Introduction
The preceding chapters have suggested that the security measures for the 2010 World Cup were permeated by the logic of war. Governance structures used a military command and control structure, while President Jacob Zuma described the spending on security operations as a ‘war chest’. As in wartime, South African politicians presented the tournament as a nationalist state of exception and urged all citizens to rally around the flag. The inverse of this sentiment was the perception that the country had been invaded and occupied by FIFA.
The thesis has maintained that this ‘emergency’ was politically managed and responsive to the
interests of a complex of public/private actors and institutions, rather than a predetermined outcome of the extraordinary security challenges presented by the World Cup. Using Graham’s (2010) work on a military urbanism as a recurring theme, it has been suggested that this was intrumentalised through security operations which twinned mobility and restriction. Instead of emerging as a novel intrusion into South African cities, the World Cup solidified, in a highly public but temporary form, a series of on-going security methods and prerogatives played out within everyday urban life.
The most urgent, problematic aspect of this overlap with entrenched security developments would appear to be the parallel efforts to remilitarise the SAPS. The security operations for the World Cup were presented by the government, the media and within academic policing studies as a forward- thinking model inspired by international best practise. By contrast, the state’s experiments with a new SAPS ranking system and the reinforcement of ‘discipline’ was often described as an atavistic holdover from the apartheid regime. For example, former government minister Kader Asmal
suggested that the return to old policing appellations was indicative of an institutional amnesia about the state violence of the recent past (Graham, 2009). Dianne Kohler Barnard (2010), the DA Shadow Minister of Police, echoed this sentiment and suggested that remilitarisation was a reactive move which failed to take crime combatting in South Africa forward. From these perspectives, it could be argued that remilitarisation was the antithesis of the policing operations at the 2010 World Cup. While the organisational acumen of the event displayed the modernity of the democratic dispensation, parallels developments within the police suggested that the government was readily invoking the practices and strategies of its authoritarian predecessors.
However, somewhat ironically, within critical urban theory South Africa’s recent past has become a dystopian metaphor for the future trajectory of urban securitisation. In his seminal City of Quartz (1990: 224-227), Mike Davis described the ‘militarisation of city life’ and the creation of fortified
181 enclaves of affluence in Los Angeles as the ‘increasing South Africanisation of its spatial relations’.
Extrapolating from ‘actually existing trends’ he also included an allusion to ‘urban Bantustans’ (224).
More recently, Weizman (2007:171, 123) notes how the concept of apartheid has been associated with the occupation of Palestine and suggests that South Africa is one of the exemplars of ‘the global phenomenon of metropolitan sprawl and segregation into ethnically and religiously homogenous communities’. Graham (2010, 49) observes that neoconservative thinkers have approvingly viewed
‘apartheid as a model’ for ‘urban lockdowns’ (ibid). He also speculates that South Africa’s past could be a conceptual template for developments in global political geography: ‘are the three-dimensional archipelagos of apartheid-style splintering, connection, fortification, and militarisation ... a grim exemplar of the future?’ (143). It could also be noted that, at the level of popular culture, one of South Africa’s [albeit American-funded] most successful film exports has been the aforementioned District 9. In the year before the World Cup, the movie appeared to resonate with audiences throughout the world by taking security trends evident in the country to a science fiction extreme, with its depiction of heavily armed corporate mercenaries and the military controlled slum of the title.
Indeed, Hansen (2006) suggests that policing in South Africa was historically influenced both by the need to maintain a harsh, inequitable order and the desire of political elites to appear modern and internationally ‘respectable’. The apartheid government was thus a police state in two senses of the word. It was preoccupied with security and repression, engaged in a perpetual war with its
‘subversive’ population (281) and at the same time this was based on the justification that modernity and prosperity would be ensured through segregation: ‘the object of policing was first and foremost to control the reproduction of labour’ and movement (ibid). This was reflected in the apartheid state’s obsession with maintaining a veneer of legality. As Hansen (282) vividly puts it, ‘The dingy
interrogation room, the torture chamber and the random arrest’ were ‘supplemented by the courtroom, the hygienic and monitored detention cell, orderly arrests and so on’.
