Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty by Aihwa Ong

This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have pe...

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The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change.

Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-223260View record in Web of Science Record created on 2016-11-21, modified on 2016-11-21

Truth and Power

In 2012, an Irish magazine introduced the Dublin-based director of “government services” at one of the Big Four auditing firms. The executive spoke from expertise in organizational change: transparency and efficiency would inevitably flow, he explained, from reengineering state institutions to be measurably customer focused according to best practice. The magazine provided another update on the quiet revolution that Shore and Wright have tracked for more than a decade—the relentless rise of audit culture.

New Questions of Evidence: Comment on Shore and Wright's 'Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society'

We are currently witnessing a rapid rise in biometric security. Borders are apparently becoming ‘smart’; passports are becoming e-passports, and when you set out on your travels your data double is already at your destination. Access to airports and even continents will increasingly be determined not by your national citizenship but by the security of your identity. Biometric security has received little anthropological attention despite historical associations with the discipline. Here I wish to outline a brief genealogy of biometric security in order to argue that, beyond the apparent newness of the technology, key biometric technologies owe their origins to 19th-entury deployments and then as now they may be understood as a form of bio-governmentality in which the security of identity opens possibilities for population control.

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The birth of biometric security

1: Sarkozy and the Roma: Performing Securitisation, by Marion Demossier 2: Video-Surveillance and the Political use of Discretionary Power in the Name of Security and Defence, by Catarina Frois 3: Location, Isolation, and Disempowerment: The Swift Proliferation of Security Discourse among Policy Professionals, by Greg Feldman 4: Compensating (In)Security: Anthropological Perspectives on Internal Security, by Alexandra Schwell 5: Petty States of Exception: The Contemporary Policing of the Urban Poor, by Didier Fassin 6: Counter-terrorism in European Airports, by Mark Maguire 7: Whose Security? The Deportation of Foreign-national Offenders from the UK, by Ines Hasselber 8: Grey Zones of Illegality: Inhuman Conditions in Receiving Irregular Migrants in Greece, by Jutta Lauth Bacas Conclusions Security: Encounters, Misunderstanding and Possible Collaborationsm, by Didier Bigo Contributors Index

The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control

Audit Culture and Anthropology

From fingerprinting in colonial contexts to scientific racism, and from face recognition pioneers to contemporary multi-modal surveillance, biometric security has long been connected to processes of racialization. Using both contemporary and historical examples, this article explores the rollout of biometric security, paying especial attention to how biometrics makes use of and relies upon racialized configurations of population. The article explores these connections and teases out the precise ways in which ‘race’ and racialization connect to the securitization of individual identities. This article also opens a space for a discussion of biopower, the most popular theoretical frame through which biometric security is currently being viewed.

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Mark Maguire

Papers

New Questions of Evidence: Comment on Shore and Wright's 'Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society'

The birth of biometric security

The Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control

Audit Culture and Anthropology

Biopower, racialization and new security technology