‘Situational awareness’: Rethinking security in times of urban terrorism

Abstract

The emergence of ‘situational awareness’ as a response to the perception of a new terrorism in European cities marks a significant shift in the conceptualization of security. Focusing on a recently introduced German Federal Police programme that trains ordinary officers in their capability to handle ‘complex life-threatening situations of police operation’, the article explores how situational awareness introduces a warrior logic into policing and urban subjectivity and modifies our understanding of security at large. It points us to the limitations of preparedness and concretizes the hitherto elusive call to resilience. Three analytical dimensions – space–time, sensing and connectivity – will be developed to render the situation thinkable for empirical research as well as to grasp security as a ‘live’ mode of government.

Keywords

Critical security studies preparedness resilience situational awareness urban terrorism

The rise of situational awareness in urban security

Lübeck, a small town in Northern Germany. On the night of 24 April 2018, an anti-terrorism exercise involving 700 police officers and trainees from federal and provincial police forces as well as fire departments and Deutsche Bahn takes place at the central train station. ‘We train for a scenario that we hope will never materialize, but for which we need to be prepared in the best way possible’, the police tweets.¹ The exercise, as a press statement announces, is meant to ‘rehearse the interaction of the manifold actors in a “complex life-threatening situation of police operation” under realistic conditions’. More specifically, the participants are to be trained in how to approach terrorist offenders, as well as protect and treat injured persons in the ‘decisive instant phase’ after an attack – in short, their abilities to cope with an ‘instant police situation’ (Bundespolizei and Polizeidirektion Lübeck, 2018, our translation).

The exercise in Lübeck is just the most recent in a number of police rehearsals designed to train preparedness while also marking the vulnerability of urban life in the face of terrorism. It is the public and urban component of a new police training module in Germany introduced after the terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice and Brussels, aimed at strengthening the capabilities of the police to respond to situations of violent mass attacks – situations whose ‘specific’ forms are not predictable, but that share the ‘essence’ (Anderson, 2010a: 231) of disrupting urban life by hitting key infrastructures and killing many, with offenders ready to die in the process. The training’s focus on the ‘complex situation’ at hand, the ‘instant-ness’ of the reaction as well as the ‘interaction’ between the agencies involved point to a new concern with the situation itself and the need to be aware of what is and what might be, to act instantly, smartly and collectively at the scene of an attack.

An imaginative, practical and affective repertoire of ‘situational awareness’ is entering the governance of urban threats. While the concept has, for some time, been deemed indispensable in the fields of controlling air traffic, fighting cybercrime, running power plants and policing EU borders – all settings with large and rapid flows of information where poor decisions have serious consequences (Endsley, 2004) – in the context of urban security, situational awareness marks a significant shift compared to prevalent anticipatory logics such as prevention, preemption and prediction. It must be understood as a response to the perception of a new terrorism hitting European cities where anyone might be hit at any moment and anything could be turned into a murder weapon. Situational awareness addresses the unforeseeable violent mass attack as it materializes, when the only thing to be done is to handle the situation itself.

To be sure, terrorism always comes as a surprise. It seeks to instil fear and insecurity. Yet never, it seems, has terrorism’s unforeseeable nature affected urban life with such a presence and ordinariness. In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism on European soil was relatively discriminate, the targets mainly representing the political and economic establishment (Daase and Kessler, 2007). While the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, and in particular the fall of the Twin Towers in New York City, were widely perceived as addressing Western global capitalism, they also marked the moment when terrorism entered the heart of metropolitan life. The new terrorism that has reached European and American cities, we hear mantra-like, hits ‘our’ way of being urban, liberal and cosmopolitan; ‘our’ manner of consuming, commuting, working and celebrating; in short, ‘our lifestyle’. The targets are metropolitan centres, transport networks, restaurants, nightclubs or soccer stadiums; the plots today turn out to be quite simple, spontaneous and not always cohesive, with amateurs proliferating and the number of victims rising in lethal attacks (Wright, 2017).

No longer understood as ‘“evil” exceptions’ (Chandler, 2014: 443), such acts of terrorism in European cities have given rise to a logic of governing that proceeds in anticipation of ‘serious’ and ‘plausible’ events (Samimian-Darash, 2016) on urban grounds. A call to alertness, smartness, sensitivity and prompt reactions in the here and now folds into the future-oriented demands of prevention and preemption. Situational awareness speaks to both professionals in policing and ordinary urban residents.

The increasing prominence of situational awareness can be read as a response to the faltering promise of security in liberal democracies (Haverkamp et al., 2011). It speaks to the growing awareness of catastrophic threats that have become unpredictable in the complex networked societies of the 21st century where infrastructure and connectivity are both key to and critical for societal life (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Dillon, 2007; Sage and Zebrowski, 2017). Governing security through the lens of the situation resonates with the idea that an understanding of violent attacks comes ‘after the fact’ (Chandler, 2014: 443) – which makes the event preventable only once it occurs, that is, in the moment of its enfolding. Furthermore, situational awareness reverberates with, and indeed concretizes, the ubiquitous call to be resilient; that is, to withstand incalculable threats and catastrophes (Cavelty et al., 2015; Lentzos and Rose, 2009).

