Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security

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My paper on stockpiling, published in Security Dialogue, began with party conversations. When I told people that I work on catastrophe preparedness, the conversation inevitably shifted towards stockpiling. Concerned friends would ask how much food, water, and candles you have to store to be safe during an emergency. The gentrification critic would remark that we don’t have enough space in our apartments anyway! Media nostalgics was happy to have found a justification for keeping their video recorders because they would still be able to watch old VHS of Pretty Woman and Terminator 2 after the internet broke down. Someone would surely tell a story of their grandparents stockpiling tons of canned food for the nuclear apocalypse, to which the food snob would reply that he’d rather starve than live without fresh herbs and vegetables. At first, I was glad if the foodie was able to pivot the conversation towards pickling because actually, I didn’t have much to say about stockpiling. I was interested in emergency scenario analysis, critical infrastructures, disrupted circulations, rapid response etc., but not in stockpiling. Little by little, I became more concerned with it precisely because it is mundane enough to qualify as a party conversation but also because, when looked at more closely, it turned out to be pretty exciting.

What I first discovered is that even though stockpiling seems to be a thing of the Cold War past, it is in fact a matter for the future: it is a kind of stuff that freezes or preserves time so that it can keep you safe in a turbulent future. This is the material and temporal quality of the stockpile; a quality, however, that does not come for free, but requires elaborate ordering and maintenance work. You have to can food, freeze vital matter, store emergency equipment, keep away parasitic animals and more generally the “tooth of time” that makes the material world, and with it the securing function of stockpiling, eventually fall apart. Yet stockpiling does not only have a temporality but also a history that seems to be as long as “human civilization”. Stockpiling, it turns out, is not only a security technique but also a tool for the exercise of power. In the earliest states, stockpiling implied a bureaucratic caste that collected surpluses, stored them in a central place and thereby materialized their power over the allocation of resources that they could now make scarce or affluent at will. In modernity, stores became more dispersed as money, commodity exchange, and new infrastructures made it possible to procure resources through circulation. But as more and more disruptions in such circulations escalated into emergencies in the 20th century, stockpiling became a reflexive security device reactive to risks associated with these disruptions. As a reaction to the First and Second World Wars, states started stockpiling critical raw materials (in the paper I analyse the case of the German Office of War Raw Materials during WWI headed by the famous system builder and public intellectual Walter Rathenau). As a consequence of the oil price crisis during the Cold War, elaborate oil stockpiling projects were devised first by the OECD and then by the IEA.

Even in the complex post 9/11 security landscape, stockpiling continues to be an important security technology. The article examines the role of reserves in contemporary German catastrophe preparedness. There are still over a hundred strategically located grain stores in Germany. And new public health threats like emerging infectious diseases prompted the establishment of pharmaceutical stockpiling. Yet fiscal austerity and budgetary constraints limit security stockpiling in catastrophe preparedness. In addition, the rise of just-in-time logistics has reduced buffer stocks so that supply chain disruptions can escalate quickly and potentially – think of food logistics – also affect the population. To compensate for the absence of public and private security stores, the government is now prompting citizens to establish emergency stockpiles. This is one of the reasons so many people have heard about stockpiling because after every other emergency the government and the news media emphasize the importance of private preparedness, and of stockpiling in particular. Although I wouldn’t argue against storing a couple of water bottles or batteries, this governmental advice is not only indicative of the out-of-stock austerity state, but also shows the paradoxical nature of mobilizing the stockpiling self as the storekeeper of last resort. Governments prompt their citizens to engage in something that private corporations and “fiscally responsible” governments are less and less willing to do. What makes stockpiling contemporary is thus precisely that it goes against the grain of current social, economic, and technological trends – from austerity and JIT to streaming – and reacts to the multiple risks associated with them.

Find Andreas Folkers’ full article on Stockpiling in Volume 50, Issue 6 of Security Dialogue: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0967010619868385

Who are the Civilians in South Sudan?

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EPA/JM LOPEZ

Why are local communities so often targeted in South Sudan’s civil wars? How do their attackers justify violence against people defined as civilians in international law? In our article in the current issue of Security Dialogue, we answer these questions by placing recent brutalities within a longer history of conflict logics and practices in South Sudan’s modern history of violent governance. These evolving local norms inform how armed actors engage with residents in today’s conflicts.

State governance has always been violent towards South Sudan’s populations. Since slave raiders and traders shaped the first colonial incursions in the mid-1800s, ordinary people have been strategic assets to be managed and exploited. As such populations are not just legitimate targets in conflicts, but key resources to capture and control. State power was extended over Sudan’s peripheries in the 1900-1920s through mass forced displacement and depopulation of strategic areas (such as Kafia Kingi); through collective ‘punishment’ of defensive populations (for example, the aerial bombardment of Nuer communities); and violent raiding by proxy fighters from other communities, turning residents against each other. Sudan’s civil wars in the South from the 1960s continued these practices. Communities were targeted collectively based on ethnicity and imputed loyalty, displaced, and forced into camps for ‘protection’ and control, by both government and rebel forces.

Today’s UN Protection of Civilians camps, the first UN bases in the world to be turned into protection camps for local populations, are a part of this long history of violent governance. These armed groups continue to see the population in contested areas as part of the war, where everyone is (potentially) part of the collective enemy, and where controlling desperate poor populations is also a convenient way of gaining access to external aid and cheap labour. It thus makes more sense that, since 2013, armed groups have targeted populations in forced displacements, collective ‘punishments’, violent raids and armed control of refugee camps.

The article also shows how this distinction between armed combatants and those defined as civilians in international law is further blurred by violent governance tactics since the colonial period. Successive governments have actively sought to incorporate the population into their militarised security apparatus. During colonial rule, men and women were pressed into service as enslaved or otherwise dependent servants, soldiers, and workers in fortified and militarised garrison towns. After Sudan’s independence in 1956, the government encouraged or coerced residents into acting as spies, ‘national guards’, informers and ‘local protection’ forces. This militarised security state continues, and continues to blur the South Sudanese definition of civilian.

This analysis does not excuse the massive and systematic violence against the general population of South Sudan. But without due consideration of these deeply engraved historical systems and logics of violent governance, today’s brutal conflicts become incomprehensible. Any attempt to implement protection measures for populations affected by war needs to be informed by a proper understanding of these local logics of conflict. In this logic, the UN in South Sudan is already another military-political authority managing local populations and controlling their movements. With the NGOs servicing them and the UN peacekeepers guarding them, these PoC camps are a strategic political asset to be managed and exploited.  

