Assessing threatening uncertainties: Counterterrorism and everyday practices of preemptive policing in Ghana

Introduction

The unexpected, spectacular, and catastrophic nature of terrorist attacks has captured public and political imaginations and called for urgent implementation of new precautionary measures aimed at combating the threat of future attacks. As transnational terrorism has emerged as one of the most significant policy concerns of the post-9/11 era, strategies of preemption have become principal modalities of security governance (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Coaffee, 2009: 9). Aimed at assessing and responding to threatening probabilities before they become fact (Masco, 2014: 11), these preemptive strategies are based on future-oriented governmental logics and, more profoundly, on attempts to tame uncertainty through anticipatory actions (Stockdale, 2016: 3). At the same time, preemptive strategies are informed by after-the-fact affective responses to terrorist attacks (Johansen et al., 2021). In the wake of diverse critical incidents such as the 2011 Norway attacks, the train bombings in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005, and the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi in 2013, the War on Terror has expanded and intensified, giving rise to the proliferation of new preemptive counterterrorism measures.

This article explores how threatening uncertainties are assessed in the context of transnational terrorism and the proliferation of preemptive counterterrorism measures. Examining the case of Ghana, which has not experienced any terrorist attacks on home soil but has recently become a key site for the development and implementation of counterterrorism measures, the article illuminates how officers in the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) perceive of and seek to preempt terrorist threats that have not yet materialized. What role do affective responses to catastrophic terrorist attacks and the transnational circulation of counterterrorism measures play in triggering security responses to threatening uncertainties? Which rationalities for preemptive actions emerge in the face of these uncertainties, and how do they animate everyday policing practices? In addressing these questions, the article traces the development and implementation of Ghana’s national counterterrorism framework and demonstrates how preemptive measures are translated, appropriated, and operationalized in practices of policing. Arguing that counterterror policing in Ghana is characterized by a conflation of risks and threats associated with ordinary crime and extraordinary terror and by diffuse imaginations of insider threats, the article shows how attempts to assess uncertainties are paradoxically productive of an inherent uncertainty.

The turn toward preemption and anticipatory governance in counterterrorism has been explored in much security scholarship during the last decades. Critical studies on how future uncertainty is incorporated into politics and policymaking (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; De Goede, 2008) and how this uncertainty informs the organization and exercise of political power (Stockdale, 2016) and underpins national security affect (Masco, 2014) have made important conceptual and analytic contributions to our understanding of the linkages between public and political imaginations of catastrophic threats and the production of preemptive security politics. Less attention, however, has been devoted to exploring practices of preemption. In line with a ‘practice turn’ directing attention towards competing rationalities of everyday security governance (Hönke and Müller, 2012: 385), this article aims to fill that gap by unpacking how preemptive politics are manifested and animated in everyday practices of preemption. Building on insights from critical terrorism and security studies, it seeks to take forward the discussion of the institutional logics and processes through which preemptive politics are governed by illuminating how preemption operates in practice. More specifically, it explores how security actors with a mandate to respond to terrorism perceive of and assess uncertainty as a basis for preemptive policing.

Furthermore, the article contributes to existing studies a novel perspective on the role of preemption in counterterrorism in a non-Western context. While much literature within the field of terrorism studies has been concerned with security governance in the USA and Europe, our knowledge of the dynamics of preemptive politics outside a Western context is highly limited. An important exception here is a recent collection of studies on non-Western responses to terrorism (Boyle, 2019), exploring how governments and security forces in countries such as Japan, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria engage in counterterrorism. With a focus on responses to the threat of domestic and international terrorism, these studies direct attention toward the complex historical, political, cultural, and religious developments and dynamics that shape diverse counterterrorism measures and effects. In line with those contributions, this article argues that we need to move beyond the bias toward Western perspectives if we are to shed light on the emergence and multiple manifestations of contemporary security responses to the global War on Terror. By doing so, it becomes clear that domestic perceptions of terrorism and counterterrorism approaches are shaped by local, context-specific dynamics. Here, the case of Ghana offers insight that can help develop and push forward the literature, both empirically and conceptually.

