Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the antagonistic sociality that takes place in families affected by parental imprisonment. It analyzes how families are the target of suspicion and care of a police rationality that aims to impede the reproduction of antisocial individuals by promoting a subject of prevention.

Paper long abstract:

The police look at the families of prisoners is infused with ambivalent feelings resulting from the paradoxical place they occupy. On the one hand, families—especially their minors—appear as collateral victims of the penal system; on the other, they represent a source of danger for society due to their potential to produce 'antisocial' behaviors. A grid of state visibility shapes a frame of antagonistic sociality in terms of criminality and social order in contemporary Chile. The inquiry argues that, as a result of the interrelation between policing, prevention, punishment, and correction in families affected by parental imprisonment, heterogeneous and eventually unexpected modes of subjectivation take shape entangled with local values, affects, and politics. It is in this context that this paper takes up the challenge of putting into practice an anthropology of lives opposed in order to analyze their interactions and discuss the mutual effects on their life worlds.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I explore how the war on drugs in Manila reconfigures sociality and enforces new forms of oppositionality in intimimate relations.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore how the war on drugs in Manila reconfigures sociality and enforces new forms of oppositionality in intimimate relations. I do so through revisiting longitudinal ethnographic material from a poor, urban neighbourhood in Manila. I argue that the war on drugs has pitted residents against each other and residents against state through ever-present death. Whereas policing has always oscillated between violence and accommodation, manageable through money, relations and cunning, the war on drugs has rendered these tactics less effective. Hence, local state officials and residents struggle to find new forms of social equilibrium that might secure both in a volatile and increasingly violent sociality.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Niger, this presentation discusses local implications of EU driven policing of the Sahara desert with a view to curbing high-risk migration to Europe via North Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The Agadez province in northern Niger has in the past decade emerged as the nucleus for trans-Saharan migration to Libya and the irregular routes across the Mediterranean to Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Niger, this presentation discusses the work of Ghanaian connection men on the desert trail as they struggle to accommodate local needs for mobility in a time of accelerated EU driven control and confinement. As their work has been criminalized and pushed underground, the migrant trail has become even more dangerous and kidnapping and extortion, violence, and death, has become even more widespread. Imprisonments and confiscation of vehicles has led to new and more dangerous routes opening and some reports suggest that as many die in the desert as on the Mediterranean Sea. This presentation will discuss the complexity of migration brokerage in a disjointed world and how migration brokers are under increasing pressure not only from the authorities - the return of the nation state in migration governance in Niger - but also from the fates of those who perish on the road. How does migration brokers understand and negotiate the recent EU crackdown on trans-Saharan migration and what kind of social and political worlds emerge as migrant lives are increasingly viewed as oppositional to the interest of European political economy?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Malian men involved in the facilitation of illegal border crossings in the Maghreb in the face of a larger order of 'politics', align their own illegal undertakings with those of the police trying to stop them.

Paper long abstract:

"There is politics in everything!" said one of my interlocutors, a Malian man smuggling people across the Algerian-Moroccan border, to a Senegalese colleague of his, who was complaining about how the border had become increasingly difficult to pass recently. In the conversation the Malian linked larger-scale political developments (in this case a national election) to local security configurations along the border, and encouraged his Senegalese colleague to pay closer attention to 'politics'.

The way my interlocutor positioned his illegal undertakings within the field of 'politics' provides the point of departure for this paper, which explores the experiences of Malian men involved in illegal border crossings in the Maghreb and their attempts to understand and forecast surveillance and policing at the borders. The Malian men's lives and work were unsurprisingly shaped by border enforcement. The police officers and border guards that my interlocutors (rather frequently) encountered, were in general spoken of as clochards (tramps) with racist tendencies, but they were also seen as little more than pawns in the greater game of 'politics'. By shifting their gaze from local encounters with police as 'antagonistic others' to a more intangible order of 'politics' as '(big) Other' (cf. Lacan), I argue that my interlocutors were not only making sense of their experiences but also realigning those experiences with those of the police who were equally susceptible to 'politics'.

