abuses, and all manner of political and state repression. Where maps are now widely understood to be subject to bias and error, satellite images are still widely assumed to present a simple, direct, and truthful correlation of the Earth. This occurs even when there is a long history of such images being so imperfect and uncertain—and as so manipulated, mislabeled, and just plain wrong—that it is necessary to be skeptical of such claims.8 US military theorists offer an excellent case study of how attempted domination of satellite sensing is being combined with long-standing metaphors about the strategic power of being above one’s enemies. In 2003, the US military’s RAND think-tank declared that space power and its attendant satellites offered the “ultimate high ground” in struggles for military superiority.9 The US military’s vision for dominating space is characterized by dreams of being able to see anything on the Earth’s surface at any time, irrespective of enemies’ efforts to occlude their targets. This is linked with an obsession with the ability to use GPS satellites to organize the dropping of lethal ordnance on those self-same spots. Satellite dominance is seen as a critical prerequisite to the dominance of airspace, landspace, and maritime space below. Finally, satellites are deemed by US military theorists to be a crucial means of reducing the vulnerability of the home nation. This is done by using satellites to target incoming missiles—and, possibly in the future, by launching specialized weapons from one’s own satellites against the satellite fleets of enemies.

“Black” Satellites: The Other Night Sky How might critical scholars and activists penetrate the “Black” world of secret military satellites? Two linked strategies emerge here. On the one hand, a secretive group of satellite activists have done much recent work

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to expose the daily trajectories or geostationary orbits of the fleets of military spy satellites as they operate high above. Working with this community, artist and geographer Trevor Paglen— who helped to expose the CIA’s system of extraordinary rendition in 2006—has spent many cold nights peering through sophisticated tracked telescopes in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and other sites around the world. With his colleagues (see Paglen 2012), he has been able to track, photograph, catalogue and calculate the orbits of 140 or so of the classified “Black” US satellites known to orbit the Earth at any one time. Paglen and his colleagues have been able to do this because of a paradox: while Black satellites are so secret they aren’t even supposed to exist, their large size means that, if you are able to calculate the certain places and times where they become clearly visible because they reflect sunlight, tracking orbital spy satellites is relatively simple. (Geostationary orbits, or GSOs, at exactly 35,787 km up, plus or minus a kilometer or two, are much harder to spot.) Pulling scraps of data from satellite enthusiasts, publicly available military budgets, and federal regulators’ flight plan information, Paglen and his colleagues have done much to piece together what he calls the “The Other Night Sky”—the clandestine world of US radar, radio, infra-red, and visual light-based military satellites. They even glean useful clues as to the location and latitude of the US National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO’s) launched satellites by decoding the military cloth badges that are made public about each launch. Paglen’s sketchy time-delay images offer a fleeting glimpse of a world that supposedly does not even exist—a world that, paradoxically, can be witnessed by anyone on the Earth’s surface simply by looking up on a clear night and catching the sun’s reflections on the satellite body. “The other night sky,” Paglen writes: is a landscape of fleeting reflections: of giants, glimpses, traces and flares. Of unacknowledged moons and “black” space craft moving through the pre-dawn and early evening darkness, where the rising and setting sun lights up the stainless steel bodies, and they blink in and out of sight as they glide though the backdrop of a darkened sky hundred of miles below. In most cases, the reflection is all we get. (Paglen 2012, 244)

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Fittingly for this chapter, like the whistle-blowing leaks of Bradley Manning or Ed Snowden, Paglen’s work is an example of what has been sous-surveillance—literally “under surveillance” or “surveillance from below.” In challenging the cloak of invisibility and secrecy that obscures top-down surveillance by the latest secret satellites, the work of Paglen and the satellite tracking community fleetingly exposes one crucial material embodiment of the increasingly secretive and authoritarian nature of security politics.10 Predictably, further exposures come from the United States’ strategic competitors. Between 2005 and 2010, for example, Russia managed to obtain detailed images of the NRO’s enormous “Lacrosse” radar reconnaissance satellites by using highly advanced ground-based telescopes in Siberia. These rare images it released for propaganda purposes. Such tactics inevitably emerge, of course, as a reciprocal world of “watching the watchers.” After completing his photographs, Paglen reflected that his project was “not a passive exercise: as I photograph the night sky, the other night sky photographs back.”11 There is also evidence that the United States has responded to the satellite tracking community by reorienting some of their most secretive of satellites—those of the multibillion-dollar “Misty” program—so that they don’t reflect sun down to the areas of the world where the main trackers live. “We would prefer that these things not end up on the Internet,” an NRO spokesperson said dryly in 2006 (see Keefe 2006).

Ground Stations: “Fragments of America” A complementary approach is to explore and map the ground-level infrastructure necessary to allow military spy satellites to function. Steve Rowell, an artist affiliated with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, has completed one of the most thorough studies here. His analysis of the distribution of US satellite stations— both unmanned and manned—across the world is especially significant because such installations are not normally counted within conventional analysis of US military bases. As Rowell (2008) puts it, “every satellite in orbit requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure on the ground.” He estimates that the United States alone has around 6,000 ground-based installations around

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the world. “These sites,” he writes, “whether radar-detection posts, satellite-tracking bases, telecommunications-intercept centers, space ports, unmanned transmitter arrays, or overcrowded field offices, are fragments of America.” Although they are fixed at the ground level, Rowell emphasizes the changing roles of ground and Earth stations in the shifting geopolitical strategies of the United States and other powers. Fenced-off, patrolled, and enigmatic, their radomes and aerials can but hint at the roles of such facilities within a vast and largely unknowable and infinitely larger data-scape of instant, encrypted, imaging, sensing, targeting, and communication. The satellite stations of the United States combine stations inherited from the British after World War II, a wide range of bases set up during the Cold War, and a newer set of installations that evidence the dramatic growth of the military intelligence industry in the wake of the “war on terror.” Steve Rowell’s mapping of these facilities gives an indication of their reach and density across the Earth. Usefully, Rowell’s work connects the abstract cartographies of the satellite-base surveillance with face-to-face confrontations with the eerie installations on the ground that sustain it. As part of his research, Rowell paid particular attention to the largest and most important of the National Security Agency’s global satellite surveillance stations: the notionally “Royal Air Force” base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, England. Menwith Hill is one of three key US satellite bases at the heart of the globe-spanning communications surveillance system known as PRISM, a system powerfully exposed by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, in 2011.12 Like a dystopian film set, the base’s architecture of more than 30 Kevlar radomes sits rather incongruously within the pastoral landscapes of North Yorkshire’s valleys. Its razor-wired peripheries are circled by US military guards; its 2,300 employees are drawn from all of the three key players in the US satellite-surveillance complex.13 Menwith Hill’s recently expanded and modernized fields of radomes house extraordinarily powerful systems for scooping up all electromagnetic wireless and satellite phone calls and data and video transmissions over large geographical areas. Linked also with the NSA’s systems for tapping terrestrial communications over optic fiber systems, bases like Menwith Hill allow covert collection—with agreement from IT service providers, of all traffic over Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, You-

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Tube, Skype, AOL, and Apple networks—of large swathes of the traffic of the whole Internet. Combined with supercomputers and classified decryption software, Menwith Hill and its allied bases provide automatic analysis and classification of a huge range of intercepted data in order to track a wide range of identified “targets.” These range from alleged insurgent leaders or terrorist “cells” in the Middle East to European politicians and businesses, and entirely legal and legitimate civilian protest groups and social movements within the UK, Europe, and North America. Menwith Hill’s systems are also pivotal in globe-spanning systems organized to support the detection of ballistic missiles and the prosecution of lethal drone strikes. Indeed, Menwith Hill is a crucial hub in a massive US effort to be able to launch lethal power at any spot on the Earth’s surface at very short delay. Such so-called time-critical targeting is deemed to be a crucial response to a world where non-state terrorist and insurgent threats are very hard to distinguish from the background of “civilian” societies within which they hide. The aim of such global targeting is to build a fully integrated network, combining satellite imagery with interception of all types of electronic communications, in a way that provides the real-time intelligence necessary to identify targets and to carry out attacks anywhere in the world without the need for conventional armies.14 Menwith Hill has thus played a pivotal role in the continuous prosecution of routine violence across vast geographic areas that have characterized the US global covert wars over the past 16 years or so.

Weaponizing Space Let’s hope the words “commence the orbital bombardment” don’t enter our vernacular in the near future. (Sager 2014)

Since Sputnik was first launched in 1957, the orbits of satellites have given geopolitics a radically vertical, fourth dimension (Caracciolo 2004). Indeed, the last half century has made the orbital domains of inner space a profoundly contested zone dominated—despite notional international agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the process—by increasing processes of militarization and weaponization.

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As well as secretive launches of ever-more sophisticated and powerful spy satellites, and an extending range of ground stations, evidence of the deployment of armed satellites is emerging. Back in 2003, for example, the US military undertook research on the lethal effects of an orbiting satellite simply letting go of long, inert tungsten rods, targeted using simple gravitational force to any spot on Earth in short order. Targeted especially at destroying the deeply buried bunkers of adversary States, they calculated that a six-meter-long rod—nick named the “Rod from God”—would impact the Earth at ten times the speed of sound, unleashing energy on impact equivalent to a small nuclear explosion.15 To bolster the militarization of space, a new field of “astro-geopolitics” has emerged, largely in the United States. This is fueled heavily by the use of metaphors linking the domination of inner orbits with the reach of empires across the horizontal planes of oceans in both pre-industrial eras and the competitive scramble between European empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank on the Republican right in the United States, and a key player in deploying such metaphors, “space is the high seas of tomorrow” (Johnson 1999). A range of hawkish astro-geopolitical theorists, meanwhile, now herald the domination of space as the key to controlling the Earth below. Their thesis is a classic tautology: as a wider range of nations emerge to launch their own military space programs, space will be weaponized; therefore, space must be weaponized most powerfully and quickly by the United States in a preemptive effort to maintain power. “He who controls the lower orbits controls the near Space around Earth” writes Everett Dolman of the School of Advanced Air Power Studies at Maxwell Air Base in Alabama—one influential theorist. “He who dominates the Earth determines the future of mankind” (Dolman 2002, 8). Given the reliance on contemporary societies and economies on satellite-based communication, navigation, and information, they constitute a clear Achilles’ heel the destruction of which would bring extraordinary disruption and economic destabilization. Italian journalist Lucio Caracciolo sees the orbital skein of communications and navigation satellites as an “indispensable strategic nerve system of the more

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developed economies” (Caracciolo 2004)—one that is highly vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons fired from the ground, aircraft or, conceivably, other satellites. “Satellite constellations set up in peace are the fixed coastal defenses of the modern age,” the US Naval Institute argues. They are “easy to target and plan against—and most likely first on an enemy’s targeting priority list” (Salamander 2015). Worryingly, the centrality of satellites to contemporary imperial power is being used by military leaders to urge for the exploration of a wide range of lasers and “kinetic” (i.e., physical) weapons that can actually hit the Earth’s surface from satellite orbits. “We will fight from Space and in Space,” then Commander-in-Chief of the United States Space Command, General Joseph Ashby, said, contemplating the future of his organization, way back in 1996. “One day we will hit earthbound targets—ships, aircraft, objects on the ground—from Space. We will hit targets in Space from Space” (Heronema 1996, 4). Anti-satellite weapons launched from below, in fact, have a long history. In the early days of the Cold War, their lack of accuracy was compensated for by huge nuclear warheads attached to modified ballistic missiles (see Mackey 2009). In 1962, to test such ideas, the United States exploded a 1.4-megaton nuclear weapon known as Starfish at an altitude of 400 km above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean (Bhalla 2014). Over the last 40 years, the United States, Russia, and China have all deployed a suite of anti-satellite missiles launched from ships, aircraft, or ground stations. These systems are now so accurate that they use conventional explosive warheads. While testing of such systems is not as common as it was between 1970 and 1990, anti-satellite missiles have been used on several occasions to destroy satellites deemed either to be a risk to inhabitants of Earth, or an intelligence risk, when the satellites fall back through the Earth’s atmosphere after their operational lives are over or following a malfunction. Such attacks create huge debris fields which in turn become a major hazard to other satellite and space operations. In 2007, the first Chinese anti-satellite launch, which destroyed a meteorological satellite, created a debris field made up of between 20,000 to 40,000 fragments of one centimeter or greater in size. In one fell swoop, the Chinese caused a 20

