Global Surveillance and Policing:
Borders, Security, Identity
Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter (eds)
Devon, United Kingdom: Willan Publishing, 2005
Zureik and Salter have collected articles from some of the leading surveillance scholars within a book that offers theoretical and empirical insights into the ‘new surveillance’. These papers are loosely organized around four themes: 1) the identification of global policing and surveillance systems as policy concerns; 2) the importance of borders to contemporary politics; 3) data flows across institutional, national and transnational boundaries, and; 4) processes of social control bound up in surveillance mechanisms (Zureik and Salter at p. 5).
Gary Marx’s piece on surveillance and borders offers little new; borrowing from Mary Douglas, Marx conceptualizes ‘the border’ as both a physical and social location that differentiates self from other. This idea is in turn picked up and expanded upon by Helene Pellerin’s analysis of borders as both political and economic spaces that encourage and/or restrict flows of capital. Pellerin’s analysis prefigures two of the strongest contributions in the collection: Mark Salter’s thought-provoking analysis of border crossings as social ‘rites of passage’, and John Donaldson’s informative and timely discussion of the uses of physical security measures to limit access to, and claims upon territory.
While many of the articles contained here add breadth and depth to a growing surveillance literature, the collection as a whole has some limitations. First, given that policing occupies a central position within the book’s title, one might reasonably expect to find this subject featured more prominently within the collection. However, this is not the case; three chapters of the fourteen included reference this subject. Of these, only Nancy Lewis’ ‘Expanding Surveillance’, which explores pressures on national police agencies to share data across borders, discusses policing in any detail. Even so, this chapter lacks a solid theoretical foundation for understanding Lewis’ use of ‘policing’ as a concept. As her own work suggests, policing in the global context is not an unitary entity or set of processes, but rather multiple often conflicting activities across public-private divides. This notion is picked up, if only in a modest way, by Aas who explores the co-opting of non-‘police’ agents into the performance of border control work. Again, aside from references to the ‘responsibilization thesis’ and ‘policing at a distance’, I found Aas’ discussion of policing to be under-theorized.
Second, many of the papers within this collection are distinctly lacking solid empirical foundations. Where empirical support is offered, frequently few details as to how data were collected or analyzed are provided. A notable example of this problem can be found in the chapter by Colin Bennett, who notes, quite rightly, the dearth of empirical work in the surveillance field, but skims over some rather salient details in relation to his own research. For example, with respect to travellers’ concerns about privacy of personal information provided to airlines, Bennett (ibid: 131) states that “from my brief interviews with representatives from these organizations, I became convinced that the protection of the personal information of travellers was something that each took very seriously.” Aside from Bennett’s assurances, how can the reader have similar confidence in the claims of airline Public Relations representatives, as we are provided no context for understanding what these interviews entailed, nor is any data cited?
Third, some of the essays in this collection, notably John Torpey’s examination of the ‘imperial embrace’, while very thoughtful, do not seem to fit with any of the identified themes of the book. The result, at times, is a sense of disconnect from the book’s stated aims.
Despite these limitations, Global Surveillance and Policing represents a timely and useful contribution to contemporary discussions of surveillance and (in)security.
LAURA HUEY
Concordia University |
