Tyler Wall

Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes

As surveillance and military devices, drones—or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’—offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the dehumanizing translation of bodies into ‘targets’ for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In this article, we analyze the deployment of drones within warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and borderzones and urban areas in the USA. What we call ‘the drone stare’ is a type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts, thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that may impede action or introduce moral ambiguity. Through these processes, drones further normalize the ongoing subjugation of those marked as Other.

‘This is your face on meth’: The punitive spectacle of ‘white trash’ in the rural war on drugs

This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by and embedded within already existing cultural anxieties about the figure of ‘white trash’, reflecting both the dominance and precariousness of white social position.

Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the “War on Cameras”

This paper considers how the politics of security and order are also a politics of aesthetics encompassing practical struggles over the authority and regulation of ways of looking and knowing. To do this, the paper considers the visual economies of police power in the United States by engaging what has been called the “war on cameras”, or the police crackdown on citizen photographers who “shoot back” or “stare down” police. Despite US law generally endorsing the right for citizens to film or photograph on-duty public police officers, in recent years hundreds of cases have been documented where police have confiscated or smashed cameras, deleted film, or intimidated and threatened those wielding an unauthorized camera. For us, this crackdown on the unauthorized stare is a theoretically and politically insightful case study—a diagnostic moment—for engaging more openly and starkly the assumptions underpinning police power more generally, particularly the ways police power aims to actively fabricate social order by eradicating anything it deems a threat in the name of security. Ultimately, we argue that the violence holstered, literally and figuratively, on the hip of modern policing is inseparable from an attendant politics of staring and visuality that further extends and perpetuates state power’s aim of pacification.

Unmanning the Police Manhunt: Vertical Security as Pacification

This article provides a critique of military aerial drones being “repurposed” as domestic security technologies. Mapping this process in regards to domestic policing agencies in the United States, the case of police drones speaks directly to the importation of actual military and colonial architectures into the routine spaces of the “homeland”, disclosing insidious entwinements of war and police, metropole and colony, accumulation and securitization. The “boomeranging” of military UAVs is but one contemporary example how war power and police power have long been allied and it is the logic of security and the practice of pacification that animates both. The police drone is but one of the most nascent technologies that extends or reproduces the police’s own design on the pacification of territory. Therefore, we must be careful not to fetishize the domestic police drone by framing this development as emblematic of a radical break from traditional policing mandates – the case of police drones is interesting less because it speaks about the militarization of the police, which it certainly does, but more about the ways in which it accentuates the mutual mandates and joint rationalities of war abroad and policing at home. Finally, the paper considers how the animus of police drones is productive of a particular form of organized suspicion, namely, the manhunt. Here, the “unmanning” of police power extends the police capability to not only see or know its dominion, but to quite literally track, pursue, and ultimately capture human prey.

The walking dead and killing state: Zombification and the normalization of police violence

In May 2012, police shot Rudy Eugene, a black man of Haitian decent, dead as he ‘ate the face’ of a homeless man on a deserted Miami causeway. Because of the strange gruesomeness of the attack and other similar violent acts, some in the media declared that a terrifying pandemic—the ‘zombie apocalypse’—had arrived. While this particular case may be yet another instance of mediated panic, we suggest cries of ‘zombies’ and ‘cannibals’ should not be dismissed as simply sensationalistic, irresponsible journalism. Rather, we see this case as a powerful example of the cultural production of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and justifies police violence and state killing. As such, we argue that all of the contemporary ‘zombie talk’, usefully reveals how the logics of security, state violence and punitive disposability are imagined and reproduced as livable parts of late-capitalism.

