Session 1: Bodies, Security and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly)
● ‘Security Beyond the Walls: Public-Private Policing Arrangements in Recife’ [Carolina M. Frossard, University of Amsterdam]
Inquiries into the ways private security shapes the materiality of cities have called attention to the proliferation of defensive architecture, fortified enclaves, and so on. Concerned with the securing, or closing off, of particular territories, these have clearly distinguished public from private, whether to describe the type of security provision in question, or to characterize the spaces under its jurisdiction. Drawing from five and half months of ethnographic fieldwork in Recife, Northeastern Brazil, the paper at hand focuses on arrangements of security that blur public and private divides, in order to reflect on the kinds of spaces these (re)produce. This exploration takes security materialities as entry points, but instead of focusing on the gates and walls that have featured prominently in past research as what separates the state from the non-state; I discuss devices that connect the former to the latter for security objectives. More concretely, I ground my analysis in two empirical cases: the analogue radio network that connects residential condominiums to state security under the “Eyes on the Street” programme, and the video-monitoring system that brings together civilians and police officers. By cutting into these socio-technical policing arrangements, I aim to explore new ways through which security governance is spatialized, and, as a corollary, what this might mean, conceptually and methodologically, for those of us dedicated to studying it ethnographically.
● ‘Certainty and Uncertainty: the Negotiation of Danger Markers in Nairobi’ [Francesco Colona, University of Amsterdam]
In this paper, drawing from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with private security officers, police and residents of two neighborhoods of Nairobi (Kenya), I show how ‘danger’ is identified through ethno-racial, class, and spatial markers in practices of security provision. Through three exemplary urban tropes – “the inside job”, “the thug”, and “Al-Shabaab” –, I analyze how threatening subjects are enacted in security practices. Categories of class and race have fuelled imaginaries of danger for a long time and this has been widely reflected in academic debates. However, when trying to identify danger, my informants often referred to spatial markers such as place of residence, or origin. The “thug”, alongside domestic workers and private security officers (the perpetrators of “inside jobs”), is constantly associated with the nearby “slum”. Conversely the “slum” is imagined as a criminogenic space; a space where crime is endogenous and that cannot be policed effectively. Similarly, “Al-Shabaab” is associated with the neighborhood of Eastleigh in Nairobi, a Somali enclave. In the identification of danger, race, class, and space are not static, or clearly bounded, indicators, but deeply enmeshed. In the paper at hand, I analyze how my informants negotiate such entanglements, and how, in the process, categories of race, class, and space intersect.
● 'Visual representations of statist violence - freedom of movement struggles in Calais'. [James Ellison, Loughborough University]
This paper examines the documentation of statist (police, security services, and far-right groups) violence against undocumented migrants and their supporters in Calais, France. Developed from a period of engaged research in the northern French port, I will assess the collection, distribution, and reproduction of visual material that exposes the everyday brutality of border struggles. After several years of increasing conflict, last year the Calais border exploded as thousands of undocumented people arrived from conflict zones across the world to make the short crossing to the UK. As with other flashpoints along trans-European migration routes, this dramatic increase promoted a harsh and brutal solidification of frontiers, forcing back the veil to reveal the violence inherent within the nationalistic politics of European states.
Promoted by the rise of britanocentric and other nationalistic groups, the UK significantly increased its collaboration with the French government to strength the security apparatus of the border. Millions of pounds were invested in border technology (thermal imaging cameras, x-ray scanners), fences were constructed and police numbers were increased. Calais became a battlefield in the carceral archipelago of European border conflicts. A space where demands for freedom of movement are met with daily repression and brutality. The challenge of people calling for freedom of movement in Calais, and across Europe, has reinforced far-right politics not only in government but also on the street. The gains made by the French Front Nationale, particularly in Calais, coincided with a rise in militant street fascism. Attacks against undocumented people and their supporters increased, the state turned a blind eye, anticipating a shift to the right in governance and some of the security services even choose to directly collaborate with these fascist street gangs. On the other hand, this increase in freedom of movement struggles has been met with popular grassroots solidarity. In an effort to support new arrivals to the European continent from Levsos to Calais, people have autonomously organised to collect and distribute material donations, construct shelters, and cook meals for refugees and migrants corralled into camps in these borderlands.