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percent increase in the number of small objects in lower Earth orbit— each one traveling at around 8 miles a second—which need to be tracked in order to minimize the damage to, or destruction of, other satellites or space vehicles. (22 years earlier, a similar US anti-satellite launch created 250 pieces of trackable debris, one of which almost collided with the International Space Station in 1999). Other development efforts in anti-satellite warfare center on the use of high-powered lasers located on the ground, on ships, or in aircraft. Microwaves, particle beams, or electromagnetic pulse devices have also been explored as ways to damage or disable both incoming ballistic missiles and orbiting satellites. Another strategy is to launch anti-satellite satellites. Satellite researchers think that the highly secretive fleet of tiny 250kg US experimental geostationary satellites under the program name MiTex are already capable of stealthily tracking, inspecting, intercepting, and even knocking out or disrupting the geostationary craft of adversary nations. One such interception has already been observed by the South African satellite observer Greg Roberts.16 While weapons, as far as publicly known, have yet to be deployed into space itself, President Reagan’s ambitious Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s and 1990s involved wide-scale research and development of armed satellites as well as ground-based anti-missiles and anti-satellite systems. Indeed, the proliferation of ground-based antisatellite weapons has rekindled the fear that weapons systems will soon be deployed into orbit around the world. Many US military theorists consider such deployments to be inevitable and suggest that the United States needs preemptively to lead such a move in order to maintain the nation’s long domination of the “ultimate high ground” (Bhalla 2014). It is clear, at least, that the United States is now developing a secret, reusable “space-bomber” (the Boeing X37); a range of satellites designed to destroy other satellites while in orbit have also been mooted. Looking beyond the reliance of the military and security services of satellites, the prospect of the use of anti-satellite weapons in conflicts is a daunting one. Such weapons contravene all of the key principles of international humanitarian law. In increasingly high-tech and automated societies, where more and more infrastructure and services rely continu-

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ously on GPS and satellite mapping and imaging in order to function, their use would cause widespread, immediate, and potentially even fatal disruptions. Destruction of a nation’s satellites, warns Theresa Hitchens, director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), would leave “an entire country without effective communication systems, with very little access to the Internet and phones, for a certain period of time.” It would also disrupt financial systems, telemedicine, ATMs, and so-called just in time logistics and delivery systems, as well as the water supply, power grids, and search and rescue operations (Time Magazine 2012). As societies automate rapidly, further impacts can be envisaged. How murderous might a future highway system used by fleets of driverless satellite-guided cars become were those satellites to be suddenly disabled or hacked? Anti-satellite attacks would also likely trigger waves of unstoppable tit-for-tat escalation between the main satellite powers. Many US war games simulating such attacks quickly escalate to nuclear exchanges. Arms control lawyers are therefore now arguing that the proliferation and possible use of anti-satellite weapons is so significant that it needs to be subject to a range of treaties, proscriptions, regulations, and inspections similar to those that have long attempted to regulate nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. “Given the nearly unstoppable advance of modern military technology,” international lawyer Robert David Onley writes, “if space weapons are not banned, countries will be forced to build satellites equipped with counter-measures that destroy incoming anti-satellite missiles—and as a consequence, effectively guarantee the permanent weaponization of space.” At such a point, he suggests, “there exists only a small leap in logic between the prospects of satellites armed with missiles for self-defense, to satellites (or space-bombers/orbiters) armed with missiles and bombs for offensive purposes” (Onley 2013, 739).

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World-Zoom: Google Earth Today the aerial view—the image of everywhere—seems to be everywhere. (Dorrian and Pousin 2013, 295)

Perhaps the most profound effect of the contemporary proliferation of satellites centers on the way their extraordinary powers of seeing from above are now harnessed to computers and smart phones. Google Earth is obviously especially pivotal here. As a system of systems linked to a computer or mobile smart phone, it offers almost infinite possibilities of zooming into and out of views of the Earth’s surface at local, regional, and global scales (see Heise 2008, 11). It does this by “mashing up” global satellite imagery, geopositioning coordinates, digital cartography, geolocated data, three-dimensional computerized maps, architectural drawings, street-level digital imagery, and other social media, data, and software. These are configured together as an “alwayson,” interactive and boundless datascape—a flexible and multiscaled portal of largely vertical images which now mediate life in profoundly new and important ways. The apparently infinite scale-jumping possibilities of Google Earth force us to revisit, and update, a very long-standing debate about the politics of the aerial, “God’s eye,” or top-down view (Tong 2014, 200– 201). Many cultural theorists argue that the new ubiquity of the digital view from above is an important part of contemporary shifts away from a world dominated by a stable and single sense of ground and horizon organized through linear perspective. Instead, contemporary societies are saturated by a multitude of “always on” digital and screen-based perspectives; extending armies of prosthetic eyes layered across entire volumes of geographic space; intense and real-time globalization; and, for many, unprecedented human mobility. Satellites and satellite vision are absolutely pivotal to this new sense of vertical “free-fall” that attends this new age (see Steyerl 2011). Google Earth is pivotal to these transformations. It is the prime means through which vertical and oblique views of our world have very rapidly become radically accessible, zoomable, and pannable in a myriad of ways. Many researchers suggest that mass public access to Google Earth fundamentally challenges long-standing assumptions that

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the view from above necessarily involves dispassionate, technocratic, or privileged visual power (see Dorrian 2011, 164–170). In presenting a virtual globe that can be navigated on screen and repeatedly zoomed, Google Earth presents a powerful imagination of the planet—one that is simultaneously global, corporate, and saturated with commercial data and corporate location-based advertising. It is thus “closely related to the production and movements of contemporary urbanization” (Laforest 2016, 660). The active shaping of this “virtual globe” by the viewer is crucial, however. In contrast to media like aerial or satellite photographs, users of Google Earth are no longer simply passive viewers witnessing the world as a zoom. Instead, participants actively customzse their own experience of Google Earth by building their own interfaces and adding their own data and imagery (see Tong 2014). Indeed, the frame-by-frame animation of the Google Earth interface works to provide viewers and users with a virtual globe which they can manipulate to provide their own personal cinematic rendition of the planet that they can then view and manipulate in a decidedly God-like way. Media scholar Leon Gurevitch calls this the “divine manufacturer of the very [Google Earth] environments [viewers] wish to travel through” (Gurevitch 2014, 97). The addition of street-level visuals through Google Street View, however, grounds this virtual world with imagery of current and historical street-scenes. Now, cloud-level and street-level worlds work seamlessly together, shimmering visual surfaces that occlude as much as they reveal to the inspecting subject. The system’s interface “provides the ability to come and go freely within a completely controlled universe,” media scholar Daniel Laforest (2016, 661) emphasizes, “while maintaining the sense of distance as a constant promise, a source of leisure, or even as an unexpected pleasure.” Despite its flexibility, the cultural and political biases of Google Earth are not hard to spot. Until recently, the system defaulted to a view that placed the United States at the center of the screen. The interface offers little evidence of the source or accuracy of the global surveillance that sustains Google Earth. The way Google Earth itself produces reams of data that are passed on to commercial information markets or security and surveillance services like the NSA is also carefully obscured.

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Many areas are also censored or offered at deliberately low resolution. Under US law, for example, Google must represent certain parts of Israel/Palestine at low resolution. States have also been found to doctor Google Earth images. Hawkish security commentators, who stress the usefulness of Google Earth to those planning terrorist attacks, are now urging that such censorship be extended. “Terrorists don’t need to reconnoitre their target,” Russian security official Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin said in 2005.” Now an American company is working for them” (cited in Stahl 2010, 66). The social and cultural biases of Google Earth can also be stark. In post-Katrina New Orleans, for example, efforts to use Google Earth to allow communities affected by the crisis to share information and support across the various neighbourhoods of the city inevitably ended up being geared overwhelmingly toward more affluent and whiter neighbourhoods because of wider geographies of the so-called digital divide in the city (see Crutcher and Zook 2009, 523–534). Certain information, moreover, is dramatically prioritized within the system—information for users of corporate services, automobile drivers, and so on. Google Earth’s dominant, de facto data-sets are heavily dominated by a cluster of key transnational corporations. To sustain their competitive advantages in tourism, travel, leisure services, oil consumption, food provision, these companies overlay the satellite surfaces with geolocation data geared toward exploiting this new screen interface. Other information—say, of human rights abuses or the installations of national security states—is obviously obscured or inaccessible, sometimes through the crudest of censorship. Extreme biases in access and use, meanwhile, mean that user-generated content of Google Earth strongly reflects wider social and ethnic inequalities in society. Beyond this lies a burgeoning politics of urban legibility and camouflage, as state, commercial, and non-state actors work to appropriate the new vertical views to conflicting ends. As financial collapse hit the Greek State in 2009, for example, the government tried to locate wealthy Athenians guilty of tax avoidance by using Google Earth to find their swimming pools. The immediate response was to drape tarpaulins over the tell-tale azure rectangles. Meanwhile, many social and political movements have mobilized Google Earth and satellite imagery in their efforts to expose war crimes

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and state violence in places as diverse as Darfur, Zimbabwe, the Balkans, Syria, Burma, and Sri Lanka (see Parks 2009; Herscher 2010). Satellite images have been very helpful in securing prosecutions against war criminals at the International Criminal Court in the Hague (Walter n.d.). Activists in Palestine, meanwhile, have actively used the system to generate maps that depict widening Israeli control there as an effort to undermine the cartography produced by the Israeli state to legitimize or minimize its degree of colonial control (see Quiquivix 2014). The system has also been a boon to those aiming to expose, hack, and contest the scale and power of national security states, military forces, and corporate power (see Perkins and Dodge 2009). Perhaps the most famous example here was the discovery in China in 2006 of a military training area that mimicked precisely the exact terrain of part of the IndianChinese border that has been in dispute since 1962. In Bahrain, in 2011, meanwhile, Google Earth’s ability to trace aggressive efforts to vertically build up “reclaimed” land to fuel elite real estate speculation had a huge impact. The mass uprising of the Shiite majority against the dictatorial Sunni elite—brutally suppressed by local security forces with the help of Saudi paramilitaries—was ignited partly by circulation of Google Earth images depicting the scale of corrupt land “reclamation” by those very elites to radically remodel and further privatize the tiny nation’s coastline. More broadly, the vertical gaze of Google Earth helped the poor Shiite majority in Bahrain to fully realize that the nation’s tiny Sunni elite owns and controls 95 percent of the country’s land and has, along with wealthy tourists, exclusive private access to 97 percent of its beaches. The geographies of exploitation and repression became startlingly clear in full colour, high-resolution imagery. “When Google Earth was introduced,” Middle East specialist Eugene Rogan relates, “Bahrainis for the first time could see the walled palaces and rich homes that normally were hidden from view. Bahrainis got a bird’s-eye view of how rich people there lived.” Whilst the Bahrainian state blocked Google Earth is response, activists beyond the country merely circulated the same images in PDF form (see Byrne 2011). While Google Earth clearly has enormous potential as a support to activism and critique, it is easy to forget that such new, GPS-enabled

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activism relies fundamentally on dual-use devices that can only function as the result of military rocket launches. Such efforts are also based on the deployment of a series of 24 geosynchronous satellites used continually to drop murderous ordnance on a wide range of countries. And they are inevitably mediated through imperial networks of militarized ground stations and data centers. And they even rely fundamentally on a network of atomic clocks run by the US Air Force. In such a context, media theorist Roger Stahl emphasizes the military origins of the whole aesthetic of Google Earth. This “began its life as the very picture of war,” he stresses. During the 2003 Gulf war, he relates: a certain 3D aesthetic appeared in the form of virtual flybys, as part of more complex computer animations, in studio surveys of bomb damage, in speculations on the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, and a range of other uses. It is not an exaggeration to say that this aesthetic took center stage in the high-tech spectacle of U.S. television coverage. (Stahl 2010, 67)

Such a perspective forces a deep appreciation of the ways in which, despite its widening civilian use, Google Earth remains a highly militarized domain embedded fundamentally within a broader militarytechnology-geotechnology-security complex. This means that the system is a key means through which citizens now consume state military violence, a process that adds to the mythology of “clean”’ war and “precision weapons” that contemporary US militaries are eager to circulate. “Rather than say that the 3D satellite image has been ‘demilitarized’ as it has entered civilian life,” Stahl emphasises, “it may be more accurate to say that the transference has draped the planet with a militarized image of itself.” The militarized nature of GPS systems—a crucial basis for Google Earth—also needs emphasis. Media activist Brian Holmes, for one, questions the powers of GPS-based art and activism in a world where the broader technological structures of power are dominated powerfully by what he calls a “hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure.” When you use a GPS-locating device such as Google Earth, he argues, “you respond to the call. You are interpellated into Imperial ideology” (Holmes n.d.).

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Finally, the vertical gaze of satellite imagery that is now suddenly so remarkably accessible offers important new perspectives on how the horizontal geographies of our planet’s surface are changing. For it is only from such distant heights that we can possibly begin to make sense of the extraordinary territorial formations currently being created by the rampant growth and sprawl of the world’s urban areas. “To truly exist,” Rice University architect Professor Lars Lerup writes, “every city needs its perspective. Its point of view. Its eyes” (Lerup 2006, 242). And yet the dominant experience at the edges of many sprawling urban areas—beyond the clusters of rapidly rising skyscrapers and elite housing towers—is one of apparently endless horizontality. In such landscapes obtaining a sense of the wider city becomes all but impossible. Google Earth allows such landscapes to be understood. Only the zoomable and extending top-down gaze of the satellite can really stretch to encompass what Lerup calls the “striated, spread-out geographies” of contemporary urbanized regions and “megalopolitan” corridors. Writing about Alan Berger’s remarkable maps of the geographies of sprawl, and wasted land, in urban America, Lerup points out that “from a satellite, this neglected in-between [of drosscape or ‘pure unadulterated waste’] is the real grammar of the horizontal city, requiring a new mathematics whose nature, strength and intelligence lies embedded in its apparent incoherence” (Lerup 2006, 243). With the satellite view of the city now a normal way of representing urban areas for mass consumption, navigation, planning and, increasingly, marketing, however, it is perhaps the way in which cityscapes are increasingly engineered to be brandscapes visible from space that is the most immediate example of Google Earth’s impacts on the ground. Here, Mark Dorrian points out that “the terrestrial surface itself becomes manipulated as a media surface, not just virtually on the Google Earth interface, but literally.” This democratization of verticality has important effects: In this new, mass market medium, corporations are now concerned with how their spaces and buildings look from satellites and aircraft. On the one hand here, there is growing evidence that city boosterists increasingly work to ensure that their branded, spectacularized urban “products” work well when viewed through Google Earth. (The con-

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struction of corporate advertising for aerial and satellite consumption is also increasingly common.) A consultant involved in the staging of the 2012 London Olympics, for example, remarked that “it’s a media event, so it will look great from the air.”17 Sometimes city authorities, keen to vertically show off their new developments, are unhappy at the slow updating of the vertical imagery of their cities.18 And already commentary is emerging of the relative aesthetic merits of the “fly-through” experience above and through the increasingly 3D virtual renditions of major global cities. “As a city to fly through or play with,” geographer David Gilbert remarks, “London works better than the homogeneity of Haussmann’s Paris or the regular order and rectilinear street plans” of Manhattan. Gilbert argues that both Paris’s long boulevards and Manhattan’s endless avenues through canyons of high towers “become less interesting than a cityscape of roads that change direction or end unexpectedly, of labyrinthine lanes and alleys that repay close investigation, and of rapid variety in the characteristics of districts and built forms” (Gilbert 2010, 298). On other occasions—such as the demolition of a US Navy office complex that by pure chance happened to resemble a swastika from above on Google Earth—built space has been reengineered because of unwanted vertical associations via Google Earth. More prosaically, of course, Google Earth is being used by a wide range of tourists and travelers as a new medium for anticipating and planning journeys and checking the validity of claims by the tourism industry, and by urban planners, architects, and clients in the production and design of urban development projects. It is necessary, finally, to emphasize again the rapid emergence of megastructural urban landscapes which are carefully designed with their representation through Google Earth in mind. Most notable here, are the “Palm” and “World” developments in Dubai—gargantuan projects marketed as “today’s great development epic.”19 Here, civil engineering, land art, and landscape architecture blurr together. They do so to create vast manufactured islands designed as gigantic vehicles for real estate speculation whose prime marketing advantage is their unique appearance, via satellites, on the mobile Google Earth interfaces carried on a billion smart phones in a billion pockets and a billion laptops in a billion bags.

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Note on the Text This chapter is adapted from text published within Stephen Graham’s 2016 book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London and New York: Verso. Thank you to Verso for permission to republish this material. Notes 1 2 3 4

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Satellites Application Catapult (2014). Jim Oberg, citied in Paglen (2012, 2). An important book in this debate is Sage (2014). On the latter, see Science and Human Rights Program, American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Geospatial technologies and human rights,” 2015 available at www.aaas.org. Geert Lovink, interview with Lisa Parks, “Out there: Exploring satellite awareness,” Institute of Network Cultures, November 1, 2005, available at http://networkcultures.org. General Lance W. Lord, then commander of the US Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) (2005), cited in Weiner 2005. Philosopher Rey Chow (2006) calls this “the age of the world target.” The satellite images of the imagined WMD facilities presented by the US government to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq are a sobering example here. See Shim 2012. Lambeth (1999) describes this “high ground” of terrestrial space as being split into three zones. Low Earth Orbits (LEOs)—between 150 and 2000km up—are dominated by fast-moving reconnaissance and communications satellites and inhabited craft for living astronauts. Here the latest reconnaissance satellites— such as the US GeoEye-1, which can spot objects on Earth that are only 30– 40cm in size—operate. Higher up—between 800 and 36,000 km away from the Earth’s surface—are a range of communications, GPS, and navigation craft orbiting at medium Earth orbit (MEOs). (GPS satellites orbit at around 20,200 km.) Finally, geostationary satellites—used for weather forecasting, satellite TV, satellite radio, most other types of global communications, and military and security eavesdropping—orbit the equator at exactly 35,786 kilometers, a distance that allows them to remain permanently over the same part of the Earth—or “footprint.” Lynch n.d. Ibid. The others are in Australasia and Hawaii. These are the National Security Agency (NSA, who runs the site); the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, who runs surveillance and military satellites); and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA, who runs geographic intel-

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ligence of many kinds). Staff from US military corporations and the UK’s GCHQ are also present at the base. Yorkshire CND 2013. “Rods from God” are referenced in both the 2003 US Air Force Transformation Flight Plan, available at www.au.af.mil, and the 2002 RAND report on Space Weapons, Earth Wars, available at www.rand.org. Paglen, “What Greg Roberts saw,” ibid. Dorrian 2011, 169. An example was Liverpool in 2006. See BBC, “Online map ‘misses’ regeneration,” November 26, 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk. http://www.theworld.ae/.

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Herscher, Andrew. 2010. “From target to witness: Architecture, satellite surveillance, human rights.” In Bechir Kenzari (ed.), Architecture and Violence. Barcelona: Actar, pp. 127–148. Holmes, Brian. n.d. Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure, available at www.springerin.at. Johnson, B. T. 1999. “The new space race: Challenges for U.S. national security and free enterprise.” The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder no. 1316, August 25, available at www.heritage.org. Keefe, Patrick Raden. 2006. “I spy.” Wired, January 2, available at www.wired.com. Kingsbury, Paul and John Paul Jones. 2009. “Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian adventures on Google Earth.” Geoforum 40.4: 502–513. Laforest, Daniel. 2016. “The satellite, the screen, and the city: On Google Earth and the Life Narrative.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19: 659–672. Lambeth, Benjamin S. 1999. Mastering the Ultimate High Ground: Next Steps in the Military Uses of Space, RAND Corporation. Lerup, Lars. 2006. “Vastlands visited.’ In Alan Berger (ed.), Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Lynch, Lisa. n.d. “‘As I photograph the night sky, the other night sky photographs back’: Surveillance, transparency, and the frenzy of disclosure,” available at www. academia.edu. Mackey, James. 2009. “Recent US and Chinese antisatellite activities.” Air & Space Power Journal, available at www.au.af.mil. Onley, Robert David. 2013. “Death from above: The weaponization of space and the threat to international humanitarian law.” Journal of Air Law and Commerce 78(2013): 739. Paglen, Trevor. 2012. The Last Pictures. New York: Creative Time Books. Parks, Lisa. 2005. “Out there: Exploring satellite awareness.” Institute of Network Cultures, November 1, available at http://networkcultures.org. Parks, Lisa. 2007. “Orbital performers and satellite translators: media art in the age of ionospheric exchange.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24: 207–208. Parks, Lisa. 2009. “Digging into Google Earth: An analysis of ‘crisis in Darfur.’” Geoforum 40(4): 535–545. Parks, Lisa and James Schwoch (eds.). 2012. Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Perkins, Chris and Martin Dodge. 2009. “Satellite imagery and the spectacle of secret spaces.” Geoforum 40.4: 546–560. Pickles, John (ed.). 1995. Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems. New York: Guilford Press. Quiquivix, Linda. 2014. “Art of war, art of resistance: Palestinian counter-cartography on Google Earth.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.3: 444–459. Rowell, Steve. 2008. Ultimate High Ground, available at www.steverowell.com. Sachs, Wolfgang. 1999. Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development. London: Zed Books.

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Sage, Daniel. 2014. How Outer Space Made America. Farnham: Ashgate. Sager, Christian 2014. “Death Metal from Space.” Genius Stuff Blog, April 14, available at www.geniusstuff.com. Salamander, C. 2015. “But can you sling one under a F-18 about to shoot off a CVN?” U.S. Naval Institute Blog, July, available at http://blog.usni.org. Satellites Application Catapult. 2014. Satellites: The Big Picture, available at https:// sa.catapult.org.uk. Shim, David. 2012. “Seeing from above: The geopolitics of satellite vision and North Korea.” GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, August, available at http://giga.hamburg/de. Solman, Dario. 2001. “Air attack.” Airfiles Blog, available at http://filmlog.org. Stahl, Roger. 2010. “Becoming bombs: 3D animated satellite imagery and the weaponization of the civic eye.” MediaTropes 2.2: 65–93. Steyerl, Hito. 2011. “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” EFlux Journal, 4, at www.e-flux.com. Time Magazine. 2012. “What if space was the next frontier for war?” October 3, available at http://world.time.com. Tong, Chris. 2014. “Ecology without scale: Unthinking the world zoom.” Animation 9: 196–211. Virilio, Paul. 2002. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. New York: A&C Black. Walter, James. n.d. Archimedean Witness: The Application of Remote Sensing as an Aid to Human Rights Prosecutions. PhD Thesis, UCLA, Los Angeles. Weiner, Tim. 2005. “Air Force seeks Bush’s approval for space weapons programs.” New York Times, May 18, available at www.nytimes.com. Yorkshire CND. 2013. “Menwith Hill and the national security state.” June 26, available at www.yorkshirecnd.org.uk.