Read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0967010619863262

* The article is an outcome of a larger project supported by the Research Council of Norway: “Protection of Civilians: From Principle to Practice” (https://www.prio.org/Projects/Project/?x=1558)

Review of Violence: Humans in Dark Times

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Evans, Brad & Lennard, Natasha, Violence: Humans in Dark Times. San Fransisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2018, 335 pp., ISBN-10 0872867544

In her writings on violence and totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously used the term “dark times” to refer to not just the monstrosities of the 20th  century, but the necessity of countering violence with sustained intellectual engagement. Speaking of the importance of challenging abuses of power in all its forms, Arendt writes that, “even in the darkest times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth (Arendt 1968, p 7). In Violence: Humans in Dark Times, authors Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard take these words as inspiration, or rather, provocation, to examine the myriads of ways in which violence operates in the world today, and subsequently, how to confront it. In a series of conversations with theorists, activists, and artists, Evans and Lennard attempt to explore the role that violence plays in modern politics, culture, the media, public speech, intellectualism, and against the environment. This is a work that is meant for both scholarly and general audiences, as it combines nuanced critical analysis and personal testimony to create an accessible, albeit cerebral, picture of violence.

First published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, the twenty-nine interviews in this volume attempt to confront the complexities of violence in all the ways it is expressed and normalized. This begins, in the volume’s introduction, with a nuanced examination of the concept of violence itself. Evans and Lennard approach violence through an ethical lens, arguing that it is not some abstract or theoretical problem, but a “violation in the very conditions that constitute what it means to be human (p. 3).” Victimization, they contend, is not the only characteristic of violence. It is an intellectual and pedagogical force that is sustained through normalization via the media and rationalized via cultural definitions of what is permissible versus what is impermissible (p. 4). In their approach to violence, Evans and Lennard see art as integral to the political field, and thus, to the study of power. Subsequently, this volume consists of interviews with renowned critical scholars, artists, performers, writers, and thinkers, and it is in this treatment that Evans and Lennard present a powerful, complex, and thought-provoking understanding of violence in its varied forms, scales, and architectures. The medium of the interview, while limiting the depth of inquiry, allows for an increased scope of discussion and a degree of equity between interviewees, which in itself exemplifies the perspective through which Evans and Lennard approach the question of violence. That is, they contend, a discussion on violence demands an ethical platform based upon reciprocity, authenticity, and the inclusion of different voices and perspectives (ibid.).

While all of these interviews offer valuable, poignant, and intriguing conceptualizations of violence, Violence: Humans in Dark Times is structured around a few lines of inquiry that see multiple treatments. In “The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher” and “Violence to Thought,” George Yancy and David Theo Goldberg speak of the link between violence and the intellectual in the public arena (p. 31, p 213), discussing their experiences in the Trump era as a way of understanding the violence of “post-racial” America. In “The Violence of Forgetting” and “Living with Disappearance,” Henry A. Giroux and Allen Feldmen talk of ignorance and disappearance, discussing how denial affects the capacity for critical thought (p. 65, p. 291). These conversations on the threat to intellectualism are presented in tandem with thoughts on modern violence by noted thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman (p. 43), Brian Massumi (p. 249), Elaine Scarry (p. 263), and Michael J. Shapiro (p. 301), all of whom eloquently discuss the ways in which their scholarship conceptualizes the problem of violence today.

As previously noted, the authors are particularly interested in the ways in which art and aesthetics can confront violence.  As Evans and Lennard suggest, art, when done properly, allows for a fundamental questioning of politics. It is directly concerned with questions of oppression and injustice, and has the potential to inspire new dialogues through alternative mediums of public engagement (p 199). To this end, they present interviews from a number of artists and performers. Simon Critchley discusses how the Roman tragedy affords us a unique perspective of modern U.S. politics (p. 19); Bracha L. Ettinger argues for art as a form of political and ethical intervention (p. 107); Gottfried Henwein examines the role of violence in his own work as an artist (p. 159); and Christopher Alden critiques the gendered politics of the opera (p. 225).

The breadth of analyses experienced in Violence: Humans in Dark Times is both integral to the volume’s argument, and a limiting factor in the search for a thorough conceptualization of violence. It is through these snapshots of how violence is conceptualized in different fields of study and experiences that Evans and Lennard highlight how it is an organizing principle of our modern times — not merely a matter of direct experience or structure, but an ontological phenomenon. However, the structuring of the book via interview, and not, for instance, topic, results in an unfinished, or perhaps uneven, conceptualization of violence. Readers are left wondering as to how these interviews connect to the overarching understanding of violence as an ethics.

While Evans and Lennard note that they are interested in considering the importance of both art and activism in reactions against and understandings of violence, the series would be well suited by the continued inclusion of theorists able to discuss how specific manifestations of violence — for instance, gendered violence, colonial violence, and/or violence against LGBTQ communities — can be understood and acted upon through art and intellectual engagement.

In its introduction, Violence: Humans in Dark Times channels Hannah Arendt in calling for illumination in the darkness. This darkness, Arendt explains, is the disorder and the hunger, “the massacres and the slaughterers … the despair… the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse (Arendt 1968, p 6)” that defines our modern times, and yet remains invisible, justified through systemic explanations and obfuscation. The metaphor of light and dark as a way to suggest the concepts of visibility and invisibility is intriguing in this aspect, as it suggests that the darkness itself is a kind of violence; an existential violence that begets acts and systems of violence. It is this violence, this ignorance of violence, that the illumination that Evans and Lennard present attempts to confront. The interviews in this volume, as small kindling or tiny flames, in the dark, begin a discussion on modern violence by speaking to those who experience, learn about, and utilize it in their lives and their work. While the editors do not engage directly with the question of what now, their interviews are perhaps meant more as a “spark” to inspire their readers into action, as a challenge that asks us to re-think our relationship with violence itself. In this way, Violence: Humans in Dark Times is an intriguing beginning to a much-needed sustained intellectual and aesthetic response to the horrors of modern times.

References:

Arendt, H., 1970. Men in Dark Times, First edition. Mariner, San Diego, CA

Evans, B., Lennard, N., 2018. Violence: Humans in Dark Times. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA.

Charting the impact of ‘gender-sensitive’ DDR and SSR programs in post-conflict reconstruction

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Over the past twenty years feminist activists, civil society groups, and international organisations have argued that there is a need to actively consider gender in all aspects of security policy. Demanding shifts in the way that Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR) programmes are delivered has been one of the most successful areas of this activism. After a string of examples in the 1990s and early 2000s, where DDR and SSR programs excluded women, or failed to address the particular ways in which their gender made them insecure, real change has since been achieved in international programming.

