“I remember when flying was enjoyable.”
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50 Stories from the airport
On 17 April 2012, a man, later identified as John E. Brennan, created major headlines as he went through security screening at Portland International Airport. As reported by “The Oregonian”, a Portland-based newspaper, Brennan stripped completely naked in order to protest against intense and invasive screening procedures. After taking off all his clothes, Brennan proceeded to walk through the checkpoint entirely naked and was eventually taken into custody by local police authorities and later accused of public nudity and disorderly conduct.
Why study the airport? As has been indicated at the very beginning, security creates friction – and arguably there are few places where this friction can be experienced as intensely as at the airport. Airports have clearly been one of the focal points of security reinforcements in the last decade. As Schouten (2014a: 23) points out, “since 9/11, terrorism has turned their security into a global controversy. Airport security has become a central preoccupation of security practitioners worldwide.” The little sketches of actual real-life ‘stories from the airport’ illustrating this section are rather randomly picked incidents (similar to the many others which can be found throughout the news archives if one is willing to dig), but they suffice to highlight the conflict potential of tightened screening protocols, attempts to profile travelers in advance of their actual journey, and new, invasive technologies such as body scanners.
Thus, why is security politics so locked in at the airport? First of all, airports have been the point of entry for the attacks of 9/11, and this very fact is regularly being recurred to by discourses of security. As such, airports have been rendered iconic for security. Second, airports are highly particular spaces of transit that lack many aspects of social cohesion that we can find in the ‘regular’ spaces that we inhabit on a regular, everyday basis. As Lyon (2003a:
13) dubs them, “airports are ‘placeless’ sites of temporary sojourn, air-lock chambers for nomadic executives or sun-seekers.” Such “non-places” (Augé, 2006) of transit, only temporarily passed through by strangers, are arguably more likely to foster an atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that must be, so the argument goes, countered by stricter security measures.
Which leads us to the third characteristic: airports feature ‘more’ security than most other spaces. More security in terms of surveillance and control technologies, more security in terms of capturing and storing data on individuals, and arguably stricter regimes of behavioral protocol. As Winner (2006: 281) argues, airports embody the “recognition that sociotechnical arrangements based on trust are also sources of insecurity [that] bought a widespread, highly costly refurbishing of many technological devices and systems.” In short: airports are highly regulated environments. This does not imply an overarching security agenda for global aviation, or even for one single airport. On the contrary, and in the vein of security as assemblage, Schouten (2014a: 25) highlights that “myriad spokespersons enter stage and open the black box or airport security, turning it into a controversy composed of many unpredictable elements.” However, notwithstanding such controversy which usually remains invisible to the occasional passenger, airports are epitomes of contemporary security regimes stacked with surveillance systems, technologies, police forces and private security guards, and as such have garnered a lot of attention from security studies.
Fourth, airports have been heavily marketized. Apart from being actual shopping-center like spaces of commerce themselves, airports are plain and simple an integral part of a global economy by providing the underlying infrastructure for worldwide trades and services, and as
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such must be carefully protected as part of the critical infrastructure that enables our way of life – or so the common argument goes. Moreover, the provision of security at airports has also been subjected to transformations. As Schouten (2014a: 29) points out, “security governance at airports and elsewhere is performed not primarily by state security forces, but rather by networks of security actors that cross-cut public/private, local/global and formal/informal dichotomies”, thus introducing a further commercial rationale into the complex assemblage of the airport. Finally, and connected to the empowerment of the global economy, aviation, like no other means of transport, is crucial to our modern lifestyle that at times appears to be dominated by unlimited mobility. Such a scope on mobility has more recently been picked up by numerous scholars who emphasize that “mobility is no longer outside authority and government. Mobility itself has become part of new forms of authority and government” (Bærenholdt, 2013: 27) and as such strikes at the core agenda of studying security.
The Austrian firm Kontraproduktion shirts (www.kontraproduktion.at) is one of those online shops that sell supposedly funny t-shirts that engage with life’s contradictions through mostly pop-cultural references. One of their products sticks out, however. In front of an airplane taking off, it shows a figure throwing a bottle into a trash can, with a slogan beneath it proclaiming:
“Throwing away my half-full bottle of water won’t make your world more secure” (“Das Wegwerfen meiner halbvollen Wasserflasche macht eure Welt nicht sicherer”). More sarcastic than humorous in its message, the shirt in fact pinpoints one of the major debates around airport security in recent years. The ban of liquids – with the exception of separately packaged containers that do not exceed 100ml – has been deemed as one of the most striking examples of highly symbolic security politics without any real world impact. Indeed, to some, it appears so absurd that it has now even found its way on to t-shirts.
The ‘stories from the airport’ that entitle this section have to be understood in a two-folded fashion. The brief anecdotes provided here are such stories that illuminate the friction that security at the airport creates every day around the globe. Just as well, however, the analytical pieces that constitute the next section (III.) are in some sense such ‘stories from the airport’.