10

Re-Spatializing Social Security in India Ursula Rao

It was a half hour before closing time on a hot Tuesday when Bapu, an elderly, casual worker stumbled into the enrollment center of a new health insurance program for poor people, which was located in the outskirts of North-West Delhi.1 He uttered a relieved “Ram, Ram” as he entered the dark, calm space and, exhausted, settled into one of the empty chairs. His gestures spoke of hardship, and I turned to him to find out what had happened. He seemed grateful for being listened to when giving me a long-winded description of his three-hour journey on four different buses that had brought him from the other end of Delhi to this place. His first effort to get the health insurance had taken him to the enrollment center near his current home in the inner North-East of Delhi. However, there he was told that his name did not figure in the local database and that, instead, he had to visit the office near Bawana, which is where I met him. The story raised several questions. What was Bapu’s relation to Bawana and why did he have to travel for enrollment in a welfare project that relied on mobile digital data? Curious to know more, I explained to him that I was a researcher investigating the management of the new health insurance, paying particular attention to its user-friendliness. Would he be willing to share his experiences and thoughts? The new health insurance, called RSBY (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, National Health Insurance) commenced in 2009. It is innovative on several accounts. Not only does it provide free health care to poor people at public and private hospitals, it is also the first project that scaled up the use of biometric technology for the flexible, safe, and paperless administration of claims, thus providing valuable experiences for the many biometric projects on the way in the 2010s. To participate in the project, beneficiaries had to collect a health insurance smart card that proves the entitlement of the family. The card stores basic social 231

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data as well as the fingerprints of every eligible family member, which are used to verify the identity of beneficiaries at hospital receptions and to ascertain individuals’ rights to free treatment. The project is extended to all families certified to live below the poverty line (BPL). This is where Bapu became stuck, because only the office in Bawana was able to verify his BPL status. He explained the complication. Bapu’s family had been hit by bad fortune when their modest home in central Delhi was destroyed during a massive slum demolition drive that prepared Delhi for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 (Bhan 2009; Ghertner 2011; Rao 2010). As compensation, his family had received a plot in the Bawana resettlement colony near the Harayana border, where he built a house; however, he could not find any work since the city was simply too far. His search across the metropolis landed him a job in the northeast of Delhi, approximately 40 km from Bawana. Traveling up and down daily was unrealistic; hence, he is renting a small flat for his family near his current place of work while informally letting out his own house in Bawana. He cares about his plot because it is an investment in a future and in the present provides him with a solid legal address in Delhi that must be presented with every welfare application. Formally a resident of Bawana, Bapu has been registered with the local office for food rations and received a BPL ration card that now had to be verified as precondition for access to the health insurance. By traveling to Bawana he took his hurdle. Bapu had just finished telling me his story when it was time for him to walk up to the tables with the computers, where a friendly enroller asked him briskly whether he was signing up alone. He replied negatively. “So where is your family?” was the next question. “They are at home,” he answered. “Bring them!” said the enroller and wanted to turn to the next customer. He was stopped by a lament. Bapu explained that they lived far away, that bringing his family would entail major logistics and the loss of a whole family’s daily income. The enroller was sympathetic, yet could not change the system. Every person to be enrolled had to be personally present to submit his or her fingerprints for storage on the smart card and as basis for future verification of identity at the hospitals. The enroller explained to the old man that he had two options: He could enroll right now and receive this card within the next ten minutes, which would then cover his personal health expenses but

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not those of his family. Alternatively, he could return another day with all family members. The enroller could not say how many more days the center would be open. They would close shop as soon as a majority of potential beneficiaries were enrolled. Only his boss would know when that would be, probably not too far in the future. Bapu was overwhelmed by all this information, and needing to think, returned to a dark corner of the office from where he reemerged twenty minutes later, just before closing time, to secure his own personal entitlement. This chapter uses the example of the health insurance to analyze the logics and logistics of welfare security. It illustrates how welfare is spatially configured, by following the routes that data, state employees, and welfare recipients travel as part of enacting welfare distribution. The health insurance faces a crucial contradiction that underscores all efforts of securing, namely to balance freedom and constraint, as well as individual and collective interests. In the welfare context, this manifests as the two often tensely related activities of protecting citizens from suffering or death on the one hand and shielding states from exploitation by corrupt-minded people on the other. While modern nation-states are invested in providing for needy citizens and thus in Foucault’s terms “make life” (2003 [1997]), the state itself figures as an entity in need of protection against overspending and the mal-intentions of imposters and corrupt middle men.2 To meet these two goals of defending individual and collective interests, states design administrative procedures that should ideally have robust mechanisms for identifying the needy among the citizens and then handing out welfare goods to individuals at points of distribution that have the capacity to recognize, error-free, the listed beneficiaries. Achieving these tasks is difficult and systems often fail miserably. Post-colonies in particular suffer from the impossible task of having to support large numbers of needy people with limited resources and administrative capacities.3 In a situation of chronic dissatisfaction with welfare distribution, that was additionally fueled by the predilection for slim states in the post1989 economic order, digital governance and biometric technology are promoted as game changers that promise to visibly improve public administration, making it robust, forgery-free, and cost-efficient. India is among the leaders in testing new biometrically enabled welfare projects in order to realize a win-win scenario of creating a more inclusive and

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more secure safety net. After several years of research about the harsh reality of the Indian welfare state (Rao 2013a), I was curious about the potential of these new projects and selected the national health insurance as a case study, since it was the first initiative to use biometric technology on a large scale. Much has already been said about the merits and drawbacks of this particular insurance, which works well in some states, while completely failing in others.4 There are debates about best practices for roll-out as well as heavy contestations about the desirability and sustainability of moving from free care in government hospitals toward an insurance-based health care system. Here I address not the content of the policy, but its institutional form, in order to show how biometric governance confronts taken-for-granted spatial arrangements of power. Tracing the development of the policy in Delhi and Chhattisgarh over a course of five years (2009–2014), I describe the process of interlacing the vertically integrated welfare state with new digital identification practices; alternatively conceived as being static or flexible, secure or risky, incentivizing or deterring illegal rent seeking. A new design seeks to reconfigure the state as a flexible entity that will be customer-centric and adapt to the spatializing practices of citizens, rather than impose a particular spatial fix. By paying close attention to spatial arrangements and the way they channel the movement of people and data, I describe the contours of a securityscape (see introduction, this volume) that works for some and fails others, and while doing so, confronts all participants with tensions that arise not only from lack of resources, human or technological failure. People face up to the impossible task of squaring the circle and reconciling the two opposites of protecting structure and lives. The securitization of the state undermines the goal of inclusiveness, challenging policy makers to either abandon their welfare aspirations or relax surveillance. To set the scene for a detailed analysis of enrollment procedures in Delhi and Chhattisgarh and their social consequences, a short elaboration of the spatial imaginary driving different governance interventions is in order. It lays bare the analytic by which certain hardship imposed on citizens, government employees, and other professionals during welfare distribution appear as alternatively acceptable or unacceptable, by way of naturalizing specific arrangements as necessary for delivering optimal services at the lowest possible cost. The following ethno-

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graphic section illustrates how policy makers in Delhi and Chhattisgarh addressed what emerged as severe faults in the new policy, selectively relaxing surveillance to enhance inclusiveness, and in turn producing new, unwanted side effects which, however, were considered within the range of acceptable hardship. Security here appears not as a linear development toward a better future; rather, activities of securitizing achieve situational compromises between the imperatives of tightening surveillance and securing lives. These reflect entrenched ideologies, the passion and preferences of involved decision makers, and eventually create specific and potentially dynamic scenarios of in- and exclusion.

Departures into Biometric Governance Ferguson and Gupta (2002) argue that the analysis of power must be sensitive to the spatial regimes that govern social processes. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) formulation, the authors contend that it is not just nations but also states that are “imagined.” Institutional structures and quotidian bureaucratic practices deploy spatial metaphors to demarcate their terrain of influence and invent ways to reach into the capillaries of society. Vertical encompassment as a mode of governing operates with nested scales, in which a central state reigns from above and directs the activities of federal states that exercise power over districts, that have subdistricts, blocks, circles, or villages.5 This structure dominates India’s approach to development, in fields such as health management, welfare distribution, or infrastructural expansion. Welfare policies are targeted at permanently settled citizens who are cared for and surveilled through the coordinated actions of a hierarchically integrated bureaucracy. Employees at local offices collect information about needs that feed into district, statewide, and national statistics; and in a reverse manner, these same employees act as outreach personnel to distribute centrally allocated resources. This system of a hierarchically organized welfare state has been criticized frequently for being blind toward the actual needs of their oftenitinerant clients (Jha 1992; Mane 2006). In India, members of the labor class in particular depend on an extended family network for survival and well-being. By regularly moving back and forth between the multiple homes of a family network, poor people manage the various needs

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of earning in the city, assisting during sowing or harvesting in the village, providing support during birth and death, giving children access to good education and securing medical treatment for the impaired, injured, or elderly (Roy 2003; D. Gupta 2005). The mobility between different sites in cities and the village hinders continuous reliable interactions with the institutions of the welfare state, which knows its clients through static surveys and reaches out to them at their “permanent” addresses. Techno-optimists are confident that digital technologies can liberate governance from its constraining dependence on hierarchically organized territories and render welfare distribution more flexible. What if citizens could verify identity and collect benefits at any place in the country regardless of their permanent address? A customer-centric system would provide multiple portals at which citizens could prove their entitlements via biometric verification anywhere in the country. The hope for the greater flexibility of biometrically enabled projects is coupled with the expectation that the new technologies for tracing and tracking bodies will eliminate fraud, unmask double dippers, curtail corruption, and thus enhance the security of welfare states. In their effort to tip the balance of governance toward more spatially flexible arrangements, policy makers take inspiration from a global trend toward adopting digital tools to control moving objects and humans. Biometric technology in particular is associated with governing complexities and flows (Ajana 2012; Amoore 2006; Breckenridge 2008, 2014; Maguire 2009). Gillian Fuller (2003) invokes contemporary fantasies of perfected control in an age of rapid movement. Portals function as crucial points of access to organize efficiently the logistics of a global society that requires flow. We might move more, and through increasingly complex landscapes, but we are also more streamlined and proceduralised in these movements. As we slip seamlessly in and out of various modes of traffic, we pass through innumerable thresholds. At each of these thresholds we are checked, but only for a “little detail”—what is my credit limit? Am I carrying drugs? Where is my e-tag? Who am I, really? (Fuller 2003, 1)

E-portals partake in the creation of an alternative spatial order by liberating surveillance from specific territorial arrangements. Ideally, it

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can be performed anywhere and anytime and thus undermines particular spatial fixes. Contemporary border protection regimes are cases in point. The patrolling of physical borders and fixed entry points—such as airports, or train stations—is complemented by routine checks that can be conducted anywhere and anytime at state departments, by police patrols, or even employers (Goldstein and Alonso-Bejarano 2017). For some the new technologies spell the beginning of omnipresent surveillance, while for others it marks the dawn of a new service culture. Most likely we will see a mixture of both, new liberties and scary forms of domination (Bennett and Lyon 2008; Caplan and Torpey 2001). In India the activity of electronic tracking and tracing complements older techniques of identifying people via documents or personal recognition at state offices (Rao 2017). Today, most e-governance initiatives utilize the service of the Unique Identification Authority of India to biometrically verify identity at decentralized checkpoints mandating the now prolific Aadhaar (Unique Identity, UID) number.6 For example, pensioners may use biometric identification at home or in any cyber café to satisfy the annual requirement for reissuing a life-certificate. Some states use Aadhaar-enabled ration distribution to permit beneficiaries to collect subsidized grains from any sales point of their choice, rather than assigning one definite fair price shop. Biometric banking has been outsourced to business correspondents who can complete banking transactions also in remote places, far from any bank branch (Jacobsen 2013; Rao 2017; Singh and Jackson 2017). In the official communication of the government these new services produce a win-win situation, of making transactions more customerfriendly and more secure. Against such propaganda are cases like those of Bapu (see also Rao 2013b; Masiero 2016). Theoretically, he and four members of his family can use the new health insurance flexibly for an entire year at any empaneled hospital in the country and receive free treatment. However, to avail the benefit they first had to register, which in this case required collecting proper information and traveling across Delhi so that the family may be identified as holding a status as living below the poverty line. To me this journey seemed unnecessarily customer-unfriendly in the digital age when data can travel to save people the journey. My naïve question to the enroller why he and his colleagues at all the other enrolment stations did not have access to Delhi’s

