Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the social construction of the Roma under Sarkozy’s presidential mandate as an internal security threat by exploring the complex and contradictory processes at stake. Drawing upon international relations and critical social theories, it argues that the symbolic and performative construction of the Roma creates different understandings which, in return, reify the nation and neutralise the Roma in the national space.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnography of the Roma controversy in France provides a window into the debate on the complex and changing nature of the nation-state against the background of globalisation. Engaging both with the concept of 'essential crisis' coined by Feldman when discussing the relationship between the migrants and the nation-state and the debate on securitization, this article seeks to contribute to the discussion on the anthropology of security at a time of intense internal and external reconfiguration. Using the trope of the 'Roma crisis', the paper argues that a complex and multilevel process of re-nationalisation and securitization has taken place against the construction of the Roma as an internal threat, the erosion of the nation-state as a guarantor of universal rights, the decline of a centralised bureaucratic culture as well as the broader issue of the decline of sovereignty which call into question the natural order of the nation. It also critically engages with the limits of the performative approach to migrants and minorities in the context of the securitization of the European Union.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the performance of twilight policing, a policing style executed by a specific group of private security officers in Durban, South Africa. This paper highlights how ethnographic fieldwork among security officers provides tremendous insight into social securitization processes.

Paper long abstract:

This research project focuses on a specific group of private security offices, namely armed reaction officers, and analyses their role in policing the streets of Durban, South Africa. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with participant observation as the chief research method, this research introduces the concept of twilight policing. Founded on the concept of twilight institution (Lund 2006), twilight policing is defined as policing that operates in a twilight zone between state and non-state, between public and private. This research argues that although operating as private agents, armed reaction officers are increasingly taking on state-like duties and ascribed varying degrees of public authority. Twilight policing is manifested through local security networks (Dupont 2004) between agents of both the public and private spheres, such as clients and police officers. Through analyzing the daily policing practices executed by armed reaction officers in various local security networks, insight is also gained into perceptions of fear and violence, descriptions of the dangerous 'other', and the prevalence of uncertainty and insecurity that both influence, and are the result of, larger processes of securitization in post-apartheid urban South Africa. By focusing on a specific policing agent, this research is therefore also an example of how anthropologists can contribute to larger understandings of security.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper we will discuss the results of two recent ethnographic case studies on video-surveillance and ‘proximity policing’, showing how both tend to be maintained as open projects and not so much as the result of a concrete and thoughtful public policy.

Paper long abstract:

Since the restoration of democracy in 1974 and the adhesion to the EU in 1986, Portugal has been building a political/legal apparatus in security issues. Portuguese institutions have been combining a 'guarantistic legal order' and a more global trend that emphasize 'securitization'.

Nevertheless, 'modernization' has been, in many occasions, the leitmotif for institutional reforms, and not so much the criminal environment or the real sense of Portugal as an insecure country per se (all data estimates that the country is one of the 'safest' in Europe).

Restoring the institutions, bureaucratic control within public management, and its democratic legitimacy for action, has been the basis for the debate around the most fundamental policies and agencies of public security. Likewise, having the political and the institutional such a strength in policies, rhetoric and public opinion, it seems that questions related to security praxis, policing and surveillance actions has been postponed and not seriously taken to improve public debate besides the one engaging decision-makers, legal agencies and police institutions. In other words, citizens and non-governmental organizations has been stepped aside a discussion which directly involves them and their daily lives.

Anthropology may contribute to produce substantive knowledge about security issues and to instigate new focus on security dispositions, actions and its effects on people's lives. In this paper we will discuss the results of two recent ethnographic case studies on video-surveillance and 'proximity policing', showing how both tend to be maintained as open projects and not so much as the result of a concrete and thoughtful public policy.

Paper short abstract:

Paper based participant observation in a police district, focusing in particular on the recently created and particularly feared anti-crime squad.

