Volume 23, numéro 1, 2025 Open Issue

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This paper sketches some of the key dangers presented by the second Trump presidency. We are witnessing a mainstreaming of far-right positions with profound implications both for government and the constitution of society. This moment is marked by censorship and self-censorship of the media, surveillance and punishment of immigrant communities, attacks on higher education, throttled scientific research, a war on gender, the evisceration of government agencies, reduced checks on disinformation or hate speech, and threats to international security. The Trump model of governance builds on hate to breed instability and chaos. These are the dynamics we must confront and disarm.

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The burgeoning market for wearable technologies with surveillance capabilities is reorienting our relationship with our bodies, privacy, and digital data. This expanding sector has prompted an exploration into how the surveillance of the individual body has been normalized more broadly in the fashion sphere through its visual communications practice. To this end, a multimodal critical discourse analysis following an adapted framework examined a series of photographic editorials and identified two overarching trends that characterize the representation of surveillance in female-focused fashion consumption contexts. Firstly, by adopting a visual style that uses analog aesthetics and obsolescent technology, contemporary surveillance’s obtrusive and expansive reality is obscured and replaced with hauntological nostalgia. Secondly, by framing the act of self-surveillance via screen technologies as erotically charged and potentially empowering, the body’s surveillance is celebrated rather than scrutinized. With close reference to two specific case studies, I demonstrate how these visual treatments can be interpreted as downplaying concerns about privacy and assisting in accelerating the collapse between public and private spheres. I argue that the fashion media’s aesthetic softening of surveillance has culturally foreshadowed an expansion of surveillance capitalism manifesting in the current interest in, and demand for, fashionable wearables.

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Kidnapping as a crime of (im)mobility can be understood as a social act of mutuality and reciprocity, where the interaction between kidnappers and kidnappees shapes a broader system of connected activities of surveillance, intimacy, control, and consent. This article argues that during situations of long-term kidnapping, novel forms of social interaction emerge as a result of mutual surveillance practices between surveillance agents (kidnappers) and surveillance objects (kidnappees). It focuses on analysing how members of The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) (the kidnappers) and Colombian politicians, police, and army personnel (the kidnappees) conducted mutual practices and activities of surveillance during their lengthy cohabitation inside jungle kidnapping camps. It presents the results of thirty-three semi-structured interviews with victims of long-term kidnapping in Colombia and eleven structured interviews with FARC ex-combatants who were involved in kidnapping operations. The article demonstrates that the senses of mutuality, reciprocity, and intimacy were crucial to creating an unconventional surveillance regime inside jungle kidnapping camps in Colombia.

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In Tunisia, the 2016 national strategy against terrorism introduced the concept of preventive measures, which legitimized tighter state control over religious discourses and practices. To bring a local perspective to the study of international preventative measures, I build upon the concept of “vernacular security” to examine how Tunisian imams involved in preventing violent extremism (PVE) programs understand security, violent extremism, radicalization, and their role as non-traditional security actors. To achieve this, I observe how imams describe their own experiences of security, in their own words and through their own understandings. Through ethnographic interviews conducted with local imams between 2019 and 2020, this research focuses on the way in which they perceive, re-enact, and influence security practices, with a particular focus on the relationship between religion and security, a central subject in post-revolutionary Tunisia. In so doing, this paper argues that local imams involved in PVE programs reproduce local and global security discourses, while at the same challenging their role in community policing.

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Online audiences have become increasingly visible to each other. Recent work in Surveillance & Society has suggested that visible viewership in gaming constitutes “visibility labour” (Abidin 2016). Yet, little work has sketched the relationship between visible consumption, visibility labours, and social media’s surveillance economy. This article fills that gap by offering a preliminary structural outline of how visible consumers play a role in digital surveillance economies. I ask: What role does visible consumption play in digital surveillance economies on Instagram Live? What kinds of visibility labour are demanded of visible consumers, and with what effects? First, top-down surveillance of user interactions turns involuntarily visible consumers into social producers through metrified viewership and personal profiles. Second, lateral surveillance, such as moderator features and reporting tools, also turns voluntarily visible consumers into social producers by reproducing Instagram’s brand and deflecting from government oversight. In the context of Instagram Live, making users’ consumption habits socially public extends surveillance culture and neoliberal trends on social media, whereby market forces are extended into further reaches of social life.

