Conferencing and the Aesthetics of Persuasion

Conference centres are classically what Marc Augé (1995) called non-places. Not belonging to any of the transient groups of participants that pass through them, their de-contextual blandness allows for serial adjustments to the theme of the current meeting. This blandness affords both the presence and the collapsing of imported scales and contexts. The venue where the 2019 ILEIPCC took place was no exception. It was on the outskirts of the city in a post-war industrial area called Paarden Eiland, where glass-and-steel office blocks and commercial buildings were separated from Cape Town's historic centre by a canal and busy highways. The interior offered a slick but otherwise neutral setting. In an enormous, windowless, air-conditioned, and brightly lit hall that could hold several thousand people, hundreds of chairs neatly faced an elevated stage furnished with white leather couches. Pink spot-lights made for a dreamlike space where anything could happen. Each side of the stage featured two massive screens for close-ups of the speakers, creating intimacy even for those who sat further back. Taken together, the set up was all form but little flavour. Affording a front-facing spectacle of communication, it nonetheless kept open-ended what, and how and who, would occupy the communicative space at any time. And indeed, just as I had decided that this hall had little to do with the institutional culture of the South African police, the main doors swung open to the sound of brass and percussion. In marched a police band, holding up a South African flag, followed by, in order of rank, the dignitaries of the event. As I turned around from my seat near the front I also saw that the audience giving the parade a standing ovation was a sea of blue—the colour of SAPS uniforms. The particular context of the South African police had claimed the venue.

The South African police is a troubled police. Despite efforts to shake off its apartheid past through restructuring and human rights training, it is still deeply mistrusted (Hornberger 2011). That is not without reason. As in the past, young Black men and people living in townships are usually victimised rather than helped by police (Stuurman 2021). The force is also overwhelmed by the scale of violent crime—a structural situation which, as Stuurman (2021) argues, more resources, personnel, and training would not fix. At the same time, despite mistrusting actual police, people yearn for a powerful policing to restore a disintegrating social order (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004). It is not rare for people to ask officers to discipline their own children for them (Hornberger 2013). Spectacularly violent street punishments and police killings of suspects during raids are widely praised (Steinberg 2008). But ultimately police fail to live up to these expectations. It is not in their power to fix the broken social contract which South African democracy has become for many (Steinberg 2012). Internal conflicts have contributed to a breakdown of leadership, and there is an ever more entrenched sense of corruption and misconduct regarding the force (Bruce and Newham 2021; Bruce 2019).

Hosting an international conference with prestigious guests from Interpol and other national forces was a welcome distraction from these predicaments. The event and its ceremonial paraphernalia afforded a rare opportunity for polishing up a poor public image. To bask in the approval of international peers made SAPS officials seek to be good hosts and to pledge themselves enthusiastically to the fight against fakes. That said, there was also another, less prominent but ultimately more dominant force in the room: the global IP lobby comprising corporations and interest groups such as Underwriter Laboratories (UL) and the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IAAC). UL specialises in testing and vouching for the security of commodities. IAAC represents about 250, mainly US-based businesses, including Merck, Pfizer, Levi Strauss, Colgate, and Disney. They were discretely mentioned as sponsors on the programme, but the opening and closing speeches explicitly honoured their involvement in making the conference possible. These sponsors also proudly claimed their role. Brian Monk, Vice President and Brand Protection Officer at UL, relayed in his closing speech how he had founded the annual meeting in 2006. He made sure that everybody understood it had been him who had taken the initiative to bring police together to co-ordinate IP enforcement tactics. He played up how it had started over a beer between him and his then-CEO, how the first meeting was held on a shoestring budget, and how it had now progressed to having full buy-in from Interpol and national police organisations. While his tone was jolly and familiar, his speech being nearly the last word at the conference left clear who was in charge of the agenda.

