Pete Fussey

Laminated Security for London 2012: Enhancing Security Infrastructures to Defend Mega Sporting Events

Since the 1970s, security planning has become an integral and required part of bidding documents and preparation for hosting sporting mega events, most notably the summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Drawing on a multidisciplinary conceptual framework derived from prior experiences of security operations at major sporting events and historical counter-terrorism experiences of London, the paper unpacks the socio-spatial implications of security measures intended to secure the 2012 Games. In particular, it highlights the threat posed against ‘crowded places’ from international terrorism as well as possible surveillance, design or managerial measures that are to be deployed to make such sites more resilient to terrorist attack. This, it is argued, both converges with standardised Olympic security models and diverges at important points, related to the pre-existence of capacity in urban counter-terrorism onto which 2012 security will be overlaid or laminated. The paper also highlights the increased use made of security for ‘legacy’ purposes.

Observing Potentiality in the Global City Surveillance and Counterterrorism in London

This article examines how strategies originally developed to tackle “conventional” forms of criminality are increasingly aimed at averting terrorism in Londons public spaces. A central theme regards the increasing orientation of these controlling strategies around (progressively asocial) technological surveillance. The utilization of closed-circuit television (CCTV) during terrorist campaigns in London since 1992 is examined. The potential efficacy of electronic surveillance is argued to be partly contingent on configurations of differing dissident groups. Although reactionary terrorist activity may be amenable to disruption through CCTV, the same does not necessarily apply for groups with more nebulous formations. Difficulties are identified in grafting crime-control surveillance strategies onto counterterrorism. Moreover, the postevent functionality of such surveillant applications emphasizes the role of the human agent and thus questions moves toward asocial strategies. Finally, a number of unintended corollary effects of such strategies, including their likely impact on the categorization and potential radicalization of individuals, are identified.

Constructing resilience through security and surveillance: The politics, practices and tensions of security-driven resilience:

This article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discourses of resilience. This article charts the emergence and proliferation of security-driven resilience logics, deployed at different spatial scales, which exist in tension with each other. We exemplify such tensions in practice through a detailed case study from Birmingham, UK: ‘Project Champion’ an attempt to install over 200 high-resolution surveillance cameras, often invisibly, around neighbourhoods with a predominantly Muslim population. Here, practices of security-driven resilience came into conflict with other policy priorities focused upon community-centred social cohesion, posing a series of questions about social control, surveillance and the ability of national agencies to construct community resilience in local areas amidst state attempts to label the same spaces as ‘dangerous’. It is argued that security-driven logics of resilience generate conflicts in how resilience is operationalized, and produce and reproduce new hierarchical arrangements which, in turn, may work to subvert some of the founding aspirations and principles of resilience logic itself.

Contested topologies of UK counterterrorist surveillance: the rise and fall of Project Champion

This article empirically analyses the provenance, application and abandonment of Project Champion, a scheme designed to encircle two Birmingham neighbourhoods with surveillance cameras. Locating analysis within the anticipatory turn in social control practices, particular emphasis is placed on how collapsing distinctions between internal and external security draw multiple new actors and agencies into the despatch of counterterrorism. The article argues that topological approaches informed by Foucauldian notions of “security” allow for a better understanding of these heterogeneous techniques and configurations of security practice. Foucauldian notions of security represent a move beyond territorial control to the management of circulations, where subjects are left in situ, but their mobilities are monitored, delineated and assessed.

Balancing local and global security leitmotifs: Counter-terrorism and the spectacle of sporting mega-events

This article considers the transferability of sporting mega-event strategies across time and place. In doing so, it presents a number of arguments highlighting the progressive global standardization of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies comprising continually reproduced security leitmotifs. Such orthodoxies are drawn from a range of experiences at both sporting and non-sporting mega-events. By contrast to these globalized models, the terrorist threats they seek to counter are almost always rooted in diverse local settings. This convergence of sporting mega-event counter-terrorism strategies does not simply represent an uncritical imposition of an external framework of security, however. Instead, this article identifies and interrogates how sporting mega-event security planning is also tempered by a range of localized processes, including vernacular cultures of security and the scale of extant security infrastructures.

