This paper examines the corporate production of the “contact zone” by Israeli arms companies as a way of legitimizing and marketing state violence to a global audience. Focusing specifically on crowd control simulations staged at international defense expositions including the Parisian Eurosatory in 2016 and the biennial Israel Defense Exhibition (ISDEF) in 2015, I demonstrate how Israeli arms companies fantasize a specific “contact zone” described by Mary Louise Pratt as “the space of colonial encounters,” in which a relationship between colonizer and colonized is established usually through conditions of coercion, radical inequality and mechanisms of exclusion.  Departing from the contact zone described by Michael Taussig as a space in which magical realism sustained ritualistic torture of the colonized at the hands of the colonizer, I demonstrate how the Israeli arms industry, and by extension, the state itself, puts forth a fantasy of a contact zone based on liberal rationalism, and above all, technofetishism. Through simulation, Israeli companies theatrically produce scenes in which high-tech “civilization” conquers and defeats low-tech “barbarism,” reflecting a fantasy of technological superiority, objectivity and control. The simulation is a “speech-act” in which the state absorbs violent actions into narratives of global “securitization,” effectively obscuring Palestinian nationalist narratives while gaining the complicit tolerance of a corporate audience invested in the perpetuation of a globalized “war on terror.” Further, while Taussig conceives of a “colonial mirror” where the colonizer mimics the savagery imputed to the savage through myth, rumor, and fantasy, crowd control simulations create a savagery devoid of identity or narrative. Rather, the simulation of an imagined savagery allows Israel to gaze into a different imperial mirror, one in which they are aligned with global, neoliberal superpowers. I conclude with a consideration of how the simulation’s “speech-act” is interrupted in telling ways. I draw primarily on Rania Jawad’s ethnographic work documenting the weekly protests by residents of the Palestinian village of Bil’in in their struggle against Israeli confiscation of their land. In these contexts, soldiers are unable to follow the clean scripts of crowd control simulation and are instead forced to enact and engage with the theatrics of Palestinian protestors. I demonstrate the ways in which Israeli fantasies of control thus fail to map onto the contact zone, creating a remainder that exceeds the neat objectified representation of risk and value that simulation creates. 

This paper considers how representations of violence in accounts authored by Egyptian policemen in recent decades speak to the construction of a particular understanding of “police masculinity” which, I argue, stands at the heart of contemporary Egyptian security discourse. While there is a growing literature that seeks to historicise constructions of masculinity in the Egyptian context (e.g. Jacob 2011; Ghannam 2013) and while there is also an emerging literature on the history of “police masculinities” in European and North American contexts (e.g. Barrie and Broomhall 2012), there have until now been few attempts to make connections between these bodies of work. Paul Ammar’s insightful research on gender, sexuality and security in Egypt is a valuable point of reference but the broad way in which he conceptualises “security” has tended to displace the police institution as a central concern. In seeking to make connections between these disparate literatures, and in taking violence as the theme for doing so, I take my cue from Michael Taussig’s contention that cultural representations of violence – in forms ranging from storytelling, gossip and rumour to ostensibly “factual” reports – play a central role in constructing social identity and relations between perpetrators and victims. I engage with representations of violence in a variety of police-authored texts, including memoirs, semi-autobiographical novels, and articles published in Egyptian police journals. This source material includes an array of accounts authored by Egyptian policemen of violence exercised by Islamist militants upon the police, violence exercised by the police themselves upon Egyptian citizens, and violence that police officers mete out to their subordinates. I argue that the continuities in narrative strategies, tropes and symbols that span this wide range of genres illuminate the ways in which violence has been a locus for the construction of an understanding of the police as masculine guardians of society from a variety of “deviants” whose danger is located partly in the threat that they post to hegemonic gender norms. At the same time, I suggest, police-authored accounts of intra-police violence serve to illuminate the extent to which the gender norms at stake are themselves ambivalent and perpetually open to question.

