Paper short abstract:

In Nairobi, intensely marketed high-tech security solutions exist alongside everyday unsensational and low-tech security provision. While in these dissimilar practices different types of villains are enacted, I focus on the latter and the unsophisticated and often racialized threat it suggests.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, drawing from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with private security officers and police in Nairobi (Kenya), I detail different practices of the city's security provision industry. I analyze how threatening subjects are enacted in security practices and how class and race categories influence imaginaries of danger. While high-tech security apparatuses - from smart cameras to biometric access control - are spearheaded during security technology fairs in Nairobi, the residents of richer areas can resort to a vast supply of cheap and relatively unskilled labor to protect their gates, mitigating the need to invest in expensive security technologies. The everyday security practices of these officers are rather unsensational, and heavily dependent on old-tech devices such as barbed wire, old-fashioned electric fences, and the officers' own bodies. While the high-tech security fairs I attended allude to a threat resembling a very clever villain engaged in elaborate criminal schemes, who can be stopped only by web-accessible CCTV and iris-scan door locks, I especially focus on the daily practices of security provision populated with unarmed officers on patrol or guarding a gate. In these practices the imagined villain is enacted as an unsophisticated and opportunistic criminal who can be intimidated by high walls and metal bars. This security threat crystallizes in the racialized figure of 'the thug', who most frequently resembles poor black young men from the nearby ghettos.