Paper short abstract:

Building on fieldwork with urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe this paper looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. It clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to antagonistic situations and relations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. Building on fieldwork with disenfranchised urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe it clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to antagonistic situations and relations. The paper argues that the struggle to identify threats leads to a nervous sociality in which figures and social forces are examined for hidden intentions and negative potentials. Such circumstances engender an apprehensive bearing, as an affective posture and approach, through which social life is sought investigated and controlled. It leads to a scanning and probing of social life and generates a range of pre-emptive practices.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the clinical emergence of "lives opposed," and the complexity of opposition in the psychiatric hospital, as German practitioners - and patients - confront the weight of a dark historical legacy, and imagine how psychiatric practices might be otherwise.

Paper long abstract:

Psychiatric diagnoses often serve to manage populations whose behaviors are antagonistic to the dominant social order (Metzl 2010). The history of such psychiatric coercion in Germany stretches back to the eugenic agenda of National Socialism, during which the lives of people diagnosed as mentally ill were considered "inferior" and a threat to "racial hygiene" (Joseph & Wetzel 2013). Hospital and euthanasia projects systemically controlled, sterilized, and executed the mentally ill in an attempt to eliminate such health conditions from the body politic (Lifton 1986). This history of psychiatric "lives opposed" becomes newly resonant today, as German psychiatry faces criticism over its continued use of compulsory treatment.

The hospital is a place of staying, but not of settling. Instead, hospitalization often constitutes a kind of limbo, where the rights of the patient are temporarily withheld, and freedom of movement is dramatically reduced (Hejtmanek 2015; Rhodes 2004). Today, regulatory bodies like the police, social psychiatry services (SPD), and judiciary committees coordinate with German hospitals to control this population, often turning to medication and restraint to manage deviant or "frightening" behaviors. In the hospital, then, antagonistic socialities become medicalized, and dynamics of care are fundamentally complicit in the decision to medicate, fixate, or hospitalize individuals against their will. This paper will explore the clinical emergence of "lives opposed," and the complexity of opposition in the psychiatric hospital, as German practitioners - and patients - confront the weight of a dark historical legacy, and imagine how psychiatric practices might be otherwise.

Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches recent trends in border policing via the notion of epidemiology. It shows how in the US and Europe, risk management strategies for 'fighting migration' treat human movement both 'epidemiologically' and as a vital resource, dovetailing with political imaginaries of emergency.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I suggest drawing on the notions of epidemics and epidemiology for elucidating recent trends in the punitive and militarized policing of border crossers. Based on field research at the US-Mexico and Euro-African borders, I discuss some of the risk management strategies put in place in recent years to control, channel and curtail 'unwanted' mobility pre-emptively in these regions. The most advanced of these strategies share an affinity with epidemiological thinking, also present in wider crime prevention, which in turn resonates with political framings of unauthorised migration as an 'emergency' or an 'invasion' afflicting the body politic. Rather than inquiring into 'humanitarian borders,' I argue, we may well wish to identify an 'infected border' in which advanced matrices for controlling and experimenting on border-crossing 'life itself' (Rose 2007) dovetail with political imaginaries of chaos, crisis and affliction. In these reflections, the paper builds not only on research among border guards, but equally among migrants and refugees, whose analyses help lay the groundwork for an epidemiological take on what we may term the 'bioeconomies' of border controls. In conclusion, the paper asks whether an epidemiological frame may allow us to discern wider trends in international crisis and conflict interventions today, while pointing to historical resonances and future alternatives to the profiteering from disasters at today's infected borders.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discuss how police officers and citizens experienced and practiced so called 'vigilance campaigns' in the US. I argue that these vigilance campaigns have contributed to local tensions in which citizens were forced to navigate relationships with police officers and fellow citizens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how police officers and citizens experienced and practiced everyday security provision in Miami, US. I focus on the ways so-called 'vigilance campaigns' in the US have mobilized citizens to respond to a diversity of security concerns and public fear, framing threats as something coming from outside a collective of 'good citizens'. A collective that primarily existed on a national level, but entailed local practicalities. In the paper, I connect literature on surveillance and secrets by looking into the daily experience of having security-related secrets.