This article explores the traces of situational awareness in current urban security governance and asks how, when it seeps into practices of security, situational awareness changes how urban threats are perceived and acted upon, and, ultimately, how ‘security’ is understood. Our argument proceeds in four steps. First, we locate the rise of situational awareness in a history of warfare, but also in the recent infusion of emergency management in security policies along with resilience – all crucial to understanding a peculiar warrior logic that situational awareness brings to urban life. We then offer a reading of situational thinking and propose three analytical dimensions (the space–time of the here and now; sensing; and connectivity) through which to make sense of situational awareness in current security rationalities. Next, our focus turns to the new training programme within the German Federal Police regarding ‘complex life-threatening situations of police operation’ in order to carve out the shift towards situational awareness in more empirical detail. The article concludes with a number of implications for conceptualizing the governing of security in our time. Situational awareness reminds us of the futility of ‘the desire for security’ (Weber and Lacy, 2011: 1028) and it demands that we face life in the immediacy of situations.

Warfare, emergency and resilience: A peculiar encounter for situational awareness

In order to begin to understand what situational awareness ‘does’ to urban security governance, it is important to recognize its origin in warfare as well as to appreciate the introduction of emergency management into security strategies and the rise of resilience. In short, certain elements of what we deem a new logic of governing security have deep roots but, with the perceived urgency of countering terrorism, are now coalescing in a new composition and with a particular intensity and spread.

In its military context, situational awareness can be traced as far back as to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (1963) and his guidance on how to win the battle without a fight. It is part of the warrior’s habit of constantly being alert and prepared; of being able to accurately read the surrounding environment and correctly decipher signs of danger so as to always act and react with a temporal and tactical advantage. Technological developments imparted a new momentum to this classical requirement, especially in the second half of the 20th century. In the world of close-range aircraft battles, the quest for optimal decisionmaking strategies in a rapidly changing situation triggered elaborate research on the ‘situation awareness’ of successful pilots (Endsley and Bolstad, 1994; Watts, 1996). The view from above allowed an overview, information gathering and surveillance, but also required situational awareness and concerted action (Niva, 2013). Anticipating the opponent’s movements became a key priority in the volatile situation of high-tech combat. The increasing relevance of situational awareness on all operational levels led to a rethinking of traditional military communication structures. As Chris Zebrowski (2016: 101–102) argues, the theory of network-centric warfare paved the way for situational awareness’s integration into – and transformation of the hierarchies of – decisionmaking. Achieving ‘shared situational awareness’ was part of a general shift in military warfare towards a growing struggle for information, knowledge and decisionmaking superiority (Zebrowski, 2016: 103ff.; Suchman, 2015). What becomes evident, then, is that the ‘situation itself’ is never given but is rather an artefact. It is a particular time–space that is constituted through the interaction of persons and things, human beings and non-human objects. It might be the effect of a technological apparatus (see Walters, 2016: 808), but it could also be triggered by a specific event like a terror attack.

Another key development in the rise of situational awareness is the increasing integration of emergency management into everyday national security policies in reaction to the recurrent experience of mass-casualty incidents where natural disaster and man-made, social catastrophes become indistinguishable (Felgentreff et al., 2012). The 21st-century German concept of ‘civil security’ is indicative of a corresponding restructuring where security is losing its status as an exclusive state responsibility and gradually becoming a ‘societal’ task (Chandler, 2013) and where the governing of security comes to be located at the intersection of internal and external security and disaster management (Haverkamp et al., 2011). This development involves the increasing integration of military experience into the police sector as well as the launch of transregional, scenario-based preparedness exercises (LÜKEX) that stem from military thinking. Notably, these do not just follow a predetermined script or planned scenario, but run on the basis of constantly generating uncertainty. As new elements are introduced and new situations emerge, strategists as well as operators have to constantly readjust their manoeuvring (Samimian-Darash, 2016).

Beyond its ties to warfare and emergency management, situational awareness must also be understood in the context of the rise of resilience and its need to anticipate, absorb and recover from any hazardous events (IPCC, 2012). The promise of resilience (Aradau, 2014) holds a number of challenging and partly paradoxical requirements for the resilient subject: they must accept ‘living with uncertainty’ (Bonss, 2011: 65), embrace vulnerability and even recognize the ‘positivity of human exposure to danger’ (Evans and Reid, 2014: 84). They have to learn through catastrophic events (Kaufmann, 2016) and be vigilant while not panicking. In a way, they have to manage the impossible, that is, be prepared for surprises (Aradau, 2014) and preempt the unforeseeable (Anderson, 2010b). Life, as critics argue, is reduced to mere survival with no space left for political subjectivity beyond reaction (Evans and Reid, 2014). While being an intrinsically ‘civil’ logic, resilience cherishes the values of strength and prudence. As the ability to bounce back or stand up again after an external shock, resilience requires flexibility and a capacity to cope with the unexpected (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001). In that sense, resilience eludes determination. As Zebrowski (2016) observes, we cannot grasp resilience, as it has no inherent meaning or value. It is by definition always only ‘becoming’. Resilience has almost become an empty signifier indicating a radical move in security-thinking that transforms the promise of security into a relentless, indefinite task (Loader, 2009). In this predicament, situational awareness seems to take us precisely where resilience leaves us: it is the how of resilience in concrete spatio-temporal settings. Concerted smartness and sensitivity is required to cope with a dangerous situation and to avert escalation (Seppänen and Virrantaus, 2015).

