Dr Pete Fussey
1 December 2011
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.
This paper examines the role of public-realm surveillance in countering terrorism in the UK over the past decade. Although 9/11 is widely viewed as having a seismic impact on judicial and (particularly transnational) policing approaches across the globe, in the UK a series of violent Jihadi extremist activities between 2005-2007 particularly animated a range of counter-terrorist (CT) responses. Drawing from ongoing research yielding data from a range of sources – principally including interviews with policing, security and surveillance practitioners – the paper outlines and analyses the diverse approaches that comprise surveillance-based counter-terrorism approaches in the UK. In doing so, the analysis reveals a contested landscape, configured via fragmented governmental arrangements and comprising substantial (and sometimes insurmountable) tensions. In addition to the way such arrangements impact upon operational efficacy, they also hold significant theoretical import, not least with regard to the way coercive state mechanisms exert themselves. Analysis of this latter regard not only enables reflection on the direction and cohesiveness of coercion, but also on the embedding of risk-based approaches into the everyday and of a devolved ‘responsibilisation’ (Garland, 2001) of counter-terrorist policing. Also important here is the way that surveillance and its social ramifications are conceptualised by practitioners in contradictory ways. Here, awareness of the limitation of technological surveillance and, also, potential to ‘radicalise’ its subjects conflicts with technological deterministic beliefs apparent at various levels of governance. At the same time, such divergence raises counters some of the claims made by specific adherents of post-Foucauldian theory within in the surveillance studies canon (inter alia Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). Moreover, this divergence of practice also generates a number of questions regarding the oversight and accountability of counter-terrorist surveillance.
Despite the multiplicity of surveillance-based CT approaches and the tensions within them, some commonalities are visible. For example, since the July 2005 attacks in London conflicts have emerged between community-based ‘counter-radicalisation’ strategies and high-level enforcement strategies. Yet both rely on surveillance-oriented strategies (albeit in different ways) and, crucially, harbour assumptions that seek to externalise and ‘other’ the subjects of surveillance. Conceptually, many of these issues are filtered through and articulated by events surrounding ‘Project Champion’, a scheme devised to monitor two predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods in Birmingham (2007-2010), a series of events discussed in this paper.
