Studying the governance of crime and security: Space,time and jurisdiction 1

Putting Theory Itself in Question: Some Preliminary Remarks

But, to take one step back, why do I present a set of questions instead of a theory? As an official theorist who sometimes publishes in theory journals and has taught theory courses for 30 years, I am often asked to either endorse one particular existing general theory of social relations or to elaborate my own. An important reason why I have chosen to not do theory in the conventional manner is that in my view, macro-explanations of ‘modernity’ in general – the approach to theorizing that can be said to begin with Durkheim – have less and less purchase on concrete analyses and are increasingly irrelevant to younger scholars engaged in innovative research. In the context of studies of crime and security, the key paradigm of theory remains that drawn from classical sociology. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Manuel Castells and Niklas Luhmann are some of the ‘big names’ that routinely appear in the theory section of studies of crime and security. (Foucault does too, but as I have shown elsewhere his work is generally misused as if it were sociological theory, so that his work, instead of being used to challenge the paradigm of world-scale theorizing about modernity, is recuperated by it; see Valverde (2010b).) But while this established world-scale style of theory is still popular in the sense of being frequently cited, there are indications that a different kind of work, work that does not so much critique as eschew and even ignore the formats and the styles of thought of classical sociology, is on the rise – the popularity of Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory being perhaps the key clue here (Latour, 2010).

Most significantly, while postcolonial studies has not made much of an inroad into studies of crime and security (postcolonial criminology does not really exist as yet), criminologists and sociologists who rely on the intellectual habits of the tradition that goes from Durkheim to such thinkers as David Garland and Ulrich Beck will eventually have to face up to the fact that what I call world-scale theory was premised on and still depends on an increasingly problematic assumption, namely, that ‘modernity’ is the proper object of social theory. To return to the point (in the late 19th century) when today’s social sciences all took institutional form, sociology could only develop as the science of modernity by contrast with anthropology’s mission to study the primitive. This means that as the category of the primitive becomes more and more discredited, it will be increasingly impossible for sociological theory to stick to its old mission statement. Anthropologists have over the past few decades come to grips with the shady history of their discipline, often painfully, and have developed highly sophisticated techniques promoting reflexivity and pursuing studies that from the outset challenge the modern versus primitive binary. Sociology, by contrast, seems not to have heard the news about the fall of Eurocentric paradigms, and major theorists continue to issue books that have ‘modernity’ in the title as if this were a valid category, when in fact modernity (like ‘the West’) is nothing but the Orientalist other of ‘the primitive’.

A major reason for the anachronistic persistence of the classical model of social theory, the model that presupposes that there is such a thing as modernity and that this is social theory’s prime object of study, is that scholars who are not sociologists and who work in interdisciplinary endeavours often look to sociology – rather than, say, anthropology or history – for theoretical tools (and, worse, ‘models’), thus continuing to reproduce the style of thought of sociological theory even outside its disciplinary boundaries. Not coincidentally, sociological geography with a Marxist bent is also popular in today’s supermarket of theory (e.g. David Harvey). Scholars who do not have a vested institutional interest in sociology’s claim to be the queen of the social sciences – people such as criminologists, urban studies scholars, public health researchers and so on – should find it easier than those employed in sociology departments to question received assumptions about what theory is and where it is produced, but for some reason this is not happening. One reason may be that interdisciplinary scholars hired precisely because of their interdisciplinarity are more often than not expected to deliver a curriculum that embodies antiquated notions of theory, including the separation of official theory courses covering the canon from ‘topic’-oriented courses. This is certainly the case in criminology curricula that I have seen, not least at my own supposedly world-class institution. Courses in postcolonial studies and sexuality studies, by contrast, are almost always theoretical as well as empirical, and while abandoning the theory–research binary, they also put in question the division of intellectual labour between sociology and anthropology that is constitutive of 20th-century grand social theory. By contrast, criminology and sociology departments (though British sociology is far less hide-bound than American sociology) usually cleave to the old idea that theorizing consists of learning the ‘dead white men’ canon and that such work is useful to guide empirical research (as opposed to being challenged by empirical research findings). In sum, therefore, there is ample evidence – though in this article I cannot digress any longer to present it – that sociology’s longstanding separation of ‘theory’ from ‘research’ sustains a highly abstract, static, Eurocentric and masculinist idea of theoretical practice, at the level of form, while at the level of content, sociology has not yet separated its own self-description from the questionable Eurocentric category of ‘modernity’.