With its ties to warfare, emergency and resilience, situational awareness builds on a peculiar combination of logics that come to resonate in the setting of urban security governance in novel ways. In what follows, we will develop three dimensions to help us carve out the novelty of situational awareness in the context of urban responses to the threats of terrorism: the spatio-temporality of the here and now, sensory skills, and connectivity.

Towards thinking the situation

‘Situations’ are difficult to grasp – as objects of government, to be sure, but also of study. In what follows, we probe a ‘situational thinking’, first, by touching on key philosophical perspectives on the situation, and second, by proposing key analytical dimensions for capturing situations and the awareness considered indispensable in them. In this sense, the article’s aim is not only to trace the rise of situational awareness as a new focus of governing security, but also to develop analytical tools to approach this ephemeral object of research. Situational awareness as a new conception of security invites us, in other words, to come up with situational awareness as a mode of scholarly attention.

Philosophy has a long tradition of analysing awareness in particular situations. For example, Martin Heidegger (1967) contends that we are thrown into the world and the ‘awareness of mood’ is the ‘sense of one’s situation in time’. Our being situated in the world is our relatedness, and awareness is key for this situating, or rather, ‘finding oneself in the world’, for ‘attunement’ (Befindlichkeit) (Burgess, 2016: 8). While Heidegger’s ‘destructive’ phenomenology seeks to work ‘back through’ the various ‘mutations from which something like “being” had been constituted as an ultimate foundation’ (Colebrook, 2012: 192), Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology gives us more of a sense of our embodied relatedness to the world. The notion of ‘lived experience’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964) signifies that subject and object of perception become indistinguishable in a sense: those who ‘see’ cannot be dissolved from ‘what’ they see. The ‘seer’ is in and part of the perceived situation (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Phenomenology thus provides us with key elements of analysing a situation.

A situation, first of all, shares with an event its being ‘impossible to say’ (Derrida, 2007). Situations are open and unpredictable. They are ‘state[s] of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life’ (Berlant, 2011: 5). Analysing emergent situations requires a dynamic understanding of the complex interplay between the situational elements that matter as they accelerate and intensify over time. And whether a situation will turn out to be a catastrophic event, is itself part of a process of identification. As Joerg Bergmann (2013: 297) shows, many catastrophes begin trivially: what will later be established as the first signs of an unravelling event are often experienced by participants in their respective situations as nothing more than minor disruptions. The interacting participants are constantly involved in interpreting what counts as a serious disruption in a particular situation, what is worthy of immediate attention, and when a situation turns critical. As Peter Adey and Ben Anderson (2011: 2887) contend, ‘before an emergency can be acted upon in a particular way, it must first be determined whether one has actually occurred’.

Second, ‘a situation is both a singularity of which one has become a part of, and a multiplicity that pre-exists one’s participation in it’ (Zigon, 2015: 503). Sociological analysis has to deal with this twofold nature of a situation that is singular and fugitive, driven by external as well as endogenous forces, and that constitutes a ‘throwntogetherness’ of people and things where the connection between them is ‘yet to be made’ (Massey, 2005: 11). Situational awareness challenges sociological and political theory as it dissolves common distinctions between actor and environment, subject and collectivity, fact and imagination, even thought and matter. The ‘realness’ of a situation is not just given because we define it or experience it as such (Thomas and Thomas, 1928; Katz, 2002), but because fact and perception are intertwined in complex ways. Awareness, within and of a particular situation, means both perception and co-production of this very constellation.

Third, the situational points us to the question of decision, or undecidability. The real decision, we learn from Jacques Derrida (2002), is always exceptional. It takes place in the absence of a norm that predefines the situation and might just be applied – otherwise there would be nothing to decide. In that they exceed the ordinary, situations of danger require ‘real decisions’ that are ‘never determinable in terms of knowledge’ (Derrida, 1994: 34).