The predominance of this lobby is no coincidence. Since the 1980s, corporate interests in advancing global IP regulation have steadily won ground, from making it onto the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) agenda of the multilateral negotiations in Uruguay in 1986, to being signed off by 111 countries in the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement in 1994, to subsequent so-called TRIPS Plus and bilateral agreements tightening IP protection even further. Some see the emergence of this powerful IP regime as a logical consequence of neoliberal enclosures of not just the means of production but the ideas and knowledge supporting it (Boyle 2003). Others highlight ironically that TRIPS was a ‘remarkable achievement’ (Drahos 1995: 7) and a ‘masterfully orchestrated coup’ (Crowne 2011: 86) because it was in fact against the interests of so many countries. Most countries are not exporters but importers of information, be it as software, consumer goods, or technology. This might be thought to dispose their governments towards low thresholds for circulation, instead of tight patents and copyright laws. But that position is seldom recognised. In this sense, TRIPS is a showcase for how the interest of a few can be conjured into the interest of the international order. To increase international willingness to sign up to this regime, states such as the United States, Japan, and Germany have linked compliance to bilateral trade and loans, and especially to agricultural exports (Drahos 1995). Compliant countries are rewarded with duty-free export deals, while defiant countries go on the watchlist of the so-called USTR 301 mechanism, leading to barriers against trade. Many countries also lack the legal know-how to negotiate or contest IP legislation and have thus been caught off-guard by states that come to international fora with blueprints for agreement (Drahos 1995). The result is a largely standardised international regime of IP protection, which also therefore framed the 2019 ILEIPCC proceedings.

Both the supporters and the critics of this IP regime give the impression that its most important hinge is legislation, policing simply following as the enforcement of that. But why then does the IP lobby sponsor expensive annual international conferences to interface with police? They do so because even though a global policy framework is now largely in place, its conversion into practical reality is much less certain. What conferences like the 2019 ILEIPCC in Cape Town do is bring IP policy alive to its enforcers. To help frame this point, I turn to the anthropology of policy and also to the anthropology of aesthetics.

Anthropologists studying policy tend to agree that the greatest efforts of policy-makers go not into crafting solutions but instead into the problematising process itself where ‘particular social relationships, identities, and practices are identified as requiring institutional intervention’ (Tate 2020: 85). In the case of IP protection, for instance, how did the counterfeiting of commodities become a global problem—not just a commercial problem for businesses whose branded goods are copied, but a criminal problem for police?

For some anthropologists the answers to such questions would lie in how policy models travel from one context into the next. Regarding the case at hand, they would rightly identify the annual policing IP conference at different locations across the world as an important pathway of translation whereby the model of policing IP is ‘conveyed […] and interpreted by various actors or […] mediators’ (Behrends et al. 2014: 2). According to Tate (2020), other anthropologists would highlight the role of expert knowledge. They would explore the roles of experts themselves in seeking to speak not just about but also for the problems that expert knowledge creates. And indeed, at the 2019 Cape Town conference certain speakers were elaborately introduced as experts as they took their turns at the podium. It would be mistaken, however, to assume this was simply a matter of weighing facts and convincing people of their validity. Little detailed knowledge was presented, and even where numbers were brought out they did not really serve to quantify the issue, as I discuss in a following section. Instead, they served to provoke an affective reflex (Massumi 1995).

Ethnographers of security have shown how new proposals for governmentality aim less to respond to contemporaneous issues than to identify calamities that might occur in the future (Collier et al 2004; Masco 2014). Policy-makers evoke the spectre of future emergencies through scenarios that conjure among their audiences the visceral sense of being pre-emptively at risk. This appeal to affect converts unknowable futures into felt ones, grounding policy in urgency. Such analyses tend to focus on the content of these imaginaries, however, and on the role of expert knowledges in setting up these scenarios. Less often explored is the form through which scenarios are presented and their content animated. To address this gap, I turn to the anthropology of ritual and religion to find a better understanding of how travelling models for policing IP come to life in new contexts (Behrends et al. 2014). Anthropologists have explored the role of secular ritual in creating collective effervescences for nationalism and state-making, for example (Andreetta et al. 2022; Kertzer 1988; Navaro-Yashin 2002). Others have shown how religiously derived forms such as conversion and confession animate global health workshops (Biruk 2020; Nguyen 2009). But it is Birgit Meyer's work on the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ in African Pentecostalism (2010) that inspires me most, for its analysis of the intertwining of form and content. Protestantism is premised on the rejection of ritual form. Pentecostal Christians thus oppose themselves, especially in Africa, to ritualistic traditionalisms. Their practice is thus a disavowal matched with counterfactual performances: the presence of ritual in the absence of ritual. To make this point Meyer attends to quotidian practices and aesthetic materialities that hold the faith in place beyond theological self-representation. She stresses how such forms ‘appeal to the body and induce sensations’ (Meyer 2010: 759) that ‘repeatedly persuade’ believers of the ‘truth and reality’ of their belief (ibid.: 756–757). In doing so she grants neither form nor content supremacy, treating form not in ‘opposition [to] but as a necessary condition for expressing content and meaning and ethical norms and values’ (Meyer 2010: 751).

