Getting Through Security by Mark Maguire David A. Westbrook

Author:Mark Maguire, David A. Westbrook [Mark Maguire, David A. Westbrook]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Political Science, Terrorism, Law Enforcement, Criminology
ISBN: 9781000217513
Google: YBEHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-29T03:52:30+00:00

Leviathan is not what it seems. Once the Emergency Ordnance Disposal – the “bomb squad” – had handed control over security back to the local police, and the police to airport security, the business of counterterrorism returned to being a matter of individuals and institutions looking out over the wall and trying to find cost effective ways to protect the public. The bureaucracy reset:

the total cost of the attack had to come off your bottom line. Nobody comes along and says to you “Oh you’ve had an attack here, have the money.” We had to fund that attack. We had to fund everything that happened on the days after. We had to fund the new bollards. So, all of that came from Glasgow Airport.

***

Limited Agency. A great deal of scholarly writing and indeed political discourse is rhetorically structured as offering wisdom to the powerful, who can do something because they are powerful. In this structure, agency tends to be presumed rather than demonstrated, i.e., power is a trope. Leviathan could do the right thing, he just needs to be educated. The trope facilitates expressions of various sorts to various ends that do not concern us here. Instead, ethnographic work within the secret college transforms what is usually a trope into a question: to what extent does a government official (or any powerful person) in fact have agency?

At first glance it may seem odd to question the agency of officials who can deliver, or worse, summon others to deliver, “kinetic force,” i.e., people who control operators who are professionally trained to kill. That would seem to be agency, and it is, of a sort and in certain situations, as explored in the next chapter. At the same time, security is haunted by the possibility of dramatic failure, a possibility that cannot be laid to rest. Less dramatically, and as already indicated, officials have very limited room to maneuver. Their domains are conflicted; their resources are limited; and therefore, so are their capabilities. It is a very big world, and sometimes, nothing can be done, even if Leviathan’s consul is sympathetic. A story from a counterterrorism conference Mark attended.

When we returned to the conference venue from our brief excursion to the US/Mexico border at El Paso del Norte, most of the delegates seemed poised to seize any opportunity to state their position on the topic of border control (which was not the topic on the afternoon’s agenda). A young scholar, who had earlier presented her research on irregular migration routes from Central America to the USA, spoke of the physical and emotional scars created by the US border. To emphasize the point, she recalled interviewing female border crossers who described taking preventative birth control pills before setting out for Texas, because rape was expected, almost inevitable. “You, I assume,” she said, directing her intervention to a senior intelligence officer from Australia, “never get to hear stories like that at work.” The Australian did not seem in the least bit surprised that he had been singled out, seeing as he “came out” as a “former spook” the night before.

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