Surveillance and Social Control in the Middle East: From Cold War to the Digital Age
Panel VII-09, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, December 2 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
Surveillance and Social Control in the Middle East: From Cold War to the Digital Age
We have been witnessing an unprecedented and accelerated deployment of new technologies of surveillance in the Middle East within the last decade The COVID-19 has not only incentivized surveillance, but also paved the way for and legitimized the use of emerging and experimental digital surveillance and control tools, which by and large target the most vulnerable populations, including women, LGBTQI communities, immigrants, refugees, and minorities. This panel tackles emerging and experimental forms of surveillance and social control in the contemporary Middle East and traces their historical antecedents. Drawing on four case studies from contemporary Turkey and Cold-War era Iraq and Syria that address various surveillance technologies and practices —such as undercover policing and informant activities, spyware and malware, facial recognition systems, aerial drones, and big data technologies—, we would like to explore a) the ways in which technologies of surveillance travel across time and space, b) the continuities and ruptures in the technologies and infrastructures of surveillance, c) the legacies of colonial (and racialized) forms of governance and of the Cold War security technologies in the making of contemporary "surveillant assemblages" (Haggerty 2000) d) the role of the pandemic in the development and deployment of new surveillance technologies and e) spaces of and for dissent in authoritarian surveillance states.
The increased availability of digital technology to ordinary citizens has increasingly transformed non-state actors into significant components of the "authoritarian surveillant assemblage" (Topak 2019). Surveillance apps and devices that are deployed by domestic partners or other family members and employers, have recently become critical tools of social control, oppression, gendered and racist violence, and exploitation. In analyzing the relationship between new techniques of surveillance and their historical antecedents, we are also interested in exploring additional or new roles that non-state actors play in the making of authoritarian surveillant practices.
Drawing on a case study from Turkey, this paper examines the hypervisibility of police surveillance and its affective power over the target populations’ political subjectivities. Turkish National Police introduced a system of community-oriented policing in 2006. Targeting the development of a public-police partnership, such policing practices paved the way for ever-increasing surveillance of Turkey’s ethno-racialized communities and the collusion between state and non-state actors. In today’s Turkey, to induce fear into the people or populations targeted, the undercover police officers do not always hide their identities. Elaborating on undercover policing as spectacle, the presentation addresses the affective force of the “spectacle of policing” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). More specifically it shows, how the spectacle of undercover policing triggers a desire to reject and defy the psychic power of the police over the self. Studies on surveillance and policing practices have shown that the threat posed by the undercover police creates fear among the people who are targeted. By taking a different path than such studies, the presentation suggests that the threat posed by police surveillance does not necessarily or exclusively produce docility, inaction, or a desire to withdraw from public visibility and become inactive. Through an exploration of the uncharted dimensions of responses that are conditioned by such surveillance, the paper illustrates that the panoptic gaze of the undercover police can be experienced as an assault on subjects’ agency and free will and urges a desire to manifest agency and express rage by being visible in the streets as acting, speaking and refusing subjects.
This paper analyses the Iraqi intelligence agencies activities in Europe against dissidents during the Cold War. The historical analysis allows me to frame Iraq’s methods of repression in the Mukhabarat’s surveillance infrastructure.
I argue that the Iraqi intelligence agencies used information gathering and violence as methods of social control. The use of repressive methods did not only take place in Iraq, but also in European countries. In this context, I speak of a transnationalization of raison d’état. I follow the concepts of Schmitt (1922), Meinecke (1924), Foucault (1978), Agamben (2005), Bigo (2019) and argue that Iraqi intelligence agencies used the exceptional remit of raison d’état to foster stability in Iraq.
During the Cold War, Iraqi intelligence agencies enjoyed unlimited power in the repression of dissidents. This paper analyses the Iraqi surveillance activities in Europe and gives two arguments.
First, I argue that information gathering on dissidents in Europe became a top priority for the Iraqi intelligence agencies. Here, I elaborate the activities of the Mukhabarat in Berlin as the centre of refuge for Iraqi dissidents and Hungary, a study hot spot for Iraqi communists during the Cold War.
Second, I demonstrate that the Iraqi intelligence agencies made use of violence to enhance social control. I analyse the assassination of the former Iraqi prime minister Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif 1978 in London and the bomb attempt on the Kurdish Student Congress 1980 in Berlin.
Research for this paper was conducted in the following archives: Hiẓb al-Ba'th al-'Arabī al-Ishtirākī Records (Ba'ath Party Records), Politisches Archiv, Bundesarchiv, BND-Archiv.
Keywords: Raison d’état, Iraq, Intelligence Agencies, Mukhabarat, Cold War, Iraqi communists, Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif, Kurdish Student Congress 1980
In the digital era, increasingly expanded security demands and practices have engendered new techno-biological control and surveillance techniques that track ordinary citizens' lives the world over. Turkey is one of the countries leading the pack by using multiple control methods to repress its citizens and intrude into people's lives' most intimate realms.
To identify and characterize Turkey's new surveillance and security strategies and assess their impact on both society and the regime, I focus on an analysis of the history of those who have had their job appointment or promotion withdrawn due to the refusal of their security vetting and archival background following the 2016 coup attempt. Having failed their compulsory security check, these people call themselves and are known in current Turkish public discourse as 'security vetting victims' (güvenlik soruşturması mağdurları). Many have lost their jobs or had their job appointment or promotions withdrawn, been permanently blacklisted on the basis of the unsubstantiated accusation of being 'connected with terrorism' (terörle iltisaklı olanlar) and then branded as 'objectionable' (sakıncalı) and therefore suspect. I pose two main questions: how do the new control practices in Turkey differ from their older authoritarian police security forms and do new methods point to a categorically different control system? I argue that the thoroughgoing changes to Turkey's security strategies and the use of new technologies indicate not a mere intensification of the use of surveillance methods as forms of extra-legal punishment but rather the transformation of the governing techniques of securitization from that of state of emergency rule towards authoritarian biosecurity rule.
Keywords
Security vetting, archival background, authoritarianism, biopolitics, biosecurity state, Turkey, lateral surveillance
The Syrian surveillance architecture & the Stasi
– Do intelligence agencies learn practices of social control from each other?
This paper examines the Syrian architecture of surveillance and social control, focusing on the surveillance practices of the intelligence agencies (“Mukhabarat”) during the period of the Cold War. I understand intelligence agencies as Bourdieusian fields that interact with each other and I approach the issues of surveillance, social control, and security from an International Political Sociology perspective situated within the broader theoretical frame of my PhD research, emphasizing everyday practices and social relationships.
Syrian surveillance practices include, among others, 1) the recruitment and deployment of informal informants from local communities to gather information on individuals and the society as a whole, 2) monitoring and violent repression of dissident groups (most prominently, the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1970s and 80s leading to the 1982 Hama massacre) and 3) the acquisition of surveillance technologies from abroad.
The paper compares the Syrian surveillance practices with similar practices found in the East German intelligence agencies’ (“Stasi”) repertoire of social control and explores the question of whether some striking similarities can be traced back to knowledge exchanges between the Syrian and East German intelligence agencies. Was knowledge learned and transmitted from one agency to the other (directly or indirectly), and if so, how?
The empirical analysis of this paper draws on both secondary and primary sources (political memoirs and archival documents from BStU Archive, Bundesarchiv, CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room).
Keywords: Mukhabarat/ Syria, surveillance, Stasi/ East Germany, Cold War, Muslim Brotherhood, learning
