Originally written: 11.02.2022.
In the early hours of November 9, 2020, Austrian police raided the house of Salzburg University scholar Farid Hafez, pointing their guns at him and his family. Their warrant accused him of “terrorist” allegiances, wanting to “destroy Israel” and “establish a worldwide califate”, and supporting the toppling of Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He was asked about Islamophobia and Islam in Austria, and his family’s hobbies and behaviour. In the following days, he was also attacked publicly by two officials of the Austrian government, including Interior Minister Karl Nehammer. Despite Austrian intelligence having conducted surveillance on Hafez (and others), they didn’t have anything to charge him with. The attack against Hafez and his family was part of “Operation Luxor” launched by the Austrian government on that morning, the largest group of police raids in Austria since World War II, during which they broke into around 70 Muslim homes and terrorized the inhabitants. This was the government’s “response” to a mass shooting in Vienna by an ISIS sympathiser one week earlier (on November 2). But not only were the victims of these raids completely unrelated to the shooting – nor any other criminal activity/offence -, according to Nehal Abdalla “Operation Luxor was meant to signal to the Austrian public that action was being taken following the attack, while at the same time criminalising Muslim activism and political action in an effort to silence Muslim opposition in Austria.” Indeed, the commission of inquiry into the events published a report three months later, “providing evidence of Nehammer’s misuse of high-value intelligence concerning crucial activities of the attacker that were pivotal to the perpetration of his attack.” [source: Middle East Eye; Reza Zia-Ebrahimi (2021) Antisémitisme et islamophobie. Une histoire croisée, p. 14-15]
More than five thousand kilometres away, in the Hotan province in China, the Luopu (or Lop) county has been one of the worst-affected areas of the government’s genocidal campaign in Xinjiang: populated almost entirely by Uyghurs, it is home to at least eight internment camps, and as reported by Lily Kuo for the Guardian, for the year 2018 it “also planned to spend almost 300m yuan ($44m) on “stability control”, including almost $300,000 on a surveillance system to cover all mosques, and funding for almost 6,000 police officers to work in “convenient police stations” and security checkpoints, as well as to patrol residential areas.” The state of terror and totalitarian “reform” against the Uyghur population is of course framed in terms of modernisation and progress, barely hiding the Han chauvinist and genocidal content of these policies:
In a village in Luopu county, almost every home has a plaque on the door marking it a “model red star family”. These are families who have met requirements, including demonstrating “anti-extremism thought” and a “sense of modern civilisation”.
Over the past year, Luopu local officials have gathered villagers to sing patriotic songs, a practice common in the camps, or to teach female residents how to be “good new era women” who promote “ideological emancipation”.
Lily Kuo (2019, January 11)‘If you enter a camp, you never come out’: inside China’s war on Islam. The Guardian.
As in the systematic destruction of mosques in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, the Guardian and Bellingcat revealed that the Chinese state has been razing the Islamic religious sites of Xinjiang to the ground since (at least) 2016. And like in Bosnia (or Afghanistan, and countless other cases), the imagined “international community” has let the nightmarish violence/oppression continue uninterrupted. This is in part because the paradigm of totalitarian policing and repression, for which Islamophobia is a particularly widespread ideological/political repertoire, is not only shared/endorsed/supported/celebrated by the majority of this mystical “international community”, but in many ways is a central part of the very fabric of capitalist and Eurocentric modernity.
These two examples from Austria and Xinjiang obviously illustrate one of the core dimensions of modern Islamophobia – the so-called “War on Terror”, through which Muslims across the world have been essentialized, criminalised and persecuted as supposed purveyors of Islamic terrorism.
There is a straight line from European and US “liberal democracy” to Stalinist one-party states or Assad’s-type dictatorships, far right regimes like fascist Italy or Modi’s India, colonial settings from French Algeria to today’s Palestine or Kashmir, and other atrocious states like North Korea, Iran, Pinochet’s Chile, Xi Jinping’s China, Assad and Putin’s regimes or the postwar military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa. The modern era, constructed and shaped by and through capitalism, colonialism and the modern forms of the (nation-)state, is characterized by a global love for policing and an omnipresent ideology of repressive paranoia.