London's shadow legacies: security and activism at the 2012 Olympics

When London organisers bid on the 2012 Summer Olympics, they promised an array of legacies, from economic and environmental to cultural and sport-related. In bid materials, Lord Sebastian Coe and his colleagues put forth a four-pronged vision for the Games: providing an unforgettable experience for athletes; forging a British sport legacy; regenerating East London economically and socially; and championing the Olympic Movement and the International Olympic Committee. But the 2012 London Olympics tendered a legacy not touted in bid materials: a revamped security state and riled-up activist communities. This article examines the dialectics of restriction and resistance: the ever-present dance between security forces and activists as they jockey for position and advantage in the public sphere. Drawing from government documents, media accounts, ethnographies and interviews with activists and security practitioners, we analyse these dialectics as played out in London in the run-up to, during and after the Olympics. First, we analyse literatures on repressive and coercive state policies and on the dissent and activism they inspire, giving special attention to specific Olympic processes. We then consider the urban setting that not only stages the Games, but also animates specific tensions on which security agencies and activists converge. This discussion is developed in the following section where we consider the measures adopted by state and private security forces for the London Games and examine the activist response to the Olympic juggernaut and how campaigners were replying to – sometimes tacitly and at other times explicitly – the states actions. The paper concludes by considering how security practices, activism and their interrelationships contribute towards a range of less-visible legacies.

Securing and scaling resilient futures: : neoliberalization, infrastructure, and topologies of power

In this paper we explore the scaling of resilience policy and practice not as an effect upon infrastructure but as enacted through infrastructure. Drawing on Foucaults topological analyses of governmental power, especially his elaboration of its coeval centripetal and centrifugal flows, we argue that understanding the scaling of resilience policy and practice involves acknowledging its infrastructural composition. We examine this infrastructural scaling through an empirical analysis of UK resilience policy and practice, as recounted by those working across multiple organizations involved in planning for, and coping with, aleatory events. This reveals how the neoliberal decentralizing refrain, expressed in resilience policy and its critique, is both sustained and displaced by interwoven circulatory mechanisms of obstruction, filtration, and acceleration. Together these infrastructural flows amount to ‘fractionally coherent’ scalings that not only centralize governmental power but are constitutive of governmental centres. Our analyses of infrastructural scaling suggest that resiliency policy and practice is far less decentralized, or localized, than others have suggested, with both centripetal and centrifugal flows of power resulting from a composite of infrastructural circulatory mechanisms that can variously scale political agency in relation to aleatory events.

Heading Toward a New Criminogenic Climate: Climate Change, Political Economy and Environmental Security

The coming “climate divide” will represent a further extension of the inequitable state of the affairs of humanity and the planet, one in which the conditions producing climate change are contributed to most overwhelmingly by the business as usual features of rich consumer societies, but which will impose the greatest costs and resultant miseries on the already poor and newly developing nations. In addition to these international inequalities, such issues will also resonate unevenly in the domestic setting. For example, not only will those with the fewest resources have the greatest difficulties in mediating the impact of climate change and its attendant shocks, but climate change will also stimulate a number of deeply criminogenic forces. Together, such interconnectivity between the global and local suggests that approaches to sustainability and resilience need to be broadly conceived in both scope and application and need to be genuinely transformative rather than operating within current ambitions for “business as usual”. Moreover, the magnitude of these issues underlines the importance of formulating an approach to sustainability and resilience that genuinely embeds the “green” of environmental concerns within the “blue” of security policy.

Crossing borders: migration and survival in the capital's informal marketplace

Abstract Major discourses on UK migration tend to be framed by simplistic dichotomies which currently inform policy, media, and public debates: migrants as parasites or providers, exploiters or exploited, victims or criminals. However, our ongoing ethnographic research amongst post-communist populations (PCPs), in particular those from the accession and new accession states such as Lithuania, Poland, Romania, etc., and Londons informal and criminal economies reveals a more complex and worrying set of realities. Static boundaries are more or less non-existent as many migrants find themselves, for myriad reasons, constantly traversing the borders between the capitals formal, informal, and criminal markets. This, in turn, requires a constant shifting of identity and status as a means of successfully negotiating passage back and forth across these economic margins. These fluctuations present a challenge to the various agencies within criminal justice and the third sector whose competing agendas are largely ...

Researching and understanding terrorism: a role for criminology?

Since 9/11 there has been unprecedented interest in terrorism across political, media and academic discourses. Regarding the latter, earlier this year The Guardian (2008) reported a 23-fold increase in academic articles cited ‘terrorism’ since 2001. Given this major refocusing, it would seem that the conceptual, theoretical and empirical tools available to criminologists leave them particularly well placed to understand this phenomena. However, many of the problems that have continually plagued ‘terrorism studies’ remain unresolved and, thus, present crucial issues for criminologists to negotiate. This paper assesses where terrorism research goes from here and, crucially, what criminology may have to offer the investigation of such manifestations of violence.