Conferences likewise present themselves as providing unmediated access to contents of information, but it is only through the forms of presentation that these contents become persuasive. Persuasion takes place at the intersection between ‘content and emotions with style bringing together the what and the how’ (Meyer 2010: 756). As Meyer states, such aesthetics of persuasion do not create entirely new conditions. They build instead on what has been professed many times before. But they produce a sensually embodied sensibility that these professions are true, dispelling doubt and replacing it with an embodied knowing of the rightness of one's position in an already-existing community of shared belief and practice.

This also speaks to the inculcation of sentiments of danger and crime regarding intellectual property (IP). The IP regime is hardly new. Laws have been signed into force, and obligations for states to show compliance created. Still at stake though is a conviction among police that the fight against IP infringement is a worthy cause to allocate resources to. That demands a sense of righteousness, overriding doubts about the messy status of fakes and about the actual harms of IP violation. Reading conference proceedings—and the participation of police and lobbyists in these proceedings—as an aesthetics of persuasion shows the entanglements of form and content that inculcate a sense of the urgency of fighting IP crime. In the following I show that this involves the use of humour, outrage, numbers, and the invocation of being family to bring an affective truth about fakes into being. Woven through all this meticulous labour of making the fake real are invocations of religious ceremony that make it even less of a stretch to think with Meyer's analysis.

Insinuations of Complicity, and Comic Relief

The South African Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, gave one of many opening speeches. The Director of Interpol, the Dubai Police (the previous year's host force), and the sponsor all had their say in the opening ceremony, but the minister's speech was especially memorable. Greatly admired by South African police, who cherished this moment in his presence, the minister is well known for his outsized media personality, gung-ho public comments, and fancy suits with matching colourful hats. And indeed, he did not disappoint. He started his speech with a joke, saying he hoped the people seated in the audience ‘were genuine and not counterfeit’. He hinted at people who knowingly buy fake goods, not being willing to pay the price of the real item, then jokingly threatened to position someone at the door to check that people's bags were ‘the real thing’. He said he would call on the brand holders present to inspect such items. Loud laughter with a nervous undertone erupted. Implicating the audience in the everyday reality of fakes brought a reaction of comic relief. Then suddenly the minister switched into an unsmiling mode and a stern lecture on the necessity of treating IP crime as crime.

‘The challenge is’, he began, ‘that IP crimes are treated differently from other traditional crimes such as theft, but the concept is the same. Stealing is stealing and thieves are thieves! Everybody understands that it is wrong to walk into a store and take something without paying’.

After further detail about the revenue that counterfeits takes away from business and from government he moved to a crescendo on the point that everyone, even those not yet born, stood to be harmed by fakes: ‘This crime takes food off the table of millions of households. I think we can all agree that we don't want this for ourselves or to the future generation. This is why we need to fight this thing now, immediately’. As if in an echo chamber of deference, the following speaker, Lt. Gen. Lebeya, spelled out this logic again. Expressing his ‘gratitude to our Minister of Police General Cele for gracing this event’, he lauded him thus: ‘You had the wisdom of reminding us that copying of intellectual property is criminality. The declaration of war against counterfeiters is most appreciated. Thank you very much for setting the tone. May I propose a round of applause’.