Empirically, the case of Ghana highlights the significance of transnational circulations and exchange of counterterrorism measures in shaping preemptive responses. In Africa, countries such as Kenya and Nigeria that have been exposed to extensive terrorist attacks and are also major partners in US-led counterterrorism efforts have been the key focus of scholarly attention (Aronson, 2013; Giroux and Nwankpa, 2019; Mogire and Agade, 2011; Prestholdt, 2019). Ghana, however, as a country that has not been hit by terror on home soil but is a main target of foreign counterterrorism interventions owing to its strategic location and role as an anchor of stability in West Africa, represents a unique case through which to illuminate the engagement with external security force assistance and exchange. This exchange is not simply a one-way process involving the direct transfer of Western models. Rather, it can be characterized as a process of transnational boomeranging (see discussion of Foucault in Graham, 2010: xvii) through which ‘travelling models’ are circulated, translated, and appropriated (Beek, 2016: 21). Such processes challenge conceptions of unidirectional traveling (see also Hönke and Müller, 2012: 391) and literal export and transfer of policy models from one place to another (see also Machold, 2016: 278), as well as ‘the unspoken assumption that Western practices of counterterrorism are universal’ (Boyle, 2019: 8).

Conceptually, the case of Ghana adds new perspectives to the framing of terrorism as an ideological threat. Unlike in Western contexts, where the framing of the threat of terror has been shaped by fear of fanaticism and fundamentalism and a dogmatic separation of politics and religion (see Vigh and Jensen, 2018), security actors in Ghana conceptualize the threat of terror as fuzzy and linked to fluid categories extending beyond the ‘Islamist Other’. As I illustrate below, the perception that anyone – even a member of your own kin – can be a terrorist co-exists with an absence of enmity and hostility (see also Christensen, 2022: 88). This absence of enmity and the fluidity of categories are reflected in everyday policing practices. Rather than being linked to preemptive profiling of particular individuals, behaviors, groups, and places on the basis of their racial or religious affiliations, as has been documented in several contexts in the Global North (see, for instance, De Koning, 2017; Fassin, 2013; Graham, 2010: xv), these practices are primarily a matter of policing ordinary flows of people and information. In this context, counterterror policing must be understood by moving beyond categorical distinctions between preemptive and reactive practices, exploring instead the nexus between the extraordinary and the mundane.

Extending from existing works on the sociology and anthropology of policing in Africa that highlight the plurality and hybridity of policing (Albrecht, 2019; Loader, 2000) and adopt a relational approach to emphasize the interplay between different rationalities and practices (Albrecht and Kyed, 2015: 4; Christensen and Albrecht, 2020), I propose that we can unpack practices of counterterror policing in Ghana by focusing on the fluctuation between categories and between the mundane and the extraordinary. Directing our attention to this fluctuation, we see that policing goes beyond the official mandate of bureaucratic law enforcement (see Garriott, 2013: 3) and beyond specific perceptions of what it means to be police and what police organizations are (see Hills, 2014). In everyday practices, police work often simply becomes a matter of simulating a presence in the present in the face of tangible concerns over safety and security.

Methodologically, the article contributes with an empirically grounded perspective on counterterrorism based on primary data. Owing to the violent and secretive nature of the research domain and the challenges related to gaining access to central actors and institutions, both terrorism and counterterrorism are difficult subjects to investigate, particularly when it comes to obtaining primary data. Consequently, most studies to date are based on secondary sources of data and policy analysis. Yet detailed and reliable primary data are vital if we are to advance our understanding of (counter)terrorism (Schuurman and Eijkman, 2013; Silke, 2001). More specifically, examining the linkages between perceptions of uncertainty and everyday practices of preemption demands a combination of tools to generate data about how future imaginations inspire present actions. Here, the article is based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among security actors involved in counterterrorism in Ghana between October 2018 and August 2019. These security actors are affiliated mainly to the CTU – a unit that was formed in 2014 and mandated to carry out operational responses to terrorism. During fieldwork, I followed CTU officers in routine activities such as meetings, briefings, reporting, and engagements with informants at the National Police Headquarters in Accra. In addition, I participated in outreach activities with religious authorities and at churches, where the officers were engaged in mobilizing the public in the preemption of potential terrorist attacks, and I took part in nighttime patrol activities that were conducted jointly with other units, including the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit and the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF). With a focus on inter-agency intelligence collaboration, I also conducted interviews with counterterrorism specialists in the Ministry of National Security, the Department of Defence Intelligence, the Ghana Immigration Service, and the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority. Through the combination of these different elements, the methodological approach I have employed generates important insight into how counterterrorism measures are articulated and justified at the strategic level and how threatening uncertainties are assessed and expressed in practices of preemptive policing at the operational and tactical levels in everyday practices.