As many others have pointed out, the “War on Terror” has become a global model for oppression and atrocities, in a similar way that anti-communist repression represented a global model of Western-approved (and thus framed as promoting freedom and progress) terror and violence. The ‘War on Terror’ is one of the pillars of today’s global system of totalitarian and chauvinist repression, which is what I want to address in this article. Starting at least during the colonizations of the Americas and Asia, this is the systematic violence against and policing of subaltern groups – women, migrants and nomads, workers, poor peasants, unemployed and informal/wageless proletarians, etc. – both in everyday life (coerced labor, disciplinarisation, terror/dehumanisation) and whenever socio/political movements arise and disrupt “business as usual”.
In addition to this “normal” repression of oppressed groups and lower classes, this global system of totalitarian madness relies on the construction of racialized (e.g. non-white migrants, the Roma, Rohingya Muslims), colonized (e.g. Native Americans, Palestinians) and otherwise scapegoated (e.g. trans and gender nonconforming people) Others who are dehumanised even further, to the point that brutalization extends beyond even the “casual”/general policing of subaltern groups, and goes as far as including genocidal violence, slave(-like) labor, forced deportations and torture. The general violence against non-racialized and non-colonized groups (such as white workers in North America and Europe) is by no means diminished or made less horrendous by this fact, in the same sense that (in the context of social violence rather than statist repression/totalitarian policing) the quasi-genocidal violence against trans people in many countries doesn’t erase the consistent patriarchal abuse/barbarism that cis women are exposed to on a daily basis.
Toward a Critical Theory of Securitization/Repression/Policing
As Samuel Clarke outlined in this article, coercion (i.e. using violence or forcefulness to get an unwilling subject to act/do sth) found a “special calling” in the modern state because it is “obsessed with categorising, monitoring and shaping their populations” – taking the form of a “gardening state”, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms.
Police Power, Policing & The Capitalist Logic of Securitization
Critical theorists of policing and repression have argued that we need to conceive of “security” as a fundamentally capitalist category, which means theorizing the centrality of what Mark Neocleous calls police power in the fabrication of the capitalist social order. Security and police power refer to a wideranging set of practices, mechanisms, institutions and social relations (rapports sociaux) that aim for an optimal reproduction of the capitalist social totality through the elimination of ‘risks’ and ‘disorder’. [And it is indeed about risks and (dis)order, as long as we view both through the lense of capital and/or the political power structure] It is the totalitarian governmentality of modern capitalism, through which the foundations of capital accumulation and social power/hierarchy are secured and reproduced: in the words of Mathieu Rigouste (commenting himself on Neocleous’ phrasing), it is a process of social pacification that represents a “war of accumulation, dispossession and subordination (FR: “mise en dépendance”)” (and exploitation). [Source: Mathieu Rigouste : “Pour prospérer, le capitalisme joue la carte sécuritaire”] In sum, it is the system whose role is to remove/destroy obstacles to capitalist production and accumulation:
Rigouste also argues that, although some other critical authors have rightly emphasized that we must transcend the limited viewpoint that defines security/repression solely as the crushing of individual liberties and rebel subjectivities, “both from a historical and sociological standpoint (…) the biopolitical aspects of the “positive/constructive” dimension coexists with and is connected to the thanatopolitical aspects of the “negative/repressive” dimension, but differently depending on circumstances/situations and the targets/victims (…) Relations of domination make different uses of biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics, depending on the situation.” [Source: Mathieu Rigouste : “Guerres préventives contre l’autonomie. Contribution pour une critique de la sécurité”]
Biopolitics (the politics of life): control as the management of life forms and the production of everyday life [Michel Foucault]
Rachel Adams: “In short, biopolitics can be understood as a political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject: ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’.” [source]
Biopolitics is politics informed by a discourse on life that is about life as much as it appears, strategically, to belong to life itself, a natural extension of life’s sacred – and thus unquestionable – value. Foucault summarizes the power of biopolitics as follows: “the endeavor, begun in the eigtheenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race.” Biopolitics is, then, the rational, sovereign regulation and control of the population. [source, p. 193]
Thanatopolitics (the politics of death): control as the management/production/distribution of death/coercion/destruction [Roberto Esposito]
To divide and administer death [source]
the biological/pathological justifications of humans’ exterminations [source]
From the viewpoint of power’s victims, the moment that power is directed to destroy, eliminate and dismantle their group, the decision about their life becomes a decision about their death. In other words, this is the delicate moment when (bio)power is transformed into (thanato)power. In this sense thanatopower is not an independent or unique form of power, but is always already a supplement of biopower, which is called to action at those delicate moments of passage from calculating life to calculating death, from managing life to managing death, and from the politicization life to the politicization death. At this moment of transformation from the bio to the thanato, the old archetypal form of power to ‘take life and let live’ reappears under the new form of ‘giving death and bargaining living’, best reflected in our times in the new form of military occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and the colonial occupation of Palestine, which is at the core of this chapter. [source]
