The Political Economy and Political Aesthetics of Military Maps

This chapter explores the representational power of maps and the violence inherent in removing volume with two-dimensional ‘objectivity’. The focus is on maps, norms and militarist institutions in Guam, foregrounding underexplored aesthetic dimensions in reports on the environmental impact of the US presence. The impact of overseas US bases is striking, a global archipelago of military infrastructure that impacts on ‘strategic and disposable’ island populations. This chapter recognizes the layers of security available even in ‘transparent’ maps.

Securing Security

There is presently no shortage of conceptual models to account for the fact that security have begun to play an increasingly important role in more and more spheres of life. However, most of these explanations rely on a figure of thought in which security is freshly brought to bear on something which has not previously been a target of security. This chapter develops an alternative approach. Drawing on my ethnographic findings from South Africa, I start out from the observation that, once it has been established, security needs to be secured if is to be maintained in the face of potentially adversarial forces. Thus, what is explored is a particular logic of security in which security becomes its own reference object. It is argued that this logic gives rise to security linkages of a particular kind, linkages that are not based on a forward-driving expansion of security agendas but, rather, on protectively and recursively backing up already existing measures. By attending to security’s recursiveness we can address some of the ways in which the “rooting” of security assemblages occurs in sociocultural contexts.

Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya

This article offers a theoretical and ethnographic analysis of 'security urbanism', examining the spatial practices of the Kenyan security state and the urban impacts of the War on Terror in Nairobi. From counterterror policing to forced disappearances, demolitions, military operations and the proliferation of checkpoints and security searches, the War on Terror has left its indelible material and affective impacts in Kenya. Counterterrorist policing operations such Operation Usalama Watch have left many marginalized Nairobi residents fearful and traumatized. Meanwhile, in rich suburbs, the twin specters of terrorism and crime fuse in the imaginations and gated compounds of the affluent. I analyze the urban, state and spatial transformations produced by the War on Terror across several geographical scales (from the highly local to the neighborhood and the national). In a first section, I focus on the 'state spatial strategies' of counterterrorism and analyze the emergence of a 'counterterror state' in Kenya. In a second section, I draw on several ethnographic vignettes to demonstrate how urban residents internalize and perform fears, fantasies and politics thoroughly saturated by the imaginaries of the War on Terror. Ultimately, I argue that Nairobi's security urbanism is the material articulation of War on Terror at the scale of the city, produced through the confluence of state strategies and everyday practices of securitized urban subjects. But how stable is the new hegemony of security in the country?

From Panopticon to Panasonic

This chapter explores current forms of controls created for, tested and applied during mega-events such as the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups and important football games in general, attempting to show that the new technologies of control are a step forward in Foucault’s disciplinary society. The initial assumption is that whenever the nature of fear evolves, there is a corresponding change in urban and architecture design. Ethnographic observations in stadiums in Brazil and critical discourse analyses of documents from the Olympic Games Organizing Committee, FIFA, and feature press articles show the fear that leads to segregation, and the strategies put in place to guarantee social cleavage, exclusion and therefore social homogeneity. I argue that security at sport sites might anticipate security strategies in other spaces, leading to segregations of class, race, religion, gender and age. And, that local incidents are critical events that shaped global security strategies.