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Over the past decade, new technologies have been increasingly deployed in a manner that allows designers to remotely collect usage data, facilitating the development and rollout of updates and adjustments after their release. By retaining control over product stabilization, designers can discourage technologies from being used in manners other than that which they prescribe, thereby reducing interpretive flexibility. As a result, end users are increasingly shepherded towards use-patterns that reflect the interests of designers. This paper explores this agential shift using three case studies. The first considers the evolution of a video game series, exploring how expanding data-collection practices in subsequent releases changed design processes and user experiences. The second case examines the evolution of social media design and the rise of algorithmic nudging. The third case broadly analyzes humanitarian design, demonstrating how dataveillance has expanded beyond consumer electronics. By maintaining control over use-patterns, designers can reduce uncertainty and increase profitability. However, these subtle power shifts also have consequences for user agency and interpretive flexibility, reanimating debates about technological determinism.

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This article addresses the puzzle of scatological humour among privacy advocates. Drawing on ethnographic work in Britain in 2014 and in Germany between 2019–2023, it advances a consideration of the phenomenon as a form of “boundary play” (Nippert-Eng 2005). Deploying the transgressive exposure of behaviours of a human body, as expressive of transgressions across a social body, scatological references use satire to make statements around contemporary digital surveillance. Splicing this to a noteworthy absence of anthropological scholarship on the concept of privacy, the article positions privacy as an extrinsic concept, alive at the boundary, that struggles to travel across cultural contexts. While continuing to support the local extrinsic work that privacy performs, it suggests the need to construct stronger architectures of value around other phenomena synonymous with not being readable.

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Authoritarian surveillance is no longer an exceptional or rare practice. In many parts of the world, we are witnessing an increase of pervasive government monitoring, of curtailing privacy protections, of stringent control of information flows, and of intimidation towards self-censorship. These hallmarks of authoritarian surveillance are not confined to authoritarian or undemocratic regimes. In a political landscape that favours strongarm authoritarian leaders, the boundaries between authoritarian and democratic regimes, the liberal and the illiberal ones, are blurrier than ever. The increasing availability of advanced technologies for analyzing (big) data, particularly when integrated with artificial intelligence (AI), has heightened the temptation for governments to adopt authoritarian surveillance tools and practices—and has amplified the potential dangers involved.

This Dialogue section introduces the multiple dimensions of contemporary authoritarian surveillance, going beyond a dichotomy between “democratic” and “authoritarian” regimes to identify and map authoritarian surveillance in diverse geographical and political contexts. We focus on surveillance beyond the exceptional and beyond the rule of law to examine an increasingly mundane but dangerous practice undermining the limited democratic spaces that remain in our world. The seven articles in this special Dialogue section explore different angles of authoritarian surveillance— the technologies that facilitate it, the laws that govern it, and the legacies that precede it or linger thereafter—and the social and political consequences that emerge as a result. Together, this collection revisits existing literature on authoritarian surveillance, calls for a renewed scholarly focus on its consequences, and proposes new directions for future research.

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This paper extends the “authoritarian surveillance as a practice” (Topak, Mekouar, and Cavatorta 2022) perspective by focusing on the major trends that shape authoritarian surveillance in three different contexts. It draws on authoritarian surveillance practices implemented by Turkey, Israel (in Palestine), and the European Union (EU) (at Africa-Europe borderzones) and observes that, despite different contexts and regime types, authoritarian surveillance is driven by structural racism and transnational associations. In Turkey, racialized Kurdish populations and pro-Kurdish dissident groups have been the major recipients of authoritarian surveillance practices, even though mass authoritarian surveillance has impacted large segments of the society. The Gülen community, which is a Turkey-origin transnational movement, played a major role in the intensification of authoritarian surveillance, while the EU provided indirect support because of its reliance on Turkey for stopping migrants trying to reach Europe. The EU implements authoritarian surveillance not only through responsibilizing external actors (such as in Turkey and Libya) for border policing but also through the deployment of its own border surveillance technologies. The EU drones, provided by Israeli companies, surveil and facilitate the return of black African migrants to Libya where they are subjected to crimes against humanity. The long history of European colonialism in Africa shapes the current racist use of EU drones as an authoritarian surveillance practice, which is implemented through the EU’s transnational associations involving Libyan militia groups and Israeli drone companies. In Palestine, the legacies of Israel’s settler-colonial racism against Palestinians have culminated in the current genocidal surveillance by Israel. Israel has been committing genocide within a network of transnational associations and is also one of the major exporters of authoritarian surveillance technology, ranging from spyware to drones. Through examination of these contexts, the paper argues that authoritarian surveillance is practiced by both liberal and authoritarian regimes, is driven by structural racism and is implemented through the involvement of various transnational actors.