Counterfeiting is thus described as a crime not just against corporate IP but against the people, with a passionate call to recognise this and join a quest for justice and the wellbeing of future generations. But this came only after the minister had shaken up the audience with a joke. Not just any joke, but a joke that implicated the audience itself as complicit in the consumption of counterfeit goods and therefore fake participants at a conference failing to commit to fighting fakes. He thus evoked a troublesome reality regarding fake goods, namely that they are popular and hard to tell apart from real ones, so that everyone can be suspected of buying fakes, and thus being of fake commitment in the context of this meeting. Charmed by the minister, people were willing to go along with this thought but not without a certain discomfort that primed them to be released from it. That release is what the minister achieved with his turn to a bright moral line between the counterfeit and the real, subsequently reinforced by Lebeya. This is not mere speaking. It is the performance of a truth. The path to salvation from complicity and suspicion is revealed in the choice to take a clear stand against faking, by accepting the message that faking is serious harm and signing up to fight against that harm. The charismatically religious format shines through in this otherwise secular space, through both humour and sincerity. A space is provided for the articulation of sins, then a return to the path of righteousness is enabled.

Importing Danger by Association: Fake Drugs and Organised Crime

Details about which goods are faked, and how, were strikingly absent from most of the subsequent conference presentations, but with one major exception: stories about fake pharmaceuticals. This began with a morning session on the first day, as if to set the tone for the importance of this example. Still fresh from the opening ceremonies, people clapped eagerly when the facilitator introduced a panellist from the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co (also known as MSD). On the stage and on the screens on each side, Tony Zook began an account of cancer vaccines being faked in Hong Kong. Ironically, he was dry in tone and did not exploit the drama of his case, instead repeating the ‘significance’ of the issue in bureaucratese. This could easily have cost him the attention of the audience, but not in the case of fake drugs. Attentive murmurs of concern and indignation could be heard as he spoke:

Unfortunately, this is reality. Very recently there has been a public disclosure of some events that have been occurring; and are still occurring, unfortunately, in Hong Kong where an MSD vaccine indicated for the prevention of HPV—one of the leading causes for cervical cancer—has been found to be counterfeited. This is a very significant issue. We don't really know how many patients were unsuspectedly injected with this counterfeit vaccine, and so we can't even begin to quantify the patient risk.

This is pretty much what he left the audience with: an unquantified but ultimately pervasive risk, and the sense of harm done to patients who think they are being protected against cancer but are not. Such deceptions could only be met with outrage, if not in fact a viscerally felt threat to participants’ own bodily integrity. Whoever did this could only be deemed a dangerous criminal actor, which outdid the need for further explanation. And it stuck. The case of fake cancer vaccines reappeared many times in the next two days, each time with less and less context and detail but an amplified sense of ‘significance’, danger, and urgency. Acting as master of ceremonies, Lt. Gen. Lebeya did not just move the programme from panel to panel but gave moral guidance to the audience on the messages they should be taking away: ‘Can you imagine […] to purchase medication for cancer treatment and it is fake medication! You know, it is something which evokes so much emotion in us! As I said earlier today, when we speak of medication, it hurts the most vulnerable of our society!’ The gap of what had been left factually underspecified about fake drugs was filled instead with the affect of vulnerability to danger. The master of ceremonies brought up this scary issue again near end of the proceedings, and so did others. The spectre of fake pharmaceuticals anchors the claim that fakes can kill, so stories about fake drugs occupied a central place in the conference proceedings. The obvious danger they pose bestows a sense of emergency that, once in place in the audience, then disseminates to discussions of fake goods in general (Hornberger and Hodges 2023).

Another way this sense of urgency was created was by linking counterfeit goods with organised crime. Transnational organised crime is generally regarded as the dark underbelly of globalisation, being connected with human trafficking, illegal narcotics, weapons, and the funding of terrorism. It is also a signifier of the most obscure proportions, capturing anything to do with illicit activities involving more than one person, which allows for many other issues to be tagged onto it. As Lebeya would sum up again: ‘Undoubtedly the events of 9/11 have changed things significantly. We are looking at security around the globe and we learned that a threat can come from anywhere and from anyone’. Such an omnipresent security threat serves well as a hook for associating any illicit activity with terrorism. Tony Dunkerly, listed in the programme as Modern Slavery Consultant could also make the connection to organised crime without providing cases or information, simply stating that ‘counterfeiting goods is funding the human trafficking process’. Using the technical language of ‘polycrime networks’, he described the linkages: ‘What we see is the convergence of one group which is involved in one line of criminal activity—i.e. production of counterfeit goods—which use the same networks, the same groups, the modus operandi, to move their counterfeit goods as they also move firearms, narcotic drugs as the networks to move people’. Here the production and trading of counterfeits is again aligned with the danger of organised crime, and a particular outrage follows from the association of fake goods with human trafficking—the subject of pervasive moral panics (Hornberger and Yaso 2012; Quirk 2007).