They are empirical takes on how airport security comes into being, how it plays out, how it is contested and stabilized, how it is made and re-made. In fact, airport security emerges and re-emerges around the narratives of security that we have explored in section I., and a considerable amount of recent research has attempted to explore such issues. Be it the fact that airports must be conceived of as complex assemblages of security that undergo constant controversies, re-evaluations, negotiations and subsequently transformations (Lippert and O'Connor, 2003; Salter, 2008c; Schouten, 2014a). Be it the fact that airports have become a focal point of governing mobile populations through a multitude of modes of power and authority (Salter, 2007). Be it the fact that airport security desperately strives to render the future actionable in order to prevent the next event of terrorism through hi-jacking or bombing and thus has become the center of attention for scholars engaging anticipatory politics (Salter, 2008b; Adey, 2009). Be it the fact of complete surveillance of airport spaces in both physical and digital terms and the discipline and social sorting it enacts in the name of security (Bennett, 2005; Adey, 2004b; 2006; Adey et al., 2012; Klauser et al., 2008; Lyon, 2008).
Be it the dominant role of security technologies for purposes of identification, access management, and scrutiny at the airport (Lloyd, 2003; Cavoukian, 2009b; Jones, 2009; Tugas, 2013). Be it the multiple securitization processes that aviation has been subjected to (Salter, 2008f). Or be it the fact that airport security in many parts of the world has been liberalized,
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privatized, and out-contracted (Hainmüller and Lemnitzer, 2003; Seidenstat, 2004; O'Malley, 2006).
In summary, airports can be conceived of as emblematic for a liberal mode of governing that is preoccupied with the empowerment of global flows. Flows of people, goods, services, money, and data, that is. Those flows, however, must nonetheless be closely monitored and regulated for the sake of security. As Lyon (2006c: 218) argues, “post-9/11 antiterrorist tactics include these three areas: travel, focusing on security at airports and borders; financial systems, focusing on curtailing the flow of funds to ‘terrorists’; and communications, focusing on the interception of suspicious messages”, all of which are domains which thrive on the paradigm of circulation. Mobility, however, has arguably garnered most attention, since its modulations in terms of monitoring and profiling, and in terms of analyzing and scrutinizing can be directly felt by any traveler – having turned global connectivity into some kind of gauntlet run. After all, in order to be granted the smooth and uninterrupted journey that is promoted in aviation’s advertisements, one better not stand out from the crowd in some suspicious fashion – be it behavior, be it dangerous objects, or be it banal data characteristics such as past travel destinations, a cash-paid ticket, or the dietary choices for on-flight meals.
As Bærenholdt (2013: 20) argues, “mobility is often associated with flow and freedom;
nonetheless, it is also about power and government.” Such an arguably odd marriage between lightness and regulation, between freedom and power, between circulation and stops becomes in fact much clearer when we underpin empirical findings from airport assemblages with Foucault’s work on biopolitics.
Only one week after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now widely known as the ‘underpants bomber’, had unsuccessfully attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with explosives hidden in his underwear, a man at Stuttgart airport made an unwise joke about a bomb – in his underpants. And even though, as reported by
“Spiegel Online” on 5 January 2010, it later turned out that he was merely on his way to Egypt for vacation with his family and had no explosives or any other forbidden objects on him, he was detained by the Federal Police, subsequently missing his flight and facing a fine of up to 1.000 Euros.
We can in fact find liberal, yet highly regulative modes of governing airport security all around the world. While a great deal of research has almost naturally been concerned with changing regimes in the US, especially after 9/11, other parts of the world, mostly through regulations of international aviation organizations such as the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), have quickly attempted to harmonize their own modes of airport security. As Bærenholdt (2013: 27) points out, particularly “the European Union seeks to govern exactly through mobility in its endeavours to produce a frictionless space, overcoming missing links and promoting transnational activities in ways in which the networking and mobilities involved seem to become purposes themselves, if not, in fact the way power is mobilised in making European society and space [emph. in orig.].” Thus, mobility (and subsequently aviation) must not only be regarded as a technical means of movement, but also as constitutive of societies, of identities, and of spaces.
Especially the latter notion of mobility as the production of space has more recently garnered increased interest from geographers who have engaged the spatial dimension of airports and their architectures and affects (Adey, 2008a; 2010; Bissell et al., 2012).