The article is structured in three parts. First, it outlines the turn to preemptive security as a way of governing future uncertainty and discusses how affective responses to terrorist attacks have accelerated the commodification of preemptive counterterrorism measures. Second, it traces how transnational exchange relations have inspired the development and implementation of contemporary counterterrorism in Ghana, here in the context of the absence of terrorist attacks on home soil. Third, three empirical cases illuminating how assessments of threatening uncertainties animate everyday practices of policing are presented. These cases – Operation Save the Future, Operation Home Shield, and nighttime patrols – are iconic examples of the ways in which preemptive practices of everyday policing are evident across different domains and of how security officers seek to make uncertain futures tangible and thus actionable through practices of imagination and performance. In conclusion, it is argued that while uncertain futures are brought into being today, preemptive policing practices in Ghana are characterized by a fundamental fuzziness and uncertainty that subvert the institutional security logics of preemption.

Preemptive security and the commodification of future uncertainty

The possibility of disasters and catastrophic events yet to come has effects on the present day (Massumi, 2007). Though there is little probability of actualization, the mere possibility has already impacted our present-day lives (Adams et al., 2009: 247; Weszkalnys, 2014). In contrast to classical risk management, informed by the likelihood of us predicting probable futures and thus preventing particular courses of future events, catastrophe risk emerges without warning – but with incalculable costs (Amoore, 2013; Cooper, 2006: 119; Fussey, 2013). By establishing our affective relation to an uncertain future as the basis for action, the response to catastrophic risks is one of ‘speculative pre-emption’ (Cooper, 2006: 120, emphasis in original).

‘The presumed apocalyptic potential of contemporary threats’, write Marieke de Goede and Samuel Randalls (2009: 859) in their work on the ways in which terrorism and climate change are imagined, ‘underpins the call for precautionary, or preemptive political action’. In the post-9/11 era, preparing for the potential catastrophe has in fact become one of the central elements of security politics and routine security practice (De Goede et al., 2014: 412). Defined as ‘security practices that aim to act on threats that are unknown and recognized to be unknowable, yet deemed potentially catastrophic, requiring security interventions at the earliest possible stage’ (De Goede et al., 2014: 413), preemption acts on the basis of an unknown, on the basis of uncertainty (Amoore and De Goede, 2008: 179). As captured perhaps most famously in US President George W. Bush’s address to the graduates at the West Point Military Academy in 2002, the basis of preemption is a threat that has not yet emerged and that is indeterminately in potential: ‘If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge’ (quoted in Massumi, 2007).

The turn toward preemptive security, argues Joseph Masco (2014), resides in the logics and lessons of the Cold War. In his book on the affective and imaginative logics of the US counterterrorism apparatus, he traces how the ‘counterterror state’ bases its programs, desires, and concepts in Cold War notions of nuclear threat (Masco, 2014: 26). Yet, he notes, there is a significant difference in the kinds of dangers informing the War on Terror. During the Cold War, the enemy was known, and threat assessments were facilitated by identified capabilities and intentions of enemy forces. In the contemporary security environment, characterized by asymmetric warfare and the breakdown of stable patterns of interpretation, unknown threats have gained new prominence (Daase and Kessler, 2007: 415). These unknowns are employed to enable preemptive security practices, ‘allowing action to be favored over restraint, possibilities over capabilities, hypotheticals over knowledge’ (Masco, 2014: 17), precisely because the unknown threats are not manageable through techniques of probabilistic calculation (Lakoff, 2007).