Paper long abstract:

During the past three decades, all urban disorders in France, including the 2005 and 2007 riots, have occurred as the result of incidents related to interactions between the youth and the police, in housing projects where lives a working class population, mostly of migrant origin. Yet, no ethnography had been conducted on the work of patrols in the banlieues. During fifteen months, between 2005 and 2007, I realized a participant observation in a police district, focusing in particular on the recently created and particularly feared anti-crime squad. Relating the ordinary activities of the police with the transformations in security public discourses and public policies, I discuss how a petty state of exception has been made possible and tolerable in a democracy.

Paper short abstract:

The paper engages with the ways in US think tanks are involved in producing knowledge and disseminating information on the topic of ‘security’, ‘liberty’ and ‘free markets’, in the process articulating and promoting a particular set of libertarian American values.

Paper long abstract:

Think tanks have gained tremendous influence in policy-making over the past few decades. This is especially the case in the US, where they have become a major force in policy debates and government legislation. Think tanks operate as research or policy institutes and initiate and promote research along their priority areas. Recently, in the wake of terrorist threats and debates on national or homeland security, civil liberties, and risk scenarios, many think tanks have placed 'security' on top of their research agendas. Think tanks organize panel debates and seminars, appear in news media, produce articles and books on these and related topics, and hence influence public debates and government policy.

This paper, based on fieldwork in and among think tanks in Washington DC, engages with the ways in which some think tanks are involved in producing knowledge and disseminating information on the topic of 'security'. More specifically, it focuses on the relations between their understandings of 'security' on the one hand, and notions of 'liberty' and 'free markets' on the other. These are notions that are often invoked in discursive acts of defining and promoting a set of libertarian American values, and that invoke and challenge the notion of 'boundary'. By looking at how and why a select number of think tanks are entrenched in the policy-making process, we can begin to understand the nature and extent of think tank influence around 'securitization', and what its implications are.

Paper short abstract:

Based on rhetoric culture theory, this paper explores the processes by which citizens are persuaded by government advertising to take part in biometric identification schemes, focussing on portrayals of fictional persons, and narrativisations of potential card usage applications by those persons.

Paper long abstract:

Based on textual and media analyses and (auto)ethnography, in this paper I explore the processes by which citizens are persuaded to take part in voluntary biometric identification schemes. Focussing on portrayals of fictional persons (human/quasi-human), and based on rhetoric culture theory (Strecker & Tyler 2009, Carrithers 2005, 2009), the paper shows how powerful narrativisations of potential card usage applications are used to encourage citizens to become engaged scheme participants. With special reference to the German 2010-introduced enhanced biometric card, and my own participation in the short-lived UK National Identity Card scheme, I show how the increasingly-prevalent commercial technique of using named persons to sell commodities is appropriated by governments in advertising their security-promoting ID cards. Based on printed and online media, I highlight how temporary Schützian quasi-consociates, represented by named 'persons', provide narratives which permit citizens to imagine themselves as similarly liberated, yet safe and secure, cardholder-citizens, both in physical and virtual worlds. Whereas it might be argued that such efforts mitigate potential insecurity-engendering alienation in face of creeping securitization and control of citizens' bodies, I demonstrate how the technique may have negative effects, e.g. in the creation of potentially unusual and off-putting 'fingerprint people' created by the UK's Identity and Passport Service. I argue that while this may display an arguably accurate portrayal of the scheme's biometric-recording intentions, such persuasion represents a morally-insecuritising move towards normalisation of state power to (in)authenticate citizens' identity via physical means.

Paper short abstract:

This paper centers on how state security policies are experienced and resisted by migrants who are being deported from the UK.

Paper long abstract:

This paper centers on how state security policies are experienced and resisted by migrants who are being deported from the UK. When migrants undergo deportation they become subjects to be surveilled, controlled and detained. Immigration Tribunals, Removal Centers and Reporting Centres become theaters of state power (Bhartia 2010) over their bodies. A relationship is thus established or reinforced between the migrant (and his family) and the host state. How that relationship develops and resulting consequences are to be addressed here. Further, facing deportation is a long and tiring process that marks deportees' lives with uncertainty and anxiety. This paper aims at granting an insight into how perceptions and experiences of justice and security are shaped and negotiated in such settings by looking at migrants' experiences of state control and their reactions to it. It is found that lack of protest among deportees in the UK is directly related both to their perceptions of justice (and shame) and to fear of stronger state control over their bodies. Resistance, on the other hand, is enacted by deportees as compliance with precisely these state controls of detention, reporting, and immobility. Migrants perceive these as tight and 'unreasonable' state strategies designed to make them fail, rendering them even more deportable. By enduring this power over them, migrants are resisting their removal and fighting to stay.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the ‘strengthening’ of UK borders through the privatisation of border controls. It looks at the consequences of shifting activities relating to the management of visa applications out of state control, and raises concerns relating to transparency and accountability.

