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Vigilant Eyes: Exploring the Role of Voluntary Citizen Surveillance in Controlwork

Kerrin-Sina Arfsten (Germany/United States)

Ph.D. Project

This PhD project investigates and analyzes contemporary forms of voluntary citizen surveillance and their role in controlwork – a term that Hille Koskela uses to refer to the practices undertaken by a range of agents to maintain social control, both for their own purposes and to further official control agendas. In recent years, the creation and mobilization of a well-informed, proactive, and vigilant public has become not only a hallmark of the exceptional politics of the U.S.-led War on Terror, but also of everyday practices of crime and social control. Authorities have increasingly encouraged the public to act as the “eyes and ears of law enforcement” and to participate in various forms of surveillance and reporting of any unusual or suspicious objects, people or circumstances. Examples include the popular “If you see something, say something” campaign that was launched in New York City in 2002, the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program and the London Metropolitan Police’s recent public call to identify and report rioters. Many of these campaigns to recruit citizens as vigilant eyes in controlwork are geared towards the anticipation of events, deploying a kind of precautionary principle that governs through the suspicion of a possible future threat. Here, the assumption is that the probable future actions of a potential offender are somehow already visible in the traces of everyday life and that these traces can be identified and rendered intelligible through the eyes of not only trained police officers but ordinary citizens. The “responsible” citizen is asked to monitor for suspicion throughout his or her routine, everyday activity, to recognize abnormality and, acting as a petty sovereign, to make security decisions. Some of these initiatives, however, are also run by private citizen-observers themselves who create their own websites in order to report and publish images of actual or imputed transgressions. As a result it is becoming increasingly difficult to delineate between the authorities and the public, the controllers and the controlled, the watchers and the watched. In fact, the participatory injunction extends monitoring techniques to such an extent that some researchers already speak of a “rising culture of informing” (Doyle 2006) or the cultivation of “citizen spies” (Andrejevic 2005). Yet, thus far, these forms of citizen surveillance have received little scholarly attention and existing surveillance theory seems inadequate to capture them conceptually. One objective of the project is therefore to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding these particular phenomena. To this end, it explores the relationship between the authorities and the public in these arrangements and analyzes underlying governmental rationalities. It examines the specific embodiment of the citizen that the discourses of responsibilization and vigilance produce and how the figure of the prudent citizen is delineated from the marginalized, irresponsible Other. Further, the proposed research examines the specific forms that public participation takes, as well as the motivation of those who engage in these vigilant practices. In what way and by whom is involvement in these vigilant activities legitimized? What are the justifications put forward by the citizen-observers for why they are engaging in these forms of voluntary private surveillance? What imaginations of justice, punishment, morality, order and citizenship can be found in their discourses? And how do these imaginations differ from the imaginations and expectations of the official criminal justice system? Which emotions are relevant when it comes to these types of voluntary citizen surveillance: Anxiety? Revenge? Voyeuristic pleasure? Boredom? Finally, the project also considers the impact that these participatory schemes have on the communities and target populations, as well as possibilities for subverting them.

Research Interests and Goals

  • Governing security and risk/privatization of security
  • Security practices of the border
  • Vigilantism
  • The relationships between state, law and violence
  • The relationships between emotion, power and resistance/dissent
  • The role of images in modern spectacles of crime and punishment

Professional memberships

  • American Society of Criminology
  • Gesellschaft für interdisziplinäre wissenschaftliche Kriminologie (GiwK)
  • Kriminologische Initiative Hamburg e.V.

Publications

(selection)
  • Arfsten, Kerrin-Sina: Aspekte des Grenzvigilantismus (working title). In: ForumRecht, forthcoming 2011.
  • Arfsten, Kerrin-Sina: The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps: Border Vigilantism, Immigration Control and Security on the U.S. - Mexican Border. Hamburger Studien zur Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik Bd. 48. Berlin, LIT Verlag, 2010.

Lectures

  • 24.10.2011

    Helden oder Verbrecher? Erscheinungsformen, Entstehung und Effekte von Vigilantismus
    Presentation at the Kriminologische Initiative Hamburg e.V.

    Location: Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

  • 23.07.2011

    Responsibilized Ways of Seeing: The Texas Virtual Community Watch and the Rise of Citizen Surveillance at the US-Mexico Border
    Presentation at the 2nd Meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism

    Location: Universität Kassel, Kassel, Germany

  • 17.09.2010

    Public Problems – Private Solutions? Border Control and Vigilantism at the US-Mexico Border
    Presentation at the Dritte Tagung Rechtsforschung als disziplinenübergreifende Herausforderung

    Location: Evangelische Hochschule Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  • 10.09.2010

    Vigilantism and the Making of „Illegal Bodies“at the US-Mexico Border
    Presentation at the 10th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology

    Location: Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium

  • 19.05.2010

    “Illegale Einwanderer”: Feindbild an der US-Mexikanischen Grenze
    Presentation in the lecture series Menschen ohne Papiere. Hamburger Beiträge zur Erforschung irregulärer Migration

    Location: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, Hamburg, Germany

  • 24.04.2009

    The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps: Border Vigilantism, Immigration Control and Security on the US-Mexican Border
    Presentation at the Common Study Session in Critical Criminology

    Location: Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

  • 18.03.2008

    Tracking the Rise of Border Vigilantism on the US-Mexican Border
    Presentation at the Common Study Session in Critical Criminology

    Location: Middlesex University, London, UK, 18.03.2008

Curriculum vitae

Since June 2011 PhD Candidate at the International Max Planck Research School on Retaliation, Mediation and Punishment at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg i.Br., Germany
2010 – 2011 Research assistant and lecturer at the Institute for Criminological Research, Department of Social Sciences, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany
2009 – 2010 Trainee at the Council of the European Union, DG H Justice and Home Affairs – External Relations, Brussels, Belgium
2008 – 2009 Research assistant at the Institute for Criminological Research, Department of Social Sciences, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany
2006 – 2008 Master of Arts in International Criminology (M.A.), Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, Germany; area of specialization: International Criminal Justice and Security Policy
2005 – 2006 Intern/Paralegal M&A Corporate at an international law firm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
2003 – 2004 Paralegal training, New York, NY, USA; area of specialization: corporate practice, mergers & acquisitions (M&A)
1998 – 2002 Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and French (B.A.), Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA