Abstract
In the last several years, Europe has witnessed a hard turn to Security—with a capital S—characterized by war language, closed borders, a vague and thus potentially all-embracing conception of the ‘enemy’ and by what C Wright Mills would call military metaphysics. The state of Paris after the January (Hebdo) and November (Bataclan) 2015 attacks, as well as the state of the Schengen zone more broadly, make this all too clear. This is the sort of Security that is given the status of a mega-concept by International Relations and Security Studies scholars; an all-embracing concept that pierces more and more membranes of life. Having said that, The Anthropology of Security is very welcome as it cuts sharply against the grain of such politico-scholastic approaches to Security.
Reading it reminded me of Clifford Geertz’s (1973: 25) statement that, in anthropology, ‘theoretical formulations hover so low over the interpretations they govern that they don’t make much sense or hold much interest apart from them’. Our work is typically suffused with precise and protracted descriptions of small facts and the circumstances in which they take place, which force theory to stay close to the ground. It is precisely in this respect that The Anthropology of Security is such an important contribution to our understanding of security, a concept hitherto monopolized by securitization theorists who have given it very little in terms of the sensible actuality Geertz would have had in mind, and which makes it possible to think concretely and imaginatively with security.
To borrow from Didier Bigo’s afterword to the book, there is indeed a traditional opposition in terms of narrative and episteme that distinguishes the canon of established securitization theories from anthropology’s grounded approaches. The former could not care less about the latter, which are thought to be drowning in their own details at worst or considered to be mere providers of empirical examples at best. However, it is exactly this grounded perspective that compromises the grandeur of that mega-concept security and the airborne theories from which it has achieved that mega status. This perspective is the fruit of very basic questions that are being asked by anthropologists. What is security? Whose security are we talking about? How is security (differently) experienced and (culturally) imagined? Can techno-scientific solutions to security issues also be part of the problem? What are the social and legal limits of securitization?
This last question, for example, is taken up by Didier Fassin in his chapter on petty states of exception, which he describes as ‘temporally, geographically and juridically limited forms of non-respect of the rule of law within democratic regimes’ (p. 105). Based on a long-term ethnographic project in which he followed a Parisian anti-crime squad, Fassin calls the French police decidedly unconstitutional in their battle against urban crime. He describes the arbitrary character of police punishment, the needless use of physical force and provocation, which produce a sense (and reality) of insecurity. He describes, in other words, how security plays out on the ground. What he finds there is a security actor causing insecurity; a law enforcement agency applying illegal methods. He is not alone in his observations. Similar illegal practices are observed at the Greco-Turkish border, from where Jutta Lauth Bacas reported unlawful treatment and clear human rights abuses perpetrated by border police.
The question whose security? is addressed in all chapters, but specifically the ones written by Demossier and Hasselberg. In her chapter on the deportation of foreign-national offenders from the UK, Ines Hasselberg writes about the social death of people who lived as legal residents in the UK for years: ‘[b]etween imprisonment and deportation, migrants and their families live in limbo. Their lives are unsettled, uncertain and insecure’ (p. 153). She argues that deportation, and particularly the lack of post-deportation accountability (Grewock’s term), might result in a greater disruption of the social fabric than the actual crime of a deported individual. Again, we see the potential damage to society of ill-considered security policies that only take into account short-term consequences. Likewise, we read in Marion Demossier’s chapter on the Roma in France about what the editors in their concluding chapter call the violence of security. The same question, whose security?, emerges. While the Roma are framed as a security threat endangering the French, it is actually the Roma who suffer from insecurity and are transformed through constant expulsions into the nomads they are considered to be in popular perception.
The technology of security is most explicitly addressed in the chapter of Catarina Frois on CCTV in Portugal, in which the question arises if techno-solutions to security are indeed part of the problem. Frois provides us with her reading of the ‘deaf-to-criticism’ rollout of public CCTV in Portugal. This rollout is described by Frois as a political process: the Ministry of Internal Affairs pointed at a security void which was not actually there. Police officers interviewed by Frois argued that Portugal is relatively safe (crime was actually declining at the time of her research) and that the introduction of security cameras actually runs counter to the Portuguese tradition of ‘proximity’ policing, that is, a form of policing that takes place close to the people. Yet, the Ministry introduced changes to Portuguese law, giving the minister the power to by-pass the Data Protection Authority, which had previously interfered and blocked the implementation of CCTV. Frois labels such politics undemocratic and argues convincingly that they are ignorant of citizens’ needs. Alexandra Schwell makes the apt remark: ‘[w]hat is the point of all these controls, checks and surveillance if not to make everybody feel safe’ (p. 83)? She raises this question within the framework of her research on so-called ‘Compensatory Measures’ which the Vienna police introduced in response to the Schengen enlargement and which led an Austrian police officer to state: ‘check everyone! Nobody should feel safe!’
Such ‘reactive securitisation’ (Maguire, p. 120) makes it clear that security must be understood as always emergent within specific conditions, as Maguire et al. argue in their Introduction. It is with their attempt to understand the conditionality and circumstantiality of security that anthropologists deliver their most important contribution.