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Under the guise of decolonizing and modernizing laws, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government has sought amendments in laws governing every aspect of digital communication in India, such as cellular mobile, instant messaging, news, and entertainment. The government has dramatically expanded its power to control and regulate different forms of digital communications, exerting significant influence over what people watch, read, hear, and think. This extensive authority enables the government to monitor, surveil, censor, and shape public mood and opinion, thus placing communications under siege. In today’s world, communication technologies are deeply embedded in our daily lives as we transmit, share, and broadcast information. In India, the enduring legacy of colonial surveillance powers continues to shape and influence the surveillance over digital communications. This Dialogue paper argues that authoritarian surveillance in India is not merely a direct manifestation of the colonial legacy of British rule, but rather a fusion of enduring authoritarian features rooted in the colonial past, and the prevailing authoritarian intentions and practices of the post-colonial present.

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Practices of authoritarian surveillance are not limited to so-called authoritarian states. Authoritarian surveillance has been increasingly witnessed in countries that uphold liberal democratic principles and institutions in the twenty-first century, along with accelerated automation of mass surveillance. This article situates authoritarian surveillance as a problem in the heart of democracy and capitalism in its materiality and imperial expansion and discusses how mass surveillance has redrawn boundaries of democratic principles. What Edward Snowden has revealed since 2013 is a good reminder of the materiality of the global surveillance networks built under the “War on Terror” that we still live in. They are embedded within digital communication infrastructures by the security agencies in the United States, the self-defined champion of liberal democracy. Nonetheless, a decade after the Snowden revelations, the authoritarian surveillance within democracy has been whitewashed in technological competitions with the Global South, such as China and India, and in tech-savvy culture in the Global North. What is the driving force of this oblivion? In a contrast with the COVID-19 pandemic surveillance, I highlight the exceptional position given to the security intelligence and policing agencies within liberal democratic institutions to generate authoritarian surveillance continuously from the imperial to postcolonial times. It is critically important to deconstruct the binary discourse of democratic states versus authoritarian states because this view tends to only problematize surveillance activities by countries located outside the “West” and sees authoritarian surveillance practiced by self-defined democratic states as harmless or even necessary to counter perceived authoritarian states. It further fuels global dissemination of surveillance technologies, just like the nuclear arms races, and produces more victims of authoritarian surveillance on earth, without borders.

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To comprehend contemporary surveillance in Brazil, especially under Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022), it is crucial to revisit the country’s most authoritarian period, the military dictatorship (1964–1985). During this period, the National Information Service (SNI) was established as a state intelligence agency and played a pivotal role in monitoring and suppressing dissent, setting the stage for future surveillance practices in Brazil. The military dictatorship ended in 1985, with the SNI being dissolved in 1990. In 1999, the remnants of SNI were restructured into the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), which remains operational today. Under Bolsonaro’s government, ABIN employed advanced surveillance technologies to monitor opponents of the far-right president. Some of these surveillance practices have been deemed abusive and are currently under investigation by the Federal Police during Lula’s administration (2023–2026). This contribution introduces the concept of recursive surveillance, suggesting that state surveillance mechanisms not only reinvent themselves but also do so in ways that create the framework for their examination and eventual exposure. Surveillance structures, particularly those created in authoritarian regimes, leave traces that may reveal the practices and ideologies of the watchers, allowing for their eventual scrutiny.

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Do both authoritarian and liberal-democratic regimes rely on similar forms of police governmentality and state terror to sustain public order and security? Are police forces inherently authoritarian institutions that cannot be reformed? Our aim is to explore these questions by analysing the case of Spain, a constitutional democracy considered free by liberal standards, yet where, in the short period between 2011 and 2024, the two main policing bodies in Spain—the National Police and the Guardia Civil—were involved in the legal and illegal surveillance and espionage of almost one-hundred parliamentarians from left-wing, Basque, and Catalan organisations, the questionable infiltration of “radical” and “anti-fascist” social movements, and operations to cover up widespread royal, political, and corporate corruption.

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In this short piece, we suggest some directions for considering the interrelated questions of postcolonial authoritarianism, platform capitalism, and surveillance. We first put forward a three-level model of contemporary digital authoritarianism, which argues for a prism of discourses, practices, and infrastructures, before we turn specifically to the political economy of contemporary capitalism. Here, we shift the focus away from only either state and/or the individual and the conventional entities in between, to consider the new platform actors driving authoritarianism and digital surveillance in the twenty-first century.