In the early 20th century, a new genre, soon to be ubiquitous, emerged in the Ottoman literary journals: crime fiction. Particularly popular, and patronised by Sultan Abdulhamid II himself, were translated Sherlock Holmes novels. This paper performs a close reading of several of these translations, comparing texts produced for public consumption with those designed for the eyes of the Sultan only. Attending to the translation strategies employed for the two rather different audiences, I read these understudied texts in the light of the legal and policing reforms that characterized the latter period of the Ottoman Empire, asking how works of fiction such as these contributed to new conceptions of the nature and location of state power. Specifically, I use Taussig’s work on the potential of narrative to blur the boundaries between reality and illusion and so contribute to a ‘culture of terror’ to speculate about the changes made in these texts’ translations. In England, the boundary between the Holmes narratives and the ‘real’ they purportedly represented was famously blurred: Holmes’s fictional death was publicly mourned, while Conan Doyle wrote academic essays on forensic method and was sought as a criminal investigator. The novels, further, are animated by two poles of fear - on the one hand, the omnipresent, often racialized ‘criminals’, and on the other the omniscient and surveilling power represented by Holmes himself – that speak to the changing nature of governance in Britain in the period. How then are these texts made legible in the context of a different ‘real’? How do they function in the Ottoman Empire at a time when British colonialism was encroaching on its borders? What ‘fears’ are neutralized in translation, and what new anxieties emerge? Drawing out the tensions between ‘foreignizing’ and ‘domesticating’ strategies in the translated texts, I argue that the simultaneous threat and allure of Sherlock Holmes, as a personification of all-seeing (British) power, is rendered in translation in unexpected ways. In some texts the transformation of representations of class, race, and justice may serve to confuse or even undo the logic of the original narrative, with potentially anarchic results; yet other texts become fraught with additional fears, such as that of encroaching colonial power. Bringing Taussig’s theories to bear on questions of translation and dislocation, this paper investigates the ways in which imperial narratives, travelling far beyond their native readership, may participate in new and related cultures of fear.

Analyses of the Arab Spring have highlighted, if barely interrogating, the deeply rooted culture of police brutality and confinement that undergirds Egypt’s modern history. Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak’s prisons overflowed with opponents from across the political spectrum, with a further 100,000 political prisoners detained since January 2011. This paper seeks to motivate and explain the Egyptian state’s extensive use of the mu’taqal as a tool of political repression. The term al-mu’taqal, similar to the Russian gulag, here refers both to a diverse array of experiences ranging from imprisonment to detention, penal labour and torture as well as to a single complex interaction of all those parts, or a carceral assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari). The paper begins in considering what delineates political imprisonment or camp internment (A. Neier and H. Arendt) from Foucault’s vision of the modern disciplinary prison. That is how do we understand sanguinary and indeed public spectacles of repression, hitherto attributed to absolutist exertions of sovereign power, when they are exercised alongside, or even within, repertoires of biopolitical power and citizenship? Against Talal Asad’s relegation of such practices to the workings of either a) illiberal and unmodern states or b) modern democratic states acting in secret or against non-citizens, I follow Darius Rejali’s study of imprisonment in Iran in questioning whether a negative relationship between torture and ‘modernity’ really holds once post-colonial state practices and prisoner experiences are accounted for. A vast extant canon of prison poetics, or adab sujun, from Egypt and the region reveals first-hand experience of painful, degrading, illegal and often culturally repugnant violence within the mu’taqal to be both routine and publicly recognised. From here, I sketch the contours of a cultural economy of the mu’taqal in Egypt along three primary axes: bureaucracratic inertia, permanent exception and what I will refer to as ‘spectral spectacles’ of penality. It is argued that the mu’taqal/a (political prisoner) as an historical subject is co-constituted along with the mu’taqal (political prison) at the confluence of these three sites. Specifically, the Mu’taqal/a is revealed to be constantly engaged in a triple process of resisting/re-telling state narratives of their imprisonment: contesting jailers’ claims to a constructive and rehabilitative prison experience; refuting legal and social prescriptions of their criminality or dishonour; and negotiating global and local cultural distributions of what constitutes ‘sensible’ state repression or ‘violent’ political activity.