Liberal government at the airport in fact presents itself in manifold ways that resemble liberal economy. As Salter (2013: 9) compellingly summarizes the empirical situation, “the
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contemporary mobility regime – with its various technologies of identification, examination, verification, and passage – functions in the same ways as the free market: a disaggregated system of controls for the movement of peoples does not guarantee any one outcome (and indeed guarantees mobility shortages just as the market guarantees shortages), but rather provides a structure in which certain outcomes are removed from the political realm and treated as either technical or economic questions.” The rationale behind such a market approach, as indicated above, can arguably be best retraced through a Foucauldian account of biopolitical regimes. As Dean (2006: 15) puts it, “certain ways of governing, which we will broadly define as liberal modes of government, are distinguished by trying to work through the freedom or capacities of the governed [emph. in orig.]”, and arguably the airport is very paradigm for such modes. Thus, how does airport security craft freedom against the backdrop of a seemingly restrictive agenda of control and inspection? The answer is rather simple: in liberal government as diagnosed by Foucault, freedom and security are not mutually exclusive concepts, but reinforce each other through population management. As he argues, “power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (Foucault, 1984b: 260). Through a statistically empowered analysis of the population itself does security come into being, then.
If we create knowledge about the population, so the political argument goes, then we can exercise power in such fashion that the ‘good’ and productive parts of the population can be granted freedom (and subsequently unlimited mobility) while the ‘bad’ and disruptive parts must and can be excluded from mobility such that they cannot unfold any harm. As Foucault (2007: 64) frames the issue, we must think of “circulation in the very broad sense of movement, exchange, and contact, as form of dispersion, and also as form of distribution, the problem being: How should things circulate or not circulate?” It is the close proximity to the economy that is emblematic for the ways in which airports operate, and that has in fact centered around the question of how to empower and regulate flows of passengers at the same time. In Foucault’s (2007: 65) terms, the task of government is then “no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out.”
In order to do just that, as has been outlined above, airports circle predominantly around the paradigms of surveillance and data gathering, such that from those digitalized streams knowledge can be created and eventually power can be exercised over flows of travelers. As Salter (2013: 10) points out, “practices of visas, preclearance, and electronic travel authorities/no fly lists, were in effect creating a globalized system for the surveillance of the mobile public”, notably for the twisted sake of both freedom and restriction at the same time, divided among population categories of riskiness and trustworthiness. Such categorizations have been rendered the focal point for a politics of/at the airport. As Salter (2013: 10) adds, in fact “the global air network is essentially a slingshot orbit; good passports are like wheels;
money is a near-universal lubricant, as well as social capital, race, language, etc.”, and major public disputes have arisen from such categories that define the borderlines of social sorting.
Protests against invasive levels of airport security screening have reached such heights that in the US, in November 2010, an online community called ‘We Won’t Fly’ (www.wewontfly.com) has formed that organizes nation-wide campaigns against the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its practices. Having originally emerged around doubts against body
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scanners that featured ‘naked images’ of the human body at the time of roll-out, the community now more generally seeks to “catapult the cause of TSA abolition and the importance of human dignity and human rights (especially the 4th amendment) into the minds of hundreds of millions of people worldwide once again.”
Arguably, the multiple techniques, technologies, discourses, and modes of governing that can be found empirically have rendered airports as such intriguing spaces for research. As Bærenholdt (2013: 22) claims, “the ways in which mobility is involved in the constant processes of redesigning and government of societies needs more attention”, as, as Salter (2013: 15) adds, “the management of circulation is not consistent across time, space, or networks”, and thus requires ongoing scholarly analyses. In fact, mobility politics must be understood as the all-encompassing attempt to digitally encode mobile populations in order to extract knowledge surplus from such data. As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008: 272) argue, such a biopolitical “grid of intelligibility is in short an accounting and valuing machine” that enables authorities to govern populations through risk, based on statistics. As has been shown throughout the narrative of security as future, the registers of risk themselves are manifold and transformative, and have historically centered around specific problems of governing.
With the scope on mobile populations, a biopolitical mode of security adds another quickly transforming element to the equation. As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008: 283-4) explain,
“biopolitical security discourses and techniques deal with an object that is continuously undergoing transformation and change through the manifold circuits of production and reproduction which comprise the very eventalness of its biological existence”: the (mobile) population.
Multiple constellations of mobilities render airport security flexible such that it can be quickly re-adjusted according to the definition of new threats and/or political programs, but they also render airport security ultimately complex and academically challenging. We have to take into account the multiple modes of conducting “data derived from the intensification and extension of increasingly novel forms of counting, accounting and surveillance” (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008: 277), as well as their future-related analytics that, depending on the modality of risk applied, may produce unstable and temporary social sorting through algorithmic techniques of data-mining, creating “mobile norms” (Amoore, 2011) for the adaptive regulation of mobility. A Foucauldian account of security highlights government as the management of de-territorialized, boundary-less and global flows of people and goods.
Security, conceived through this lens, produces freedom and openness, and empowers modern economic principles, while at the same time shutting down those elements of the population that by specific discourses are rendered ‘risky’ and thus unwanted. The analytic pieces to follow attempt to unpack, or at least shed some light on some of those mechanisms, while at the same time accounting for their impact across the social dimension.