Enigmatic Presence

The Earth’s fast-expanding array of active satellites are central to the organization, experience – and destruction – of contemporary life on the earth’s surface. Yet it remains difficult to visualize and understand their enigmatic presence. Mysterious and cordoned-off ground stations dot the earth’s terrain, their futuristic radomes and relay facilities directed upwards to unknowable satellites above. Small antennae lift upwards from a myriad of apartment blocks to silently receive invisible broadcasts from transnational television stations. Crowds might even occasionally witness the spectacle of a satellite launch atop a rocket. In such a context, this chapter introduces the ways in which the regimes of power organized through satellites and other space systems are interwoven with production of violence, inequality and injustice on the terrestrial surface. Necessarily, the chapter also attends to the importance of how space is imagined and represented as a national frontier; a birthright of states; a sphere of heroic exploration; a fictional realm; or as a vulnerable domain above through which malign others might stealthily threaten societies below at any moment. The essay addresses the contested geopolitics and ‘astrogeopolitics’ of satellites. It explores satellite regimes as means for national security states to intensely scrutinise the Earth’s surface. It analyses the increasingly weaponised means of directly launching lethal violence. Moreover, it addresses satellites systems as domains contested by all sorts of countergeographic artistic, social and political movements who appropriate the increasingly civilianized architectures of vertical military scrutiny to both contest their hegemony and to add power to ground level political and social struggles.

Borderization and Public Security in Argentina

This chapter discusses the border areas between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The contemporary redefined security paradigm, which rests on a specific historical context, targets the global threat of drugs and terrorism. This chapter discusses certain events historically, in order to understand what we mean when we say security, especially public security in Argentina, and particularly at the borders. We work with the concept of “borderization,” a tool that allows us to elicit the formation of limits and differentiations, and a tool that allows us to think about spaces of security that emerge in metropolitan and geo-political nation-state borders.

Domesticating Security

The impact of the U.S. security concerns is not only seen in political and spatial restrictions on public space or inscribed in militarized borders, but also in the increasing penetration of the private realm of home. This domestication of security concerns through the architecture, urban design and management of private residential communities addresses homeowners’ sense of social and financial insecurity through socioeconomic segregation, controlled physical environments and racist discourses. These securitization practices, the securityscapes that are a result of architectural and social infrastructures and how they work can be uncovered through an ethnographic analysis of housing regimes and the affective, discursive and bodily practices that make up and regulate home life.

Introduction

This introductory essay explores security in the contemporary moment by reviewing theories of security within and beyond anthropology. The chapter exposes the lack of attention to spaces of security, before showing the ways in which chapters in this volume give comparative, historical and technical insights into security today. We show the ways in which careful examination of ethnographic examples, from biometrics in India to bomb proof rooms in Israel, show the importance of the spatial dimensions of security. We also show the value of focusing on securityscapes as infrastructural realizations of security’s elusive qualities.

Re-Spatializing Social Security in India

This chapter analyzes the changing logic and logistics of welfare security in the biometric governance era. Power is exercised spatially, and in modern nation-states it follows a model Gupta and Ferguson call “vertical encompassment”. Citizens are cared for by institutions that communicate hierarchically. Information about needs travels upwards, from district and state to national statistics, and eventually it informs decisions at central government offices, where funds are disbursed downwards through the hierarchical channels of the welfare state. The system requires permanently settled citizens. Therefore, it works badly for itinerant citizens who travel seasonally for work. Biometric governance promises to improve the system by rendering data mobile and thus permitting citizens to identify and collect welfare anywhere. Using the case study of India’s biometric National Health Insurance (RSBY), the chapter examines an emerging securityscape that creatively combines old and new ways of managing welfare distribution. While doing so, it confronts all participants with the difficulty of combining the protection of the integrity of state structures with the imperative to care for citizens and ensure survival. Regardless the technology, securitization of the state undermines the goal of inclusiveness challenging policy makers to either abandon their welfare aspirations or relax surveillance.

Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel

Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters as an integrated room within every residential unit throughout the country, replacing neighbourhood underground bunkers and communal shelters located in the basement floor of apartment blocks. A secured residential space (popularly called mamad), this space is commonly used as an ordinary room (a children room, extra bedroom, home office, etc.), one of the 3-5 rooms of the majority of apartments in Israel. Only during times of emergency, it is used by household members as a shelter. Based on fieldwork in Israel from January 2014 to January 2015, a period covering the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, we explore in this paper the blurring of distinction between emergency and routine as concepts and experiences involved in domesticating spaces of security in Israel.