The Virus of Surveillance: How the covid-19 Pandemic Is Fuelling Technologies of Control

While it is too early to provide a definitive analysis of the impact that the covid-19 health crisis will have on digital state surveillance, this article aims to provide a first assessment. It starts by situating states’ response to the crisis in the longer history of epidemics and their connections to what philosopher Michel Foucault called “regimes of power.” By surveying various surveillance discourses and practices in countries like France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States or Israel in the Spring of 2020, the article identifies three key trends magnified by the crisis, namely, the crystallisation of new public-private assemblages in the management of health data, a shift towards health-based justification regimes for legitimising controversial surveillance and urban policing technologies, as well as mounting human rights threats and oversight failures in a context marked by a “state of health emergency”.

Reforming Indigenous policing: Understanding the context for change

Protests over the policing of Black and Indigenous people and people of Colour that started after the death of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of the Minneapolis police set the stage for debates about the role of the Canadian police in ensuring public safety. These protests have resulted in calls for police reforms, including reallocating police funding to other social spending. The public’s attention has focused on urban policing, and there has been comparatively little focus on policing rural Indigenous communities. We address this gap in the literature, arguing that Indigenous policing is distinctively different than what happens in urban areas and the challenges posed in these places are unlike the ones municipal officers confront. We identify ten specific challenges that define the context for Indigenous policing that must be considered before reforms are undertaken. Implications for further research and policy development are identified, including founding a commission to oversee First Nations policing.

Urban borderwork: Ethnographies of policing

This special issue introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city. To address how the mutually productive relationship of policing and the city shape current transformations in the ordering of urban space, the notions of borders and bordering are invoked. In contemporary cities across the global North and South, borders and bordering practices are reconfigured to address mobilities and flows deemed to threaten social order and have thus become manifestations of fear and anxiety linked to these mobilities and flows. At the core of our framework is the argument that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. By approaching urban policing as a practice of bordering that is informed by material and imaginary manifestations, tensions between (de)territorializing and (de)stabilization are highlighted as both the vehicle and outcome of bordering practices. These tensions, we propose, can be captured through the concept of trembling. Trembling implies both a physical and emotional response to anxiety, excitement and frailty that is paradoxically built into borders and bordering practices.

Epidemic policing: The spreading of counter-radicalization in Denmark

This article offers a theoretical and ethnographic account of what I term “epidemic policing.” The article introduces the notion of epidemic policing to show how Danish measures for countering violent extremism are based on an epidemiological approach resembling the World Health Organization public health rationale, and how the field of countering violent extremism policing is itself expanding in epidemic ways. With an empirical starting point in ethnographic fieldwork among the police in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, the article ponders the intersection between crime prevention and countering violent extremism in urban policing. The article shows that while traditional Danish crime prevention has been marked by conventional processes of securitization and topographical forms of policing, a particular form of topological policing is implied in the security logics of countering violent extremism. This new form of policing entails a reconfiguration of the epidemiological approach, including a diffusion of encoded risk categories, an expansion of institutional security infrastructures, and a de-territorialization of the space that is being policed. The article argues that this reconfiguration of Danish urban policing is a highly spatialized process, which has resulted in the co-production of intensified territorial control and an inert potentiality of policing everywhere in the city.

‘My Life is Like a Movie’: Making a Fiction Film as a Route to Knowledge Production on Gang Political Performances in Goma, DR Congo

‘My life is like a movie’ is a sentence that often surfaced during my fieldwork on gangs engaged in everyday policing in the city of Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo); referring to the martial arts and action movies they like to watch. For this article, I will reflect on how during my ethnographic research I ended up making the fiction film Street Life together with the Congolese filmmaker TD Jack, the gang leader Alino and his group Rich Gang. The paper explores the making of Street Life as a route to knowledge production on the political performances of gangs seeking to carve out a space for themselves in Goma’s urban policing environment. Broadly, two issues are dealt with. Firstly, I analyze how gangs’ everyday political performances are re-enacted and actively mirrored in the film. Secondly, I reflect on how making a fiction with gangs changed my way of dealing with ethnography: in terms of method, my positionality in the field, and ethnographic representation. The paper is also a call for taking the visual – and by extension other senses – more seriously. Not just by writing about sensory experiences, but by incorporating them in our academic work. Sometimes it is better to just let people see it!