Time and space

Situational awareness is about presence in the here and now, which entails a particular mode of capturing time and space in ‘live governance’ (Walters, 2016; see Adey and Anderson, 2012). At stake is the concrete and immediate, instead of the indeterminate and uncertain that the future might bring. If decisions are ‘a key site for understanding how life is governed through forms of security’ (Adey and Anderson, 2011: 2879), then the challenge for security personnel is not only to recognize an emergency situation, but also ‘how to stop [it] turning into disaster’. ‘Decisions must be made in relation to the unfolding of the event’, where ‘one possible “effect” is stopped, another may open up’ (Adey and Anderson, 2011: 2885–6, 2897). This includes, theoretically, taking the speed of the occurring incidents in a particular environment into account as well as the feedback loops of the decisions and the multiple effects of interacting elements that on their part may accelerate the emergency situation.

The awareness in and of a situation is in (need of) constant adaption as new elements enter the situation. Actions might also reach beyond the concrete time–space of the situation, and these ‘loops’ via the ‘outside’, for example a social media post of an emergency scene, may have an impact on the respective scene again and become part of the account of what is happening or has occurred, and may even affect police decisions. As William Walters (2016: 808) points out, the situation ‘is a family of event-happenings’ which might include ‘emergency, crisis and incident. What connects this family is the governmental aspiration of inhabiting and acting within and upon the event’.

Grasping the situation is a challenging analytical endeavour. If situations produce their own demands, urgencies and, ultimately, decisions, what does this tell us about the relevance of ethical and legal norms (Amit and Knowles, 2017; Herdova and Kearns, 2015)? How, for example, do legal principles, like proportionality or necessity, enter the situation and guide professional action and intervention given the challenge of assessing what the situation actually is? The methodological challenge with situational awareness is to capture how the social as a script both enters a situation – and the moment of decision – and is rewritten in the process (Nassehi, 2008). How does the reading of the situation alter as it is recapitulated again and again ex post? What happens to the loose ends that are produced? How do speculations, distortions, misinterpretations and false statements drive the public process of discerning ‘what happened’? But also before the fact: how are possible catastrophic situations envisioned? What features of ‘these kinds’ of events from elsewhere feed the imaginaries of possible catastrophic events and how are these imageries located in concrete settings such as the urban shopping area or train station, or even in the scenario décor in the training centre?

Sensing

Situations are affective, not merely because they may be shaped by collective feelings of fear, panic, rage or nervousness, but also because they evolve and take shape through ‘modes of affection’, ways of drawing connections and varying intensities. A range of sensing skills is needed to grasp situations, that is, to know what they are and ‘how to be in [them]’ (Berlant, 2011: 5) – or else, how to get out of them. Situational awareness means sensing the situation’s possible intensification and acceleration, in short, ‘its becoming dangerous’ (Zebrowski, 2016: 109). It requires not only instant reactions (see Zebrowski, 2016: 103), but also what Bergmann (1990) calls ‘local sensitivity’. Its dedication to the newness of each situation reorders the reliance on experience and knowledge in predicting the dangers to come. It entails sensing, perceiving, reading, assessing, guessing or conjecturing a situation. Individuals are required to train and expand a variety of senses, including touch, smell and vision, as well as use a range of technological devices and algorithms to help employ these senses more comprehensively.

Governing security has always operated through the senses: knowing the ‘codes of the streets’ and ‘having a feel for the situation’ are without doubt precursors of today’s situational awareness, yet often bound to a locality that was familiar to a police officer or a local resident. In addition, while earlier approaches were more concerned with ‘seeing’, as in the New York City subway motto ‘if you see something, say something’ (Reeves, 2012), situational awareness wants the full, multisensorial attentiveness of security officials and ordinary citizens alike. It does not follow ‘an anticipatory logic, [assuming] that the unforeseen can be made foreseeable, can be somehow folded into present decision’ (Amoore, 2007: 226); it is not about foreseeing but literally about seeing and sensing what is about to happen in the here and now. ‘Staying attuned’, in order to note even the slightest differences and anomalies, is the new rationale. Awareness involves a complex sorting mechanism that cannot rely on known ‘types’ and ‘profiles’ alone, but requires a reading and sensing of the situation and putting elements into context. Which element, link or person is relevant or constitutes a danger remains an open question. Patterns might be identified, but often only afterwards, with no clarity about their relevance to the next incident. While the logic of risk calculation involves a certain openness to the possibility that ‘anything can be a risk’, as François Ewald (1991: 199) holds, the assessment of risks always builds on previous experiences. The emerging paradigm of situational awareness, in contrast, works on the basis of radical openness. Sense is unique to the situation itself. As former CIA Officer Jason Hanson puts it: ‘When your head is up, you’ll notice someone in a black coat in the summer when it’s 100 degrees, you’ll spot something that doesn’t look right’ (Blodget, 2016).