Rwanda has widely been lauded as a success story in this regard. The externally-funded, locally-owned DDR/SSR programme’s gender-sensitive approach has included actively integrating women into the new national Rwanda Defence Force (RDF), and implementing polices to address gender insecurities across Rwanda, as well as within military families. However, rather than focus on efforts to mainstream gender equality within the national military and reduce overt forms of gendered violence in society, we examined how Rwandan masculinity has been reconstructed through the DDR/SSR programme. To do this, we analysed RDF policy discourse, training materials, the writings of a Rwandan military historian, and statements from Rwandan male and female soldiers during depth interviews. We then questioned whether this reconstruction process smuggled harmful notions of gender and militarism into gender-sensitive programming.

Our research shows that the Rwanda Defence Force has rejected the explicitly violent and aggressive forms of militarised masculinity that have received most attention by feminist critics. However, the RDF’s promotion of a more ‘civilised’, respectable form of militarised masculinity has been used to entrench the central role of an elite-dominated military in the post-conflict state, and has marginalised other ways to be a man in Rwandan society. We show how this has been achieved through the appropriation of Rwandan myths of origin, in addition to internationally imported myths promoting the ideal of the cosmopolitan military in international DDR/SSR programming. In doing so, the Rwandan Defence Force maintains an oppressive pattern of practice (which we term a masculine logic) that while appearing to be egalitarian, has produced several harmful consequences in Rwanda. The most visible of these include the entrenchment of oppressive norms of femininity that demand women behave in ‘respectable’ ways in order to deserve the protection that DDR/SSR has demanded; the silencing of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) soldiers; and by banishing those military men who no longer fit the new Rwandan ideals of militarised masculinity to civilian society. Our field research in Rwanda also revealed that educated young Rwandan men who have been singled out as potential leaders experience increased surveillance under this oppressive masculine logic.

In problematising some of the prevailing ways in which this agenda has been pursued by policymakers and academics, our article reaffirms the importance of remaining attentive to how ‘gender-sensitive’ programs can still smuggle oppressive masculine logics into their design and implementation in post-conflict reconstruction environments.

Droneland: Towards a Domestic Drone Theory

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In December 2018, a civilian drone operator allegedly disrupted hundreds of flights at Gatwick Airport in the UK by flying an industrial class drone across the flight path of aircrafts, causing a major political and security incident. To be sure, the Gatwick drone was neither the first nor the last such incident – similar cases have since been reported at Heathrow, Newark, Dubai, and Dublin airports – but, nonetheless, it seems to represent a new moment in the (short) history of Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs). If we are all familiar with the deployment of armed predator drones in foreign battlespaces, and increasingly aware that drones are now also being deployed by domestic law enforcement and immigration authorities in Europe and North America, what happened at Gatwick Airport was the most visible sign of the emergence of a new species of non-state drone actor. In a direct reversal of the ‘normal’ power relation between the state and the citizen, the citizen herself is now able to deploy drones against the state – with apparent impunity.

To begin to understand what is at stake in the phenomenon of the domestic drone – a phenomenon which is by no means simply an abstract political or juridical concept, of course, but a concrete reality which is lived by citizens in their everyday lives – we now need a specifically domestic drone theory. It is revealing that most drone theory still tends to view civil drone use through the optic of its military equivalent: law enforcement UAVs are thus commonly read as a symptom of the growing “militarization” of police or immigration control. If this martial logic inevitably tends to reduce civilians to passive targets of state drones, we also now need to consider how civilians may actively engage with, resist or even enjoy their status as drone citizens. In such burgeoning fields as drone art, drone journalism, drone activism and the drone leisure industry, we increasingly encounter a citizen who is not simply a fearful, anxious or suspicious object, but a drone subject, actor or consumer who can exploit UAVs  for her own ends.

In Arthur Bradley and Oliver Davis’s articles in Security Dialogue, as well as in Antonio Cerella’s interview with the acclaimed artist Adam Harvey on the Security Dialogue blog, we seek to begin the work of mapping the political geography of our domestic dronescape. To explore some of the complex ways in which civilian life is lived with, through and against the drone – from active or passive obedience, through complicity, to outright resistance – we focus on a range of empirical sites from the 2016 killing of Micah Johnson by Dallas Police in what was reported to be the first domestic ‘drone strike’ on a civilian on American territory, at one extreme, to the range of anti-drone surveillance clothing created by Adam Harvey, on the other. What exactly, we ask, is at stake in the deployment of law enforcement, border patrol and other domestic drones? Is it a singular, exceptional and unprecedented event in the history of the modern state or the application of a pre-existent military logic? To what extent, finally, does it foreclose upon individual or collective citizen agency – or might it also make possible new species of civil participation, resistance and freedom? In all these ways, the domestic drone must remain under our critical surveillance.

This introduction is a part of the Security Dialogue special compilation ‘Droneland’ edited by Arthur Bradley and Antonia Cerella. An interview Dressing for a machine-readable world with Adam Harvey by Antoinio Cerella accompanies this compilation and can also be found on this blog, and two peer reviewed full-length articles: Deadly force: Contract, killing, sacrifice by Arthur Bradley and Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing by Oliver Davis were published in the 2019 August issue 50(4) of Security Dialogue.

Dressing for a machine-readable world: An interview with Adam Harvey

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‘Think Privacy’
Public Service Announcements by the Privacy Gift Shop
©Adam Harvey 2016

Adam Harvey1 is an award-winning artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work has been widely covered in such publications as the New York Times, CNN and the Huffington Post, and has also been cited by critical theorists such as Grégoire Chamayou and Derek Gregory. Harvey’s work explores the societal impacts of networked data analysis technologies with a focus on computer vision, digital imaging technologies, and counter surveillance. In particular, Harvey is interested in the question of how fashion can be used to address ‘the rise of surveillance, the power of those who surveil, and the growing need to exert more control over privacy’ (Harvey 2012).

To quickly summarize his career thus far, Harvey’s projects include CV Dazzle, camouflage from computer vision; Stealth Wear, his ‘Anti-Drone’ fashion range, and the Privacy Gift Shop, an online marketplace for counter-surveillance art. For his Stealth Wear collection (2012), Harvey fabricated a set of clothing inspired by traditional Islamic dress from silver-plated fabric that reflects thermal radiation, enabling the wearer to avert overhead thermal surveillance. The metal-plated fibres reflect and diffuse the thermal radiation emitted by a body, thereby reducing the wearer’s thermal signature under observation by a long wave infrared camera (Harvey 2012). This range of anti-drone clothing is available for purchase online, alongside other works of counter-surveillance art, at Harvey’s Privacy Gift Shop (https://privacygiftshop.com). In the years since it has been produced, the Stealth Wear collection has been the subject of features in the New York Times (Wortham 2013), Washington Post (Priest 2013) and Der Speigel (Backovic 2013).