Few young scholars are directly challenging the organization of their departmental curriculum and other practices that embody and reproduce, however implicitly, the antiquated notions of theory just canvassed. But more or less quietly, many young scholars are broadening the scope of what counts as theory. Indeed, canons seem to be steadily losing ground to new approaches: Actor Network Theory, governmentality studies, science and technology studies, risk studies and others. These endeavours are not only interdisciplinary but, what is not so often discussed, inter-methodological and inter-theoretical.

The question then is: in this new climate of inter-methodological and inter-theoretical work, what can people like myself, trained in classical and contemporary philosophy and theory, offer research? One possibility would be to offer to build yet another, postmodern, abstract model of how the world works. But with all respect to Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck, I do not think it makes sense to put new wine in old skins, new content in the old formats of theory.

This is why I seek not to build a new model or to argue for one of the existing models, but rather to pose a set of questions that both come out of research and can guide future research, as I have been doing, in bits and pieces, for the past few years (Valverde, 2009, 2010a, 2011).

The first point – which has almost the status of a premise, though not quite – is that asking questions about ‘what is security?’ or what security ought to be is not very fruitful for researchers, however satisfying it might be for philosophers. Social scientists make much more useful contributions when they instead focus on security projects – defined nominalistically as the governing networks and mechanisms that claim to be promoting security at all scales. And in studying security projects, I argue that it can be useful to first ask questions about the logic (including the values and telos) of a security project, and then ask questions about what geographers call ‘scale effects’ – though ensuring that temporal scale is included in the analysis too, not just spatial scale.

From there, one can move to the somewhat separate question of jurisdiction, which is almost always taken for granted in criminology. Deciding who governs where – the basic jurisdictional question – is not only important in itself but also has the effect of determining how something is governed. Shifting jurisdiction from one organization or level of government to another has the effect of automatically changing how something is governed, as will be shown below.

Finally, it is appropriate to move to documenting the effects of techniques of security used – human, technological, architectural and so on. That will be done in the penultimate section. Certain logics of governance tend to go together with certain techniques, but this link is not fixed, and so studying the techniques somewhat separately from the logic, the scale and the jurisdiction can be important.

But to begin it is necessary to address – without claiming to answer – what most people imagine is the basic question: if crime is a negative phenomenon for society as well as for individuals because it harms security, what is security? Crime is far easier to define, whether one uses official data about law-breaking or victimization surveys. But the positive correlate, security, is far harder to grasp.

What Is Security?

Unlike lawbreaking, security cannot be seen and measured objectively. The great thinker of security, Thomas Hobbes, explained the elusiveness of security by pointing out that what he called ‘war’, and we would call insecurity, is not a series of objectively measurable events, but rather a tendency, or what would soon come to be called a probability (and much later, a risk). War, he wrote, consists

not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known; and therefore the notion of Time is to be considered in the nature of Warre, as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of Foule weather lie not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together; So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE. (Hobbes, 1968 [1651]: 186, emphasis added)

A secure commonwealth is thus one in which there may well be some violence or other anxiety-producing events, but in which people do not have to constantly fear for their lives and their property as they do in the state of nature. They are secure because they have agreed to hand over most of their natural liberty to the corporate entity whose task is to ensure sufficient security so that private individuals can get on with maximizing their property and their (private, non-political) pleasure. That this security is achieved only by running the risk of having the sovereign or the state abuse its powers, in ways which may make individuals quite fearful and insecure, is of course the central paradox of the social contract, as well as the central paradox of state security, as critics of Hobbes from John Locke to Edward Snowden have pointed out.

It is this paradox that has been explored by a large number of scholars and public intellectuals in recent years, in studies that often conclude, as Lucia Zedner’s (2009: 235) erudite overview does, that ‘the human need for security should not be permitted to defeat itself’ (see also Dillon, 1996; Neocleous, 2008; Wood and Shearing, 2007).