The turn to the senses not only has consequences for security personnel, it also demands a different set of skills and responsibilities for all citizens. While Simmel’s (2006) urbanite of the early 20th century had to learn a blasé attitude to keep an array of distractions at bay, the 21st century urbanite is required to be attentive to all the eventualities in the surroundings. Yet, in contrast to the neurotic citizen (Isin, 2004), situational awareness requires an attentive citizen who deploys ‘intuitive expertise’ (Thrift, 2004: 596) while remaining unperturbed and composed. Situational awareness then is not a generalization of suspicion and nervousness, but rather echoes the functioning of algorithms and automated surveillance technologies, in that it is to track ‘everything that moves’ and identify irregularities (Bauman and Lyon, 2013: 5). It is to spot what appears to be strange or wrong, not in relation to a predefined norm, but to the concrete situational context. Ultimately, it means to be able not just to follow a rule or apply a norm, but rather to unconventionally connect disparate things (Aradau, 2015).

Connectivity

Connectivity is intrinsic to conceptualizing the becoming of the situation as well as being aware in it. As situations are ‘singular multiplicities’ (Zigon, 2015), where people, things, technologies and places are conjoined, and affect each other, situational awareness requires people to apprehend the ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005: 140) and to connect the dots that are specific to and come to constitute each situation. In cities, this connectivity is particularly acute. Cities are hotspots of infrastructural connectivity, with high population densities and countless fleeting encounters, which is also what makes urban spaces vulnerable. However, while urban and security studies have pointed to the vulnerability of material and technological infrastructures and their securitization (Coward, 2009; Collier and Lakoff, 2015; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015), recent acts of terrorism seem to have raised a public sensitivity to the vulnerability of the manifold social bonds and forms of togetherness that define modern urban life (Hentschel and Krasmann, 2018).²

The analytical dimension of connectivity puts the focus on the modes of relatedness that matter – both in the long run and in the here and now; within one event and between different events. How could a passenger or visitor have sensed that something in their surroundings is about to change in an unforeseen and peculiar manner? How do people reach out to others in the situation, and what kind of ‘shared situational awareness’ (Zebrowski, 2016: 103) is possible? Focusing on connectivity also sharpens the analytic lens on the simultaneity of events in distributed locations: how are numerous situations assembled into one event that is later called a concerted terror attack, and what are the moments that support such a conclusion? Shared situational awareness may entail an orchestrated cooperative effort to communicate ‘critical information’, as in the case of disaster management (Seppänen and Virrantaus, 2015: 115), or more spontaneous collective work comprised of arbitrary decisions in the constellations at hand (Simone, 2013).

The notion of connectivity also makes us see how different attacks, such as those hitting Paris in 2015, Brussels, Nice and Berlin in 2016, or Manchester and London in 2017 are connected and related to each other in public perception, political decisionmaking and policing strategies.³ Although different in terms of degrees of organization and choice of weapon, the attacks were read as part of a new kind of urban terrorism that exposed the vulnerability of European cities and that demanded more nuanced strategies. Whether it was a lone wolf, a terror cell or a network, trucks, explosives or stabbings, whether known to the intelligence services or not, all events have been recognized quickly as related, seen as versions of each other, compared to each other and folded into patterns. When a truck drove into the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016, and another into pedestrians on London Bridge in June 2017, or when a rented van killed pedestrians at the boulevard of Las Ramblas in Barcelona, it had already been established as a pattern of terrorist killing. As Jon Lee Anderson wrote in the New Yorker, one of the first images to emerge from the Barcelona scene was ‘an iPhone video clip, without any narrative or commentary – nor needing any’, and adding: ‘We have seen this scene before. […] With increasing frequency, the episodes begin to blur together’ (Anderson, 2017).

Rehearsing the city as a battlefield

The terror attacks that hit popular areas in European cities made situational awareness an important principle of governing security both in policing strategies as well as civilian calls to action. In the UK context, situational awareness is explicitly termed a strategy to establish a Common Recognised Information Picture (CRIP): the Situation Cell led by the Cabinet Office is ‘to ensure that there is a single, immediate, authoritative overview of the current situation available to decision makers’ in cases of emergency (Cabinet Office, 2010, para 3.9 and 3.10).⁴ In German security programmes there is no such explicit naming, yet the logics and techniques implemented over the last years indicate a turn to situational awareness as well. This section draws a picture of an emerging landscape of situational awareness in the face of new urban terrorism. It focuses on a new awareness training module in the German Federal Police before touching upon the less situational and more static urban design measures taken against terrorism.⁵ Both perspectives approach the situation, the vulnerability in it and the required awareness in a different way, and must be understood in their interwovenness.

