This paper explores the relationship between counterinsurgency policing and digital authoritarianism, two phenomena that are evolving in tandem. Using Pakistan as a case study, it investigates the development of smart policing technologies, the introduction of cybercrime legislation, and internet governance and monitoring, to identify three pathways through which counterinsurgency policing is aiding digital authoritarianism: transnational networks, domestic policymaking, and historically entrenched patterns of pacification and population control. This paper relies upon fieldwork conducted in the cities of Karachi and Lahore. It suggests that in democratically regressing states such as Pakistan, counterinsurgency policing strategies rooted in colonial logics of governance and surveillance can provide the foundation for cementing authoritarian control in today's digital era through a variety of institutions, processes, and legal frameworks, producing a chilling effect in both physical and digital realms. In doing so, this paper makes critical contributions to contemporary debates on counterinsurgency policing and digital authoritarianism.
Abstract The assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moïse on July 7, 2021, revealed an intricate international enterprise, with the participation of mercenaries from at least four countries. The Colombian nationals under investigation for supposedly participating in the sinister operation were former members of the national army who fought the U.S.-backed war on drugs, and at least one of them was previously a member of a special unit investigated for crimes against humanity. How may we draw connections between the enduring violability of bodies in Colombia's long war and imperial violence elsewhere? Although this article is focused on Colombia, by placing the magnicide in relation to everyday racialized practices of security in the region, the article underscores and goes beyond activists’ outcries that not only are cops, soldiers, militias, and self-deputized individuals “just” violence workers whose practices render the territorial and legal borders of policing as fictions, but also their increasing confluence reveals a much broader imperial strategy of outsourcing and democratizing violence to uphold global and domestic statecraft. It is argued that domestic Pax Colombiana meets Pax Americana in the ever-expanding foundational violence that increasingly drags bodies (youth killed in the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, displacements by the Colombian armed conflict, or nameless victims of Colombian-exported mercenaries around the world) into the global plantation's spaces of death. How do Black activists envision peace midts an imperial continuum of violence?
Preventing violent extremism (PVE) programs are central to state efforts to counter radicalization, particularly in educational settings. This unique ethnographic study, based on 68 hours of classroom observation, examines the Educational Youth Program (EPJO), where police officers conduct "radicalization" workshops for primary school children (aged 11-12). Officers perceive Muslim pupils as potential threats, effectively racializing them as a "suspect community" in need of reform. Police braided words of care and love with the language of security and surveillance, a form of "tough love" that serves as a tool of control. Their intimate methods of care/love extract knowledge, or better said, intelligence from children in the form of confessions. "Salvation" is promised only if pupils recast their religious identities to fit a securitized-secular framework. Otherwise, a secular hell-suspicion, surveillance, and exclusion-is awaiting these children in this world. This paper expands the literature on racialized PVE initiatives by revealing how care, security, and secularism intersect, and how invasive efforts are reframed as benevolence. Officers' affective labor transforms classrooms into securitized spaces, turning "love" and "care" into tools of a racialized, secular governance. The apparent success of EPJO reflects its mastery of pastoral, intimate power: presenting control as care and security as love, all while entrenching systemic exclusion under the guise of societal protection. The state has not abolished hell, it only secularized it.
By examining how the UK's onshore circulation of natural gas is secured according to plural notions of risk, this article develops a conceptual framework for attending to the relational constitution of circulating bodies and things, and the negotiated ways in which their realities are strategically manipulated through security's practice. Deploying the language of molecular security, it offers 3 inflection points for critical security studies. First, it challenges reductions of circulatory security to practices of filtration and maintenance, showing how lines of exception are drawn through entities' constitutive relations in attempts to manage their capacities to act. Second, the paper demonstrates how security operates according to plural imperatives (public safety, economic productivity, political stability, climate security), referent objects (nation-states, populations, economies, organisations, environments, individuals), and performances across a variety of scales (atomic to planetary). And third, it stretches security's relationship with the exception, showing how it often takes mundane, managerial, forms whereby both the threats identified, and the interventions deployed, may never cross the threshold from normal to exceptional politics.