This suggests that the recuperation of aspects of apartheid identified by Davis, Weizman and Graham has to do with the combination of internal militarisation and sophisticated apparatuses of spatial control and segregation observed throughout the world. As this chapter will argue, the interface between past and future, between local and international is central to the extension of contemporary militarisation. As an intensified site of international security developments and cooperation, mega- events may expose these preoccupations in an especially concentrated and heightened manner. But while Graham (2010), Neocleous (2011) and Souza (2011) agree that architectural fortification and authoritarian social policy converge into the increased militarisation of cities, the origins and extent of these developments remain a matter of debate.
182 For Graham, the driving force behind the continuous relocation of military techniques and tactics into the governance of urban space is the protection of areas and populations of value from dangerous
‘intrusion’. As his use (12) of Foucault’s ‘boomerang effect’ suggests, this draws upon a long- standing back and forth between ‘colonial heartlands’ and ‘frontiers’, in which political authorities were engaged in simultaneously fighting insurgencies abroad and rebellions and class conflict at
‘home’ . However, the current era is marked by an unprecedented militarisation of civil spaces. For Graham (74), the replacement of the Keynesian post-war settlement by ‘market fundamentalism’
results in polarised cities, and this combines with the technologies made available on the international security market and ideologies of social domestication to entrench urban militarisation. The result is that in many cities security has become a euphemism for protecting archipelagos of privilege, in which dangerous or unwanted sections of the public become a target (96). ‘Neoliberal globalisation’
rapidly morphs ‘into permanent war: the architectures of globalisation merge seamlessly into the architectures of control and warfare’ (78).
The ‘paranoia and neurosis’ (93) embedded within security policies and architectures reflect the failure of political and economic elites to create an equitable form of globalisation. Security is both self-fulfilling, in that the construction of security zones and islands ‘recreates’ the perception of danger and threats (150), and illusory, as it draws on ‘myths’ of technical precision and seamless, 24- 7 ‘surveillance, targeting and killing systems’ (177). However, this obsession with control fails to address the real challenges of contemporary cities, such as ‘intensifying global interconnections, rapid urbanisation, extreme financial volatility, increasing demographic pressure and resource depletion’, or the ultimate challenge of the ‘Anthropocene’, a new geological era created by the human impact upon the natural environment (382-3).
Military urbanism thus distracts attention and resources away from such pressing problems into fearful projects of pre-emption. And following Carr (2010:30), the linked state–corporate logic of
‘military futurism’ actively works to impose a bleak ‘weaponised’ future in the name of preserving the international state system and consumer capitalism. But the attempts to securitise ways of life which are reliant on economic and ecological exploitation are paradoxical as they weaponise a socio- economic system which perpetuates and deepens ‘current and future crises and insecurities’ (Graham, 2010:310). For Graham, this necessitates ‘a radical politics of security’ (383) which can deal with these threats and which understands ‘the continually deepening transnational and cosmopolitan connections that so mark our age, in all their complexity and ambivalence’ (ibid)
However, Graham’s proposed solutions to modern environmental and social crisis appear to be politically naïve. While calling for ‘a resurgent conception of Keynesian state politics’(382) to roll back the excesses of neoliberalism, he admits that states are ‘so woven into the circuits of dominant
183 capitalism, so complicit in their own politics of public spectacle and private secrecy, that such a reworking is unlikely to come from them’ (382-3). In response, Cities Under Siege concludes with a call for unified challenges to the status quo by ‘the Left’ (381), organised through ‘global civil society’. But as Graham’s use of capitalisation suggests, this implies that ‘the Left’ is a homogenous block, which clearly collapses vast differences in ideologies, tactics and world views , as well as fault lines of race, gender and class. Furthermore, self-consciously left-wing governments in countries such as Brazil and South Africa have embraced ‘technocratic and authoritarian’ (Souza, 2011:14) forms of security and governance, while civil society is not immune from its own anti-democratic tendencies.
Indeed, Souza (2010b:318) suggests that the call for ‘resurgent’ Keynesianism is effectively a reformist strategy for the continuation of capitalism with ‘minimum horror’. However such efforts to
‘tame’ the social and ecological destruction of capitalism ignores how it is ‘mode of production’ that is ‘intrinsically and essentially anti-ecological’ and crisis prone (316).