But one can only talk about ‘the human need for security’ (or for that matter ‘the central paradox of security’) if one takes ‘security’ as a single – if admittedly fuzzy – entity, such that one can undertake to do a history or a theory of security.

While the theories and histories of security that we now have are certainly useful to criminology, it may be time to move to a different type of project, one that instead of focusing on security as a noun, a thing – a choice that inevitably leads into normative discussions about good security versus bad security – turns the gaze not on a single word or a concept but rather on the very wide variety of activities and practices that are being carried out under the name of ‘security’. The shift away from ‘clarifying concepts’ in the Oxford tradition to documenting and reflecting on practices is of course Foucault’s great intellectual move. But we can also draw inspiration from a different source, American legal pragmatism. We can describe what we do as studying what following William James (1994 [1936]) could be called ‘varieties of security experience’. That is, instead of starting with an abstract noun (‘security’), and proceeding to carry out philosophical or philological or historical inquiries, we can start with actually existing practices of governance that the participants themselves – not outside observers – describe as promoting security in some way. On the basis of that study, we should be able to then draw conclusions about how ‘security’ is being constituted in a variety of realms.

The conclusions will not have direct political or normative lessons; but they will be useful for those who want to engage in both practical and intellectual work in the general area of the governance of security.

The Logic of Security Projects

What I am here calling the ‘logic’ of a security project – which is the substance of the first research question I suggest we ask – draws on Rose and Miller’s (1992) influential distinction between ‘political rationalities’ of governance and ‘technologies’ of governance. However, Rose and Miller, and governmentality studies generally, tend to emphasize the instrumentally rational elements of governance; I use the word ‘logic’ to include the affective and aesthetic dimensions of governance.

Criminologists have long pointed out that governing crime, or ‘governing the world through crime’, in Jonathan Simon’s (2007) influential phrase, are enterprises which are by no means purely actuarial or rationalistic. Unconscious fears about mythic figures, racialized demons and assorted ‘folk devils’ are often contained not only in policing responses and in correctional practices but even in the criminal law itself, as has been amply demonstrated by the literature on the US ‘war on drugs’, and also by studies of recent anti-terrorism legislation.

In addition to the well-known affective and aesthetic dimensions of crime control that derive from fears about the racial ‘Other’ and the disreputable, the less well-known feminist literature on the gender dimensions of safety, security and risk continues to be highly relevant today, and it too has drawn attention to the unconscious dimensions of both perceptions of crime and responses to crime.

So within ‘logic’ I am including the aims and the assumptions of a project – that which tells us what counts as relevant information – but also the culturally specific fears and moods that pervade the field of security. ‘Mood’ is important, here: the less than rational dimensions of policy making are not limited to ‘fear’, as in fear of crime – crime control measures can be part of optimistic projects, for example, forms of nationalism.

So what are some examples of what I call the logic of security projects?

Across the street from my house in Toronto there is a public park that is illuminated until about midnight by very strong lights. These lights, which are bothersome to many of us but appear to be acceptable and even necessary to those who govern such things, were initially placed there in the 1950s. Then they were known as ‘morality lights’. Now, nobody calls them that. They are called ‘security lights’. The way in which the exact same entity (bright electric lights in the park) goes by different names at different times illustrates the way in which one and the same technique can be mobilized by different ‘logics’ of security, one geared to securing the moral order by preventing couples from making out in public versus one focused on ‘stranger danger’.

Another example of a simple technique that can be mobilized under quite different logics is the collection of crime statistics by police district. Those data are generally used to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ neighbourhoods, for example by real estate agents, or by the police themselves. The use of those data has then the effect of increasing the socioeconomic differences between neighbourhoods, since the respectable will avoid buying a house in a ‘bad’ neighbourhood and the police will likely make fewer stops and arrests in ‘good’ neighbourhoods. The ‘logic’ of such data collection is thus, in this case, that of increasing urban differentiation – the logic of the famous Chicago School circles. However, district-specific crime data can also be used to counteract increasing social inequality: they can be used, along with other data, to channel more resources to those areas that appear to need it most. That’s the welfarist logic of Toronto’s ‘priority neighbourhoods’ project, which uses quantitative indicators of disadvantage to funnel more resources to those areas that need it.