If a range of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Mahwish Christy and the collaborative art installation #NotABugSplat (https://notabugsplat.com) undoubtedly address similar questions of the ethico-political status of drone warfare, surveillance and data collection, what arguably distinguishes Adam Harvey’s work in this field is its specifically non-military, or domestic, focus. Grégoire Chamayou (2015: 203-4) provides this description of his work in Drone Theory: ‘One of the questions that arises is whether societies that have, for the time being, failed to rule out the use of this type of technology in wars waged on the other side of the world will eventually realize, perhaps with a jolt, that this technology is designed to be used on them too, and whether they will mobilize themselves to block its use. For it is important for them to become aware that a future of video surveillance with armed drones awaits us if we don’t prevent it. As a last resort, there is always the possibility of purchasing anti-drone clothing, such as that invented by the artist Adam Harvey. It is made from a special metallic fabric that renders the body practically invisible to drones’ thermal imaging cameras’.

In his interview with Antonio Cerella, Adam Harvey discusses the conceptual origins and reception of his work, its relationship to critical theory on drones, surveillance and biopolitics by figures like Chamayou and Gregory, the growing militarization of the domestic sphere and, more widely, how art can be used to – playfully – resist or challenge what he calls the fatalism of living under the gaze of domestic drone surveillance.

Antonio Cerella (AC): In recent years, your work has become increasingly influential in theoretical and philosophical circles – Grégoire Chamayou refers to your anti-drone camouflage in his Drone Theory (Chamayou 2015). To what extent are you aware of, or interested in, contemporary theoretical debates about biopolitics, drone theory, surveillance and security studies? Do they inform your work at all?

Adam Harvey (AH): Theoretical debates around surveillance are of great interest to me, but I’ve intentionally unhinged myself from thinking through the more historical part of these debates because I think the current state of surveillance and security is mostly unprecedented.

For example, Bentham’s Panopticon is of limited value in thinking about how social media is designed to accumulate data that’s used to train neural networks which are eventually licensed to government surveillance programs. And the Orwellian concept of Big Brother seems to anesthetize more complex discussions about computer vision being used to infer sexuality, criminality, or one’s psychological state.

As an artist, I see an opportunity for imaging new ways to represent the current state of surveillance, if it can even be called that. We are being observed by drones in many ways that we can’t know. And my project Stealth Wear (Figure 1) was about asking what are the limits of perceptibility – how do you know how we’re being looked at?

Figure 1 Stealth Wear: ‘Anti-Drone’ Burqa
Photo: ©Adam Harvey 2013
Materials: Burqa with silver-plated rip-stop nylon exterior and black silk interior.
Credits: Engineered by Adam Harvey. Designed by Adam Harvey and Johanna Bloomfield.
Model: Tate

One of the biggest challenges in discussing topics related to surveillance technologies is to avoid becoming fatalistic. My work aims to imagine new and expressive ways of adapting to this environment. In my own work, there is an object attached to it that is a ‘discussion-generator’ that people can easily refer to. From my perspective, it’s important to use wording that is appealing and provocative, and to frame the work so that there is an overlap with different circles, because the most important thing is what happens next, once the project is activated.

Only after working on these projects have I discovered, and enjoyed, becoming involved in actual contemporary discussions about drones, which I’m grateful to be included in.2 For me, experimental art projects become a gateway to other forms of related knowledge.

AC: An important theme informing much of the research on drones is the question of what happens when military drones come ‘home’ and begin to be deployed by domestic law enforcement agencies, immigration and border patrol services and so on. According to Chamayou, your work addresses the kind of society which has finally realized that the drones they are using in other parts of the world are designed to be used on them too – that a future of civilian surveillance by armed drones is here. For example, it has recently been reported that the Metropolitan Police in London are now using drones equipped with thermal imaging technologies for counter-terrorism purposes3 and, as Arthur Bradley and Oliver Davis discuss in their contributions to Security Dialogue, last year in Dallas the police killed a suspect by using a robot bomb (see also Graham 2016). Could you say something about how your work addresses this ‘militarization’ of the domestic sphere? Does it challenge that process? Or perhaps even reinforce it by encouraging civilians to adopt processes of camouflage?

AH: I think the reality is that dense urban areas have become military sites. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s how adversaries have adapted to asymmetrical military power, by advancing their mission into vulnerable non-militarized areas. The response from national security agencies has been to infiltrate communications, and to create deterrence through surveillance accountability. In New York City, where I previously lived, armed soldiers, bomb-sniffing dogs, and cell phone interceptors are a regular part of life. In 2012, when I began research and development on Stealth Wear, it seemed clear that drones were an inevitable next step once the economics worked out.

In my work, I encourage people to engage with, but essentially resist militarization, by adopting camouflaging techniques to modulate their visibility and hopefully mitigate the negativity of this militarization. The big challenge is to confront the preexisting narratives of privacy-paranoia.

So, the tension is: ‘do I accept this garment at the risk of being labelled paranoid’ or ‘do you embrace it as a fashion-forward concept?’ I tell people that you may only wear a tuxedo once or twice a year, but it’s still a great garment. So, if your rationale is that you’re okay with this garment that you wear once a year, then maybe it’s okay that you wear a camouflaging garment once a year if you want to evade thermal surveillance. But I guess it’s not that simple because it’s still tied up with the dangerous idea of ‘why do you want to hide?’, instead of thinking about it as an act of protection or defense. In some ways, that’s what fashion is: a kind of defense against categorization. Fashion gives you control over how people interpret you.

AC: What do you mean by protection against categories and categorization? It seems that this is related to your current work as well.

AH: Fashion gives you the ability to role-play and to shape-shift between social classes. By appearing in different garments, you can convince people that you belong to a different social class. There are different types of camouflage and one of them is social camouflage where I try to blend in to a crowd of really smart people when I’m not smart by wearing smart clothes. Or the opposite, that you dress down as an undercover agent wearing a T-shirt, carrying a newspaper, with a baseball hat on. These are equally valid forms of camouflage that aren’t seen as military, but can be still used in military ways: covert agents deploy a very basic street fashion to camouflage them. Fashion is an integral part of deception, both for civilian and military appearance.

AC: Why is the idea of camouflage so important to your work? In your work, it sometimes seems as if we can’t really stop or block surveillance as a society – the best we can do is hide ourselves as individuals or even run away. Is this the only solution to the kind of categorization you’re talking about?