As well as simple material support there has been a concerted effort by radical solidarity groups to organise with undocumented people to build campaigns that contradict the dominant narratives of either humanitarian assistance or the necessity of stronger frontiers. By exposing statist violence, promoting freedom of movement actions, and building strong networks to resist border restrictions, these groups through the production of digital counter-archives, have created strong counter-narratives that challenge the state’s response to freedom of movement struggles. By assessing and analysing the visual material produced as part of this counter-narrative I will draw on my own experiences collecting and distributing digital video and photography over the last year. The paper will develop theoretical intersections through the examination of Calais as a case study and this will provide the background for understanding statist violence and regimes of control as they exist in the world today.
● ‘Irom Chanu Sharmila – The woman with the feeding tube: Body, violence and the state of exception’ [Tanvi Pate, University of Warwick]
[Abstract not available publicly]
Session 2: Materiality and State Spaces (chaired by Dr. Chris Rossdale)
● “Separatist flowers and state monuments: materializations of power and dissensus in Kurdish Turkey ” [Will Day , University of Bilkent]
This paper seeks to return to and reconsider, in light of theories of the state that attend specifically to struggles over the production of space, a set of events and images that have lingered since I carried out two years of fieldwork in Diyarbakir, the informal capital of Kurdish Turkey. In 2008, controversy erupted twice over municipal flowerbeds, both resulting in lawsuits against the city government on charges of terrorist propaganda. The events attracted no shortage of public ridicule, and accusations of absurdity. ‘Separatist flowers!’ was the mocking reaction of one local paper. True as this reaction is, at a certain level, these events deserve closer analysis; I aim here to place these and similar incidents within a broader history of the unfinished project to produce state space in Turkey, particularly in the contested and troubled geography of Kurdish Turkey. This means both attending to state acts of remaking landscapes and cityscapes to ‘state the state’. Drawing on Lefebvre’s remarks on monumentality, I look at controversies over mountainsides, flags, and city monuments in Diyarbakir and across the southeast. It also involves looking more closely at everyday material practices where struggles over what Ranciere terms the “distribution of sensible” occur: struggles over the color of clothes, certain charged symbols in this context such as stars or the victory sign, and orthography—struggles over what can and cannot be seen, heard, felt, and touched, which Ranciere sees as central to the political.
The push and pull of these ordinary struggles, together with the monumental projects of state-space making in the region, suggest an important material aspect of state practice and the everyday of political life in Kurdish Turkey often overlooked in more standard accounts focused on categories of rights, minorities, or formal citizenship. The focus on struggles over what can and cannot materialize also speaks to a growing body of work seeking to push theories of the state towards a greater attention to concrete practices that link people with spaces large and small, and what this might say about the study of the state and substantive citizenship.
● “From the Angle of a Vessel: The refugee ship as a ‘viapolitical’ site of strategic political action” [Elizabeth Alexander, Royal Holloway, University of London]
In the aftermath of WWII, thousands of Jewish survivors attempted to migrate to Palestine via sea routes on ships of questionable seaworthiness. The British government, intent on defending the British Mandate, deployed a military blockade of Palestine and attempted to implement a policy of refoulement. Suspect ships were identified across the Mediterranean, foreign governments lobbied to prevent their movement. Once underway, Naval destroyers were sent to capture ships suspected of participating in the Zionist operation Aliyah Bet (Second immigration). If captured, a ship was towed to Haifa, offloaded, and abandoned just offshore. Its surviving passengers were detained, caged aboard a British prison ship and either returned (refouled) to their port of origin or sent to Displaced Persons (DP) camps. These vessels of mass migration posed challenges to state control of territory and borders then as they do now.
Vessels are inherently mobile; they transit in-between and transect recognized delimiters of power and control in a specific assemblage. The objectives of governments and organizations, the motivations of passengers and crew, the clandestine nature of the operation, the routes and the sea itself contributed to the phenomena of the ships becoming mobile material settings for political disagreement.
William Waters proposes the concept of ‘viapolitics,’ as an argument for substantive, focused research on vehicles, routes and roads as a way of deepening our understanding of migration as a field of struggle and borders as a topology of power. Within the material constraints of ships, the entanglement of humans and vessels serves as a contact point for exactly this kind of analysis. This paper will examine the case of one particular ship named ‘Medinat Ha’Yehdim’ in the post-war movement of Jewish refugees. Through an analysis of several key events en route to Palestine, this ship will be interpreted as a material site of asymmetrical power contestation and strategic political action. ‘A whole field of otherwise overlooked struggles is brought into view once we investigate migration from the angle of its vehicles’ (Waters, 2015).