The move from probability to possibility in contemporary security politics (see Amoore, 2013) represents a shift toward a future-oriented governmental logic that is aimed at controlling time by acting upon a range of potential futures (Stockdale, 2016). More specifically, it can be argued, a major feature of the global security landscape is the reorientation from spatial governance to temporal control, from a reactive orientation to a temporally inflected attempt to tame uncertainty through anticipatory actions in the present (Stockdale, 2016: 39). In order to act on an uncertain future and ward off a range of possible catastrophic disasters before they take place, imagination must be mobilized and deployed to profile that which has not yet occurred (Amoore and De Goede, 2008: 179).

Offering a vocabulary for understanding the presence of the future in preemptive actions, Ben Anderson (2010) argues that futures are made present through practices of calculation, imagination, and performance. Calculative practices, he suggests, render futures actionable through a range of techniques such as threat prints, data mining, impact assessments, and trend analysis. Here, catastrophe models used by insurance companies to estimate loss in the context of ‘low probability, high impact’ events are, for instance, employed to quantify disorder and disruption through calculation (Anderson, 2010: 784). Imaginative practices are used to make futures present through techniques such as visioning, link analysis, and scenario planning. Rather than being aimed at numericizing reality, these practices of imagination are shaped by the creative visualization and narrativization of ‘affectively imbued representations that move and mobilize’ (Anderson, 2010: 785). Performative practices make futures present through techniques aimed at embodying ‘as if’ futures. To achieve this aim, scenario-based exercises, simulations, and wargaming are effective techniques of performance that activate the experience of how a future event might feel (Anderson, 2010: 786). Scenario-based exercises generate experiential knowledge and an ‘affect of urgency . . . in the absence of the event itself’ (Lakoff, 2008: 401) and thus constitute a powerful means of inspiring preemptive security practices.

The role of affect as a driver of preemption has been a central theme running through much scholarly literature on the turn toward preemption and anticipatory governance in counterterrorism. As noted by Masco, counterterrorism is fundamentally dependent on the mobilization of affect. ‘For it to be possible to declare war on terror, terror must be made manifest as a structure one can feel with some regularity,’ he writes; and ‘for an emotion to be an enemy, it must be made ever present’ (Masco, 2014: 25). Indeed, as a result of the absence of empirical fact combined with the presence of radical uncertainty, the affective serves as the primary basis upon which preemptive action is activated (Stockdale, 2016: 91). As suggested by Stockdale, the importance of ‘gut feeling’ or ‘instinct’ perhaps most clearly illustrates how the politics of preemption operate through the affective realm (Stockdale, 2016: 90).

The mobilization of affect also inspires the ways in which counterterrorism measures are globally proliferated through transnational exchange. In the wake of 9/11 and the launching of the global War on Terror, counterterrorism models and technologies have become central commodities of an already booming market for security. In fact, the War on Terror has provided ‘an unprecedented focal point for the transnational interchange of security expertise and knowledge transfer’ (Ellison and O’Reilly, 2008). In order to find a cure to eradicate the source of uncertainty emerging from the threat of terrorism, new policies and laws have been implemented and new models and technologies developed and tested (Zevnik, 2017: 236). In this way, De Goede et al. (2014: 413) argue, ‘security preemption turns uncertain futures into commodities’.

The commodification of future uncertainty has been manifested in the acceleration of counterterrorism models and interventions, most predominantly in the USA and within the EU, where terrorism has gradually shifted from being perceived of as a domestic problem to being regarded as an international – and/or imported – problem (Den Boer, 2003). In the Global South, this acceleration is reflected in the proliferation of Western states providing training, equipment, and technical support for counterterror capacity-building and operations. In Kenya, for instance, significant external pressure has encouraged greater commitment to a counterterrorism agenda during the last two decades (Prestholdt, 2019). Here, support mainly from the USA, the UK, and Denmark has enabled the Kenyan government to significantly expand its counterterrorism infrastructure through a combination of hard security measures and soft interventions aimed at addressing conflict prevention and development issues (Bachmann and Hönke, 2010). In Nigeria, counterterrorism programs have equally grown and expanded since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The USA alone, which is also the largest bilateral donor in Nigeria, increased its military assistance to US$11.1 million per year through, for example, security training and capacity-building (Giroux and Nwankpa, 2019). Although Ghana has not been directly affected by domestic terrorism, it has recently become a strategic key site for external counterterrorism interventions. Here, affective responses to catastrophic terrorist attacks, particularly in Africa, have inspired recent efforts to develop and implement a national counterterrorism framework and infrastructure.