Paper long abstract:

Acts to 'strengthen' the UK border through, for example, increased policing and the collection of personal biometric data, is a topic of growing academic interest, especially in terms of the themes of surveillance and security. However, the exploration of such issues from the perspective of the privatisation of border controls is a subject that has received far less attention. What happens when a core state concern (border regulation) is privatised? My focus in this paper is on the privatisation of the visa application process in the UK. This means that British officials at British embassies in many sites around the world no longer carry out the activities relating to the checking and collection of application data. Instead the process is conducted by a US-based multinational corporation, on behalf of the UK Border Agency. In effect, the 'commercial partner' of the Border Agency acts as a gate-keeper to the British government, mediating and managing the process so that potential visitors/migrants never deal directly with British officials. Private sector management raises important questions relating to transparency and accountability. How is the process monitored? Can individuals' privacy and other rights be protected? Based on my own experiences of applying for a work permit for Britain, the paper explores some of the consequences of visa privatisation. I suggest that the nature of the object privatised raises particular concerns, ones that are significantly different from those involving the privatisation of other once publicly owned goods and services.

Paper short abstract:

Forensic science is important part of the process of ensuring public security using reliable scientifically valid evidence. On the other hand it can also be a tool of control and coercion directed against criminal and non-criminal population, and particularly against the »other« presented as danger to the particular national lifestyle.

Paper long abstract:

Forensic science is undoubtfouly important part of the investigative and judicial criminal process. It presents reliable evidence that can be interpreted in favor or against the suspect of the criminal offence. But as reliable and important forensic sciences are, there is also other side of the forensic science, which does not correspond to the popular image of the CSI.

Forensic scientist is obliged to follow the science and the law. While science is progressing relatively fast (new technologies, new processes etc.), the law usually follows with significant time gap. And of course, the question of the ethical forensic science is non-existent. Therefore questions of the use of the forensic data is getting very important, particularly with the more and more widespread exchange of the forensic data via different international treatises. Forensic data has thus become widely available to different law enforcement bodies which can use them according to the national legislation. Fingerprints and DNA are today commonly exchanged through different channels.

Usually both sets of data can be checked in the national and international databases. There are many questions concerning why and what can be checked in the databases including with the question what (or who) and why is in the databases.

The presentation will systematically show several important issues of the contemporary forensic science:

• Database building

• Kinship search in the DNA database

• National search in the DNA database

Dangers of the use of the forensic science without strict legislation and control will be emphasized.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is about new assemblages of security technology and techniques. Here I focus on abnormal behaviour detection, especially ideas around malintent, the theory that bodies betray the intent to cause harm.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about the art and science of abnormal behaviour detection in secure zones such as ports of entry. I explore this topic by drawing on fieldwork with the security/counter-terrorism agencies in the UK. I compare my findings to the different approaches adopted in the USA, especially viz the theory of malintent. Malintent, simply put, denotes the intent to cause harm. The 'theory of malintent,' such as it is, holds that individuals who intend to cause harm will display particular behavioural and/or physiological reactions depending on the nature, timing and consequences of the planned event. In 2008 the US Department of Homeland Security reported on the new Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST). FAST aims to screen individuals in informated and secure spaces such as airports. Alongside the traditional gaze of the security operator, the system uses non-intrusive sensors to capture physiological, nonverbal and paralinguistic cues. For example, sensors will aim to record video, audio, respiration, cardiovascular reactivity, bodily secretions, eye movement, facial features and facial expression, and readings of the skins electrical resistance. In contrast to this technology-reliant approach, in the UK and Ireland abnormal detection is the realm of skilled operators. How do informated zones see persons, and how do detectives see abnormal behaviour?

