Vulnerable warriors: the atmospheric marketing of military and policing equipment before and after 9/11

Abstract

In this paper we analyse changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing products at security expos between 1995 and 2013. While the initial aim of the research was to evidence shifts in terrorist frames in the marketing of policing equipment before and after 9/11, our findings instead suggested that what we are seeing is the rise of marketing to police as 'vulnerable warriors', law enforcement officers in need of military weapons both for their offensive capabilities, as well as for the protection they can offer to a police force that is always under threat.

Prison Tech: Imagining the Prison as Lagging Behind and as a Test Bed for Technology Advancement

“…Hence, he has a specific expertise. We did not pursue follow-up interviews after attending the expos and trade shows, anticipating on the one hand difficulties that researchers have pointed out in earlier studies (Feigenbaum & Weissmann, 2016), but also doubting the added value. Instead, we extended the material of field notes from the participant observations and informal interviews with brochures and other advertising material collected at the events.…”

Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing

“…Indeed, as Peter Kraska (2007: 508) notes, such military-grade material is now deployed as a matter of routine in a wide range of US policing contexts in ways that were unheard of and would have been deemed unacceptable some three decades ago, for example in searches of private homes: ‘It is critical to recognize that these are not forced reaction situations necessitating use of force specialists; instead they are the result of police departments choosing to use an extreme and highly dangerous tactic, not for terrorists or hostage-takers, but for small-time drug possessors and dealers.’ As Kraska (2007: 506) also notes, the rise in use of such militarized policing tactics, units and equipment has been astonishing: in the early 1980s the yearly average of SWAT-team deployments or callouts stood at 3,000, whereas by 2007 this had risen to 45,000. As Anna Feigenbaum and Daniel Weissmann argue in their compelling study of the world’s largest international security trade fair, Milipol – the very name of which advertises the convergence of policing and the military – such widely attended expos ‘can be seen as a space in which the values of police militarisation manifest’ (Feigenbaum and Weissmann, 2016: 485), in particular the conflation between political dissent and insurgency, and such events also demonstrate that, for a security industry developing new technologies, ‘the police and the military are increasingly regarded as two slices of the same pie’ (Feigenbaum and Weissmann, 2016: 482).…”

“9/11 is alive and well” or how critical terrorism studies has sustained the 9/11 narrative

“…that specifically deals with the question of as a moment of temporal rupture five articles Aning Lynch Pokalova 2013,Clini 2015, and Fieganbaum andWeissman 2016) referred to is a moment of temporal rupture more than times, with Clini (2015) having the highest number of references at 26 in an article entitled )nternational Terrorism )ndian Popular Cinema and the Politics of Terror. Another 14 articles used this construction more than 10 times.…”