One more example illustrates how logics of governance matter – and here, the analytical point is that one established governing logic can be easily drawn upon, overtly or not, to support and strengthen the logic of a newer project. Advertisements promoting home security products suggest that ‘security’ in this context consists of upholding and increasing the sovereign power of an individual who is always presented as: (a) owning a house, not renting an apartment; and (b) the head of a family whose other members are always already nothing but vulnerable victims. Home security marketing gives the impression that domestic violence does not exist, that the only unruly teenagers are by definition someone else’s children and that the person whose very identity appears to depend on a mortgage is entitled to monitor and control and literally see every activity of every person who is occupying the household, especially children and domestic workers. One need not be a declared feminist to appreciate that the logic of home security marketing is not unrelated to the logic of the patriarchal nuclear family.

Having shown that security projects of all kinds all assume – and produce – a certain logic of governance, and that logics can flow from one project to another, we can now go on to the next set of questions. These have to do with the scale of a security project.

The Scales of Security

That scale matters in both practical security enterprises and in our analyses of these activities is widely recognized, though often only implicitly. Measures that are considered appropriate to defend a nation-state’s borders, for instance, such as an army and an intelligence service, would not be considered appropriate at the scale of the city or the neighbourhood.

Theoretical studies of scale shifting and scale issues by geographers such as David Harvey, Neil Brenner and others have come to be used by criminologists, especially urban criminologists. I used geographic work on scale myself in an essay included in Adam Crawford’s (2011) edited collection on International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (see Valverde, 2011). There, I argued that ‘broken windows’ criminology’s choice of scale ² – the microlocal – is the key move, since the plausibility of the thesis depends on the rigid exclusion not only of national-scale information (e.g. about immigration and other demographic changes) but also of city-wide information, for example, about deindustrialization.

Most studies of crime and crime prevention choose one particular scale and remain there throughout the study. Multiscalar analyses are possible (as when ethnographers look up from their favourite street corner long enough to include broader demographic and economic trends in their analyses) – but they are not common. That is not necessarily a problem; what is problematic, I argue, is to proceed without a clear awareness of the pros and cons of the particular scale we happen to be using.

Scale, however, is more than the amount of space that is included in either the actual security project at hand or in our analysis. Temporality too – which is certainly key to all security projects including crime prevention, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out – is scalar.

The importance of temporal scale choice is visible, for example, in the tensions between the work of police detectives and those less celebrated officers who engage in community liaison and crime prevention. Detecting crimes and finding the criminal is a backward-looking enterprise that treats the present as a vast collection of (a) clues and (b) witnesses. ³ The logic of detective work deploys the logic that in other work I have called the ‘forensic gaze’ (Valverde, 2003), but for present purposes what is important is that this enterprise has a particular temporality (the retrospective reconstruction of a crime that took place in the past) and a particular spatialization, focusing on the scene of crime and radiating out from that.

By contrast, crime prevention work looks to the future rather than the past; but it also encompasses an indefinite series of possible future events, and in that sense is broader in both spatial and temporal scope than detective work. The space to be secured in crime prevention may be relatively small (a house or a park), but the project has to monitor and guard the whole of that space, without privileging a single ‘scene’, as detective work does.

Temporalizations differ not only by direction (forward versus backward) but in other ways as well. Henri Bergson famously pointed out that ‘duration’ – the phenomenological time of human experience – is not the same as objective, calendar time; but more prosaically, the field of crime and criminal law also contains and relies on temporal distinctions, such as day/night, weekday/weekend, peacetime/wartime, youth/adulthood and so on. These distinctions are often embodied in law itself as well as in law enforcement practices.

While I have made a point of highlighting temporal scales, since they have been wholly neglected both by legal geographers and by criminologists, it is nevertheless important to remember that in practice temporalizations are not separate from spatializations – it is more useful to think of the local park in need of crime prevention measures or the murder that needs solving as entities constituted in particular spatio-temporalities, or what Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) called ‘chronotopes’.