Paper short abstract:

Foreign military deployment has assumed a permanent position within current security policy of Western democracies. My presentation, drawing on comparative research, sheds light on the impact of the new, extended security conceptions for military role conceptions from an anthropological perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Deviations from classical understandings of nation-state security have become established to an extent that foreign military deployment has assumed a permanent position within current security policy of many Western democracies. The resulting implications have not yet been duly reflected upon in their entire scope. My presentation aims to highlight the impact of the new, extended security conceptions for military role conceptions from an anthropological perspective.

The changes in global security conditions since the end of the Cold War have been much discussed in political science on the IR level but less in social anthropology with an eye towards human agency in the affected security institutions. Democracies wish for their 'citizens in uniform' to be civilized and democratic. Democracies also wish for them to prove effective and strong when called upon. Soldiers are expected to be loyal citizens, armed helpers, and professional fighters all at the same time. The fact that these requirements are riddled with tension, if not outright contradictory, is seldom articulated. Such tensions have increased in the context of troop deployment decisions in 'wars of choice' as will be argued with examples from several European countries: Military deployments are never limited to 'armed social work', but soldiers are faced with the possibility of combat involvement and have to integrate these contradictory moments in their professional identities. On the grounds of results from a large comparative research project, conducted in 12 European countries for the past five years, I shall present a typology of soldiers' coping strategies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss the ways in which the overlapping care and security concerns of liberal rationality have influenced the racialization of the welfare system, the industries of care, humanitarianism and development, and the internationalization of social care policy.

Paper long abstract:

Although an impressive production amidst the social sciences have focused in the resistance and integration difficulties of immigrants, the complex 'dispositifs' of care targeting deprived immigrant populations have drawn substantially less interest. Yet it could be argued that while less self-evident, this set of programs of care show the pivotal importance of looking after the conditions of the racially and culturally different surplus life in motion in 'Western' governmental activity in the past few decades, triggering ambiguous calls for protection and correction, empowerment and contention. While it is clear that it reveals overlapping care concerns with a security agenda, the discourse and approach of compassion and intervention towards specific populations do not hide immanent contradictions or functions of social control, but is rather part and parcel of the very liberal-cosmopolitan global governance of our times. This paper will discuss the ways in which liberal rationalities have influenced the racialization of the welfare system, the industries of care, humanitarianism and development, and the internationalization of social care policy.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon fieldwork in Polish state institutions, the paper scrutinises how hegemonic imaginations of (in)security are translated in different contexts, focussing on the East-West asymmetry. In reviewing existing theoretical approaches, it seeks to theoretically advance an Anthropology of Security.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will scrutinise the impact of the enlargement of the EU and EU conditionality on the way Polish state institutions define, adapt, reproduce and deal with security issues. Since the new member states had to submit to a homogenising Europeanisation process, they also had to internalise the EU-15's concept of the "threatening other(s)" and shape their bureaucracies and policies accordingly. The EU's insistence on the Big 3, i.e. terrorists, irregular migrants, and organised crime as an extraordinary threat for internal security, follows the logic of securitisation as a practice that is both discursive and institutionalised in practical actions. As such it contributes to the perpetuation of old and the development of new practices and cognitive patterns.

Security, however, is differently experienced and culturally imagined. The East-European member states are security communities in their own right with their own categorisations and codifications of threats, and these may differ significantly from those of the EU-15, creating a tension which officials have to negotiate in their daily work.

Drawing upon fieldwork in Polish state institutions (ministry of the interior, police, border police), the paper will scrutinise how hegemonic imaginations of (in)security travel and are translated in different local contexts, particularly focussing on the East-West asymmetry. I contend that anthropology, dealing with phenomena of everyday culture that are framed by the wider context of the macro level, can make a valuable contribution to critical security studies. Therefore, in critically reviewing existing theoretical approaches, the paper seeks to theoretically advance a critical Anthropology of Security.