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- Convenors:
-
Tessa Diphoorn
(Utrecht University)
Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam)
Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Main Site Tower (MST), 03/004
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel brings together analyses of different transformative processes of security and calls to change how our societies are policed. Such analyses are crucial to better understand how security and policing are employed and conceptualised, both theoretically and empirically.
Long Abstract:
Across the globe we are witnessing a growth in calls to transform our entire premise and understanding of security within our societies. In the aftermath of highly publicised police atrocities, we have seen protests around the world (e.g., Black Lives Matter and EndSARS), that are calling for a fundamental change in the way societies are policed and securitized. Abolitionist movements, that seek to transform policing and security in its entirety, are expanding and forcing us to re-think what policing is. How are these different abolitionist and reformist calls defined and how do they take shape? What do such calls entail for our premise and approach to security and what role do certain materialities, such as arms and punitive technologies, play in such conceptualisations? How can we transform institutionalised structures of security that determine logics and practices that are harmful to many? What new vocabularies are produced within such transformative calls and how are they infused with notions of hope and prosperity? In this panel, we aim to address these questions by bringing together different perspectives on the interplay between societal security and its (calls to) transformation to better understand how transformative logics are voiced and constituted around security and policing. This panel specifically invites ethnographic perspectives that flesh out transformative security efforts, but also encourages broader philosophical and theoretical approaches to understanding how we can change our usage and approach to security and policing, both in scholarly and public debates.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Zsofia Hacsek (Coventry University)
Paper short abstract:
Alternative Security Review is a new research initiative that intends to investigate security issues in the UK. Its goal is to invite more voices in the dialogue around ’security’ and make the UK a more welcoming, hopeful, and secure place for everyone.
Paper long abstract:
Who is telling the story of ‘security’ in the UK and from where do they get their data? This presentation seeks to address these questions by introducing ‘The Alternative Security Review’, a joint initiative of Rethinking Security and Coventry University. It aims to provide a counterbalance to the UK Government’s Integrated Review of Defence and Security, which focuses specifically on the military-security landscape, and not issues of post-Brexit and post-pandemic precarity, exploitation of global capitalism, and the heritage of British colonialism.
The presentation outlines how methods rooted in visual anthropology can provide a bottom-up perspective on the topic of ‘security’, a topic area which is often governed through policy elites. It will introduce the rationale for re-evaluating ‘security’ to encompass grassroots and local concerns in the UK (such as food, housing, job, health care insecurity), before sharing preliminary findings from the project’s first activity, a visual anthropology-based pilot project in Coventry. This aims to provoke a conversation about how we define ‘security’ in our lived existence, and how we can make the UK a more welcoming, hopeful, and secure place for everyone.
Maja Sisnowski (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
De-escalation is an approach to transform potentially violent situations. It encompasses diverse security and care mandates, training practices and assessment heuristics. This paper examines how de-escalation regulates and alters the interfaces of service users and welfare service provision.
Paper long abstract:
De-escalation is evoked in public debates when institutionally authorized security actors are charged with excessive use of force, often to stress that a given situation could and ought to have been resolved with less violence. In this paper, I propose to study de-escalation as a security technology and area of expertise encompassing diverse security and care mandates, training practices and theoretical models of aggression and violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on de-escalation trainings and practices in German homeless shelters, I show that in practice, de-escalation is meshed up with everyday routines and structures of welfare provision. To understand how de-escalation becomes productive here, I attend to how shelter staff and security personal engage with risks of violence and aggression in a context which has become increasingly securitized in recent years. My argument is that de-escalation practices are surface tactics in that they regulate and transform the interfaces of service users and welfare service provision in several ways. For one, de-escalation practices surface aggression, violence and injury in bodies, buildings and routines, by fostering attention to tension and friction. But de-escalation is also a technology that is tactical about interaction, working to establish and maintain contact and connection in some moments while in others lending as little as possible to conflict, reducing exposures and putting up facades. It is through this focus on surface tactics that I propose to query the transformative depth of de-escalation as a security technology.
Laura Thurmann (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Anthropologists’ efforts to increase gendered safety during fieldwork have been conceptualized as a feminist movement rather than a matter of transforming security. In this paper, I am looking at security practices and networks in fieldwork through the lens of anthropological security studies.
