Militarising Mumbai? The ‘politics’ of response

This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities

Learning from Israel? ‘26/11’ and the anti-politics of urban security governance

This article calls for a greater emphasis on issues of politics and anti-politics within critical debates about transnational security governance in the metropolis. While scholars have documented the growing popularity of policy ‘models’ and ‘best practices’ in policing and urban security planning, we know little about what makes these schemes attractive to the officials who enroll in them. I take the government of Maharashtra’s decision to ‘learn from Israel’ following the 2008 Mumbai attacks (26/11) as an invitation to re-evaluate the relationships among policymaking, politics, and depoliticization. Focusing on references to Israeli security know-how as a ‘best practice’ by Maharashtra state officials, I explore how an association with Israel was used to negotiate the conflicts and controversies that followed 26/11. The article has two aims: first, it addresses how transnational policy schemes work anti-politically within particular local contexts. Second, it locates counter-terrorism policy as a form of performative politics, which is generative of policy problems. In doing so, the article helps to reclaim the political contingency of policy responses to terroristic violence and addresses the agency of policy actors in the global South

Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a ‘laboratory’ for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. The article argues that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. It further calls into question the thesis' polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. The article takes these concerns as an opportunity to re-assemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond

TENTATIVE SECURITIES: 26/11, ISRAEL AND THE POLITICS OF MOBILITY

This dissertation examines the global mobility of security knowhow in relation to the management of terrorism in megacities. Specifically, it offers three insights. First, it shows how historical events are performed as sites in need of transnational policy intervention. Second, it enables an understanding of how and why the sourcing of policy ‘models’ actually takes place. Third, it sheds light on how mobile policy schemes travel geographically and are put to work in particular contexts. In doing so, it elaborates on the conditions under which policies move geographically but also addresses the kinds of constraints and contradictions they face. The dissertation develops two closely related theses. The first has to do with how policy models are constructed as mobile objects while the second highlights the kinds of pressures and conflicts that such models are used to resolve. Regarding the construction of policy models, Israel’s status as a global policy exemplar should not be understood as a closed professional consensus or incontrovertible fact that exists independently ‘out there’. Rather it is a deeply ideological construct, emerging from processes of geographic interaction. Israel’s claim to expertise in security knowledge needs to be constantly re- articulated. Indeed, the Israeli involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks (26/11) reveals a basic tension. On the one hand, the Israeli officials’ prerogatives to comment on the handling of 26/11 reflects Israel’s dominant position on matters of counter-terrorism and homeland security (HLS). On the other hand, the extensive efforts of Israeli officials to situate Israeli security expertise as a ‘solution’ also reveals that the relationship between 26/11 and the ‘Israeli experience’ of fighting terrorism was not, in fact, obvious or natural. This link had to be actively made. Indeed, the event’s status as a failure of governance in need of urgent policy intervention emerged through Israeli criticisms of Indian security authorities and comparisons to their own alleged success in managing live terror attacks. The second component of my thesis is that the Mumbai authorities’ decision to take up Israeli security ‘solutions’ must be situated in relation to local public pressures and conflicts to which 26/11 gave rise. The reason why Maharashtra politicians decided to learn from Israel in 2009 was not because they suddenly woke up to the reality of global terrorism and realized that ‘securing’ Mumbai against this threat would require a set of technical skills that they lacked. Rather it was because they believed that an association with Israel would be helpful in managing public dissent and restoring their authority to govern. What ‘learning from Israel’ offered was not a set of concrete policy prescriptions for how to manage terrorism but rather an image of progress and success

"Violence Work"

No abstract available

India’s counterinsurgency knowledge: theorizing global position in wars on terror

Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on dominant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counterinsurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reducible to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial histories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics

Mobility and the model: policy mobility and the becoming of Israeli Homeland Security dominance

Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is now quite widely acknowledged within academic literature and beyond. While existing accounts of Israel's HLS industry have made a number of critical contributions to understanding its rise, they fail to readily address how Israeli HLS approaches have come to be understood as mobile and universal strategies to be applied worldwide. They also negate the extent to which Israel's security ‘solutions’ are (re)invented as they move geographically. I argue that Israeli claims to HLS dominance are realized through their encounters beyond Israel/Palestine in ways that stabilize their practices and technologies as global exemplars. Building on policy mobilities scholarship, I suggest that bound up with the development of an Israeli HLS ‘model’ is the constitution of an audience, which is central to giving these approaches their global appeal and respective political force. In developing these claims I explore the role of geographical imaginations in the constitution of mobilities and argue for the need to move from a framework of discourse to one of performativity

Policing reality: Urban disorder, failure, and expert undoings

This article intervenes in discussions about the circulation of policing knowledge and the politics of expertise. As part of a broader conversation about transnational reconfigurations of state power, critical scholars have drawn attention to the influence of global policing “models” and “private” experts in shaping policy. They show how such figures and forms of knowhow symbolically enforce urban order and dispossess marginalized communities under conditions of neoliberal crisis. While incisive, these approaches can unduly portray expert authority as boundless and unassailable. This article argues that a sustained theoretical engagement with questions about controversies and failure opens up fruitful avenues to unsettle the perceived smoothness, inevitability, and omnipotence of experts in relation to politics and governing. Drawing on insights from actor-network theory (ANT), it situates deference to global experts as interventions that seek to enact and police the terms of “reality” concerning urban order. This approach allows us to better understand how such interventions work but also how they misfire and come undone. These claims are developed through a close reading of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's attempt to solicit policy advice from renowned global “supercop” William Bratton in the aftermath of the 2011 England riots

Security Preparedness in European Cities. Is it really time to learn from Israel?

As part of European policy debates on counterterrorism, there have been increasing calls to draw on Israeli expertise in protecting European cities. While transnational collaboration is, in essence, neither positive nor negative, European policymakers need to consider the full range of costs and consequences it is likely to have