Counterterrorism in the absence of terror

On 21 September 2013, a group of four young men with rifles and grenades carried out an assault on the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, killing at least 67 people in what was subsequently announced to be an Al-Shabaab terrorist attack. Terrifying images of dead bodies, women running for safety while carrying their children, and visitors seized with panic escaping the busy shopping center nurtured already existing anxieties and fears of terrorism across the globe. In Ghana, the attack raised concern about the level of preparedness and ability to disrupt potential terrorism. In 2014, soon after the attack, the CTU of the GPS was formed. Divided into a counterterrorism secretariat, specialized assault forces, an intelligence unit, and a witness/information management unit, the CTU was given the mandate to deter, detect, and stop any threat of violence or act of terrorism.

While the formation of the CTU was not a direct result of Al-Shabaab’s activities in East Africa, the decision to create a specialized counterterrorism unit must be understood in the context of the global War on Terror and the circulation of counterterrorism models and security expertise (see also Christensen, 2017; Grassiani, 2019; Machold, 2016). In Ghana, this circulation can be traced from the era of British colonial policing to the contemporary increase in the marketing of counterterror models. As explored by Beek (2016: 28) in his book on police work in Ghana, the formation of police in the Gold Coast coincided with the formation of the English police forces, and their parallel expansion was based on policing models developed through exchange between Britain and the colonies. As is the case also with counterterrorism models, these models did not simply diffuse by themselves but were translated, appropriated and subverted as they were incorporated into Ghanaian security assemblages. In the context of counterterrorism in Ghana, distribution and exchange is shaped by foreign training interventions that are led both by the British and by a range of other security actors. In 2016, for instance, the US government organized joint counterterror exercises with Ghanaian security forces, and in 2018 the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) trained the GAF in counterterror responses. Although not involving a direct transfer of models or security practices, such external interventions have produced key transformations in security governance as well as in security discourses and practices in Ghana.

On 15 March 2016, the National Security Council of Ghana issued a statement on its decision to step up counterterrorism measures. On the basis of current intelligence on extremist activities in West Africa and a review of major recent terrorist attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire, the Council argued that Ghana faced a ‘credible terrorist threat’ (Africa News, 2016). Noting that ‘security measures may be enforced at various locations for the purpose of public safety’, the Council advised the public to ‘be vigilant, cautious and curious, and report any unusual circumstances to the law enforcement agencies’. The statement was made six months after Nazir Nortey Alema, a 25-year-old graduate from the Kwame Nkrumah University, had sent a WhatsApp message to his family telling them that he had left Ghana to join the Islamic State. Local media portrayed Alema as an ordinary young man and an active student who had shown no signs of being radicalized. Ghanaian National Security Coordinator Yaw Donkor confirmed that Alema and at least one other Ghanaian citizen had left the country to join the Islamic State (O’Grady, 2015). Both of them had been radicalized through an online forum and had apparently crossed the border to Burkina Faso before arriving at a training camp in Niger and then moving on to Turkey or Syria. Alema’s story represented a critical event that changed public security perceptions and discourses in Ghana (WACCE, 2016). From being associated mainly with external conflict scenarios, the notion of transnational terrorism suddenly became linked to internal security dynamics and discussions on the threats associated with the return of foreign fighters. Alema’s story furthermore represented an early warning that not only marginalized, disenfranchised youth but also ordinary university students can be vulnerable to radicalization. ‘Anyone is a potential recruit’, the national security coordinator warned (Mpoke-Bigg, 2015).