I argue that these vigilance campaigns have contributed to local tensions in which citizens were forced to navigate relationships with police officers and fellow citizens. State policies and programs targeting security-related secrets have cultivated feelings of distrust, and resulted in alienation and individualization. In these campaigns citizens were imagined to be a member of a national community that ideally revealed each other's secretive and suspicious information. In practice however, people shift and connect simultaneously with multiple political communities as they experience political belonging to local, urban, and national collectives. Ultimately, I show that state agencies are able to expand the constructed category of security-related secrets to include other, mostly personal and private, information.

The paper draws from eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Miami, during which I worked primarily with local patrol officers and residents in three very different, but geographically close neighborhoods.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the police engage in practices of bordering, as they seek to govern the political and social anxieties linked to urban mobilities, and how the policing of gang-related crime in public housing areas has perpetuated the politics of othering.

Paper long abstract:

Policing and the control of borders, previously concentrated at territorial edges of states, are currently disaggregated and delocalized away from national borders. Most significantly in this regard, national borders increasingly expand into and take effect in the city. This expansion is, at least partly, a consequence of the influx of refugees and migrants into cities which has moved the policing of migration from external national borders into urban environments. This paper suggests that urban policing is principally a practice of bordering. From the state to the street level, the police engage in multiple practices of 'bordering in' and 'bordering out', as they seek to govern the political and social anxieties linked to urban mobilities by separating wanted populations from the unwanted. Empirically, the paper illuminates how these practices of bordering perpetuate the politics of othering in the context of the policing of gang-related crime in two public housing areas in Denmark ('Gellerupparken' and 'Mjølnerparken'). In this context, the legitimization of extended stop and search operations - an interpretive policing practice which involves the selective filtering of mobility - has triggered new formations of suspicion and conspiracy, and a revitalization of tensions between marginalized residents and Danish welfare state actors. To unfold these tensions, the paper engages with the affective dimensions of bordering, and the ways in which registers such as fear, anxiety and desire are productive of 'antagonistic socialities'.

Paper short abstract:

Presently, an increasing amount and often obscure means of technologies are developed to police people with little human interaction involved. Bearing this in mind, this paper takes an ethnographic look at how this 'policing-at-a-distance' (Bigo 2005) affects a number of Danish police detectives.

Paper long abstract:

"Social distance is a catalyst of physical violence and prejudice." This notion can be found in much social theory. It is, for example, integral to Bauman's thoughts on 'adiaphorization' and the moral blindness of a globalised, postmodern world. In theories about policing, an increasing distance between the police and the policed is similarly criticised. Looking at the growing and obscure means of technologies developed to surveil and control people with little actual human interaction involved, Bigo has criticised the both Orwellian and dispassionate capacities of such 'policing-at-a-distance'.

Bearing this "problem of distance" in mind, this paper takes an ethnographic look at how Danish detectives deal with various technologies implemented to enhance their chances of catching cross-border criminals. Beforehand the detectives would carry out investigations via an actual social embeddedness whereas they now increasingly have the opportunity of policing suspects at a distance. Remembering the tenets of aforementioned social theory, it is of little surprise that the detectives exuded a greater cynicism and crudity in relation to criminal suspects. Yet, what this paper aims to demonstrate is that it would be wrong to assume that they enjoyed this. Instead, the detectives were concerned about this global trend in policing. Essentially, this was because of how the various policing-at-a-distance technologies might have empowered them as watchers, but as workers they felt disempowered. This was what made the detectives to sarcastically, but to some extent also seriously, proclaim that they might be 'the last real policemen'.