RĂ©sultat de la recherche
Spatialities of security and surveillance: Managing spaces, separations and circulations at sport mega events
The paper explores empirically how contemporary security and surveillance practices and techniques permeate the production and management of everyday urban spaces. It does so from three interrelated perspectives, focusing on separation and access control, the management of circulations, and the internal organisation and monitoring of specific spatial enclaves. This analysis draws upon empirical insights into security governance at the European Football Championships 2008 in Switzerland and Austria (Euro 2008).
The paper also considers a number of more fundamental insights with regard to the intertwined spatialities of surveillance, relating to enclosure and circulation, fixity and fluidity, external separation and internal organisation. Three key issues stand out: firstly, the complex challenges associated with the necessary balancing and reconciliation of the core requirements of mobility and security, circulation and enclosure in contemporary security governance; secondly, the “atmospheric” implications of spatially articulated security and surveillance measures; and, thirdly, the logics and impacts of surveillance with regard to the orchestrations of urban life.
Borders, circulation and sport mega-event security : the example of Euro 2008 in Switzerland and Austria
The paper draws upon empirical insights provided by a two-year research project relating to security governance at the European Football Championships 2008 in Switzerland and Austria (Euro 2008). The objective is to study the role and modalities of border and access control in the context of sport mega-event security on various national and urban scales. This investigation seeks to demonstrate that security and surveillance at sport mega-events are shaped, fundamentally, by efforts towards the increased flexibility, variability and mobility (in both space and time) of carefully orchestrated access, passage and border controls. At stake in this “mobile border assemblage” are a large variety of phenomena, places and scales: from classic border controls at the national boundaries to a wide range of inter- and intra-urban enclosures and passage points (Graham, 2010) aimed at monitoring, restricting, filtering and also managing and facilitating different forms and modalities of circulation (of people and objects). This paper explores the reasons, logics and characteristics of this phenomenon.
Following Michel Foucaultʼs conceptual distinction between (apparatuses of) “discipline” and “security” (Foucault, 2009), the paper also aims to bring to the fore a number of more fundamental insights into the spatialities of contemporary security and surveillance. Two key issues stand out: firstly, the complex challenges associated with the necessary balancing and reconciliation of the core requirements of mobility and surveillance in contemporary security governance, and secondly, the multi-scalar, public-private interests and forms of expertise associated with this phenomenon.