AH: I agree that we can’t stop surveillance. I think this would be an unattainable goal and this is where surveillance fatalism re-emerges. It’s not possible to opt out or hide completely. Framing it this way guarantees failure. However, there is still a lot of room to be expressive and successful in defeating, blocking, or reducing certain kinds of surveillance. In a way, both fashion and camouflage are about staying one season ahead of the latest trends.

There is an interesting story about the word ‘camouflage’. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt considered it as a ‘form of effeminate cowardice, a mere defensive strategy [that] all but announced an unmanly desire to hide instead of fight’ (Elias 2016). Throughout the early 20th century camouflage quickly proved useful and by the end of World War II it had finally evolved into sign of humanity’s increasing intelligence – of our ability to outwit our opponents, outmaneuvering their sensory or perceptual strategies.

I find it strange that we don’t see the same connection happening with privacy right now. In the beginning of this century, there was a lot of negativity around the words “hiding” and “privacy”. And now in 2017, we’re beginning to see the same situation unfold: privacy is increasingly becoming a sign of intelligence.

AC: So, you’re putting forward a reverse argument. You’re saying that in the last two centuries, camouflage has been used for military purposes, but we can use it for civilian purposes in order to get some privacy back?

AH: Right. I’m also saying that embracing military-strategy surplus is not taboo. I think a lot of people aren’t comfortable engaging with military culture. But, if it can be reformulated in a more fashionable way, then people will be more willing to engage with topics such as thermal surveillance or facial recognition. When I started working on CV Dazzle in 2010, face detection was mostly linked to national security, not consumer products. Subverting it meant also meant subverting national security. Similarly, in 2012-2013, the primary use of thermal drone surveillance was to locate foreign enemy combatants. Now both are a daily part of the UK’s domestic surveillance program (Davis 2017)

AC: In your project CV Dazzle (Figure 2), you show how some very lo-tech fashion modifications that anyone can make can be used to overcome hi-tech surveillance technologies. You can even buy some of the technologies you develop on your website the Privacy Gift Shop (Figure 3). Another theme from our recent work in Security Dialogue is the extent to which the ever-increasing penetration of drones into the domestic sphere might also create the possibility of new forms of civil resistance. To what extent do projects like CV Dazzle describe a politics of ‘everyday resistance’?

Figure 2: CV Dazzle Look 3
Photo: Adam Harvey
Model: Jude
Hair: Pia Vivas
Art Direction: DIS Magazine

AH: That’s a great way to look at it. When you put clothes on in the morning, when you style yourself to go out, you need to consider the new environments of mass surveillance we’ve created and aren’t easily escapable. Machine vision is a reality: you’re being observed and analyzed and will be continually analyzed for the next decades whenever that information is stored on a database. How do you reflect that in the way that you appear throughout time? Well it’s not possible to see into the future, but it is possible to see into the present, to a certain degree. A lot of the important information on what’s happening in the computer vision industry is buried in long technical papers, but as you become more aware, the decisions you make in the morning – everyday resistance – will begin to affect the way that you dress. You start dressing for a machine-readable world.

AC: Can you say a bit more the relationship between everyday resistance and the idea of play? It seems you are talking about something slightly different from the militarization of the private sphere. It’s not about militarizing yourself, it’s more about a playful mode of resistance.

AH: Yeah, I like to avoid thinking of these projects as resistance. In fact, they’re the opposite. Where resistance costs you, these projects are designed to afford new opportunities. I mean, they’re politically-motivated and serve the same purpose, but I absolutely want to avoid creating more resistance for people.

AC:  How, if at all, do you see the political debate around drones and surveillance changing in the next few years? Do you envisage any kind of concerted attempt by governments to challenge the monopolies of the big tech companies? Is the idea of ‘a human right to our own data’, for example, possible or desirable?

AH: I think we’re only at the beginning of learning what it means to be digitized at varying resolutions. Take the capabilities of cameras now (a lot of my research is on visual information) – it’s astonishing how much you can learn through aggregate information with neural network classifiers. For example, with a 6 x 7 pixel face image, you can do facial recognition on a group of 50 people with 95% accuracy. At 100 x 100 pixels, you have enough information to recognize hundreds of thousands of individuals. But even with 11 x 11 pixels, it’s now possible to resynthesize a low-resolution image into a higher-resolution image, meaning 11 x 11 pixels is nearly enough for some facial recognition applications.

I can imagine an EU-centric push towards a human right on protection of personal visual data. It’s astonishing how much biometric information can be obtained remotely without one’s consent. For example, it’s possible to extract your heart rate and skin conditions and iris data from over a hundred meters away. This information could eventually be augmented by multispectral sensors that can measure body temperature (thermal) or vein patterns (infrared). But first we need to develop a better understanding of what exactly we mean when we say ‘face’ or ‘biometric’. Do we mean to include psychological inferences and heart irregularities along with facial recognition?

AC: Who has the upper hand at this moment in these new forms of visual recognition technologies? The private companies or the government? Or are they working together for security purposes?

AH: They are both working together. I think the corporations have the upper hand of talent, but not funding or hardware. The NSA will always be years ahead of corporations with their computational capabilities. But this could be changing with regards to quantum computing. You can see evidence of collaboration in the Snowden documents, which reveal that the NSA received a license for facial recognition software called PittPatt from Google. But PittPatt was a start-up from Carnegie Mellon. And Carnegie Mellon receives significant funding from the Department of Defense, DARPA, and IARPA. Depending on how you look it, it’s one ecosystem.

AC: This is very much related to the idea of the fungibility of technology. The government only funds those projects that are fungible for military purposes. When a technology is invented, it has to be functional for security purposes, otherwise they would never invest any money in it.

So, anyway, you are currently in London for the opening of a new project. Could you tell us a little about this and your future plans?

AH: Recently, I’ve come to the realization that visual machine communications are an integral part of how the new world is operating. I used to approach computer vision and surveillance from the perspective of counter-surveillance and avoidance. But now this limits my ability to communicate. I’ve now changed my approach and I’m embracing these technologies, because as I understand that they’re here to stay. I’m thinking about how they can be applied to helping human rights groups, how they can be used by groups like Forensic Architecture.4 To ignore the technological capabilities that enable you to keep protesting surveillance is the wrong strategy moving forward. I now believe visual machine communications to be an essential way of understanding the world and communicating information.

The work I am presenting here in London is called MegaPixels.5 It’s a real time facial recognition query into the databases that are used to train facial recognition software. Most people don’t know that they might be in these databases because the databases are created from social media images. They are created from photos posted online. The installation currently uses MegaFace, which is the largest publicly available facial recognition training dataset. When you walk up to the installation you’ll see the highest confidence matches from the dataset, and there is a small chance that you may find yourself. Out of the billions of people in the world, this dataset has 672,000 people. By chance, at least 2 people during the exhibition were positively identified in the dataset.