ON PACIFICATION: INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE

In 1957 at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), one of NATO’s two strategic commands, a speech was given by General Allard of France. France had by that time given up what had become known as its ‘dirty war’ in Indochina, but was happy to continue a series of wars elsewhere which were hardly any ‘cleaner’. Such wars were understood by NATO and its allies, but also by their opponents, as ‘revolutionary wars’, and this was the subject of Allard’s speech: how to defeat the revolution. Allard’s view was that war against the various communist and socialist movements then in existence had to involve ‘pure’ military action, but that this alone would not be enough. Also needed was a second group of actions, grouped together because they worked in unison: psychological action, propaganda, political and operational intelligence, police measures, personal contacts with the population, and a host of social and economic programs. Of this combined action Allard notes: ‘I shall classify these various missions under two categories: Destruction and Construction. These two terms are inseparable. To destroy without building up would mean useless labor; to build without first destroying would be a delusion’. He then goes on to expand on these terms. The meaning of ‘destruction’ is fairly clear: the co-ordinated activity of army and associated state powers to ‘chase and annihilate … deal spectacular blows … and maintain insecurity’. ‘Construction’, however, means ‘building the peace’, ‘organizing the people’, persuading the people ‘by the use of education’ and, ultimately ‘preparing the establishment of a new order’. He adds: ‘This is the task of pacification’ (cited in Paret, 1964, 30-1). It is remarkable how often a comment along these lines appears, again and again,

For the Very Existence of Civilization: The Police Dog and Racial Terror

Abstract: This essay maps the emergence of police dogs in the mid-1950s and 1960s United States in relation to white bourgeois fears of black criminality and insurgency. Although widely circulated images of dogs attacking black protesters in 1963 Birmingham have fashioned the police dog into a symbol of racist violence, there has surprisingly been little focus on the K-9 of this period that goes behind the terror of the image. Paying attention to the archival record of the period, I unpack the political meaning of the police dog as it relates to the policing of the “color lines” and “property lines” of racial capitalism.

Philanthropic Soldiers, Practical Orientalism, and the Occupation of Iraq

This article discusses the ways in which white, male, United States soldiers make sense of both themselves and Iraqi others. Drawing from qualitative interviews with twenty-four said soldiers from southern Indiana, most of whom having deployed to Iraq, it is shown how these soldiers perform gendered and racialized Orientalist discourses to rationalize United States empire and in particular the military occupation of Iraq. Specifically, imperialist discourses that imagine a superior “us” and an inferior “them” and understand United States state violence as ultimately a Western humanitarian “rescue” are shown to be powerful cultural logics in the sense-making practices of the interviewed soldiers. This article then is concerned with what others have called “practical Orientalism”—or the ways in which formal and official Orientalist discourses are adopted by everyday actors.

‘Do Some Anti-Poaching, Kill Some Bad Guys, and Do Some Good’: Manhunting, Accumulation, and Pacification in African Conservation

On 5 January 2015, park rangers in the southernmost region of South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park—a park roughly the size of Israel—encountered a group of three armed men. Suspecting that the men were in the park to kill rhinoceros illegally in order to harvest and sell their horns on the global black market, the rangers confronted the men. According to the accounts of the rangers, the three men opened fire, leading to a brief shootout. When the dust settled, two of the suspected poachers lay dead while the third had escaped into the brush of the park. Speaking at the funeral for Vusi Nyathi, one of the slain men, Nyathi’s nephew, Julio Mabuya, said as he dug his uncle’s grave ‘it feels wrong’. Explaining his uncle’s decision to hunt in the Kruger bush, Mabuya illuminated one of the central confounding problems not only of illegal hunting in Africa but also of the logics and practices of anti-poaching initiatives and (neo)colonial relations with the continent more broadly: ‘the money is there’ (Serino 2015). This chapter will describe the various intersections of capital, poaching, conservation, police, accumulation, and pacification through an examination of some contemporary movements in conservationist responses to animal poaching in Africa—increasingly referred to as a shift towards ‘warrior conservation’.

Engaging Empire at Home and in the Field: The Politics of Home-Front Ethnography in States of Emergency

This article is a reflexive engagement on the politics of ethnography on the US home-front in violent contexts of US empire-building and death dealing. Specifically, my concern is with reconciling ethnographic accountability to the populations home-front ethnographers ‘study’ locally while remaining accountable to the geographically and subjectively distant lives that are ‘over there’—out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. It is suggested that the home-front is not separated from distant battle-fronts, but linked through relations of violence, hence problematizing notions of ethnographic responsibility and loyalty. To do this, I draw from my experiences conducting a near two-year ethnography of the US home-front, particularly a rural county in southern Indiana that is both a research ‘fieldsite’ and my childhood ‘hometown’.