For Neocleous (2011), the attempt to offer a more cosmopolitan conception of security glosses over the militarism inherent in the very concept of ‘security’. More exactly, ‘wars’ of various kinds are the structuring logic around which the state and capital organise and sustain bourgeoisie order in the
‘work’ of security, which oscillates between different countries and back again (2011: 201). From this standpoint, contemporary militarisation is the latest ratcheting up of a historical lineage stretching from colonial manhunts with ‘mastiffs and knives’ (198) and the creation of pacified labour forces (194) which fuelled the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital, through to contemporary wars on drugs and terror. Whether through knives or drones, dogs or night-vision scopes, the underlying impetus behind increasingly ‘elaborate security systems targeting civilian populations in general and suspect communities or the enemy within in particular’ is ordering the political relations necessary for accumulation by ‘facilitating a functional integration of the pacifying powers of the modern state’
(200).
From this standpoint, the militarised spatial assemblages which ‘pop up’ (Warren, 2002) in such spectacular fashion during mega-events are a particularly concentrated ‘front’ in the on-going class war that shapes capitalist society. The call for measures to protect sporting events from external threats such as terrorism is not a reaction against pressing dangers but is part of a broader, continuous strategy of remodelling and extending police powers in order to manage ‘problem subjects’ (204). To extend Neocleous’ critique of security politics into Graham’s work, it can be argued that military urbanism is not so much the product of the world-historic urban changes wrought by neoliberalism but is instead the latest configuration of ‘police power’. Indeed, it could be further speculated that neoliberalism has served to strip the state of its social democratic façade, revealing the endoskeleton of the ‘war machine’. And, from the perspective of the global South, this may not even appear a novel
184 development, as the Keynesian post-war settlement was never strongly installed in most parts of the world (Abourahme, 2009).
The concept of ‘pacification’ suggests that there is no incongruity in the militarisation of civilian mega-events. As a central articulation of the ethos of capitalist society (Smith, 2011), mega-events are sites of densely concentrated value. Because they contain such vast financial and symbolic prestige, it would seem logical that they would be governed with extraordinary security displays which make visible their political and economic worth (Munoz, cited in Marcuse, 2007). From the perspective outlined by Neocleous, it is not that the logic of war has redefined urbanism so much as that the ever- present wars of pacification and class are more overt under the conditions of neoliberalism.
In contrast with Graham, Neocleous argues that militarisation is not a distraction from real security concerns but is part of a larger repertoire of policing actions which support bourgeois order, a repertoire which also includes welfare and other governmental efforts to manage society. To attempt to find a cosmopolitan, alternative conception of security, as Graham proposes, is to fall into the ‘trap’
of security and replicates the same inequitable politico-economic system which is the real base of anxiety and fear.
Neocleous focuses upon how security works as a projection of elite power, and particularly on the use of the often phantasmagoric and exaggerated threat of terrorism. But he has little to say on the issue of public safety and violent crime. This underplays the lived and situational fear of violence which Souza (2011) identifies as the driving force behind ‘phobopolisation’. In Southern countries, violence is a socially complex but real threat. For instance, in a discussion of drug gangs in Brazil Souza (11) identifies the tense interactions between these groups and the other residents of favelas .While these gangs may be the targets of state-led pacifications, they are themselves implicated in violence against residents through exerting their own forms of ‘tyranny’ (ibid). Souza (2) resists the ahistorical tendency to present our era as uniquely violent, citing the fear of urban violence found in Ancient Rome and eighteenth-century London, but argues (2009:29) that what stands out today is the intensity and omnipresence of security concerns throughout differing urban contexts.
In particular, he (2011:2) identifies three crucial aspects which combine to entrench such a ‘quasi- Hobbesian’ view of urban life. Unlike Neocleous, who suggests that elites have long viewed the
‘domestic’ and the ‘frontier’ as one continuous colony, Souza argues that the contemporary period is marked by the obsolescence of long standing borders between policing and warfare. Firstly, the
‘traditional conservative’ (3) idea of policing as an internal practice and warfare as carried out abroad against defined enemies has been supplanted. Political establishments talk about their foreign military engagements as variants of international policing, while internal policing uses ‘military methods and
185 personal’ (4). Secondly, this is entrenched through the linked coordinates of the political, commercial and media ‘industry of fear’ (ibid). Finally, while military and police planners often view capitalism as being threatened by toxic miasmas of crime and terrorism, he suggests that this perception of chaos is really the ‘emergence of a new order, or of new orders, both legal and illegal one and at many scales’ (5). Within contemporary capitalism, this includes the erosion of the welfare state in the global North, the ‘collapse’ (ibid) of the developmental state in parts of the global South, increasingly precarious employment, and the flourishing of trade in illegal commodities and money laundering, which have been aided by deregulation.