Handling complex life-threatening situations: Switching into hero-mode

As a reaction to the terror attacks in Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016), the German Federal Police has begun to train their ‘anti-amok’ specialists and multipliers to expand their skills and learn how to deal with ‘complex life-threatening situations of police operation’ (‘Komplexe Lebensbedrohliche Einsatzlagen – KLE’). Since the beginning of 2018, KLE has been extended to become a two-week training course that all 35,000 Federal Police Officers are supposed to go through. The emphasis is on the complexity of these new situations: with a new type of offender who has decided to kill as many people as possible and who is ready to die; with possibly multiple targets and second hits; and, more generally, the difficulty of acting in an extremely uncertain and unpredictable setting. The training explicitly responds to a ‘paradigm shift’ in the perception of threats, as one of the lead trainers emphasized in a conversation, where relying on special forces, usually deployed from far away, is not an option in the urgency of the moment. Instead, ordinary police forces employed, for example, at urban transport hubs need to be ready to react promptly in such a scenario. Thus, the Federal Police Officers on the ground are responsible for figuring out what is going on, and they have to be ready to enter the situation and take decisions quickly. A complex repertoire of capabilities, i.e. forms of practical know-how (see Anderson, 2010a: 230) must therefore be developed.⁶

To expand this repertoire, expertise is borrowed from the special police tactical unit GSG 9, created after the kidnapping of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972 and specialists since in hostage liberation and fighting terrorism. Information and skills also come from other police forces around Europe who share footage and tactics from actual cases. The introductory film for the two-week training shows graphic images of the 2015 and 2016 terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, including close-ups of the terrorists killing police and security personnel at close proximity. The trainees, so goes the idea, need to face the seriousness of the threat and the brutality of the type of offender.

As a lead trainer explained, key is the strengthening of each police officer’s physical and psychological condition. In ‘situation trainings’, the trainees are put under extreme physical and emotional stress to stretch their personal limits when facing ‘losses’, ‘collateral damage’ or even ‘friendly fire’. The ‘basis must be right’, the trainer explains: ‘If I can handle my gun, if I can unload it while running, if I am not shaking from exhaustion, I can pay attention to the situation around me.’ Unlike in preparedness exercises (Aradau and van Munster, 2012: 105), time is not suspended, but rather intensified. In addition, police officers, who are trained to use their firearms non-lethally, have to learn ‘to flip the switch’ when facing someone with an explosive belt, for example. Overall, in such life-threatening operations, an expanded repertoire of virtues is required, notably ‘attentiveness, decisiveness, aggressiveness, self-mastery, ruthlessness, surprise’ (Bundespolizei, 2017: 11). The initial phase of intervention in a situation at hand is cast as a ‘phase of improvisation’, when the officers do not yet know exactly what kind of situation they are facing, but must have the tools to act nonetheless. Something like a ‘universal key’ is needed in order to act in the right direction. There are actions, a trainer points out, that work for all complex life-threatening situations. Despite the multiple specific scenarios that are rehearsed, the situation is prepared for as a ‘generic event’ (Anderson, 2010a: 231), requiring generic tactics.

The Federal Police’s own magazine dedicated a special feature to the new training programme, where the narrative presented is one of urban warfare. As it explained, the foundation for the training programme consists of insights from ‘tactics in urban grounds’. ‘The term [KLE] is military and describes basically a new battle around places and houses, in other words: a confrontation in buildings and densely built areas’. Communication is key and so is the ‘scanning of the environment for irregularities’ with the ‘sensitively attuned danger radar’ (Bundespolizei, 2017: 11; our translations). ‘360 degree awareness’ is required as much as the ability to act and react, instantly and decisively, and possibly shoot: without hesitation, but not prematurely either. Exercises to develop a police officer’s ability to recognize ‘diverging forms of behaviour’ as a way of acting ‘before’ the situation unfolds are a crucial part of the training.

The internal training is complemented by exercises in German cities under ‘realistic conditions’ (Bundespolizei and Polizeidirektion Lübeck, 2018), as happened for example at train stations in Leipzig, Berlin-Lichtenberg and Lübeck. The point of these semi-public performances is twofold: to show the seriousness of the threat, but also the decisiveness and level of professionalism of the police or, in Ben Anderson’s (2010a: 232) words, to generate ‘an affective public aware of both threat and response’. In each case several hundred police officers, firefighters, emergency services and security personnel of the German Railway Association perform the scenario of a terror attack. Residents and hotels around the station are warned in advance about the gunshots, detonations and screaming simulated for the training. Top police personnel from all over Germany are invited to join and learn from the exercise. The media is informed beforehand, and welcome to join a short version of the exercise carried out exclusively for them, in advance of the actual exercise, at which public access is restricted. This restriction is necessary, the police reasons, because, in addition to managing an ‘instant police situation’, tactical procedures are rehearsed, which must be kept secret (Bundespolizei and Polizeidirektion Lübeck, 2018). The train station is accessible but the relevant platforms are blocked and shielded by screens which, as a journalist reflects in his piece on the Lübeck exercises, invoke a theatre stage (Kulms, 2018). The exercises have a peculiar publicness: people are supposed to know about them, get a sense of their existence and the reasons for their existence, but are not supposed to know details about the concrete tactics involved. This is like a politics of public secrets: we are not in the know but we know enough for it to draw our attention (Walters, 2015).⁷