Either concretely through the spectre of fake medications or more abstractly in the image of organised crime, counterfeiting in general is thus imbued with a sense of danger and emergency, triggering outrage. An Interpol official could state without further explanation or proof that IP crime ‘is not a victimless crime, it is organised crime, and it impacts on communities, and people die as a result’. This imbues his call for action ‘that we see IP crime for what it is’ with the intensity of fighting murder. In this atmosphere of vaguely but compellingly disseminated associations, to doubt that faking is serious crime becomes morally unthinkable.

Affective Evidence: Magic Numbers

A third way the conference drew people into taking seriously that the counterfeiting of goods is major crime was through the use of particular kinds of numbers. Before Tony Zook went into detail about the fake cancer vaccines in Hong Kong, he primed his audience with this: ‘The Pharmaceutical Security Institute [PSI] which collects information on pharmaceutical crime has shown a 100 per cent increase in the number of counterfeit events involving cancer medicines within the last year’. The PSI has the statistical authority bestowed by its being called an Institute, but even more performative of facticity is the reference to an increase of 100 per cent. That sounded drastic. An increase from one to two detected cases would also be an increase of 100 per cent, but it did not seem as if this mathematics was to be scrutinised. Instead, 100 per cent was left hanging in the air as a curve so steep as to be out of control.

Such impressionistic numbers convey concrete affect instead of abstract calculation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). Ugandan police officer Superintendent Jackson Mucunguzi presented us with the following in his presentation ‘Food defence—tomorrow's challenge—are we prepared?’: ‘seventeen thousand tonnes of fake food removed from the supply chain, twelve and half thousand investigations opened, 257 illicit factories dismantled, and seventy-three organised crime groups disrupted’. Rattling off numbers in such close proximity creates an atmosphere. First, the specificity of the numbers produces a sense of documentary factuality. Second, numbers such as ‘seventeen thousand tonnes’ of food evoke a sense of overwhelming scale. In the fifth panel, Chinese official Bing Liu deployed a similar approach. A Chinese speaker from the private sector had already remarked in an earlier panel that China always gets a lot of attention at these conferences, thus hinting at China's reputation as global faking centre which makes Chinese presenters face the suspicion of complicity with IP crime. Determination to persuade the audience of China's commitment, Bing outdid all numbers previously cited: ‘The last five years we have processed criminal cases for one hundred thousand criminal IP cases. This is of a value of sixty-five billion. We have cleared criminal cases of fake branding of fifty-seven thousand including 340 brands from foreign countries’. Again, the audience is left with the impression of the immensely large scale of the money and policing work involved. It was not clear in which currency the monetary value was measured, but the number of sixty-five billion was big enough on its own to make this a detail, rather than create questions or misunderstandings. The message was clear: China deals with IP crime on impressive scale.

Here numbers are used for compelling impressions of police efforts conducting raids and seizures, and the aura of enormous monetary amounts feeds back into the narrative of theft and injury the minister had spelled out for everybody to take as truth. This pulls an endless shadow of criminal activity ‘out there’ into the bright light of enforcement. As it is the power of the spectacle (Debord 1983), these awesome numbers overwhelm the listener, often followed by ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhs’ welling up from a spellbound audience. They deepen the certainty that counterfeiting is crime and awaken a call for action—not from afar or above, but in the hearts of police not wanting to be seen to fall behind such results as these rapidly listed huge successes. Rather than quantify, let alone qualify, these numbers simply bedazzle and persuade.