Jurisdiction

In many of the examples I have given, the governance issues are not limited to logics and scale effects, even though that was the focus of the analysis. Scalar effects shade into jurisdiction: for example, that trash removal is a local issue is both a product of the naturalization of governing scale and a result of the fact that local jurisdiction over waste is taken for granted, just as jurisdiction over war and peace is assumed to lie with the state, always and everywhere. The study of jurisdiction does not have to stop with formal law. There are important jurisdictional divides in non-state or informal systems of governance, which means that those interested in informal social control and extra-state security should therefore include jurisdiction in their analyses. For example, in many families mothers and fathers have quite distinct jurisdictions, even though by law they have the same powers and duties. All manner of other social units, from inmate communities to organized crime groups to university departments, also rely a great deal on jurisdictional divisions of labour that may not be visible from the outside but which insiders soon learn to take very seriously. Informal jurisdictions are by no means remnants of some kind of traditional past: capitalism constantly gives rise to myriad private or semi-private jurisdictions, as we see with the rise of international commercial arbitration, Internet law and other phenomena. Jurisdictional analysis in my meaning of the term thus requires knowledge of ‘law in action’, not just law in the books.

Most legal geographers, and some criminologists, conflate jurisdiction with spatial scale. But even when a jurisdiction coincides with a particular geographic space, jurisdiction is analytically distinct in important ways (Dorsett and McVeigh, 2012; McVeigh, 2007). After all, a murder might take place in a city park, but city bylaw officers have no jurisdiction over that event.

Even jurisdictions that are territorial – rather than functional – rarely feature a single Hobbes-style sovereign. Territories are governed simultaneously by a host of authorities wielding different jurisdictions, and not only in federal countries. In the urban setting, for instance, an area in which I have conducted much empirical research, boards and commissions are particularly important in the management of everyday disorder, and often play a more important role than the local authority. Bodies such as parks commissions, school boards and public transit authorities, not to mention countless quangos and urban development corporations, exercise jurisdiction over islands of territory within a municipality, though with the ‘island’ metaphor being inadequate in that these special purpose bodies are never fully sovereign, and frequently overlap with several other special purpose bodies as well as with political entities from the local authority to the nation state. Subnational and special-purpose local authorities exist throughout the world, including in states thought of as highly undemocratic and centralized, such as China. The upshot is that the Hobbesian model of a single sovereign with a unified, complete jurisdiction has never existed, even in dictatorships.

Criminologists tend to take jurisdiction for granted, to ‘black box’ it – perhaps because the criminal law is the least contested of all the jurisdictions one generally finds in stable democracies. But even though the jurisdiction of national criminal law has been naturalized since at least Blackstones day, there are many struggles that show that this jurisdiction too is contested. Medical authorities, for example, are currently, in Canada, arguing that physician assisted suicide should be removed from criminal jurisdiction and put under their authority, and the long fight to decriminalize homosexual sex is another example. While criminologists are quite aware of the struggles over the use of the criminal law to regulate morality, they rarely pay attention to other actual or potential challenges to the jurisdiction of the central state, ones that do not have much political traction. It is taken for granted that municipalities might engage in experiments in enforcement; but the criminal law itself is assumed to be wholly within state jurisdiction.

Despite the relative success of this ‘black boxing’ of criminal law jurisdiction, the game of jurisdiction is nevertheless more complex and unstable than it appears. The instabilities become particularly visible in the international arena. When Blackwater private contractors murdered Iraqi civilians in cold blood in 2007, for example, many were appalled to discover that the USA had previously passed a law removing their forces of occupation from all Iraqi jurisdictions. They were even more shocked to discover that because the contractors were not soldiers they were not subject to the substitute colonial-style jurisdiction of the Military Extraterritorial Justice statute that had been passed by Congress precisely to allow the USA to punish soldiers for offences committed abroad. The Iraqi victims, in other words, were not able to seize on any jurisdiction at all to claim justice. This was not due to a lack of law – in fact, there was an excess of law, with several statutes (e.g. the Alien Torts Act) hovering in the air alongside Iraqi criminal law and the US statutes mentioned; what was absent was jurisdiction. As Fleur Johns’ (2013) important work on the thicket of regulation and law that in fact fills what are thought of as lawless spaces or legal black holes shows us, studies of state misconduct that invoke Agamben’s (2005) ‘state of exception’ would do better to pay attention to the complex network of overlapping jurisdictions, laws and regulations that exist even in places like Guantanamo.