AC: Can I ask you a very difficult final question? I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, but I wanted to raise what I think might be his response to the situation you are describing, namely, that we are very easy to profile because we are so easily identifiable through these new media technologies, social media, Facebook, Google, etc. Is this because of our behaviour, or is it because the system compels us to behave in a specific way which can be recognized? I think Foucault would say the latter: it’s not because we are always very similar to ourselves but because the system provides us with very detailed, structured pathways which we need to follow to behave as ourselves. We have to invent ourselves by means of the system and that is the reason why we are recognizable. So, in a way, the only way out would be to unplug the system.

AH: This is reality, and you can certainly see it with facial recognition and facial analysis. People become recognizable as the identities they bought into. Faceception (www.faception.com) is one company that clearly shows this feedback loop. It’s a filter bubble effect in the physical world. We can become trapped in the datasets of our former selves.

References

Backovic, L (2012) ‘Hier kommt der Drohnen-Schutzanzug’. Spiegel online, 17th January. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/stealth-wear-modedesigner-adam-harvey-stellt-drohnen-schutzanzug-vor-a-877844.html (accessed 24.05.18).

Elias, Ann (2016) ‘Camouflage and its impact on Australia in WWII: An Art Historian’s Perspective’. Salus Journal. Vol 4, No. 1.

Chamayou, Grégoire (2015) Drone Theory tr. Janet Lloyd, London: Penguin.

Davis, Caroline (2017) ‘London could get 50m armed police base to tackle terrorism’, The Guardian, 11 September. Accessed 01.11.17. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/11/london-new-armed-police-base-met-tackle-terrorism

Graham, DA (2016) ‘The Dallas shooting and the advent of police killer robots’, The Atlantic  http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/dallas-police-robot/490478/ (accessed 01.11.17).

Harvey, A (2013) https://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear/ (accessed 24.05.18).

Priest (2013) ‘Government surveillance spurs Americans to fight back’, Washington Post, August 14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/government-surveillance-spurs-americans-to-fight-back/2013/08/14/edea430a-0522-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html?utm_term=.45579b1d8d92 (accessed 24.05.18).

Wortham, J (2013) ‘Stealth Wear aims to make a statement’, New York Times, June 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/technology/stealth-wear-aims-to-make-a-tech-statement.html (accessed 24.05.18).

 

This interview is a part of the Security Dialogue special compilation ‘Droneland’ edited by Arthur Bradley and Antonio Cerella. An introduction to this compilation can also be found on this blog, and two peer reviewed full-length articles: Deadly force: Contract, killing, sacrifice by Arthur Bradley and Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing by Oliver Davis were published in the 2019 August issue 50(4) of Security Dialogue.

Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration

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Leena Vastapuu (2018) Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration, London: Zed Books Ltd. Book review by Linn Marie Reklev

Scholars and policy makers put increasing attention on the role of women in conflict and peacebuilding. However, women are often portrayed as “victims”, and their multiple roles in conflict are often ignored. Leena Vastapuu’s new book aims to address this knowledge gap by exploring the various experiences of women in wartime and its aftermath. In doing so, Vasatpuu contributes to academic debates in peace and conflict studies by advancing arguments in feminist peace research, and fleshes out additional insights regarding women’s involvement in civil wars in West Africa. She also provides policy-relevant knowledge, uncovering the consequences of peacebuilding policies that lack an adequate gender analysis. The book is well-written, thorough and thought-provoking, and should be of great interest to a broad audience engaged in peacebuilding issues.

The book addresses the two Liberian civil wars and the post-conflict period, formulating four research questions that aim to capture the life trajectories of women war veterans: 1) addressing the roles of women and girls during the war, 2) the extent to which these roles were recognized in the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programmes implemented, 3) the situation of women war veterans in today’s Liberia, and 4) their aspirations and dreams today. These are discussed individually and chronologically in the book. By applying the theoretical concept of social rafters, arguing that the tactical agency of the Liberian women war veterans is somewhat limited due to their disadvantaged position in society, Vastapuu examines how these Liberian women use available resources to create sturdier “rafts of survival” in a complex security environment (p. 78). She does this through the methodological approach of curious contrapuntalism, which is a way to “critically observe and challenge overlapping and constantly evolving social realities” (p. 8). This approach allows for overlapping narratives and perspectives addressing the same phenomenon, also uncovering marginalized narratives often deemed insignificant. In this way, the author makes visible the perspectives of the women war veterans which provides a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of post-conflict Liberia.

Vastapuu’s book is an important work of methodological innovation as she explicitly acknowledges her limitations as an ‘outsider’ in the environment under study due to differences in culture, social structures and class. To shift the agency from herself to her interlocutors, she applies the ethnographic method of auto-photography, providing her interlocutors with cameras with which they took photos in line with particular themes. Following this, the researcher conducted individual interviews with the participants, where the participant explains why she took the specific photos and what insights they provide in relation to the given topic. In this way, the participants explain their “life-worlds” to the researcher in a “non-imposing manner” (p.5). Chapter 1 delves further into this method, showing how it can be used in practice to examine the everyday life of three Liberian women war veterans as social rafters, through their own eyes. The book’s autoethnographic style at times feels more like reading a novel than an academic book. However, this is not to say that the academic arguments come across as less sound, well-founded or significant.

Traditional notions of gender roles in conflict situations are consistently challenged. In chapter 2, Vastapuu opens up the reader to the realities of her interlocutors’ wartime actualities, including their reasons for joining armed groups and their experiences on the battlefield. She finds that the women’s reasons for joining are complex and diverse: a significant number of girls and women joined to avenge the deaths of loved ones, while some joined due to peer pressure and/or to gain material goods. As Vastapuu notes, the motive of revenge is a factor that “does not fit neatly into the picture of a peace-seeking Liberian mother” (p.49). She also finds that gender was not the most significant category of discrimination within the ranks. Female fighters and commanders were not perceived to be different from, or of less importance than, their male counterparts. In this way, the book highlights that gender relations in conflict contexts work in different ways, and that no assumptions of gender roles should be made without a context-specific analysis.

Chapter 2 also addresses the issue of sexual violence in conflict, finding that the main difference between male and female fighters was that the women were more likely to be raped. By emphasizing the personal stories of her interlocutors, Vastapuu effectively makes clear the brutality and scope of the problem, and not least the severe psychological trauma these women still suffer from today. However, the book also delves into the “strategic” use of intimate relationships in combat situations, which is rarely addressed in the academic literature. The author draws upon the individual stories of her interlocutors to show how many female combatants viewed intimate relationships with male fighters as an important survival strategy – a “channel for sturdier rafts of survival” (p. 79). In this way, the ‘social rafters’ concept proves a useful tool to uncover the complexities of women’s constrained agency in conflict situations.