● “The Missing Politics of Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk in Informal Urban Settlements” [Arabella Fraser, King’s College, University of London]
The paper speaks to the broad themes of the production of state space in urban areas, state spaces of exception and the production of citizenship. It critically examines studies of urban disaster and climate change risk that have increasingly invoked governmentality as a theoretical frame for understanding how urban risk governance functions. Such perspectives are useful in re-politicising understandings of urban climate change risk and vulnerability. However, the paper uses the idiom of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to question the current treatment of the politics of expertise in the governmentality literature and highlight the need to unpack the workings of the urban state. A case study of the ladera (hillslopes) programme for managing landslide risk in Bogota, Colombia, is used to show how the practices of knowledge through risk assessment are intertwined with particular practices of government in ways that produce risk and vulnerability in state-designated risk zones. Three dimensions of this are explored: the politicised assumptions of state-based risk assessments and their effects; the co-production of risk assessments with state values, discourses and practices in informal, urban areas (including norms of urban citizenship and practices of exception and flexibility) and the effect of state disunity on the production of risk (with risk and vulnerability produced in the contradictions and tensions between different state and quasi-state agencies). The paper concludes with the implications for (urban) state theory and for urban risk management practice.
Session 3: The Urban and State Spaces (chaired by Lisa Tilley)
● “Billboard space in Egypt: reproducing state space and dominating space of representation” [Mohamed AboTera, Cairo, co-authored with Safa Ashoub, GIZ]
Billboards have been increasingly dominating the skyline of Cairo for a couple of decades already with a sharp increase after 2011. Naturally, they advertise many products but it is easily noticed that real-estate advertisements have a significant share, especially gated communities. They all present some sort of a promise, so what could be the promise of the latter? Analysing their general visual and textual characteristics we can find some recurrences. There are many promised messages delivered through those advertisements out of which we shall focus on elements of the natural and built environment.
Today all advertised developments exist in the desert. Historically in Egypt, the Nile rhythm regulated both nature and urbanism in the valley. There has been a dichotomy of the valley and the desert which still continues; a binary of life and death, inside and outside, state and statelessness. Yet, this condition of nature has been dominated by the Dam followed by over-urbanisation and exhaustion of natural resources including space.
Four decades ago Henri Lefebvre predicted that by the year 2000 nature (and space) will be the new scarcity to the extent that it would require reproduction and that urban planning should be understood within this struggle over scarcity, where urbanisation is perceived as a tool for domination. In that regard, urbanisation of the desert, nevertheless expected, can be considered as a state tool to manage this struggle over scarcity. Yet, within this process we argue that mental space is also under reformation through advertisement imagery and billboards.
While billboards promise a decent urban and natural environment, they occupy ground space, cover urban and natural environments, and thus contribute to their scarcity. Moreover, they are covering the unfortunate deteriorating-by- neglect environment with a promise for a better reality for the fortunate. However, this promise of nature and reality is paradoxical. While images are promising ‘Nature’ they present trees and open greeneries which form quite a distant reality from the arid nature of the desert, bringing again the valley- centred perception of nature imposed on the desert.
Advertisements and billboards are a predictable product of a real-estate free market, yet we have reasons to believe they are also related to a State Mode of Production. After being commodified and exhausted space became also occupied by promises of a better space. It is either that the image of valley-space is expanding, or that the dichotomy is inverted so that the desert represents order, liveability and statehood as opposed to the stateless informality of the valley. Is the state producing this new space of dominance as an expansion of state space? In this paper we are attempting to understand issues of state hegemony, its mode of production of space and dominance over spaces of representation through the instrumentalisation of urban planning and its images.
● “(Dis)assembling the Urban in Documentary Photography” [Vladimir Rizov, University of York]
Photography and the urban are often beneficially interweaved. Often, photographic depictions are used as starting points for discussions on the political, social, and everyday aspects of the urban experience. This paper aims to provide a particular historic conjuncture, in which the technical aspects of photography are invoked to speak on the issue of urban space as a manifestation of the state.