Coupled with external security interventions, the case of Alema became a central driving force behind the development of Ghana’s National Counterterrorism Framework, which was initiated by the Ministry of National Security in 2016 in cooperation with the Bureau of National Intelligence, the Research Department, the GAF, the Police Service, and other governmental agencies (Christensen and Edu-Afful, 2019). In the review of the domestic threat of terrorism, the framework emphasized that many others had reportedly followed Alema’s example and that this could become an avenue for further radicalization as well as planning and execution of terrorist attacks on home soil. Additionally, the framework highlighted that while Ghana had not directly experienced terrorist attacks on home soil, domestic, regional, and global threats linked to, among other issues, the proliferation of extremist groups and arms, Ghana’s contribution to UN peacekeeping, and the presence of foreign mission interests made Ghana a potential target for terrorist acts. Against this background, a comprehensive approach aimed at preventing, preempting, protecting against, and responding to terrorist threats was presented. In combination, these measures would strengthen the capacity of security services to confront any future threats, it was noted.

‘When you see your neighbor’s beard on fire, you protect yours with water’, the director of counterterrorism at the Ministry of National Security in Ghana states (Interview 1). Drawing on an old adage to explain the linkages between the rise in terrorist activities in neighboring countries and counterterrorism measures in Ghana, he discusses the reasons why the Counterterrorism Framework was established. While the threat level was assessed to be ‘low’ during the initial process of development, recent incidents in the region, most notably the rise in terrorist-related attacks at the northern borders in the neighboring country of Burkina Faso, have raised the threat level in Ghana to ‘moderate’, thus further highlighting the need for such a framework. Despite the launch of extensive regional counterterrorism initiatives, including France’s Sahel-focused Operation Barkhane, terrorist groups have demonstrated a renewed capability to conduct attacks on both soft and hard targets and to reconfigure resources and exploit community conflicts and local vulnerabilities to mobilize support and mask their operations. Faced with the emergence of Salafist-jihadist groups such as Boko Haram, Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), and Ansurul Islam, and their territorial expansion to the Gulf of Guinea, a counterterrorism spokesman at the Department of Defence Intelligence equally emphasizes that ‘the threat is just at the doorstep’ (Interview 2). Consequently, the director of counterterrorism explains, it is paramount to prepare, and here most importantly by focusing on preemption (Interview 3).

In the Counterterrorism Framework, preemptive measures are aimed at ensuring a rapid response to terrorist threats based on early warning signs and risk assessments of the likelihood of terrorist acts. Moreover, preemptive measures include the surveillance of suspicious persons through the monitoring of emerging traces of radicalization, extremism, and terror-related activities. Among officers in the CTU, the preemptive measures outlined in the framework inspire everyday practices of policing.

Everyday practices of policing

In this section, I empirically illuminate how preemptive measures animate three domains of counterterror policing. The first domain I present focuses on how affect is mobilized through imaginative practices in the context of outreach activities; the second on how unknown futures are made actionable through performative practices during scenario-based exercises; and the last on how awareness of signs of danger from an unknown future shape nighttime patrols. These domains of policing have emerged through a methodological approach based on the ‘extended case method’ (Van Velsen, 1967: 143) and inductive analysis enabling identification of how preemptive policing makes uncertain futures present through practices of imagination and performance (see Anderson, 2010).

Tracing police officers who are mandated to carry out the operational response to terrorism over time and through different spaces and activities of policing, ranging from day-to-day monitoring of urban circulations, through awareness-raising activities in mosques and churches, to worst-case scenario exercises, we see that while being aimed at responding to threatening possibilities before they become fact (see Masco, 2014: 11), everyday practices of preemption are simultaneously productive of uncertainty in the present. This uncertainty, I propose, is produced in a context where fuzzy representations of terrorist threats are incorporated into security practices, giving rise to a conflation of risks and threats associated with ordinary crime and extraordinary terror (see also Johansen et al., 2021).