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or even India’s complete BPL database to provide flexible service to all citizens caused astonishment. Looking at me with puzzlement, the operator replied thoughtfully after a little while that such a database would be really big and would never be supported by his moderate computer. What kind of equipment did I think they had? I was not ready to give up so easily and suggested that operators could access a central database through the Internet instead. “This would require a standing Internet connection and a powerful server,” he rebutted. I carried the question about the database up the hierarchy and received another answer. Highlevel bureaucrats feared that giving all of those short-term employees from a host of subcontracted companies access to the entire BLP database would raise the chances of data misuse and theft. It was safer to place enrollment firmly under the authority of trusted state employees who would keep an eye on these casual digital workers. While new techno-savvy decision makers praise the security features of digital governance, they too are aware of the multiple new opportunities for fraud and failure. Precautions like those concerning the regulated access to databases show that the goals of securing the state and saving people do not align as easily as the win-win narrative suggests and that not every solution likely to enhance efficiency is desirable when considering data safety and security. The specific context of the health insurance necessitated the implementing agencies to decide how to identify beneficiaries, minimize the opportunity for illegitimate rent seeking, ensure that sensitive social data are not leaked, and entitlements are not fraudulently taken away. The following section introduces in detail a policy that by combining features for enhancing security with customer-centric design ends up being so complicated that it produces frequent errors on account of failed communication. By year two the policy was in crisis and required major rethinking if indeed the ministry wanted to realize the ambitious aim of making the new health insurance a universal feature of its welfare offerings. States learned from failure and different solutions emerged of which I will introduce those in Delhi and Chhattisgarh, illustrating specific local compromises between the two hard-to-reconcile imperatives of security and inclusiveness.

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Predicaments of Distribution The health insurance is an experimental new policy targeted at people living below the poverty line and designed to prevent health shocks that might land working-class families in a permanent debt trap. The insurance covers treatment at participating private and public hospitals for up to Rs 30,000 annually.7 The architect of the project, Anil Swarup, emphasized (Interview 29.11.2010) that to be useful, the project had to take the reality of the Indian labor class into account and thus had to be portable, cashless, and paper-free. His office collaborated with an Indian fintech company to develop a biometric smart card that would store data about entitlements and fingerprints of all participating family members. The card could be produced instantaneously during the enrollment procedure, thus leaving no gap between application and reception of the card. At the other end of the service chain, hospitals had been fitted with card readers, fingerprint scanners, and necessary software to enable them to identify beneficiaries forgery-free. When patients arrive, the receptionists ask for their smart cards, check fingerprints against recorded master copies, establish the status of beneficiaries and then, if permissible, admit patients for free treatments, while also logging relevant treatment packages electronically with the concerned private or public health insurances for later reimbursement of expenses. Insurance companies pay hospitals after patients have been discharged, and are in return compensated in the form of lump-sum payments of a fixed annual insurance premium for every participating family. Contracts between insurance companies and the governmental ministries are renegotiated every year, after the evaluation of performance and usage permits reasonable assessments about adequate premiums. The project uses complex electronic networks to create a simple front for customers, so that poor people who find getting high-quality treatment nightmarishly difficult are given a free choice of providers. With a valid smart card in hand they would be saved the hassles of severely long queuing in government hospitals, borrowing money from families for expensive private treatment, or preserving and carrying documents for reimbursement. They would instead travel to the next available participating hospital—with the necessary specialization—and avail themselves of free services using their smart cards. Needless to say, the

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vision is not the practice, and I have discussed somewhere else (Anjaria and Rao 2014) complications with reimbursement processes, biometric identification, hospital inspections, managing the limited amount of Rs 30,000, and annual renewal of the card. Here I focus on issues of efficiency and security as they emerge during enrollment, the critical moment when entitlements are matched to people who can become beneficiaries, if, and only if, they are seen by the state (Scott 1998). While portability is a function of the smart card, and based on an entirely new digital infrastructure created specifically for RSBY, issuing of cards requires knowledge of the population and thus depends on established state institutions. Who is poor? How many people live below the poverty line? And how should they be identified? Knowledge about (or the construction of) poverty is linked to specific imaginations of populations and welfare. In India, like in the rest of the world, welfare has been reimagined in the post-1989 neoliberal order propagating slim states and imposing strict austerity measures. Rather than caring for poor people, states now design restricted interventions to incentivize and discipline populations to invest in self-care (Rose 1999). Rigorous assessments of efficiency have the twofold aim of reducing the “cost of a particular intervention, while at the time increasing its effectiveness” (Mooij 1999). In the 1990s, India too moved away from blanket welfare or group-specific interventions typical for the early post-colonial period, to target individuals or families on the basis of detailed assessment of economic status. To this end, three BPL surveys carried out in 1992, 1998, and 2002 provide detailed information about the extent of poverty and enroll individual families into the status as potential welfare recipients (Corbridge et al. 2005). The exercise of surveying utilizes the institutions of vertically integrated states (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Centrally designed surveys are distributed through the command structures of the state from center, to state, to district, and then block or circle. At the level of suburb or village, fieldworkers conduct interviews with heads of households to assess the economic situations of families. The figures are collated into abstract statistics that move back up the hierarchy to provide background information for political decision making. In a reverse direction funds flow from the center and are handed out to beneficiaries by street-level bureaucrats in the respective areas of their jurisdiction. These structures

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are notoriously difficult for itinerary populations and exclude people who were absent during the counting drive, moved in the meantime, or fell into poverty after a survey has been completed. The issue became pertinent during RSBY enrollment. Launched in 2008/2009, RSBY had huge difficulties taking off in Delhi. According to official figures, Delhi recognizes 147,000 households as living below the poverty line. They are known to the state as holders of BPL or AAY (Antyodaya Anna Yojana, Poorest of the Poor) ration cards. In the first year, only 41,990 families (or 29% of eligible households) signed up for RSBY, a conversion rate that was much too low for any insurance company to sustain interest. Feedback from the field identified many shortcomings, among them a lack of campaigning, as well as a high number of potential beneficiaries not listed in the outdated BLP database. There were at least two issues. Delhi keeps a strict cap on the number of issued ration cards so that not every BPL family possesses a ration card that may evidence their status. Even more concerning, the high mobility of the labor class makes survey data originating from 2002 hopelessly outdated, since many people would have left Delhi and many more arrived, while a majority of poor families would have changed address at least once in a period of eight years. To overcome the difficulties with the BPL data, the RSBY cell in Delhi decided to involve Mission Convergence in RSBY enrollment. Mission Convergence was founded in 2008 by the Congress Government of Sheila Dikshit to ease the communication of marginal citizens with relevant state agencies by unifying all services in the hands of social workers working for a network of local NGOs, selected for their good track record and now operating under the new name of Gender Resource Centers (GRC), whereby each GRC is responsible for the delivery of the entry suits of state services of up to 10,000 vulnerable families in their catchment area. To know its clientele, Mission Convergence conducted a Vulnerability Survey in 2010 and 2011 in all labor class neighborhoods of Delhi. The information was digitized at district centers and then merged into one large database in the head office. It contains social information of more than 4.2 million families, which can be sorted according to different criteria (e.g., income, social or economic status, family size) and of which 987,824 people were accepted as vulnerable by the state government, also for the purpose of RSBY enrollment.

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In Delhi, the second year of RSBY enrollment was organized through a dual structure. Ration offices continued to service BLP and AAY ration card owners, while GRCs attended to other beneficiaries listed in the vulnerability survey. By merging two databases, the number of eligible inhabitants rose to almost 1 million in 2009/2010. While the conversion rate remained disappointingly low at 22 percent, the absolute number of beneficiaries had jumped up by five times, to 212,058 families during the second year of the health policy. The rule change had made the project more inclusive, but also more complicated. The new twin structure confused beneficiaries, who did not know where to go in the first instance. Bapu is a case in point. His first point of call was his local Gender Resource Center, which had been recruited to advertise RSBY along with enrolling a section of the population. At his GRC he was told that the local office only entertains clients who participated in the vulnerability survey but held no ration card, while ration card owners needed to visit their circle office. When finally undertaking the arduous journey to the other end of Delhi, Bapu failed to take his family, not fully understanding the process and that it required not only additional travel but undertaking the travel taking every family member along. Of course, this journey could have been saved had the ministry provided BPL data on a cloud to be accessed by employees of GRCs, insurances, or their subcontracted Third Party Administrates (TPAs). However, this could have put Bapu and others at risk of identity theft and when executed on a scale, could rob the state of massive resources. The worries seemed reasonable considering RSBY’s entanglement with the private market. The short-term, badly paid computer operators of subcontracted TPAs working for profit seeking private health insurances could not be trusted with sensitive personal data. While beneficiaries struggled to understand where to go and what to do, GRC employees were overwhelmed by an almost impossible task. In March 2010, I spent two weeks with Priya behind the RSBY reception desk at a GRC in northeast Delhi. Every day the young, alert computerliterate case worker sifted patiently through a database of those locally registered as “vulnerable” to give them permission to walk over to the computer station of the TPA and enroll in the health insurance. At most times there was a long queue and people were pushing impatiently, shouting that things should move quicker, while Priya desperately tried

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to find out more efficient ways of serving her clients. She had taken up work in a Gender Resource Center because the plight of poor people really touched her and she loved the idea of government outreach centers near poor people’s homes. The queue upset her greatly, because she did not want the GRC to be one of those unpleasant offices where clients are pushed around and made to wait forever. Yet, she had difficulties finding names on her excel spreadsheets. One day, after five hours of carefully scanning through long lists of names on her poorly lit computer scene, her eyes burning from concentration, she exclaimed in frustration: “This is ridiculous! Everyone’s last name here is ‘Mohammad,’ ‘Pratap,’ or ‘Kumar.’ How am I supposed to know who is who?” Without a clear marker that could identify families quickly and uniquely, she was forced to read through the entire list of first names attached to each of these common last names in order to know whether an applicant’s family was on her list, and thus could be certified as living in the catchment areas, being vulnerable and therefore eligible for enrolment in RSBY. The procedure was not only slow and tedious, but prone to mistake and exclusion. Things often heated up when Priya found out that people had a ration card: “Why did you not say so!” She hated echoiing the same chorus over and over again. “Why did people not listen the first time round?” Priya would say, turning to me. She had no option but to patiently repeat instructions with every new client: “If you have a ration card, you are not on my list. You must go to your circle ration office! They will find your name there and enroll you. Do not forget to take your ration card along. Otherwise they cannot help you.” People distrusted this information, after all, they have a history of being sent from pillar to post when seeking welfare. Some started quarreling because they could not comprehend why such a trip to the ration office was necessary; surely they were just being shooed away because the case worker did not want to service them. Maybe she wants a bribe, some speculated. Confusion abounded and many potential beneficiaries had to undertake several trips to understand the process, confirm where they had to go, and eventually locate their name on a database, or give up because they were not listed, or had an unfindable name. Amidst all of this they were of course supposed to remember that they must take all family members along on the journey.