Photography is a technological development that uncovered a new epoch of seeing in the centuries following its invention in 1839 (Sontag, 2008; Rose, 2001). Undoubtedly, it has gone through many changes, from its origin in the form of the camera obscura (Lovell, 1981), through various analogue incarnations (Barger and White, 1991) to contemporary digital cameras. On one hand, there are several aspects of photography which remain underemphasised in discussions of the topic; introductions to the history of photography often detail the technological affordances, the social networks of inventors, and the channels of technical and chemical expertise; common as well is the indication of photography’s rootedness in the modern, the industrial, and the technological as a whole. On the other hand, these themes and issues are seldom given a material relevance, nor are they given a specific historic conjuncture.
The central example in this paper will be the Paris of the 19th century, more particularly the Paris after Haussmann’s urban restructuring (Benjamin, 2009) as captured by the work of Charles Marville (Sramek et al, 2013) and Eugené Atget (2011). By analysing documentary photographs of post- Haussmann Paris, urban space will be revealed as a locus of state power. Urban, social, and political implications will be extrapolated through an interweaving of photographic and theoretical sources. Thus, the paper will demonstrate urban space’s relation to state power, the state’s reflection onto urban experience itself, and the wider mechanisms of control that are the interweaved with state spaces. Furthermore, in an attempt to avoid historical particularism, examples of early 20th century Petersburg (Shelaev and Shelaev, 2013) and 1960s New York (Berman, 2010) will be briefly discussed. By outlining a historic trajectory of urban state spaces and their totalised control, an argument aiming to disassemble views of historic understanding of the urban and its depiction will be provided, thus contesting fixed notions of power.
● “State Space and the City: the ’56-ers Square in Budapest” [Melinda Harlov, Eötvös Loránd University]
There is a square in Budapest, Hungary that was erected solely to fulfill state aim, which was to celebrate the 70th birthday of Stalin with an eight meter-tall Stalin statue on a more than two meters high tribune. The square had a general strong state emphasis during the Soviet area with parades and processions, and a harsh change right after that by removing the statues and changing the name of the square from Procession Square to ‘56ers Square. The political use of the territory is almost minimal from the 1990s and rather diverse public entertaining events got located there and it became the biggest free parking spot of the city. The political power expressed its will in regard the future usage of the area just in 2011, when the state bought the area from the city and its district to establish many new museum buildings there occupying the total territory without any significant allusion to the history of the site. Not just the actual physical modifications and their critical evaluation but also the political requirements towards the area and its use are going to be subjects of analysis. Therefore legal texts about the establishment of the square, the proposal for the different statues and buildings as well as speeches that were given on the tribune then podium at the researched venue are also investigated in the presentation to understand the process of expressing state space. Fortunately there are numerous visuals available about the past, the present and the planned future of the area that would not just help to visualize the topic but also function as sources of analysis by for example investigating the expressed scales and perspectives. The time frame of the study will be the period from 1949, when the state decision was made about the establishment of the square, until 2011, when the future of the area was decided. The proposed paper not only introduces this vivid narrative about the state use of an actual urban site, but also places it into the academic discourse of memory and representation.
Carolina M. Frossard is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam (AISSR/UvA). Her ongoing doctoral research inquires into how arrangements of security composed of state and non-state actors – as well as of technologies, and materialities– reconfigure the ways citizenship is performed and understood in Recife, Northeastern Brazil. Her work fits within the broader scope of SECURCIT, an ethnographic research project focused on public-private assemblages of security and citizenship in five different cities: Recife (Brazil); Miami (USA); Nairobi (Kenya); Jerusalem (Israel-Palestine); and Kingston (Jamaica).
Carolina joined SECURCIT shortly after being awarded a master’s degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) – enabled by a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the researcher’s hometown. Prior to her graduate studies, Carolina was part of the Communications and Advocacy team of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in Latin America.
Francesco Colona is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development and part of the Centre for Urban Studies at the same university. After a Bachelor degree in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, he completed a Research Master in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, with a research on organizational strategies of armed groups and their patterns of violence against civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is now part of a research team studying “Public-Private Security Assemblages and the Reconfiguration of Citizenship” in five different cities: Kingston (Jamaica), Recife (Brazil), Miami (USA), Jerusalem (Israel) and Nairobi (Kenya). In his own research he focuses on the last city, where he tries to understand - ethnographically – how citizenship and access to (or targeting from) security is reconfigured in hybrid forms of security governance, with a specific interest on the private security industry and the resident’s initiatives.