Jurisdiction is not just the determination of the ‘who’ of governance, the determination of the correct sovereign. Jurisdictional games also determine what spaces, persons and/or issues are to be governed by any one authority. And perhaps most importantly, in determining the who and the what of governance, the game of jurisdiction ends up quietly determining the how of governance, the qualitative element. In Canada, if a dispute about mining is settled in favour of the province, the logic then used to govern will be that of ‘natural resources’, over which provinces have complete jurisdiction. If the dispute is settled in favour of the federal government, then sovereignty will make an appearance, whereas if aboriginal nations are given the legal right to exercise jurisdiction the logic of conservation and sustainability will then rise to the fore.

Another example: cities in Canada have been arguing that they need to have a say in immigration policy. If they were successful (highly doubtful), I am sure cities would govern immigration very differently, using a human-resource model rather than worrying about terrorism.

Thus, who is thought of as the proper authority for space X or problem Y – the question of jurisdiction – ends up settling the often unasked question of how something or some space is to be governed. And the ‘how’ of governance is not independent from questions of space and time. Restorative justice, for example, redefines some crimes as matters for family-like or community-style governance; and it is not coincidental that neither the conventional space of criminal justice (the courtroom) nor the conventional temporalization of criminal punishment (‘serving time’) appear as appropriate.

Techniques of Security

In a complete analysis of a security project one has to pay close attention to the array of techniques used to implement the project in question. By ‘techniques’ I do not mean only technologies such as video surveillance, but also what Actor Network Theory calls ‘techniques of inscription’ (e.g. writing qualitative reports versus generating a set of numbers), as well as what governmentality studies regard as everyday techniques of governance – which includes everything from architectural details characteristic of certain security institutions to bodily habits.

Current journalistic discourse is fixated on communication technologies; we constantly hear that the Arab Spring would not have happened without social media, for example. Such technological determinism, however, is not only ahistorical but also neglects information practices and governing techniques that are not embedded in or facilitated by machines of one sort of another. Long ago, Ian Hacking (1982) drew attention to the great importance of the 19th-century’s invention of ‘avalanches of printed numbers’ as an information format with great effects, and many studies since have shown the importance of formats that may or may not be connected to hardware.

Thus, when analysing the techniques used to carry out certain security projects we need to include much more than the equipment. Law itself, I have argued elsewhere (Valverde, 2009), contains important ‘technicalities’ that do a great deal of governing work, even though they are usually neglected not just by criminologists but also by legal scholars focused on high law and grand legal principles.

Governmentality studies of policing and crime control have explored the effects of techniques of security in many contexts, paying attention to information formats and other types of techniques. However, in my view it is dangerous to focus only on techniques. The logic, the spatiotemporal scale and the jurisdiction of the particular security project being furthered cannot be read off from the techniques. They require separate analysis.

Conclusion

In my view, the crucial challenge facing theorists today is to finally get over our longstanding habit of equating ‘theorizing’ with constructing models. Models of modernity are particularly problematic from a postcolonial perspective; but assuming that theorizing equals modelling is problematic more generally. A major problem is that the models claim to explain or at least describe change – but the models are themselves static. The laws of motion of ‘society’, of capitalism, or of neoliberalism, are not themselves dynamic. This is not surprising. As Nietzsche said long ago, it is not possible for human thought to be as nimble and mobile as the realities which thought attempts to capture; but we can at least try for more dynamic approaches in which thought itself, not just history, is constantly on the move.

Governance projects are, I suggest, more complex than is usually thought. And they are certainly more complex than their designers realize, since many of the complications arise from interactions between different dimensions of governance that are often specific to the situation and cannot be predicted in advance. In some instances jurisdiction flows from spatial scale; in other cases the game of jurisdiction breaks up space; in some cases the logic of a project is smoothly promoted by the techniques used, whereas in other places the techniques end up acquiring a life of their own and undermining the governing logic. The four sets of questions I have presented here – about logic, scale, jurisdiction and techniques – constitute my own attempt to give us tools to do the impossible, that is, to capture in thought, and especially in writing, something of the constantly shifting reality that is before us.