What this thanatopolitics of who lives and who dies — with a heavy emphasis here on the “dies” bit — is not is the related concept of necropolitics. The latter is a distinct and important idea first suggested by philosopher Achille Mbembe that more accurately describes the politics of dead bodies (the necro in Ancient Greek). The thanato/necro distinction is crucial in everyday circumstances since the politics of death is often described using the necro- prefix — and while death and dead bodies are obviously connected, the politics surrounding each remains unique and should be distinguished from one another. Dead body politics and death politics occupy distinct experiences for the average person, and recognizing the difference between what death is and what a dead body is remains profoundly important for medicine, the law, and everyday decision making in places such as hospices. [source]
Necropolitics (the politics of the dying/of crushing life): control as the management of the living dead or by crushing life [Achille Mbembe]
Necro comes from the Greek root nekros, meaning “corpse.” Necropolitics then translates to the “politics of death.” Philosopher Achille Mbembe describes necropolitics as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.” In other words, necropolitics is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life. The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth. (…) But the further away you are from those axes of privilege, the less your life is worth under the logics of necropolitics — and the more precarious your existence becomes. (…) “Collateral damage” justifies the killing of millions of Black and brown people. Our governments rationalize their deaths as the only means by which the rest of us can lead better lives. This, to me, is the heart of necropolitics: One person’s life comes at the expense of a more vulnerable person’s death. Or, in Mbembe’s words: “The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.” (…) These examples reveal that necropolitics does not just operate during a pandemic, but is a constant. It is the force that maintains the social status quo that we all know and live within. Necropolitics is slow violence. It names the long, drawn-out state of dying that many marginalized people were condemned to from birth. People distanced from the dominant norm are trapped in what Mbembe calls a “death-world”: a form of “social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Necropolitics is a useful framework in that it teaches us “how to recognize the deadly workings of power.” [source]
Mbembe’s necropolitics offers a novel approach as it draws both on Foucault and a decolonial approach (often inspired in Frantz Fanon) and conceives of necropolitics as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death. The colony in general and the slavery plantation in particular have given birth to those necropolitical practices — fostered by white supremacy — that still continue today. [source]
In an interview with Costas Eleftheriou of the ENA Institute, Neocleous was asked “What is the position of security and insecurity in the present society?”, and he responded:
Much of our political arguments appear to be a form of endless chatter about security.
The idea of the police power rests on the idea of ‘ordering insecurity’. Police power is founded on a logic of ‘insecurity’ which then feeds into the fabrication of demands for ‘security’, which we are then told only the police can really offer us. This has proliferated in the last 2 decades. I think two over-riding features of this are most apparent and most dangerous.
The first is that security wants to become unanswerable. We are expected to bow down before every security demand. Plus, every attack on our lives and liberties comes in the name of security. Security is now the grounds of our obedience: shut up and obey, because security is at stake.
The second is that we are now expected to have internalised this. I call this statecraft as soulcraft, and at the heart of this soulcraft is security. We are expected to have our souls transformed in the name of security. We are expected to believe in it, and to keep showing that we believe in it by performing security ritual after security ritual. Our lives are being destroyed in the name of security.
Costas Eleftheriou & Mark Neocleous (2021, 27 May)Mark Neocleous: Capitalism was created by the police power | Interview at ENA Institute.
And a crucial point here is that the notion/scope of police power and policing isn’t limited to the professional police forces – though it is of course a central part of it. Because in most Western countries, this professionalization of policing was part of a broader professionalization of political, administrative and state functions, and many of these were initially conceived of as policing. Only gradually did things like public health and safety, welfare and social security, regulation of the market, and so on, emerge as their own domains of policy/state activities, i.e. were distinguished from the category of police power/policing.
With such a differentiation, so the argument goes, the new police institution could better focus on its true remit of preventing crime and enforcing the law, for which it would now be professionally trained and organised. But there is a problem with this idea that the new police was somehow the ‘real’ police. First, regardless of the widespread assumption that the narrowly defined police institution exists to prevent or eradicate crime, it is still the case that even the most ill-defined ‘disorderly’ is considered grounds for police intervention. Hence the police are always intervening in situations regarded as ‘disorderly’, regardless of whether a crime has been committed or a law broken.