Chapter 3 assesses the DDR programmes that were implemented in Liberia after each war. Vastapuu uses the curious contrapuntal approach, stringing together the ‘official’ institutional narrative, the experiences of women war veterans themselves, and the ‘external views’ of NGOs, external evaluators and independent researchers in order to discover a fuller story of “what really happened and why” (p. 86). In doing so, she successfully shows how the DDR programmes in reality failed to provide the results they had promised, and argues that they were not sufficiently adapted to the situation on the ground. The ongoing process was in itself seen as a manifestation of justice, “rather than instruments of justice” (p.113). Although arguments that the peacebuilding process must be locally grounded and context-specific are not particularly new, Vastapuu’s approach gives compelling empirical substance to these arguments, and provides new insights into how and why these processes may fail. As such, while conceptually and methodologically innovative, the book also proves to be highly policy-relevant.

Chapter 4 and 5 highlight the real-life consequences of the conflict and the failures of the DDR processes. These chapters address the women veterans’ attempts of ‘social rafting’ in post-conflict Liberia and their hopes and aspirations for the future. Moving between structural issues in modern Liberia related to corruption, employment and education, and the personal stories of the women war veterans, she presents a subtle postcolonial critique. Without explicitly stating so, Vastapuu shows how international actors deserve criticism for how they have operated and continue to operate in Liberia. In this regard, Vastapuu also makes clear the need to implement a gender perspective in all peacebuilding efforts, and the consequences of failing to do so. Indeed, the subtle way of uncovering structural problems by combining personal stories and other narratives to tell “the full story”, is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Ultimately, the book is a compelling read and an important academic contribution also beyond the field of feminist peace research. The innovative methodological approaches of the book, although perhaps perceived to be radical by some, generate insights that traditional research methods may not have. Despite that the context-specific nature of gender relations in conflict are highlighted in the book, one should assume that women play multiple roles in conflict contexts also outside of Liberia. Yet, by emphasizing the perspectives of women war veterans, the perspectives of others – such as male war veterans – are lacking. This has been a conscious and justified choice by the author, from which others may build through additional comparative perspectives that distinguishes between the experiences of other social groups in environments of civil war and post-war reconstruction.

 

Securitizing the Muslim Brotherhood, legitimizing state violence and renewing authoritarianism in post-Arab Spring Egypt

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On 14 August 2013, we watched televised news in horror as Egyptian security forces brutally attacked largely peaceful sit-ins of Muslim Brotherhood supporters protesting against the removal of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

In just 12 hours, the state’s use of live ammunition, snipers, armoured vehicles and bulldozers led to the deaths of an estimated 1000 Egyptians and the smouldering remains of tents, banners and human debris. To onlookers at home and abroad, it looked like the tragic aftermath of a war.

Human Rights Watch called it the biggest massacre in modern Egyptian history. But perhaps more shocking than state violence were the reactions of ordinary people: many Egyptians blamed the Brotherhood for bringing this tragedy on themselves. As researchers of contemporary Egypt we were faced with a baffling paradox: how had revolutionary demands for an end to state violence in 2011, transformed in just 2 years into complicity with the brutality of security forces. Why did Egyptians accept, and in some cases, cheer–as the authorities killed and maimed their fellow citizens? What role did everyday Egyptians play in demonizing the Muslim Brotherhood?

In our Security Dialogue article, we deploy the concept of ‘securitization’ to understand this unprecedented state violence and its widespread acceptance in Egypt. ‘Securitization’ was developed to analyze how security threats are constructed through the speech of state elites in order to allow ‘exceptional’ measures outside of the ‘normal’ political process. But few authors have used the concept to understand security logics in non-democratic contexts, with some arguing that securitization cannot be applied in authoritarian political systems because there are no ‘rules’.

Tahrir Square, 2011 Photo: Jonathan Rashad, Wikimedia

We take a different view. Our article begins by examining what precisely constitutes ‘the rules’ under an authoritarian regime. We draw on the political thought of Marxist Antonio Gramsci, specifically his concepts of hegemony and civil society, to theorise authoritarianism as culturally, institutionally and socially embedded. We argue that a ‘break from the rules’ occurs when rulers deviate from the ‘authoritarian bargain’, thereby rendering state violence unacceptable in the eyes of a critical mass within society. Conversely, the legitimization of state violence is highly dependent upon a consensus within civil society.

The Egypt case illustrates the crucial role of civil society in securitizing the Brotherhood through their demonization of the organization as an existential threat to Egypt. We argue that this wider discourse within Egyptian civil society set the stage for the military coup against former president Morsi on 3 July and further securitising ‘moves’ by the military. In particular, General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s 23 July speech, calling on Egyptians to give the military ‘a mandate to fight terrorism’, and the subsequent mobilization of Egyptians on 26 July, provided crucial political cover for the massacres to follow. Hence, the article highlights the blurred lines between state and non-state actors or, indeed, co-opted and independent actors vis-a-vis the state, in the securitization process.

Finally, the article considers how this securitization process institutionalised new levels of state violence and repression, extending well beyond the Muslim Brotherhood: from youth activists to trade unionists and regime critics. We suggest that securitization not only constitutes a break from ‘normal politics’ but may also be integral to the reconstitution of a new ‘normal politics’ after the revolutionary upheavals of 2011.

The article has implications for how scholars study counter-revolution and the renewal of authoritarianism in the post-Arab Spring era, pointing to the utility of securitization theory in shedding new light on the dynamics underpinning the dramatic increase in the use of state violence, complementing existing institutional and materialist analyses. More broadly, the application of securitization theory to non-democracies opens up new avenues of research into the processes by which security logics are used to enable and sustain authoritarian regimes. Research of such dynamics is perhaps more urgent now than ever before.

Stepping into the haunted house? Two challenges when slowing down critique

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A world without the need for critique is unthinkable. And yet, Critical Security Studies (CSS) have learned that critique is a difficult and far from self-evident exercise. The Security Dialogue 50th anniversary issue builds on this legacy and addresses, once again, the specter of critique. It is an attempt to give words to the messy states of affairs that we explore with our research.