Paper long abstract:
In the past decades, processes of transformation have shaped both global and local debates about the future of security. Development organizations working in the framework of the Security Sector Reform, debates about defunding US police forces following the Black Lives Matter movement, or feminist critique of police responses and legislation regarding sexualized violence are just a few examples of recent attempts to change security structures that have influenced global debates. What has been less visible are the ways in which anthropologists have equally engaged with questions of transforming security in their own discipline. In the wake of the #Metoo movement, an increasing number of researchers, initiatives and groups have started conversations about how to increase gendered safety for fieldworkers. So far, this has been conceptualized as a feminist movement rather than a matter of transforming security. In this paper, I am proposing a way of looking at gendered safety in fieldwork through the lens of anthropological security studies. By building up on concepts of security as networks of formal and informal actors (e.g. Diphoorn 2016; Göpfert 2012), I explain how researchers themselves perform security work during ethnographic fieldwork to prevent, mitigate, or deal with gendered risks. I examine the networks that researchers encounter or build both in their fieldsites and in their social and academic environment and how they contribute to gendered safety. My data is based on 12 months of PhD research on gendered security practices in fieldwork among German and UK anthropologists.
Rano Turaeva (Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to highlight policing and securitizing migration in Russia in the examples of two major fields which is directly related to the policing of migrants/migration and mobility namely propiska regime and deportation regime.
Paper long abstract:
Russian migration politics is a dynamic process which adopts to the political economic, and social currents which implies fluidity, changing character and also insecurrity for those who suffer from such hostile politics namely migrants. Others who are in the powerfuk positions such as judges, police, employers and the like benefit from uncertainties and insecurities of migrants. Uncertainties are produced through a continuous state of deportability and how mobility or a limitation to it lead to the violation of basic human rights related to mobility and the freedom of movement (Turaeva 2013).
The paper aims to highlight policing and securitizing migration in Russia in the examples of two major fields which is directly related to the policing of migrants/migration and mobility namely propiska regime and deportation regime. Both regimes are two major problems which each migrant faces, fears and has to deal with on a daily basis while avoiding police raids, paying police fees, or just dealing with any documents which can directly lead to deportation. This is what De Genova describes as a condition of ‘enforced orientation to the present’ (De Genova 2005: 427) as the future is so insecure that each day need to be spent as much as productive in case one is deported. The experiences of being deportable is intense and contributes to the reproduction of uncertainty, which makes the same situation potent for those in power and happily benefit from the same. Uncertainty is resource which are at hand for employers who can then abuse migrants.
Nina Hellum (Norwegian Defence Research Establishment)
Paper short abstract:
Norwegian soldiers show a change in their will to serve and motivation for military service in empirical data from 2009 until 2022. In a decade the incentive to sacrifice your life or taking someone else’s, seems to have changed from the individual and personal to value based and societal reasons.
Paper long abstract:
During several field studies and interviews among Norwegian soldiers from 2009 until 2022, I asked the question: “As a soldier, in the extreme consequence, you have to be willing to take or give life (kill or die). In such a case, whom do you do it for? What makes it worth it for you?” The earlier answers entailed, “the lad beside me in the trenches”, “my girlfriend/wife”, “mom”, or someone close. The later answers, although still containing loved ones, have pivoted somewhat to, “the values we have in Norway”, “our society”, and “the Norwegian culture”. Today’s soldiers seem more motivated by societal features than before.
The reasons are several, the enrollment of conscripts have decreased in number, and conscription service has become popular. Highly motivated persons with good academic and athletic results are recruited. These are somewhat more “political correct” than before, which also might be a reflection on today’s Norwegian youth. Another likely reason are the Norwegian Defense’s commercial campaigns over the last years. They have focused on Norwegian values, and that a defense is there to ensure that “nothing happens”. The last reason might be the international security climate. The victory of Trump in the American presidential election, the surge in “fake news”, “disinformation”, “online influence campaigns”, and “echo chambers” impacted young people worrying more regarding public safety and cyber security issues.
In February/March 2022 there are newspaper interviews with soldiers in northern Norway, on the Russian border, saying, “shit suddenly got real” and “I get stressed when the war is so close to Norway”. The war in Ukraine might shift the soldiers’ attitudes and motivation even further. Seeing that this is a long lasting study, I will proceed to collect empirical data on this question.