James Ellison is a research student completing a PhD on visual representations of border violence in Calais, France. Co-supervised within the Department of Art and Design and the Department of Politics at Loughborough, his research project involves direct engagement with the everyday experiences and political struggles created by the UK / French border regime through the production of visual and social media. After several years’ worth of involvement with activist solidarity networks his research interrogates the connection between anarchist politics, media practice, and state borders. Formerly he was a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he completed an MA in Art and Politics in 2012.
Tanvi Pate is currently a Sessional Teacher at the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS), Warwick. She teaches Introduction to Politics PO107 and Britain and the War on Terror PO380. She passed her Viva on 12 January 2016, her PhD thesis examined the markedly different nuclear policy of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush US administrations towards India by focusing on the three core categories of identity, inequality and great power narratives. Drawing on a critical constructivist framework, she argued that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity within relations of identity and difference. Building upon the postcolonial perspective of imperialism, she argued that difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy that manifested in great power narrative sites of; peaceful civilisation; unstable deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’, and ‘gender’ in terms of radical otherness and otherness were recurrently utilised through these great power narratives enabling the concerned administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order. The main contention was that ‘foreign policy’ is not external to the state, but in fact constitutive of the ‘state’ in terms of inscribing the boundaries that demarcate ‘inside’ from ‘outside’, ‘self’ from ‘other’, and ‘domestic’ from ‘foreign’. Thus foreign policy becomes redefined as a boundary-producing practice which attains a performative dimension through which the state- effect is constituted. Tanvi aims to continue research on state performativity, state of exception, and the making and unmaking of borders.
John William Day received his PhD in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2013. He teaches political theory and composition at Bilkent University. His interests include the anthropology of displacement and dispossession, cities and citizenship, political ecology and political geography, theories of the state, semiotics, and legacies of materialist thought in contemporary political theory.
Elizabeth Alexander is a PhD candidate in Political Geography at Royal Holloway with a focus on materiality, national identity and nationalism. Her supervisory team includes Peter Adey, and Klaus Dodds, Geography and Chris Rumford, Political Sociology. She completed a taught MSc in Geopolitics and Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her MA thesis focused on Place, Politics and the Scottish Referendum and was awarded a Pass with distinction. Prior to her recent academic experience, Elizabeth worked in as a global product management director.
Dr Arabella Fraser is a post-doctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience, Department of Geography, King’s College London. Her research interests include the governance and politics of climate risk and adaptation, the relationship between urbanisation and climate risk in the Global South, in particular in informal urban settlements, and the development of theories of institutions and environmental change. Arabella completed her PhD in the International Development Department at the London School of Economics in 2015. The thesis examined the politics of risk assessment in the informal, urban settlements of Bogota, Colombia, and the implications for theories of urban risk, vulnerability and climate adaptation. She holds a Masters in Government (LSE) and a BA (Hons) in Social and Political Science (University of Cambridge).
Mohamed AboTera was trained as an architect with both a professional and an academic career. He finished his MA in Architecture, Globalisation, and Cultural Identity at the University of Westminster in 2007. His activities include academic teaching and research, cultural project management, and architectural consultations. He is also a co-founder of MADD platform and affiliated with a number of urban initiatives. In his research he is interested in the political dimension of space, unplanned urbanism, representations and urban activism.
Vladimir Rizov is a doctoral researcher in the sociology department at the University of York. His interests revolve around documentary photography and the urban
Melinda Harlov studied (among many other subjects) communications, nationalism and cultural heritage management in both Hungarian and English-speaking educational institutions. Since 2006, she has been working in diverse cultural and educational offices that made her able to create a multinational and multidisciplinary network with members at her researched area and to experience cooperation in such environment. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography at Eötvös Loránd University and she co-teaches the interdisciplinary sophomore class at McDaniel College, Budapest. Her research interest is how international norms (of UNESCO World Heritage Committee) and national requirements can be adopted to local and regional circumstances. Her comparative approach is ensured also by attending both national and foreign scholarly programs and by presenting and publishing her research at these academic media.
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