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In Delhi, a mobile health insurance remained dependent on static survey data with a limited by-use date, and since the health insurance required annual updating, it produced huge gaps in coverage. Participation dwindled in subsequent years, dropping to 142,000 participants (14%) in 2010/11 and 44,571 (8%) in 2011/12. When I returned to conduct more fieldwork in 2013, RSBY had been abandoned in Delhi and I was back at the headquarters talking to Anil Swarup about my disillusionment. “Forget Delhi. It is a bad example, maybe the worst,” I was told. “Chhattisgarh really cares about the project. This is where you can observe it working the way it should.” On the same day, I bought my ticket and was on my way to Raipur. In Chhattisgarh too, enrollment and supervision of RSBY is organized through the institutions of the vertically integrated state. However, unlike Delhi, here distribution is overseen by the ministry of health that instructs District Medical Officers (DMO) to support the project. I began my round of visits in the company of a ministerial employee in the district of Dhamatri. As we entered the building of the DMO we were greeted by a huge pile of paper slips with names on them. Several clerks were busy sorting them conscientiously by neighborhood and keeping them in neat piles. Later in the day, contracted fieldworkers would come and collect the paper slips for their locality. Their tasks were to visit people, alert them to the health insurance, explain the benefit, inform them about the date and location of the enrollment camp, and hand over the slip proving eligibility. The DMO was proud of this system that actively reached out to citizens. After our conversation with him, we proceeded to the enrollment station in Meeva. It had become twelve noon and as I stepped out of the air-conditioned car it took a minute to adjust my eyes to the glaring sunshine. Women waited patiently in a long line under the hot sun. I walked up to number eight in the queue, a lady in a pink sari, introduced myself, and asked why she had come. “To get the new health card,” she said predictably. “Would you show me your slip? They told me you get a piece of paper to enroll.” “I don’t have one,” replied the lady named Leela. We began a conversation, and she spoke about her work as a housekeeper, how she leaves the house in the morning after dropping the kids at school to clean in several middle-class houses in the nearby colony and thus had missed the health worker when she came by to deliver the information

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about RSBY. However, her neighbors are nice people and they told her about the enrollment center. She had no doubts about her eligibility, since she possesses a BPL ration card, and when she reached the table 30 minutes later told the operator confidently that her name would be in the list. Pradeep loaded the BPL data, which took him ten minutes. He was furious and cursed the computer. His is a high-pressure work environment in which payment depends on output. Pradeep is prepared to work quickly but suffers from the slowness of a fading laptop. Every station has an enrollment capacity of 60 families per day, but enrollers never manage more than an average of 40 enrollments per day. Loading databases is particularly time-consuming. Once the portal had come up, Pradeep checked for Leela’s name and did not find it. He checked again and then said, “I can’t waste more time on this. Go to the other table and fill in the form!” Leela did as she was told. The form was an application for MSBY (Mukhyamantri Swasthya Bima Yojana, Chief Minister’s Health Insurance Program). MSBY is a state-funded non-targeted replica of RSBY providing the exact same benefits to all residents of the state regardless of their economic status. It was introduced in the second year of the policy. Like in Delhi, the first year had produced a huge number of exclusions and left the ministry as well as insurances dissatisfied with the degree of penetration and risk pooling. Hence, the state decided to launch MSBY, a fully state-funded non-discriminatory program open to all citizens, which continues to function, showing impressive linear growth development.8 For poor people, MSBY became a way to circumvent the BPL criteria that many struggle to prove. Leela could not take home a card on that day because she had to bring a proof of address to evidence her status as citizen of the state. Moreover, moving from the RSBY to the MSBY enrollment system on his computer would have taken Pradeep 30 minutes and he had already wasted 15 minutes with Leela. He was not prepared to invest more time. Leela had to go home with just a promise. I asked her whether she would return to claim her MSBY card. “I will see,” she said cautiously. Her lukewarm response raised questions. I knew that many people had doubts about the benefit of RSBY/MSBY and thus did not bother to get or renew their card (Anjaria and Rao 2014). Did she lack real interest in the insurance? I inquired from others in similar situations and real-

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ized that I had missed an important aspect. Munshi explained a common doubt: “See,” she told me, “I can get an MSBY card. No problem. I can use it when I am sick. It would be good to have it especially for the kids. We worry a lot when they fall ill. We want to give them the best treatment. However, when you have a MSBY card it shows you are ‘a regular person.’ You are no longer identified as BPL!” This worry about possible status ambivalence is rooted in a history of negative encounters with the welfare state. Most people can narrate multiple incidences of rough treatment by bureaucrats. Whenever they seek a pension, ration, a loan, or state insurance payment they are made to wait, come back the next day, refused a necessary form, forced to bring additional documents, or pay a bribe. Frequent contradictions between different documents could cause delays or lead to rejection of a claim (Gupta 2012; Rao 2013a). These pitfalls caused some people to refuse a benefit that might in the future undermine their status as welfare recipients. While this worry posed a disincentive for some, others were happy to embrace MSBY without worrying about possible future complications. A health insurance is a useful benefit after all. The inclusive approach of MSBY mitigated the negative effects of BPL data errors. Residency in a state is easier to prove than an official status as “poor.”

Conclusion The notion of vertical encompassment as persistent state structure provides a helpful lens for analyzing the flow of power and resources, however, there is the danger of essentializing states when overstating their vertically integrated character. State agencies (can) operate with multiple spatial arrangements, as is particularly apparent in postliberalized economies that try new distributive models through involving market players or civil society organizations in the tasks of development (Sharma 2006). The past two decades of writings on the anthropology of the state have shown that the notion of an internally coherent state separate from, or “above” (Ferguson and Gupta 2002) society is more of an ideological position than a reality (Abrams 1988; Mitchell 1991). Numerous studies have illustrated how states are heterogeneous and internally contradictory (Das and Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Hull 2012; Mathur 2016) and their practices do not always conform

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to a singular “mode of being” (Das 2004). These insights raise questions about coordination. When and how does the state hang together? Which transactions and translations link people and departments? By approaching the question through a spatial lens, this text focused on the difficult conjunction between two imaginaries associated with the classical welfare state and e-governance respectively. They clash as India is recruiting digital technology into known forms of governance. RSBY emerged from a radical critique of India’s welfare system and its makers’ trial biometric technology to offer a safe and mobile entitlement, and continuously update procedures when performance remains unsatisfactory. “Look at this man,” said the receptionist at Meerut Hospital in Delhi to me during the early days of RSBY. “He is poor! It is obvious, everyone can see that and you cannot fake it at that level. His body gives him away. So why does he not have an RSBY smart card so that we can treat him for free?” Gazing through the lenses of the BLP survey, state agencies were unable to “see” poverty in this immediate sensorial way. When the procedure left thousands of potential beneficiaries excluded, Delhi added data from a more recent survey, while Chhattisgarh dispensed with targeting. While welfare is thought to be inclusive, there are huge gaps in coverage that affect more than anyone else the itinerant labor class. The new approach adopted for RSBY takes mobility into account and makes the benefits available through an older system that relies on static and localized survey data. To use the benefit, clients must learn to produce situationally adapted behavior that fits the relevant governance mechanism, in order to get and then use the insurance. They perform the work of seeking information, traveling to enrollment stations, and later using the card at the correct hospitals in the appropriate manner (Anjaria and Rao 2014). This activity of networking creates what Janet Vertesi (2014) calls a “seamful space.” The term captures the artful aligning of multiple coexisting and at times incompatible infrastructures during everyday practice, in her case at the Deep Space Network in Spain. Against the hope that future computation will produce the seamless combination of multiple devices and social spaces (Weiser 1993), she asserts that the integration of infrastructures requires constant work of translation, since “each infrastructure presents its own politics, standards, ways of knowing, ontologies, temporal rhythms, and interactional possibilities” (Vertesi 2014, 266; see for the Indian case study also Singh and Jackson 2017).

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Traditional ways of thinking about the population are recruited into new procedures creating haphazardly integrated spaces. While digital governance is praised for its great security potential, it is also associated with new fears about the possibility of impersonation fraud and identity theft. The desire to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of state spending requires not only reliable identification of individuals but also in-depth knowledge about the population and its needs. How to make available targeted welfare to a limited number of those people who need it most, so that they may stay productive and not fall into a state of abject poverty? The receptionist at Meerut Hospital felt that the benefit should go to everyone who looks poor. The Chhattisgarh government decided it should be available to everyone who feels a need, while other states governments reinvested in targeting and relied on an established tradition of statistical evidence making. The operationalization of statistic-based governance follows a particular spatial logic. It knows people as permanently settled, captured in surveys, and traceable at registered addresses. In contrast, biometric governance knows people through mobility patterns, which become traceable as they regularly pass through checkpoints. The new security logic superimposes these two structural logics onto one another and creates multiple interfaces that incentivize clients, service personal and state employees to make an extra effort to learn a behavior that will patch these policies together. By figuring out the orbits created by the states, and moving dutifully on them, people create a managed population and fulfill the idea of securing lives and structure. Notes

1 All names of beneficiaries, case workers, bureaucrats, and operators have been changed to protect the anonymity of people participating in the research. The only exception is Anil Swarup, who is the architect of RSBY. 2 The history of the welfare state is deeply entangled with the structures of vertically integrated states. Foucault (2003[1997]) describes the emergence of modern biopolitics as the imperative that the sovereign will support life and does so by controlling birth and death rates, producing healthy and productive bodies, managing environments, preventing emergencies, and providing for contingencies. Welfare payments, insurances, and medical interventions as means to these ends, emerge in tandem with statistical thinking as a way of mapping populations for the purpose of taking informed decisions about necessary actions and monitoring the effects of governmental programs. In India, the notion of a right to welfare is entrenched in the post-colonial project.

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3 The independent states emerge in opposition to the oppressive colonial regimes insofar as self-rule is conceived as a route to social equality and universal prosperity for all citizens (Corbridge et al. 2005; Sharma 2006). To meet the aspiration of social security, while tackling the odds of limited resources, uneven infrastructure, and pertinent hierarchies, the developmental state moved through a process of continuously updating its redistributive system. The BPL survey was implemented in India for the first time 1992, in a moment when individual targeting increasingly replaced welfare tailor-made for specific groups or addressed at the population at large. 4 RSBY produces new needs and new costs. Novel state institutions must fix treatment rates, assure quality, and invent mechanisms for supervising hospitals and insurances. The insurance system exposes state agencies and beneficiaries to the profit-seeking activities of private health providers and may lead to cost explosion. A capped insurance is an integral part of neoliberal governmentality. It downloads health risks onto beneficiaries who must manage the treatment of an entire family within the relatively small amount of Rs 30,000 per year (Anjaria and Rao 2014; Das and Leino 2011; Dror and Vellakkal 2012; Krishnaswamy and Ruchismita 2011; Selvaraj and Karan 2009; Taneja. and Taneja 2016). 5 Ferguson and Gupta (2002) contrast the example of the vertically integrated state to new emerging power structures in many African countries, in which INGOs and institutions of global governance circumvent state agencies and directly reach out to people in specific localities. Interconnections between grassroots organizations and financiers from the Global North create alternative spatial arrangements that compete with or undermine the distributive models of hierarchical states. 6 For details, see the official UID homepage of the Government of India, https:// uidai.gov.in, and for a list of services that will soon require an Aadhaar number, see Aarohi Naralin, “Timeline: Twenty Two Mandatory Notifications for ‘Voluntary’ Aadhaar Since January 2017,’ The Wire, https://thewire.in. 7 For details see the official RSBY homepage, at www.rsby.gov.in. 8 See Government of India statistics on RSBY/MSBY at http://cg.nic.in.