Second, all the institutions concerned with questions of good order and the behaviour of citizens within this order have a close relationship with what now count as professional police forces. So close, in fact, that the police institution continues to intersect with all other state agencies, from vehicle licensing organizations to schools and from housing departments to social security agencies. The development of modern forms of police power is thus identical with the development and spread of the institutions of political administration. Third, the police also intersect and engage with all sorts of other bodies that claim some ‘authority over some ‘order’. Hence, to give an obvious example for Greece at the moment, one can find police suddenly being inserted into University campuses. In other words, despite the supposed narrowing of the police remit during the gradual professionalization of police forces, the police institution nonetheless still lays claim to the most comprehensive powers possible. It does this because the state wants it to liaise with all the other agencies, but also because simply enforcing the law will never be enough for an institution charged with the fabrication of order. This is the basis of the ‘special standing’ of the police power that all the early police theorists understood. My point is that to understand this we need a theory of police power, and not just the police.
Neocleous’ central thesis is about the “role [of police power] in the fabrication of a social order of dispossession, exploitation, accumulation”, at the core of which was/is the ‘consolidation of the wage form’:
Without separating workers from the means of production, capital could not have come into being. Without such separation there can be no capitalist accumulation. The state, through law and violence, and through the violence of its law, sets about forging the class of wage labour. It does so by violently removing them from access to land, driving them from their homes and turning them into vagrants. At which point, the ruling class passes laws allowing the state to police vagrancy, for example by allowing the authorities to send vagrants back to their birthplace in order that they be put to work. This is a disciplinary process designed in turn to make them as amenable as possible to becoming wage labour. The police power was central to this process.
Finally, Neocleous emphasizes the (functional/ordinary) ‘permissive nature of the law’, i.e. the centrality of discretion to police power. Unlike most professions (where ‘discretionary power increases as you go up the organisational ladder’),
in the police organisation discretion at the lower levels is incredibly high. This is because discretion is at the heart of everyday policing, and central to discretion is the idea of vagrancy
Categories such as ‘vagrancy’ give absolute authority to the police power: the police officer has the arbitrary discretion to question, stop, search, and arrest anyone they’re suspecting/accusing.
the intention is not to punish a crime as such but to instead eliminate things considered disorderly
Further readings from Neocleous:
But securitization/policing also relies on constructing a differentiated “demand” for security – i.e. for presumed protection against ‘risks’ and disorderliness -, including among parts of the lower class(es), which is stratified through “a system of material and symbolic privileges” (think David Roediger’s ‘wages of whiteness’):
The consolidation of a hegemonic bloc involves the general insecurity [the original in French uses ‘insecuritization’ to denote a process] of the population, but this is done in a differentiated manner: responding to the majority’s ‘need’ for protection involves the sacrifice of a minority perceived as dangerous
(…) The common horizon, the Gemeinwesen, offered by the hegemonic project of the ruling class, can only be realised insofar as it identifies at the same time what threatens it, both real or imaginary threats. The construction of hegemonic consent cannot be satisfied with resting only on the mobilisation of an imaginary of transclassist collective identity or on the improvement of the material conditions of a large part of the workers. To be hegemonic, a ruling class must implement a project that succeeds in presenting existing forms of life as what needs to be preserved in the face of threat. Through security, the stability of the existing social order always appears preferable to the prospect of social change against which security protects us. The threat makes the existing preferable and desirable. Through security, the question of individual survival in bourgeois society is no longer limited to the material question of the reproduction of labour power, but is linked to a common destiny, which is presented as perpetually threatened. Any prospect of rupture tends to appear as a civilisational regression against which bourgeois society always emerges triumphantly as the lesser evil.
Paul Guilibert & Memphis Krickeberg (2016)L’hégémonie de la sécurité. Vacarme. Translated via deepl.com.