Mirroring Standing’s (2004:53) comments on how organised crime functions as a form of predatory capitalism Souza (2009:47-8) argues that capitalism contains its own ‘criminogenous’ tendencies.
These include the propagation of desires, which many people cannot afford to satiate through legal means; the dissemination of competitive, individualistic values which entrench the perception of social life as a continuous war; and a culture industry which feeds off lurid narratives of violence and the belief that ‘everything can be transformed into a commodity and that everything has a price’
(ibid). In turn, this propagates the idea that individual self-worth is dependent on property and wealth, which in the South African context has been viewed as a major motivating factor for criminality (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2009). The cumulative product is the perpetual reinforcement of a widespread sense of fear, both through physical violence and the continual turbulence of the economy. And this is a fear which permeates society: referring to gated
communities, Souza (2011:6) uses the metaphor of the prison to observe that ‘middle class citizens live in prisons and it is only in prisons that they feel themselves free ... this kind of statement gives us a taste of the socio-psychological atmosphere in a phobopolis’ .
This makes the ‘militarisation of the urban question’ (2009) an increasingly common phenomenon.
Souza suggests that the only way to replace this with a less fearful politics is to combine egalitarian urban development with a progressive public safety strategy (2011:16). But he remains sceptical about what the state can achieve in this regard: ‘structurally seen the state apparatus is ultimately always a heteronomous instance of power, no matter how sincerely committed to (re)distributive measures and popular participation particular governments can be’ (ibid). At best, under the current conditions of capitalism, public policies can mitigate certain problems but as a product of the local, national and international challenges arising through the criminogenous dynamics of the geo-political and economic order: ‘phobopolisation is a challenge that the capitalist state is very probably not able to overcome… The state apparatus seems to be part of the problem rather than the solution’ (18).
Finally, as an international challenge, Souza (2010a:461) suggests that Graham inadvertently
simplifies the asymmetries between North and South and oversubscribes to distinctions between rich
186 and poor, frontier and metropole. Most particularly, this underestimates how ‘semi-peripheral’
countries such as South Africa, Mexico and Brazil are sites of both great wealth and poverty. While profoundly unequal, they are by no means poor (ibid), with advanced capitalist infrastructures and strong states existing amidst structural underdevelopment.
What this suggests is that semi-peripheral countries like South Africa represent the ultimate example of military urbanism’s twinning of movement and control. With First and Third world conditions continually overlapping within the territorial boundaries of one country, security may serve as the political technique which manages the tension and fractions incubated by constant social
contradictions. Rather than being neocolonial war zones, countries such as Brazil and South Africa are major political and economic forces in which sophisticated consumer societies flourish amidst on- going crime ‘wars’. As a consequence of this, it may be the case that South Africa is a pioneer in the
‘crisis management’ which Peters (2011) observes in increasingly polarised societies in the global North.
Despite differences in approach, focus and proposal, the work detailed above shares a material conception of security. Rather than a transcendent good, arising from the urgent need for public protection, it has been argued that the ‘militarisation of the urban question’ (Souza, 2009) is a product of broader political and social processes. This clearly extrapolates into wider questions of economy and power far beyond the parameters of this thesis.
With the aim of identifying a track through this complex terrain, this chapter will focus upon how military urbanism works through the interface between the domestic and international, the past and future, and is undergirded by a dark imaginative rendering of urban space. Samara (2005) suggests that the influence of internationally used doctrines and tactics on the post-apartheid government’s war on crime may reinforce a localised culture of militarised policing and security. The chapter will develop this argument in a different direction and suggest that the policing of South Africa’s complex social environment also provides a concrete example of the tensions and anxieties embedded
throughout transnational security developments, an international dimension especially pertinent to the security operations at the 2010 World Cup. Finally, Souza (2010:461) suggests that, despite local and national differences, the international dimensions of urban militarisation require a global focus. This chapter aims to go some way towards developing this kind of critique.
Chapter Structure
The chapter will begin by discussing how the government offered a technologically advanced security apparatus for meeting the presumed challenges of the 2010 World Cup. However, it will be suggested