”if critique is a specter that scholars are to address, our world looks like a haunted house”

Doing and mediating critique implies that there is always a multitude of actors who engage in critique. Scientific experts, NGOs, concerned citizens, state authorities, journalists, militias, and more, are all at times ‘critical’ of one thing or another. In other words, if critique is a specter that scholars are to address, our world looks like a haunted house. Hence, we sought to explore the matters of critique as well as how to make our critique matter. By unpacking different ways of ‘doing and mediating critique’, the special issue’s contributions show the diversity of what can be considered a critical intervention, the theoretical and practical challenges of scholarly critique, and its role and its limitations in the world we inhabit. While reflexive and often self-critical, the articles resist the urge to dispel or dismiss the specter. Equally, they resist reducing critique to a monster, the reaction to whom would be to unmask it or fall prey to panic. There is, in many contributions, an experimental effort to find new ways of making critique matter, e.g. thinking with photos or working in security research consortia.

Haunted house. Source: pixabay.com

Our own contribution is an invitation to step into the haunted house. If CSS are to address the specter of critique, we suggest practicing companionship. As we put it in the article, companionship “involves engaging with the possibilities for critical renewal that everyday companions might suggest”. While this position resonates with pragmatist approaches within the so-called ‘practice turn’, our key scholarly companions have been two philosophers of science and technology – Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers. When we put Haraway’s notion of companionship to work, we came to realize that companionship is not always easy. Thus, we want to use this blog post to reflect about two major challenges we encountered and continue to struggle with.

First, to address the specter of critique via companionship does not simply imply getting along with kindred spirits. It requires an engagement with matters that can be difficult and troubling, sometimes with practices and actors that we find disturbing. As one colleague put it: would we accept a fascist politician as a companion of critique? This is a legitimate question. It obliges us to clarify that companions are not to be allies or friends, but the people, things, and ideas that we decide to work with and whose impact on the world we seek to understand. As such, they are staying with us; they accompany us and our research over a long period of time. In fact, we need their company in order to understand them in depth. These companions of critique, willingly or not, provide us the means to advance an account of how socio-political phenomena emerge and are consolidated. The challenge is rather to observe these companions patiently, to resist merely undoing them, while still allowing ourselves to define our stance towards this companion. In research practice, this means asking ourselves, again and again, what kind of world-view we enact with our critical interventions and what the consequences of our critique could be.

The second challenge is how to make our critique matter. Generally speaking, researchers publish their critical interventions in scholarly articles. CSS scholars are no exception and the success of a journal like Security Dialogue shows how critical approaches can make a difference in the somewhat conservative discipline of IR. Yet, this model of mediation is not without problems. It is not only a question of the scope and audience of the mediation – who will read these critical articles? – but also of the way in which we can do critique. A trend that glaringly shapes the production and publication of critique is the act of measuring whether it is critically important. Critique has to be made count – whether that is expressed in journal metrics, number of citations or other impact criteria. Academic careers are increasingly built on the monetary sums of secured grants, the number of academic tasks successfully realized, and not least the amount of journal articles, possibly solo-authored – all of which facilitate the tasks of hiring and grant committees. As Stengers notes, this knowledge economy thrives on research that quickly disengages with its research objects, states of affair and respondents. Engaging at length with companions bears the risk of slowing researchers down. Ironically, being relatively junior scholars ourselves, we had to balance the challenges of dedicated commitment and making critique count in the knowledge economy within this very special issue project (as with most projects we undertake).

Security Dialogue is a living proof of how companionship matters for CSS. We are thankful to its current and previous teams for having created an excellent academic outlet for critique through the course of the past 50 years. And we are thankful for providing us with this unique opportunity to make ‘doing and mediating critique’ the topic of its anniversary celebration. This is also why we want to take this opportunity to emphasize that what we need to make our critique matter beyond impact factors is slow, dedicated, and patient critique based on companionship; a form of critique that gives us the means to live inside the haunted house and learn, everyday anew, to address our specters.

 

Speed, Event Suppression and the Chronopolitics of Resilience

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Terrorist attacks, infectious diseases, financial crises, and floods—what makes contemporary dangers so threatening is their tendency to suddenly materialize, rapidly escalate and quickly spread. So how might we respond to such threats?

In my recent article in Security Dialogue, I investigate how emergency responses are being reorganized in the UK to grapple with the speed and unpredictability of contemporary emergencies. Specifically, I focus on the framework of Integrated Emergency Management (IEM).  IEM looks to accelerate the speed of emergency responses in order to hasten recovery.  It does so by adopting new models of emergency organization rooted in the principles of communication and information exchange.  Various information and communications technologies are relied on to circulate information between the diverse agencies (e.g. police, firefighters, ambulance, etc) involved in the response.  The aim is to achieve ‘shared situational awareness’—that is, a common understanding of the nature of the event and the response’s progress by all responders.

Shared situational awareness is said to improve the integration of different response agencies cooperating within a response, enhance problem-solving and permit the devolution of responsibilities from senior commanders to front-line responders.  The result is a model of emergency response governed from the bottom-up.  As responders identify the extent of the challenges wrought by any given emergency (e.g. a road has been flooded, x number of hospital beds are needed, a cordon needs to be set up) then different response plans may be actioned, new levels of command and control introduced, and distinct specialist agencies invited to assist in the response.  The result is a bespoke emergency response that can be quickly assembled and adapted to address the unique challenges arising from the often-unpredictable unfolding of an evolving emergency.

As I demonstrate in my article, speed is a principle consideration when it comes to strategizing the organization of emergency responses today.  Ideally, we might think of security as a space free from danger.  But emergency responses cannot prevent an emergency from happening.  Instead, they are premised on the hope that when emergencies happen, that actions can be taken to quickly resolve it. Speed is critical in this regard.  IEM looks to ensure a swift return to ‘normality’ following an emergency.  It does so by accelerating emergency response activities to diminish an emergency’s temporal duration, geographic scope, and destructive potential.   Operationalizing a model of emergency responses rooted in the idea of bottom-up self-organization, emergency responses must evolve quicker than threat itself!  Emergency responses, in this respect, can be understood to underpin efforts to enhance UK resilience, ensuring our capacity to quickly ‘bounce back’ from disruptive challenges.  In my article, I call the distinct form of security enacted within emergency responses ‘event-suppression’. Event suppression ensures security not by preventing an event from happening, but by quickly closing down the ‘disruptive’ time of the emergency event and ensure a swift return to ‘normality’. Event-suppression ensures that when events happen, that they have a minimal disruptive impact on ‘daily life’.

On the one hand, distinguishing event-suppression as a distinct form of security might encourage us to consider the very different modes through which security is achieved. On the other hand, we might consider the implications of this ‘need for speed’ for contemporary security politics.  Does it undermine slow democratic process of debate and discussion?  Is it sufficiently checked by slower processes such as training, planning, and the drafting of legislation?  How does such an understanding relate to more spatially oriented analyses examining ‘state of emergencies’?