Security, Surveillance and Space: Contested Topologies of Anticipatory Urban Counter-Terrorist Surveillance

Drawing on data generated from ethnographic research and two years of interviews with counter-terrorism practitioners this paper analyses practices and arrangements of domestic security surveillance operations in two empirical case studies: the London Olympic security programme and, also, urban counter-terrorism surveillance measures in a British city. Particular emphasis is placed on the anticipatory turn in security practice and how collapsing distinctions between internal and external security draw multiple new actors and agencies into the dispatch of counter-terrorism and attendant surveillance practices. With them come diverse practices, orthodoxies, values, techniques, weightings of risk and ambitions for security and surveillance. The paper argues that topological approaches informed by Foucauldian notions of ‘security’ (2007) and biopolitics (2008) provide particular utility for understanding of these heterogeneous configurations, techniques and practice of surveillance. Such approaches not only provide conceptual tools to articulate the diversity, plurality, conflict and cohesion within CT practice but, also, capture how power simultaneously operates at different scales and for varying (sometimes competing) purposes. Moreover, the paper argues that such conceptualisations 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 and, ultimately, reclaims elements of Foucauldian surveillance-focused debate from the shadow of panoptic analyses.