These exercises, both in the training camps and in ‘realistic’ urban settings, indicate a change in the self-understanding of a police that was previously tasked with rather civil duties such as the control of drug dealing or migration. In the face of life-threatening situations, a warrior logic seeps in, demanding full awareness, ‘aggressiveness’ while invoking a ‘worst-case’ scenario. The police officers, as a trainer describes it, have to ‘shift into hero-mode’. This does not simply involve automated procedures, but a range of ethical decisions: deciphering what is going on and detecting ‘divergent behaviour’, assessing what is at stake and what is proportionate, deciding if it makes sense or is necessary to intervene even before anything has happened, and ultimately being ready to sacrifice themselves. If the training aims to automatize courses of action and strengthen determinedness, it also allows for thinking in terms of an emergency (Scarry, 2011) in which legal norms are literally incorporated. More broadly, situational awareness as a response to urban terrorism may lead us to several projections of logics of warfare onto ordinary urban life and space. Here the German example offers but one of a range of different renegotiations of these military–civil logics as European countries struggle to deal with urban terrorism.

This leads us to a crucial point on the specificity of governing security through situational awareness. ‘Security’, as we call those measures with which we pursue the goal in the same name, only seems to happen once something has become a pattern (Perry, 2013); that is, when what is to be prevented is known. But, as we argue, security scholars ought to be attentive to the modes of governing that elude this kind of knowledge, assumption and planning. Researching situational awareness reaches its fullest challenge when security personnel and ordinary people alike figure out ‘live’ what is happening and what needs to be done, in the face of a kind of event that has not occurred yet, when the nature of the danger and the imminent dynamics must be speculated upon, by all sorts of non-orchestrated agencies.

If the KLE police exercises are to strengthen law enforcement’s abilities to act on any complex life-threatening situation by imagining and preparing for them as emergent events, it is only in the accounting of concrete situations after the fact that the space–time, the sensing and the modes of connectivity in the assembling of the situation become most palpable, even though necessarily truncated. Cases in point are the stories of courageous acts by selfless individuals (such as the young employee Lassana Bathily in the besieged kosher supermarket in Paris who opened a walk-in freezer to hide customers during the bloodbath in January 2015) or the concerted smartness of strangers (when people at a scene of terror throw bottles, chairs or skateboards at the attackers as featured in the 2017 attacks in London). Media coverage that reconstructs those acts of courage also brings this figure of the (situational and in/voluntary) urban warrior into being. The city in these accounts figures as an active environment that is not only the scene for the eruption of an event of horror, but also a reservoir of objects that may be repurposed as weapons of self-defence or for saving others. It can provide hideouts and be the place for a range of spontaneous collective agencies to form between strangers. Media and social media accounts of selfless acts in life-threatening situations can thus help us get at some of the crucial elements of situational awareness that may not be guiding police programmes officially, but that are resonating as a popular consciousness of heroic or mindful action in extraordinary events.

Defending urban space: Prestructuring the situation

If cities have to be imagined and rehearsed as a potential place of war, this is also reflected in plans and pre-existing practices to design terrorism out of urban environments, as in a major proposition by the European Commission to improve the protection of public spaces. The kind of awareness articulated here is first of all a more long-term and general acceptance of the fact that cities are vulnerable: ‘It is important to increase the awareness of managing authorities, local authorities [etc.] to the vulnerability of public spaces, as well as enhancing knowledge and the spread of good practices in promoting security by design.’ (European Commission, 2017: 3) More concretely, security by design should become an essential principle: ‘design concepts at the entrance of buildings can help to prevent terrorist intrusions […] and ensure protection of buildings’ perimeter from invasion of vehicles […]’. Such barriers and detection equipment, the Commission continues, ‘should be as discreet as possible to minimize their impact on society and avoid creating secondary vulnerabilities’ (European Commission, 2017: 6).

The European Commission regulations from October 2017 came at a time when many cities had already put bollards and other (makeshift) barriers in place, and as citymakers, planners, traffic engineers and other experts had long entered discussions on how to protect the urban environment from an act of terrorism by vehicle. According to this rationale, city planning, too, has to flip the switch. As a traffic engineer argued with regard to killing by vehicle, ‘we’ need to be ready to move away from an ‘expectation of civility’ in traffic towards counting on deliberately damaging behaviour by, for example, installing all sorts of ‘crash- and attack-resistant bollards’ already used for governmental and military buildings (Oakes, 2016).⁸

The call for barriers, combined with heavily armed policing and more surveillance, follows the established idea in crime control that crime (here killing by vehicle) can be designed out of an environment (Newman, 1976; Parnaby, 2006; Weber and Lacy, 2011), at least right here, at least exactly this type of crime. ‘Situational crime prevention’ approaches (Clarke, 1997) are in accord with a neoliberal logic of limited intervention to ‘reduce the supply of criminal events by minimizing criminal opportunities, enhancing situational controls, and channelling conduct away from criminogenic situations’ (Garland, 2001: 171). Today, such measures are created ex post and in reaction to an event that has become a pattern; they ‘fix’, name, plan for, build against the situation, eager to prevent the next one of its kind. To be sure, anti-terror design cannot fully capture and respond to the unfolding of a situation, but it may act upon the situation in the sense of prestructuring it, channelling movements, averting certain harmful courses of action. The message to citizens is ambiguous: it does not convey that they are safe, but that the city government is aware of the threat and has made an effort to minimize it.