‘We Are All Family, We Are IP Family’: The Romance of the Private–Public Partnership

Finally, I would like to discuss the sway of the idea of the conference as family reunion. Panel discussions during the second half of the first day were interrupted by a prize-giving. Prizes were awarded for achievements by individual police who had gone the extra mile to bring IP crimes to book. Winners were asked to come to the stage to receive certificates and awards. Speeches that accompanied this spoke to an image of hardworking honest officers pioneering investigative pathways. The speaker concluded his celebration of their accomplishments with the statement that ‘we are family, we are IP family’. This suggestion of kinship is striking. It does not just unite people from diverse nations and of diverse rank and task into the imagined community (Anderson 1991) of a closely related IP crime-fighting squad. It also evokes a relationship of exchange. As Marshall Sahlins (1972) reminds us, the relationship of exchange between strangers is restricted and might even involve betrayal. In contrast the relationship of exchange within a family is generalised and recorded only in the long run. This is significant, because at the centre of the conference stands the idea of collaboration between private and public actors: businesses and police. What the form of the conference manages is to convert a contingently tactical relationship, based on vast differences in aims and in access to resources, into the sense of an enduring bond of mutual interdependence—not one in which the private sector manipulates and mobilises public actors to service their own narrow interests.

The overall proceedings carefully scaffolded this sense through small and large gestures affording affective form to the wished-for mutuality of business and police. These gestures forged a shared vocabulary, an imagined community, and a sense of enduring exchange. The opening ceremony saw certain phrases and slogans recited so often that they became common vocabulary. The head of Interpol used main commercial sponsor UL's online slogan to confirm a ‘common desire’ to ‘make this world a safer place’. He described UL's sponsorship, not just of the annual conferences but of an international online college, not as the grounds for a conflict of interests for police but as ‘a moral example of excellence for private–public partnership’. The college, so the main sponsor set out proudly, had ‘over twenty-two thousand registered learners representing about eight hundred different government agencies’. Free of cost for police and prosecutors, thus a major private investment in directing public action towards the enforcement of the global IP regime shaped by business, the description of this college during proceedings as a ‘morally exemplary partnership’ and a familial arrangement banished doubts about the capture of policing by corporate priorities.

This allowed for both private and public participants to express openly what they wanted from the other. From the side of business, this focused on policing's executive powers and national as well as transnational intelligence. Tony Zook from Merck said that ‘the significant thing here is that MSD [Merck] cannot conduct any criminal enforcement security so the success of our mission now relies heavily on our ability to collaborate with law enforcement’. He thus charged police with the responsibility of saving lives, a compelling responsibility once its ‘significance’ was established. Meanwhile police mentioned on stage how they desired private companies to be available during cases. They made clear they were dependent on confirmations by product experts that goods were counterfeit. Without such documentation they were unable to get warrants of arrest or search and seizure. However, such interdependence only emerges once police have accepted the policing of IP violation as serious crime and thus as their mission. Admitting their need for the private sector in that mission is itself a confirmation of their entanglement in an ambiguous relationship.

The audience received a glimpse of that ambiguity. Food-security expert Richard Werran said that coming to a police conference was new for him. At the same time, he claimed affinity to ‘the family’ by bringing up his own family background. He stressed how proud his father, a police officer, would have been to see him there. But then in his role as a chair for a panel he posed a question to South African, Zimbabwean, and Chinese police officer panellists: ‘Industries are reluctant to engage with law enforcement because they risk brand damage. They don't want their name in the public. How could this be managed?’ This addressed a fundamental difference between private and public interests. Corporations are keen to fight IP crime but they fear public knowledge that their brands are being counterfeited, which could damage trust in their products. Governments and police depend in contrast on publicity for their successes, such as prominent media coverage of seizures of fake goods that highlight the fake goods in question (see Hodges this volume). It is hard to reconcile these ways of doing things.