Conclusion

‘Ghana has not been attacked yet. This narrative implies that Ghana is yet to be attacked,’ the head of the CTU explains, pointing to the ways in which representations of a constant potential for attack can nurture fear and anxiety among the population. ‘Due to this narrative, we are investing, we are buying a lot of equipment . . . but how do we counter fear with fear?’, he asks rhetorically and argues that the narrative of ‘not yet’ should be opposed in order to nurture security awareness rather than panic. Comparing terrorism to epidemics like Ebola, he explains how the population has been educated on the behavioral aspects, on how the virus spreads, and how it can be mitigated. Terrorism, in his view, should be approached in similar ways. ‘Rather than investing resources in building a gate, resilience is the key,’ he underlines (Interview 5). Drawing on the notion of resilience – a central organizing metaphor of national security and emergence preparedness (Coaffee and Fussey, 2015: 88) – he points to the significance of developing both reactive capabilities to respond to and recover from terrorist attacks and proactive preemptive measures to confront uncertain future threats.

This article has explored how counterterrorist officers assess unknown security threats through preemptive practices in the present directed at an uncertain future. Since it is only through modes of articulation and representation that threats are actualized and made tangible (De Goede and Randalls, 2009: 861), practices of imagination and performance are effective means of bringing uncertain futures into being in the present (Anderson, 2010). Through a focus on how preemption is enacted through outreach activities, exercises, and patrol activities, it has been elucidated how security officers with a mandate to respond to terrorism perceive of and seek to preempt threats that have not materialized but are manifested only in imaginaries and simulated actualizations. Here, affect is a central basis for action, as it nurtures an acute alertness based on the perception that an attack may occur at any moment. However, in a context characterized by the absence of terrorist attacks on home soil, the mobilization of affect is dependent on the ability to bring lived experiences with terrorist attacks from other contexts into being through articulation and representation. As evident from Operation Save the Future, explicit images of death and destruction in the wake of terrorist attacks in the subregion are invoked to drive home the point that the threat is gradually approaching, thus calling for constant alertness. Similarly, Operation Home Shield activates the presumed need for combating uncertain futures ‘as if they were material and imminent threats’ (Masco, 2014: 15, emphasis in original), on the basis of worst-case scenarios inspired by attacks in the Global North.

The mobilization of affect has facilitated and accelerated the transnational exchange of counterterrorism and the commodification of future uncertainty. Precautionary measures based on threats in other countries have turned counterterrorism into a domain of global engagement, precisely because these measures are shaped by and stimulate an affective atmosphere of anxiety that is transforming both national security infrastructures and individualized emotions (Masco, 2014). This transformation and the prominence of preemptive security logics, it has been argued, is accompanied by the proliferation of suspicion and surveillance (Coaffee and Fussey, 2015; Fussey, 2013: 354), which produces new forms of insecurity and enables the nationalization of fear (Masco, 2014: 18).

Complementing our focus on how the politics of preemption become embedded in national security and governance infrastructures, as well as in public anxiety, this article has provided a novel perspective on how preemption is enacted and embodied in the everyday practices of security officers assigned the operational responsibility for implementing counterterrorism models and measures. Conceptually, this has offered insight into the ways in which fear of future spectacular attacks is translated into the everyday, where blurry and diffuse imaginations of insider threats animate mundane practices of policing. For officers in Ghana’s CTU, the expansion of the figure of fear, nurtured by the perception that even ‘your own disgruntled brother or sister’ can be radicalized (Interview 6) and their inability to locate and fix signs of suspicion, gives rise to a conflation of risks and threats associated with terror and crime. This conflation produces an inherent uncertainty. While practices of imagination and performance enable a fleeting experience of having access to the future, the slippery nature of threats that have not yet materialized ultimately makes the aspiration to tame an uncertain future an impossible endeavor.

Empirically, the article has offered insight into how models are translated and appropriated as they become entangled with context-specific security logics and competing rationalities. Shifting the perspective from policy to practice and from police organizations to the lived experiences of police officers who perform counterterrorism on the ground, we see how these logics and rationalities are productive of a modality of counterterrorism that ends up being mainly about demonstrating a presence in the face of more tangible security concerns in crime-ridden neighborhoods. In this way, as everyday counterterror policing becomes an exercise in demonstrating a presence in the present day, rather than acting upon potential futures, the principal institutional security logics of preemption are subverted.