All the discussed trends towards awareness of urban vulnerability point to a rethinking of the city as a potential battlefield, lurking within the everyday of urban life. Yet, this is not simply the militarization of urban life (Graham, 2010; Coward, 2009), but more a gradual incorporation of logics of war and of the habit of a warrior into everyday civilian life. Situational awareness is embedded in a vast array of measures to control access to urban public and semi-public spaces to prevent attacks. Together with virtues like preparedness, vigilance and courage, it pervades into all sorts of critical situations in the city.⁹

Since the terrorism currently feared in Europe happens in the very normal, public or quasi-public inner city places of transit, consumption and amusement, this makes for a more pervasive vulnerability of urban life that cannot be overcome simply through a politics of barriers, patrolling officers or cameras – a fact that police personnel as well as ordinary city dwellers are well aware of. With situational awareness, an entire mode of governing and also of experiencing and moving through the city might be about to change – as barriers remind people of (even indirectly) experienced events and the ubiquity of the threat, as individuals are encouraged to be alert, aware and mindful, and as police forces, through their public exercises, caution us that the danger is real.

Conclusion: Rethinking security, situationally

Where then does situational awareness leave us in the conceptualization of security? First of all, it begs the question of decisions. Governing security, to be sure, for the most part is not characterized by the exceptional. It is heavily structured by predefined paths, by organized procedures of decision, by professional habits, known patterns and stereotypes, by plans, protocols and laws. Yet focus on the situation and the moment of decision brings the ‘radically unknown’, that which is not knowable, to the fore (Burgess, 2011: 3). If this uncertainty is, according to Giorgio Agamben (2005), what characterizes police action in general, as it always carries a moment of discretion with it, talk of the state of exception is nonetheless misleading in this context, as it disregards the shifting nature of situations of danger. Emergency situations may increase alertness but, as Peter Adey and Ben Anderson (2011: 2895) point out, it is the ‘tension between prestructuring the decision and a leap into the unknown’ that characterizes them.

This leads us, then, to situational awareness’s intimate relation to preparedness and resilience. As a rationale, situational awareness is a form of active, embodied preparedness. At the same time, situational awareness also grows out of preparedness, to act beyond that which can be predicted, calculated or rehearsed. Situational awareness addresses, at least in theory, the need for instantaneous action, speedy decisions and connecting yet-‘unbound’ people,¹⁰ in the here and now, a time and space that preparedness can never fully catch up with. Situational awareness is also a peculiar instantiation of resilience as projected onto a concrete situation. While situational awareness ‘grows out’ of preparedness, it can ‘grow into’ resilience in the sense that it might form a certain ‘resilient habit’, a capability that could be improved through a training of the senses, as a mental, corporal and affective task. Thus, situational awareness shares important terrain with both preparedness and resilience, yet it is only situational awareness that covers the terrain of the yet-unknown event itself.

Third, in a setting that can never be fully prestructured or prepared for and is always partly a leap into the unknown, a number of tentative requirements for the security subject articulate themselves. The subject of the situation of attack is expected to switch into hero or warrior mode, all while listening to their intuition and sensing what’s going on. The neurotic or panicking subject is replaced by the sensitive and brave subject who reads the signs and boldly decides on how to intervene on the spot. It is the subject who is able to connect the dots and to engage in collaboration spontaneously.

This liveness of governing security is the final idea that merits attention here. While previous principles of governing security operated with distinctions of more or less dangerous settings, states, environments, places or people, the turn to the situation unravels this distinction between safe and unsafe as well as the presumption of predictability through risk assessments. Live enactments of situational awareness are often ad hoc, fast and inherently messy. They do not enter our categories of governing security (yet) as that which can either react to or prevent something happening. With the sudden and abrupt temporality of situational awareness, governing security is being shaped along the logics of the moment, where neither the police nor security experts nor ordinary people can (fully) prepare for unprecedented collective agencies and emerging practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank J. Peter Burgess, Claudia Aradau and the audience of the public lecture series of the Laureate Program in International Law, University of Melbourne, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their instructive comments on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Christine Hentschel is Professor of Criminology at the University of Hamburg. Her fields of research are sociology of security, vulnerability and radicalization as well as urban studies and affect theory. She is the author of Security in the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Postcolonializing Berlin and the Fabrication of the Urban (IJURR, 2015). Email: christine.hentschel-2@uni-hamburg.de

Susanne Krasmann is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg. Her main research areas are law and its knowledge; sociology of security; epistemologies of control; vulnerability and political theory; the power of truth. She is co-editor of Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges (Routledge, 2010) and has published in international journals such as Cultural Studies, Foucault Studies, Leiden Journal of International Law, Punishment & Society, Surveillance & Society and Theoretical Criminology. Email: susanne.krasmann@uni-hamburg.de

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