None of the panellists indulged the question. They ignored it as if Werran had simply stumbled over his line. Instead, they followed through with the script of harmonious mutuality. Major General Alfred Khana from the SAPS stated with full confidence that ‘fortunately in South Africa we do not have this problem’. The Ugandan representative said this had once been a problem while assuring that ‘these days we assist the brand holder so that his reputation is not tainted’. Bing Liu pleaded misunderstanding of the question and asserted that destroying counterfeits publicly is ‘letting the public know that law enforcement agencies are attaching great importance and making a great effort to deal with the problem of unsafe goods’. After this, the discussant rested his case. The session carried on without further ripples or any attempt to spell out conflicting interests or instrumentalities. The master of ceremonies closed by picking up yet again on ‘family’ and made sure that the shared mission of fighting crime linked to terrorism or other threats to life wrapped itself around the proceedings.

There is no space for doubt in these conference proceedings. Doubt would take too literally the idea that proceedings are representations of complexity, rather than stimulations of the senses. As in all ritual form, the conference is able to transcend occasional glitches in script and instead affirm with conviction what has already been rehearsed.

Conclusion

In short, conferences such as the 2019 ILEIPCC bring policy alive. They do so through an aesthetics of persuasion (Meyer 2010) that makes counterfeiting sensually tangible to participants as serious, even murderous harm. Throughout diverse speakers and topics, the staging of the proceedings entangled form and content for participants to create a sense of urgency around fighting IP crime. Such entanglements are both fluid and particular. The aesthetically abstracted hall provided a decontextualised yet slick and dreamlike stage that was readily available to be overwritten by performances of international and South African police culture alongside the understated but crucial presence of the IP lobby.

The minister's opening speech shook up the audience's conscience through a joking implication of complicity then a path to redemption by accepting that IP crime is serious crime. Accounts of fake pharmaceuticals stood out in their concreteness but other goods were simply named as counterfeit to avoid the ambiguity and complicity they evoke, as in the case of the minister's joke about fake bags. Fake pharmaceuticals have the power to lend both viscerally felt urgency and the figure of the innocent victim. As various speakers appeared on stage, IP crime was placed in associative rather than demonstrated affinity to potent but also open-ended signifiers such as organised crime. This endowed IP crime with the seriousness of human trafficking and terrorism. Bedazzling numbers of products confiscated and at what value were thrown in the air like fireworks, substantiating the magnitude and omnipresence of IP crime and documenting the readiness of the police across the world. That readiness was displayed as being in unison with private actors as the whole conference was set up as a family reunion. As police stated their need for private sector support they matched the desire of private partners for the force of executive powers. An equilibrium of interdependence could be declared that erased the need for ambiguity or doubt regarding motives.

Private–public partnerships have been described as misleading but powerful devices at the frontier of financialisation. They redirect public resources into the service of private interests (Muehlebach 2023: 25). Treating IP violations as matters of criminal rather than civil law puts the onus of cost and labour onto the state rather than business. Presenting this partnership as familial affords a hierarchical relationship (dare we say a patriarchal, even toxic one) the facade of the public good. IP law has thus conscripted the utilities of policing. Until recently in South Africa that conscription has been haphazard. South Africa has a history of contesting IP law and exhausting TRIPS flexibilities, especially in the field of health and copyright law, and until recently police involvement in the protection of IP crime has been perfunctory. Colonel K's unit, as he said himself, lacked senior support. As I found in my research with them, their everyday routine was chasing down street traders for selling badly copied DVDs and CDs, rather than protecting major brands. This might have been just enough for the South African state to appear compliant with international legal impositions. But such perfunctory performances could hardly be presented as a passionate approach. The 2019 ILEIPCC sought to change this. Its entanglements of form and content inculcated an embodied sensibility among South African participants regarding IP crime and effaced the interests of the private sector, leading the police to own the initiative with passion.

None of this is unique to the conference I attended. What is specific here is that South Africa is a setting where little else compels the policing of fakes in terms of either demonstrated urgency or popular demand. It would be easy for IP to remain a neglected object of policing here. Providing the forms by which truth is established and doubt driven out are therefore central to the IP regime. This was the work taken on in the proceedings I have described. And this work has real consequences. As Captain K's account makes clear, new policing structures were created, new priority crimes declared and resources allocated accordingly. These are substantial shifts for an organisation that generally speaking moves slowly when it comes to its own transformation. Induction into the fear of the fake in this case creates its policing.