Rather than merely a set of technologies and institutions, security is therefore a social relation (or a set/system of social relations). As emphasized by Neocleous, the continuum of security (or ‘police power’, or ‘policing’) includes not only repressive elements/practices, but also supposedly ‘positive’ ones: ‘social security’, protection against unemployment or harsh labor conditions (or accidents at work), and so on… But it even impacts interpersonal relations and interactions by shaping individuals’ behaviors and perceptions – promoting individualism, anxiety and mutual distrust. In a sense, it creates a cop-like/policing mentality among the general public:
Far from functioning solely in the mode of state recruitment in the name of national defence, the security ideology not only structures life forms but also produces specific subjects constructed on the basis of a rationality of risk. Messages in public spaces calling on all individuals to be vigilant and to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ generate anxiety and at the same time turn ordinary citizens into potential profilers, into security actors. The security ideology seeks to and does make the individual responsible for his or her own security insofar as the individual must constantly assess the degrees of risk in his or her activities and inter-individual relationships. They are required to keep abreast of threats, both near and far, to adopt appropriate behaviour and to consume the various commercial solutions that are supposed to protect them from the threat (weapons, alarm systems, anti-virus software, etc.).
Paul Guilibert & Memphis Krickeberg (2016)L’hégémonie de la sécurité. Vacarme. Translated via deepl.com.
Surveillance & Terror Capitalism
A central part of the capitalist system is commodifying – i.e. turning into an object/source of sale/profit-making – everything that can make an extra profit (more precisely, increase capital accumulation), and this generally implies restructuring/reorganizing economic relations based on which regions of the commodified world/universe are more beneficial in terms of profitability and capital accumulation. In the 21st century, mass surveillance is a major sector of the global economy. According to Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism, mass surveillance of the Internet – which depends on the “global architecture of computer mediation” – is the root of the commodification of personal data.
Mass surveillance is the immense capture of data by private firms and intelligence agencies, and both private capital and state/political/colonialist actors benefit from it. A large category of capitalist actors make money through so-called “Big data”, an euphemism for the massive extraction of information about individuals, their behaviors, their preferences, their social networks (e.g. both online and offline friends, see “shadow profiling“), and much more, including data gathering through sensor-based (i.e. with microphones, cameras, accelerometers, temperature, motion sensors…) and “connected” devices (toys, drones, and wearables such as smart watches and fitness trackers). The “global architecture of computer mediation” has produced what Zuhoff calls “Big Other”: private capitalist empires like Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook that rival some of the world’s most powerful states in terms of economic, infrastructural and surveillance capacities/resources. Summarizing Zuhoff’s analysis, Donell Holloway writes that: “Surveillance capitalism practices were first consolidated at Google. They used data extraction procedures and packaged users’ data to create new markets for this commodity.” But there are other actors: third-party data brokers and smaller companies also take part in this profit-making madness.
The goals of capitalist data collection are to resell data, offer predictions that can be used for selling other products, and profiling potential ‘consumers’ (for example identifying potential borrowers, whether people are insured, etc) – aka victims/targets. This huge creation of data can also then be used by intelligence services with which data-gathering companies regularly partner/collaborate. States and firms use various legal provisions and means of intercepting communications, but they also benefit from the global generalization/proliferation of surveillance cameras, facial recognition algorithms, “black box” systems, and so on…
Finally, the work of Darren Byler on terror capitalism is an outstanding contribution to this critical discussion about securitization as part of the global violence of both states and capital. Emerging “directly from the “global war on terror” that the George W Bush administration declared in 2001”, new “regimes of technological surveillance and control” wherein state(s) and capital work hand-in-hand haven been developed across the world. Although the Chinese system in Xinjiang is “unique in terms of its scale and the depth of its cruelty”, stateless, minority or refugee populations – especially Muslims – are targeted all around the world by this new system, which Byler and Carolina Sanchez Boe define as follows:
Terror capitalism justifies the exploitation of subjugated populations by defining them as potential terrorists or security threats. It primarily generates profits in three interconnected ways. First, lucrative state contracts are given to private corporations to build and deploy policing technologies that surveil and manage target groups. Then, using the vast amounts of biometric and social media data extracted from those groups, the private companies improve their technologies and sell retail versions of them to other states and institutions, such as schools. Finally, all this turns the target groups into a ready source of cheap labor – either through direct coercion or indirectly through stigma.
Darren Byler and Carolina Sanchez Boe (2020, July 24)Tech-enabled ‘terror capitalism’ is spreading worldwide. The surveillance regimes must be stopped. The Guardian.
A quote from a Microsoft employee offers a brutal summary of the issue of securitization:
Surveillance is about controlling and disciplining marginalized people – whether it’s people of color, immigrants or poor people. Companies use surveillance to discipline workers. Law enforcement uses surveillance to reinforce systemic racism and perpetuate mass incarceration. States use surveillance to enforce border logics and state oppression. Surveillance, as a concept, isn’t neutral – it is always about control.
Reading list: