Debbie Lisle

Gazing at Ground Zero: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle

This essay uses the temporary viewing platform at the site of the former World Trade Center to explore our fascination with violence, conflict and disaster. It illustrates how discourses of voyeurism and authenticity promote a desire for sites of horror, and examines how that desire both disrupts and reinforces our prevailing interpretations of global politics. The viewing platform at Ground Zero was initially constructed to manage the thousands of people who traveled to New York in response to the shocking media images of 11 September. However, their desire to escape mediation and touch “the real” had the opposite effect—it transformed Ground Zero into a tourist attraction. Using Ground Zero as a starting point, this essay theorizes discourses of voyeurism and authenticity through the work of Baudrillard, Debord and Bauman in an effort to position the tourist as a significant political subject.

Laboratizing the border: The production, translation and anticipation of security technologies

This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the laboratory, the security experts they engage, and the material components of the device itself. Drawing on in-depth interviews, observations, and ethnographic research of the EU-funded Handhold project, we explore how assumptions about the way security technologies will and should perform at the border shape the development of a portable, integrated device to detect chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives (CBRNE) threats at borders. In disaggregating the moments of sovereign decision-making across multiple sites and times, we question the supposed linearity of how science comes out of and feeds back into the world of border security. An interrogation of competing assumptions and understandings of security threats and needs, of competing logics of innovation and pragmatism, of the demands of differentiated temporalities in detection and identification, and of the presumed capacities, behaviours, and needs of phantasmic competitors and end-users reveals a complex, circulating and co-constitutive process of device development that laboratises the border itself.

Frontline Leisure:: Securitizing tourism in the War on Terror

This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses that brought the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, within the orbit of a global security apparatus waging a ‘war on terror’. Drawing on critical work in international relations and geography, this article understands the securitization of tourism as part of a much wider logic in which the liberal order enacts pernicious modes of governance by producing a terrorist threat that is exceptional. It explores how this logic is reproduced through a cosmopolitan community symbolized by global travellers, and examines the measures taken by the tourism industry to secure this community (e.g. the physical transformations of hotel infrastructure and the provision of counter-terrorism training).

The Surprising Detritus of Leisure: Encountering the Late Photography of War

This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography—that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are privileged over foreign landscapes and abject victims, these photographs foreground a more ambivalent set of viewing relations which elongates the moment of encounter between the viewer and the picture. Secondly, the paper explores this ambivalence through a common but unexamined motif in Late Photography: the juxtaposition of leisure and war. Focusing on the material detritus of leisure facilities that populate the photographs of Simon Norfolk and Angus Boulton (eg, bullet-marked hotels, wrecked swimming pools), the paper suggests that the tentative formations of solidarity between viewers and the ghosts populating these images constitute a provocative alternative viewing relation.

The New Face of Global Hollywood: Black Hawk Down and The Politics of Meta-Sovereignty

This article uses Ridley Scott’s 2001 blockbuster film Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the “newest component of sovereignty.” While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicization, this article is equally interested in the film’s production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitments (e.g. racism, collusion between Hollywood and the Pentagon, post-September 11 th patriotism), these readings continually posed an imagined “America” against “the world.” This article argues that Black Hawk Down is not about sovereignty as traditionally conceived, that is about national interest shaping global affairs. Rather, Black Hawk Down articulates, and is articulated by, a new and emerging global order that operates through inclusion, management and flexibility. Drawing on recent theoretical debates over this new logic of rule, this article illustrates how Black Hawk Down invokes much more diffuse, complex and deterritorialized categories than national sovereignty. In effect, Scott’s film goes beyond traditional notions of sovereignty altogether: its production, signification and reception deconstruct simple notions of “America” and “the world” in favor of what Hardt and Negri call “Empire,” what Zizek calls “post-politics,” and what we refer to as “meta-sovereignty.”

Local Symbols, Global Networks: Rereading the Murals of Belfast

Traditionally, the political murals of Belfast have been understood as expressions of either loyalist or republican communities, a reading that reduces the complex struggles of Northern Ireland into a simple conflict between two groups. This article rereads the murals through the specific context of the peace process, in which the “two communities” thesis is losing its relevance. It suggests that when the murals are understood through three, wider networks—production, signification, and reception—it is possible to see how they disrupt ongoing debates about public art, make explicit gestures to other international conflicts (such as the hunger strikers in Turkey), and encourage a new form of political tourism. Rereading the murals in this way reveals the multiple global networks that the city of Belfast is linked into, networks that are silenced by a traditional “two communities” framework.

Exotic Endurance: Tourism, Fitness and the Marathon des Sables

This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established colonial asymmetries are recast in a neoliberal context as runners test their resilience, endurance and strength against an ‘extreme’ Saharan landscape. While the paper calls attention to these asymmetries, it is more concerned with troubling reductive colonial encounters in order to reveal their instability, heterogeneity and ambivalence. Indeed, the central conceit of the Marathon des Sables – that superior Western fitness regimes and technologies will dominate the race – is inverted by the overwhelming success of Moroccan runners and disaggregated by the biopolitical regulation of elite running bodies. These unexpected intersections of global tourism and fitness demand further attention because they reconfigure our received notions of who (and what) is capable of exerting agency in postcolonial encounters.

'Witnessing Violence Through Photography: A Reply'

This is a reply to:Moller, Frank. 2017. “Witnessing violence through photography.” Global Discourse. 7 (2–3): 264–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1339979

Energizing the International

This intervention addresses the rather mundane question of method — of how we go about identifying, exploring, analysing, tracing and politicizing assemblages. Certainly the ‘materialist turn’ has energized the scholarly landscape by allowing us to recognize the political in a radically expanded landscape of sites, scales and temporalities. It has displaced humans as the dominant agents of political change and placed us in intense and deeply embedded relations with the non-human things in our proximity, but also at a distance. But what research methods are adequate to such a radical expansion of our research landscape? With such a critical understanding of how knowledge itself is produced, is it even possible to speak in terms of ‘research methods’ anymore? Are we supposed to reimagine more traditional research methods such as ethnography, or develop new approaches that embrace wonder, surprise, intuition and experimentation? while many of these questions prompt grand ontological statements, I want to push the more mundane outworkings of materialist thought through a constant refrain of: ‘yes, but how?’

Lost in the Aftermath

What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructures of containment. We focus instead on the painful traces of EU migration that continue to be produced by global structures of citizen/alien, legal/illegal, friend/enemy. We do not produce a comprehensive diagnosis, normative argument or critical framework. Instead, we rest awhile in the aftermath of the crisis – specifically on the Greek island of Kos – to think about questions of abandonment, erasure and displacement. This is a visual essay representing a conversation between two researchers as they interact with the aftermath of the refugee crisis on Kos. Reflecting on select images from September 2016, we present a dialogue that directly speaks to a core theme each image raises. In doing so, we question some of the basic assumptions about how to do critical analysis on migration, security and borders, and therefore seek to disrupt dominant modes of academic writing as well as the practice of research itself.