So, what still remains largely unquestioned? Many of us will now be familiar with the G4S security debacle that led its director, Nick Buckles, to apologize for the “humiliating shambles.” But who are G4S? And, more importantly still, what are the political implications of this shift toward private security? The company is the world’s largest private security provider with marquee statistics: some 657,000 employees and a “unique global footprint” that covers 125 countries. It provides a range of global security details, including safe passage for the global financial elite and for high-end leisure tourism, airport and embassy security, and managing asylum centers, prisons, and other detention facilities.
While politicians have taken G4S to task over its contractual failures, any critique of private security provision is absent from the debate. It is left to us to raise the questions of public accountability and political legitimacy. Private contractors invariably work for the private interest. They service particular constituencies. They are allegiant to the flag of currency exchange and profit making. While such organizations claim to be professional and socially responsible, it is a mistake to see them as apolitical. Embodying the (neo)liberal pursuit of power and its will to planetary rule, they represent a profound change in liberal security governance — the political sphere and the very nature of sovereignty itself are replaced by a technocratic ensemble of private/public, military/policing, local/global contractors. As G4S’s social responsibility statement proclaims: “Our size and scale mean we touch the lives of millions of people across the globe and we have a duty and desire to ensure the influence we have makes a positive impact on the people and communities in which we work.”
The distinction between private security contractors and the military has become a false dichotomy (the lines between the private and the public long since abandoned), but the British soldier has nevertheless returned as the reliable face of civic protection. The British soldier embodies the freedom that society is said to enjoy, freedom that is understood as a result of soldiers’ sacrifice and commitment: making the streets safe from Kabul to Islington so we are left in no doubt that our protection cannot be otherwise.
But what does it mean politically to have trained killers on the capital’s streets? Should this have happened in North Korea or Iran, politicians would have undoubtedly lambasted the despotic state of military affairs. We, however, reason it to be an efficient use of resources to maintain the democratic peace. In the process, we fail to question what it means to live in a time when the distinctions between war and peace, global and local, private and public, soldier and citizen, once again blur.
We are invariably left to ponder here the perceived source of threat. One hundred thousand soldiers on the streets of Manhattan would not have prevented 9/11. The horrifying violence of that day illustrated the futility of conventional force. And yet, conventional force is the only illusion of power that liberal societies can hope to maintain now that the ability to wage war has become one of its most profitable and dependable exports. On the social aside, the psychological brinkmanship of full militarization, the brazen show of potential force, echoes Susan Sontag’s famous paraphrase “shocking and awful.” Whether the intended audience for such a performance is external or internal, it is clear that militaristic posturing — as both a symptom and defense of the emerging carceral state — demands a more serious discussion than is currently being entertained.
It is well documented that President George W. Bush tried to instill a military spirit into the civilian bodies of American citizens. As he once famously declared, “Every American is a soldier and every citizen is in this fight.” While some may explain this in terms of the logic of “exceptional times,” it does not account for the more normalized practices of militarism we witness in our liberal societies today. George Chesterton observed some time before the Olympics buildup: “The only place you could be sure of seeing a British soldier used to be outside a pub in a garrison town at chucking-out time. Now there are soldiers on talent shows, parading in sports stadiums and singing on daytime television.” Soldiers are rewarded with on-television spots and garrison towns with royal patronage. We are left with the militarization of the public realm that we witness on the streets of London today: “We have turned the reality of war into an emotionally nourishing theater ... [that] serves an ideological and financial function.”
Some will invariably counter here that the militarization of the public realm simply reflects the dangerous world in which we now live. After all, none of us would wish to be blown up by a suicide bomber. Where is the freedom in that?
While the high-profile nature and location of the Games undoubtedly makes it a target, what is required is a more somber and considered response. It was common after 9/11 and 7/7 to question why these people hated us. Many politicians and embedded academics insisted that we were endangered simply because of who we were and have been — the simple laws of physics tell us that we need to account for our actions and our histories of violence. Only then can we deal with the problem at the level of power and, hence, political contestation.
Michel Foucault put forward the idea of the biopolitical in order to critically assess the racial-, gender- and class-based dimensions of securitization practices.1 Foucault was acutely aware that making life secure was not about setting limits, as if everything stemmed from legal declaration, but about creating conditions that benefited particular constituencies. The regime of determining what needed protection by means of risk assessment, conceals the disposability of others behind an objective mask of scientific verification. This brings us to one of the most sinister dimensions to Olympiad security.
The placing of rapier missiles on the Fred Wiggs Tower block in Leytonstone, along with five additional sites across the city, brings into critical question the very meaning of the term “Terror.” Not only have the tenants living in marginal social conditions expressed their concerns that the missiles actually make them more of a target, they have identified the somewhat obvious point that sleeping with a high-velocity missile system on your rooftop is truly terrifying. While the residents have famously protested with banners proclaiming, “THIS IS NOT A WAR ZONE,” their opposition was overruled by High Court Judge Charles Haddon-Cave, who stated that missile deployment was lawful and proportionate to the level of threat faced. He did, however, note that the residents’ concerns demonstrated “something of a misapprehension” about the equipment.
This is not a critique of the tremendous effort and dedication of the athletes, of course. Neither is it a challenge to major sporting events and their genuine ability to have a marked impact upon the emotional well-being of people. It is to question who benefits financially and politically from Olympiad security in the longer run. While it is too early to tell the lasting effects, if the previous experience of the Games in Athens is anything to go by (when private contractors feasted on a security bill of some $1.5 billion), the weight of austerity to follow will be similarly selective in its target audience.
Major sporting events will always be deeply political. For too long, we have placed politics in a neatly defined box, owned by a distinct political class, which has benefited only a select few. This, despite the fact that some of the most significant political moments in the history of human struggles asked a blessing neither of politicians nor universal moral theorists. Nor do we wish to banish from memory the victory of Jessie Owens from the 1936 Olympics or the dignity showed by Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the idea of global revolt entered the political lexicon during the troubled year of 1968. And just as Diego Maradona claimed some divine intervention against the forces of British colonial oppression in 1986, so the terrain seems ripe for a further act of Argentinean political defiance as the Falklands question refuses to go away. We should not, however, be blinded to the wider political project at work here. As Will Self critically explains:
The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that “host” them. This one is no different, presenting a