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About the Editors

Setha Low is Professor of Anthropology, Environmental Psychology, Geography, and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Urban anthropology books include: Theorizing the City, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture, Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America, Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, and The Handbook of the City: Engaging the Future. Dr. Low has received Guggenheim, Getty, and NEH fellowships and numerous awards for her research and activism. She lectures internationally on public space, social justice, and diversity. Mark Maguire is Dean of Maynooth University Faculty of Social Sciences. His research explores counterterrorism training and operations in several European jurisdictions. He is coeditor of The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counterterrorism and Border Control and Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowedge, and Power.

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Nurit Bird-David is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Haifa, Israel. Zoltán Glück is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.  Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit at Newcastle University. Alejandro Grimson is an anthropologist and Professor at the Institute for Social Studies, National University of San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thomas G. Kirsch is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the Department of History and Sociology, University of Konstanz, Germany. Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology, Brown University. Ursula Rao is Professor of Anthropology at University of Leipzig. Brígida Renoldi is a Researcher with the Institute for Social and Human Studies (CONICET and UNaM). Carmen Rial is Professor of Anthropology at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. 255

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Matan Shapiro is Post-Doctoral Fellow, Sociology and Anthropology Department, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Index

Aadhaar (Unique Identity—UID), 237, 249, 252 Affect, 13, 29, 34, 50, 55, 72, 77, 142, 158–159, 183, 205 Afghanistan, 55, 198–201 Aid, 26n6, 198, 230 Airports, 12, 45, 53, 58, 100, 102, 108–109, 114, 121, 146, 162, 237 Alcohol, 106, 135, 137, 171 Algorithms, 102 Al-Shabaab, 14, 31, 49, 54 Anderson, Benedict, 10, 26, 235, 249 Andersson, Ruben, 9, 26 Anonymity, 108–109, 121, 138, 159, 248 Apartheid, 5, 122, 129, 133–134, 139, 202 Appadurai, Arjun, 6, 10, 11, 26, 147 Assassinations, 18, 39, 51–52 Augé, Marc, 6, 113, 120 Bale, John, 104, 113, 117, 120 Battles, 117n10, 169, 184, 228; Battle of Pacaembú, 166, 177n8 Bauman, Zygmunt, 59, 67, 74, 76 Bentham, Jeremy, 7 Bigo, Didier, 6, 17, 25–27, 58, 76 Biometric identification, 1–2, 20–24, 111, 118–119, 231, 233–237, 239, 247–251 Biopolitics, 6, 28, 89, 248; bio-power, 114 Bird-David, Nurit, and Matan Shapiro, 6, 16–18, 22, 123, 181 Bolivia, 93, 95, 140, 162 Borderization, 15, 22, 24, 78–91, 93–95, 97; border control, 1–2, 4, 12, 27, 29, 76, 78–79, 83–87, 92–114, 117

Boundary objects, 126, 130, 140 Braudel, Fernand, 8 Brown, Wendy, 7, 27 Buenos Aires, 88, 96–97, 255 Bunkers, 6, 18, 55, 163, 165, 167, 172, 178– 183, 210, 216, 227 Buzan, Barry, 2–3, 27, 138n5, 139 Caldeira, Teresa, 41, 46, 54 CCTV, 12–13, 16–17, 75, 107, 110–111, 117– 118, 127, 131, 133, 136 Checkpoints, 14, 42–45, 50, 53, 102, 112, 115–116, 119, 237, 248 China, 7, 189, 217, 223 Christianity, 133–135, 137 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 110 Citizenship, 8, 13, 14, 20, 23, 34, 53–54, 59–62, 65–67, 71, 74, 84, 89, 108, 113, 129–130, 143, 145, 154, 164, 171, 174, 179, 187, 201–203, 224, 233–238, 241, 244– 245, 249, 251 Civil defense, 169, 182 Class, 5, 17, 22–24, 33, 36–37, 42–48, 50–53, 56, 61–62, 67, 69, 71, 84, 99, 100–106, 113–116, 131, 133, 135–138, 143–148, 151– 153, 160–161, 167, 170–171, 191, 197, 200, 212–215–216, 235, 239, 241, 244, 247 Cold War, 2, 8, 29, 38, 55, 77, 80, 165, 167, 178–180, 183, 205, 208, 214, 217; Cold War epistemology (of the bunker), 178, 180, 183 Colonialism, 37, 39, 41, 52, 54–56, 81, 191–192, 201–205, 223, 240, 248–249; decolonization, 187

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Communism, 15, 61, 80, 83; socialism, 14– 15, 55, 59–62, 67, 68, 70, 71–72, 74, 77 Corruption, 49, 61, 88, 92, 94, 97, 199, 223, 233, 236 Cosmology, 170, 172, 176, 182 Counterinsurgency, 36–37, 39, 56, 198 Counterterrorism, 1, 8, 14, 26, 29, 31, 34, 37–39, 41, 50–52, 58, 108, 140 Covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs), 13, 154–156 Cowen, Deborah, 12, 27, 35, 54, 190, 204 Crime, 11, 13, 15, 27, 46, 54, 69–70, 74, 78– 79, 89, 90–91, 93, 95, 97–98, 123–125, 129–138, 141, 144, 155, 158, 222, 249; organized, 78,90, 93 Crowds, 32, 50, 207 Cuba, 80, 128, 140 Danger zones, 14, 37, 47, 162 Das, Veena, 4, 16, 27, 35, 54, 120, 247, 249–250 Databases, 69, 75, 111, 116, 231, 238, 241– 242, 243, 245; digital data, 70, 220, 222, 231, 233–234, 237–238, 247 Davis, Mike, 5, 27, 54 Debt, 142, 202, 204, 239 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 15, 17, 27, 67, 74, 76 Delhi, 231–247, 250–251 Delinquency, 90. See also Crime Democracy, 2–3, 84 Deportation, 32, 205 Dictatorship, 15, 80, 88–89, 104–105 Discourse, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 11, 15, 21, 24–25, 33, 46, 48, 50, 82, 94, 96–97, 100, 123, 126, 140, 145, 151, 160, 172, 180–182, 206 Domestication, 143, 160, 164–165 Douglas, Mary, 170, 182 Drones (UAVs), 107, 112, 119n29, 209, 215 Drug trafficking, 78–79, 82–83, 88–89, 90– 91, 94–95, 152, 158, 236 Dubai, 226 Dystopia, 47, 151, 210, 214

Elden, Stuart, 12, 19, 27, 34–36, 54 Emergency, 3, 18, 27, 61, 89, 163–167, 170, 172–177, 180, 182–183 Enemies, real or imagined, 15, 59, 61, 63, 75–76, 90, 169, 209, 211 Eski, Yarin, 11–12, 27 Ethiopia, 31, 34 Ethnicity, 143, 150–151, 161, 170 European Union (EU), 124 Evidence, 10, 14, 63, 70, 90, 93, 144, 178, 191, 201, 210, 213–214, 216, 221, 225, 241, 245, 248, 251, 253 Facebook, 111, 214 Fassin, Didier, 9, 14, 27, 102, 120 Fear, 2, 5, 7, 13–17, 24, 27–29, 33–34, 38, 41–47, 50–51, 65, 67, 72–74, 79, 84, 99– 100, 113–115, 121, 126, 140, 142–148, 151, 154–162, 172, 182, 187, 218, 238, 248 Fences, 4, 11–12, 17, 42, 47, 51, 57, 100, 104–105, 118, 125, 127, 141, 146, 152, 184, 187, 214 Fetishism: Marxist, 11; technological, 111 Fieldwork, 131, 133, 138 n3 FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations), 16, 99–102, 106, 112–113, 115–116 Fortification, 41, 46, 163; fortress, 143, 147, 150–152, 160–162, 205, 253 Foucault, Michel, 3, 6–7, 23–28, 36, 41, 55, 58, 60, 68, 71, 75–76, 89, 96, 99, 114, 115–116, 120, 233, 248, 250 Fuller, Gillian, 236, 250 Gal, Susan, 128, 139 Gallie, W. B., 2–3, 25n3 Gangs, 89, 103, 122, 125, 151 Gated communities, 4–5, 7–9, 12–14, 22– 24, 46–47, 79, 100, 104–105, 108, 114, 131–133, 141–144, 146–162, 221, 246 Gaza, 164, 171, 173–175, 181n1 Gender, 23, 100, 104, 113, 116, 122, 125, 150, 160, 161, 165, 241–243, 251

Index

Geopolitics, 12, 27, 80, 177, 214–216, 228, 230 Globalization, 27, 56, 82, 209, 220 Goldstein, Daniel M., 8, 28, 126, 140, 144, 147, 162, 237, 250 Google, 110, 214; Google Earth, 20, 220– 226, 228–229 Governmentality, 6, 20, 27–28, 36, 54, 180, 182, 249–251 GPS (Global Position System), 109, 142, 208, 211, 219, 223–224, 227 Graham, Stephen, 5, 18–20, 27–28, 33, 37, 41, 55, 123, 201, 206, 208 Guam, 18, 23–24, 184–191, 193, 195–198, 201–205 Gupta, Akhil, 10, 20, 28, 34–35, 54–56, 88, 97, 181–182, 235–236, 240, 246, 249–250 Gusterson, Hugh, 10, 28, 30, 140 Healthcare, 23, 38, 173, 191, 231–232, 234– 235, 244 Hegemony, 50–52, 56, 160, 204 Herzfeld, Michael, 88, 97 Hezbollah, 163 Holbraad, Martin, 128, 140 Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Pedersen, 2, 25n1, 28–29, 183 Hollywood, 210 Holmes, Brian, 224, 229 Homeowners, 149–150, 154–155, 160–162, 170; homeowners’ associations, 130, 141, 141, 145–149, 154, 226 Homicide, 5, 94, 116 n7 Hooligans (football), 16, 103, 105–106, 111, 117 Human rights, 14, 32, 38, 54–55, 61, 82, 84, 88–90, 96, 99, 114, 119, 140, 148, 154, 162, 192, 208, 210–211, 222, 227, 229– 230, 232 Hungary, 57 Huntington, Samuel, 94 Hussein, Saddam, 224

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Ideology, 50, 139, 168, 171, 185, 235, 246 Imagination, 2, 4–7, 10, 19–22, 27, 48, 50, 66, 90, 171, 181, 201, 205, 209, 221, 228, 240. See also Imaginaries Imaginaries, 10, 13, 33, 41, 50,143, 150–151, 247 Immigration, 38, 80, 94, 115, 143 India, 1, 9, 20–21, 117, 223, 231, 233–235, 237–241, 243, 245, 247–251 Infrastructure, 1, 4–9, 11, 14, 16–20, 22–24, 27, 43, 45, 49, 51, 59, 81, 89, 125, 127, 132–133, 137, 142–143, 146–147, 149, 152–154, 160, 176, 190, 197–198, 203, 213, 218, 224, 228, 240, 247; affective, 14, 16–20, 197 Intelligence (for security), 58, 72, 77, 90– 92, 111, 214–217, 225, 227. See also CIA Iraq, 19, 55, 169, 187, 227 Israel, 1, 9, 88, 118nn21, 22, 163–183, 222– 223; Israeli military, 17–16, 110 Jacobs, Jane, 6, 28 Jessop, Bob, 35–36, 55 Jusionyte, Ieva, 88, 97 Kafka, Franz, 7 Kenya, 14, 31–56 Kenyatta, President Uhuru, 37–39, 53–55 Kidnapping, 47, 94, 151, 158 Kinship, 60, 62, 64 Kirsch, Thomas, 15–17, 22, 129, 132, 140 Landscape, 10–13, 17–18, 20–25, 139, 141, 143, 147, 161, 168, 184, 197, 202, 204, 212, 214, 225–226, 236 Latin America, 15, 79–80, 83–84, 95, 105, 148; Argentina, 1, 9, 15, 78–93, 95–98; Brazil, 15–16, 22–23, 79–85, 88–121; Paraguay, 15, 22, 78–79, 85–88, 91, 93, 96 Lefebvre, Henri, 4–6, 8, 26, 28, 33, 36, 54–55 Lerup, Lars, 225, 229 Logistics, 12, 190, 204, 219, 232–233, 236

260

| Index

Los Angeles, 27, 162, 213, 230 Low, Setha, 1, 3–4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 46, 77, 100, 114, 141, 144, 147, 149, 161–162 Lutz, Catherine, 1, 8, 18–19, 22–24, 29, 165, 167, 172, 178, 180, 182–183, 187, 203 Lyon, David, 59, 67, 74, 76, 237, 250 Maguire, Mark, 1, 8, 26–27, 29, 57, 76, 83, 97, 100, 102, 120–121, 126, 138, 140, 147, 236, 251 Mamad (security room), 18, 163–183 Masco, Joseph, 1, 8, 29, 33–34, 38, 41, 43, 55, 59–61, 72, 77, 165, 167, 178–183, 196, 202, 205 Materiality, 5–7, 12–13, 22, 24, 34–36, 41, 47, 51–52, 63, 81, 84, 93, 114, 125, 127, 131–136, 142, 146–147, 160–164, 167, 170, 172, 179–180, 213 McElvey, Tara, 75 Media, 5, 8, 10, 41, 47–48, 62, 66, 73–74, 79, 81, 90, 103, 109, 111, 114, 137, 143, 145, 158, 164, 166, 173–174, 196, 198, 202, 206–208, 219–226 Mexico, 95, 116, 147 Military operations, 51, 196–197; Operation Usalama Watch (Kenya), 14, 31–37, 39, 48, 54; Operation Tzuk Eitan (Israel), 164–165, 171–173, 177, 181 Military bases, 18, 184, 186–190, 192, 196– 197, 202, 205, 213–215. See also Security: architecture Military ordnance, 202, 208, 211, 224 Milieus, 6, 18, 21, 83, 87 Minorities, 62, 73, 148, 157, 191 Mobility, 4, 7, 15, 17, 20, 45, 54, 82, 134, 143, 162, 220, 236; class/racial, 17, 20, 44, 146, 241, 247 Montreal, 99, 109–110 Morality, 18, 25n4, 73, 87, 94, 133–134, 145– 146, 160, 172–173, 177 Municipalities, 115, 142–143, 150, 154, 161, 169, 173–175

Nairobi, 14, 22–23, 32–34, 41–53, 55–56; attack on Westgate Mall, 14, 31, 42–43, 46–48, 51, 53, 55 Neighborhood watch, 157 Neoliberalism, 28, 54, 60, 72, 76, 129, 144– 145, 149, 160–162, 164, 179–182, 240, 249, 250–251 New York, 13, 88, 141–144, 147–150, 156–157, 159 North Korea, 189, 230 Obama, President Barack, 95, 188 Olympic Games, 99–100, 102, 104, 109, 110–113, 115, 117, 118–121, 226 Ontology, 128, 164–165, 176, 183, 247 Orwell, George, 71, 117n10, 121 Otherness, 94–95 Panoptic, 7, 16, 20, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115–119, 121, 250. See also Bentham, Jeremy Parks, Lisa, 207–208, 223, 227, 229 Photography, 22, 71, 185, 208 Police, 23, 31–32, 34, 39, 45, 48–51, 53–55, 57–62, 66–67, 69–72, 77, 87–94, 103, 105–107, 111– 112, 117–121, 129, 132, 134, 139–140, 199, 237 Population (as category of governance), 3, 6, 9, 19–20, 27, 55, 56, 59, 60–62, 67, 70–71, 81–83, 88, 94, 99, 104, 120, 133, 177, 181, 187, 240–242, 248–249. See also Governmentality Precaution, 6, 12, 238 Preparedness, 92, 138–139, 164–165, 168, 202 Prison, 7, 90, 99, 114–115, 120 Problematization (as methodology), 1, 3, 12, 25n4 Protection, 23–24, 28, 47, 94, 123, 127, 136, 143, 149, 152–153, 159, 167–170, 174–177, 181–182, 192, 197, 233, 237 Rabinow, Paul, 9, 29 Race, 5, 17, 23, 38, 44, 80–81, 100, 105, 113, 125, 135, 137, 143–147, 150–152, 157, 161, 201, 212, 223, 229, 246, 248

Index

RAND Corporation, 211, 225, 228–229 Razor wire, 21, 41–42, 45, 47, 214 Recursiveness, 4, 15–16, 123, 128–131, 135– 140, 168 Refugees, 31–32, 34, 37, 39, 49, 42, 54–55, 124, 198 Religion, 100, 143, 145, 151, 161, 183 Resilience, 28, 172–175, 177, 182 Rial, Carmen, 16, 23, 103, 114 Richards, Paul, 177, 183 Risk, 2, 6–8, 22, 78, 82, 87, 95, 119–120, 132, 143–145, 150, 162, 171, 178, 187, 196, 217, 232, 234, 242, 245, 249 Romania, 14–15, 23, 57, 59–60, 62–69, 72– 73, 76; Romanian Securitate, 60–68, 70–77 Rose, Nikolas, 2, 21, 28, 149, 240, 251 Rowell, Steve, 213–214, 229 Safety, 4, 6, 8, 13, 41, 101, 107, 110, 114, 118,121, 143, 148, 153–154, 156, 168, 171, 184, 234, 238 Samimian-Darash, Limor, and Meg Stalcup, 9, 26n7, 29, 124, 126, 129, 140 Satellites, 19–22, 55, 192, 206–230 Scale, 1, 9–14, 16–18, 20–21, 34–39, 44, 50, 53, 56–58, 60, 78–79, 105, 118, 123, 128, 136, 138, 141, 144, 147, 170–171, 182, 191, 203, 218, 220, 223, 230, 231, 234, 235, 242 Schools, 32, 47, 49, 64, 79, 118n16, 125, 171– 172, 198–199, 244 Sebald, W. G., 7, 29 Securitization theory: Copenhagen School, 6, 14, 25n2; and (in)securitization theory, Paris School, 9, 14, 16–17, 20, 22, 24, 25n2, 37, 52n2, 58, 60, 67, 72, 94, 121–124, 138, 143–150, 161–162, 165– 166, 169–170, 178, 183, 234 Security: architecture, 12, 16, 21–22, 99–100, 105–106, 115, 142–147, 152, 154, 160, 179, 182–185, 215, 220, 226; apparatus, 2, 8–9, 11, 17, 22, 83, 106,

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261

109, 111, 115, 129, 146; apparatus, state, 38, 58, 102–103, 106, 109, 111, 115, 128; assemblage, 1, 9, 11, 15–17, 26, 29, 55, 59, 67, 69, 70–71, 122, 124, 127, 129, 136–138, 207; assemblage, surveillant, 67, 69–70, 74, 76; guards, 8, 22–23, 42–46, 53, 101, 131, 141, 145– 146, 152–159; homeland, 12, 26–27, 58, 126, 139, 168; national, 11, 25, 29, 37–38, 54–55, 58–60, 66, 77, 80–84, 89, 102, 144, 164, 168, 177–183, 205, 208, 212, 215, 218–219, 227; networks, 1, 9–10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 64–68, 72, 75– 76, 81, 87, 93, 100, 107, 118, 129, 132, 135, 140, 215, 224, 227, 229, 235, 239, 241, 247, 250; private, 4–5, 13, 17–18, 23, 79, 80, 100, 102, 107–110, 112, 119, 121–123, 128–132, 142–150, 154–156, 160–168, 223; scape-shifting, 11, 16, 18, 20, 23; securityscapes, 5, 9–12, 16, 20–25, 80, 100, 129, 143, 145–147, 150, 157, 160–161 Shopping, 31, 42, 44, 47, 100, 114. See also Shopping malls Shopping malls, 14, 31, 41–47, 53, 100, 114 Sloterdijk, Peter, 5, 20, 28–29, 209 Smart technology, 110, 151, 208, 220, 226, 231–232, 239–240, 247 Smuggling, 79, 92, 96 Snowden, Edward, 118n25, 213–214 Social structure, 5, 13, 157, 246, 249 Somalia, 22, 24, 31, 37, 44, 52, 54 South Africa, 16–17, 52, 56, 122, 124, 128– 140, 218, 250 Sovereignty, 6–7, 27, 83, 95, 100, 102, 113, 188 Soviet Union, 61, 77, 80 Stadiums, 6, 11–12, 16, 22, 24, 32, 34, 100– 121, 150 Stoler, Ann Laura, 186, 191–192, 205 Suburban life, 8–9, 13, 45, 134, 141, 153, 162, 202, 240

262

| Index

Surveillance, 2, 7, 14–15, 17, 20–21, 23–25, 57–77, 99, 107, 109–111, 118, 120, 127, 133, 137, 142, 145, 148, 157, 162, 209–210, 213–214, 221, 227–229, 234–236, 250; dataveillance, 14; video, 58, 63, 69, 71, 103, 111, 118, 142, 152, 157, 165–166, 214, 229

United States, 10, 17, 23, 29, 38, 58, 61, 63, 66–67, 95, 102, 117, 135, 138–140, 142– 149, 158, 161, 165, 178, 186–191, 197, 199, 202–206, 213–218, 221

Verticality, 12, 19–20, 27, 55, 68, 206, 215, 220–227, 230, 234–235, 240, 244–246, 249 Television, 103, 114–115, 118–119, 164, 207, Violence, 8–9, 15–16, 24–25, 39, 49, 51, 57, 224 73, 96, 103–105, 107, 114, 116, 130, 139– Terrorism, 7, 15, 18, 29, 32–35, 37–39, 41– 140, 151, 172, 185, 190, 204–205, 207, 215, 59, 67–68, 72–83, 88, 90–97, 102, 109, 223–224, 229 113–121, 124, 126, 140, 143–144, 177, 183, Virilio, Paul, 210, 230 205, 214–215, 222, 249; War on Terror, Visuality, 19, 60, 62–63, 69, 103, 112, 156, 33, 38, 41, 54–55, 77, 205. See also Coun164, 171, 204, 206, 210, 212, 221, 228 terterrorism Volumetric space, 12, 19 Texas, 141, 147 Vulnerability, 143, 158, 211, 241–242 Threats, 3, 6–7, 15–16, 19, 37–38, 42, 49, 52, 61, 72–73, 79–83, 88, 90, 93–95, Wacquant, Loic, 47, 56 103, 111–112, 125–127, 134, 138, 143–145, Walls, 4, 7, 12, 14, 17–18, 21–23, 27, 37, 41, 150–153, 157, 159, 161, 165, 167–168, 170, 45–47, 51, 54, 63, 100, 117, 131, 134, 141– 176–179, 183, 184, 190, 192, 197, 202, 207, 142, 146, 148, 150, 152–159, 166–169, 215, 229 199, 223 Training, 61, 73, 88, 91–93, 119, 171, 179, Welfare state 20, 130, 144, 173, 231– 190, 198–199, 205, 236, 253 238,240, 243, 246–250. See also GovTri-Border Area, 15, 79, 84–86, 91, 93, 95 ernmentality Tulumello, Simone, 5, 29 Wells, H. G., 19, 30 Turkey, 19, 187 Wenner Gren Foundation, 3 Twitter, 48, 53, 111 Westbrook, David, 26 n8, 30 World Cup, 16, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, Uncertainty, 6, 59, 79, 142, 176 116–117, 119 UEFA (Union of European Football AsWorld War II, 186, 196, 214 sociations), 106–109, 118–119 United Kingdom, 116, 118, 120, 206, 228 Zedner, Lucia, 127, 140