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.