Notes for a Monstrous Anthropology

So, what is so monstrous about security? Consider the specimen in Figure 1 below: a graffito outside the EU border agency Frontex headquarters, it depicts a Pac-Man figure chasing migrants through the European borderlands. Like most good monsters, it combines parts of different creatures. The unblinking eye and the barbed-wired mouth are both human and eerily not; the machinery mounted on its back melds creature and machine. An evil cousin of Haraway's cyborg, it is also a monster that keeps growing. Like Dr Frankenstein's creation, it exhibits a self-propelling onward force. The more it eats, the more it grows. And, like most monsters, what it eats are humans.

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Frontex graffiti, 2011. Photo by Ruben Andersson.

Citation: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 42, 2; 10.3167/cja.2024.420209

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The Pac-Man subversively turns the tables on the monstering of the Other that sustains security operations. In fact, this incessant conjuration of monsters is at the heart of security's monstrosity. A different article could focus entirely on the political history of monstering: from geopolitical enemies turned monstrous in war to the racial or religious monstering of the Other in the shape of migrants, terrorists, ‘powerful cabals’, and so on—the list is long (and generative of intensive securitisation debates). Instead, I will turn the metaphors round, in the manner of the Frontex graffiti artist, and approach security itself as a monster in the making.

Today, anthropologists are among those searching for labels to attach to it. Sometimes, security appears as a morbid symptom of all-pervasive neoliberal logics and of Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ running wild (cf. Walters 2012). Many see it rising as a neo-fascist behemoth (Neumann 1944), with Gramsci's quote not infrequently marshalled for the purpose. To others, it is simply a continuation of coloniality by other means, reproducing the divides inaugurated by violent Western projects of colonialism and slavery along lines of race, gender and religion (Walia 2013; cf. Al-Bulushi et al. 2023).

Militarised global apartheid, security empire, border imperialism, data colonialism, racial, surveillance or security capitalism—the compound concepts in circulation suggest an inherited, if mutating, logic of power. I have considerable sympathy for these perspectives. We are all struggling to name the creature and to situate it historically. My provocation here in part consists in thinking outside of inherited logics, including those offered by colonial critiques as well as by their Foucauldian and Marxian counterparts. Decoloniality is a case in point. As a recent review reminds us, security cannot simply be situated on an axis of ‘North-South’ domination, though that is an important element in its power and allure (Al-Bulushi et al. 2023). Rather, it is becoming a common language and logic drawn upon by a proliferating array of actors for their own repressive ends—including governments of El Salvador, Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia and China, as well as a whole array of non-governmental and corporate actors. Moreover, many of these actors actively draw on decolonial language in securitising their own populations (Shah 2024). India's vast Aadhaar system of population management, or China's social credit system, tell us that security does not stop at inherited divides, though it feeds on them. Neither should our theorising of it, even as we must remain alive to historical echoes and continuities.

So, how does it feed? Theories of ‘securitisation’—classically, the treatment of sociopolitical issues as existential threats in need of extraordinary responses—remind us that security is not a given. Scholarship on border security or counterterror further shows how securitising systems are sustained by fear as well as by the insecurity they so frequently generate (Massumi 2015). Anthropologists have pushed further, interrogating how security dynamics consolidate across scale, from gated communities to global surveillance (Glück and Low 2017; Goldstein 2010) while offering a window onto security's intimate and relational side, drawing on feminist theory (Al-Bulushi et al. 2023; Ochs 2011). Other studies have traced, for instance, how border security pulls together colonial and capitalist histories of inequality while frequently obscuring their traces (Ould Moctar 2024). Perversely, many such studies suggest, security systems escalate by feeding underlying insecurities in a vicious cycle.

In this respect, security is monstrous insofar as it exhibits self-perpetuating characteristics. Yet I will argue that it's the increasing capability to track, control, and appropriate intimate human life that makes security particularly monstrous today, in the manner of the Pac-Man figure. To continue with our gentle provocation, we can say that security has a colonising tendency, in the broad sense.² It encroaches and it eats. But it doesn't necessarily do so for an ulterior political purpose of the kind implied, say, in Foucault's (2007) take on governmentality and security, which he saw as being concerned with controlling or calibrating the human population in terms of risk and probability. What we see today, rather, is security escaping its modernist confines to become quite a different beast relative to its biopolitical incarnation—eating into what Nikolas Rose (2007) once glossed as ‘life itself’ in its biological but also in its psychosocial aspects (Andersson 2018; Han 2017). In its voraciousness, security fuels and feeds on inherited divides while increasingly breaching them. With important differences, it is coming for us all.

How is this occurring? As a starting point, let us pair the poetry of monsters with the prose of economics and note how the expansion of security can be seen as a combination of accelerated growth across its demand-side and supply-side axes. In many geographical and institutional settings, including those we'll visit, notions of ‘harm’ are expanded and escalated into threats in a one-sided manner. On the supply side, meanwhile, control capabilities keep increasing, drawing justification from the expanded harms.

Giorgio Agamben was among the first to put his finger on this dual expansion. In 2014, he warned that ‘security reasons’ had become a catch-all for ‘a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly identifiable danger’ (Agamben 2014, np). Agamben was speaking of Europe but his view resonates with developments elsewhere, from China's ‘comprehensive security’ and high-tech penal colonies (Byler 2022) to the securitisation of everyday life in Israel-Palestine (Ochs 2011) or at the India-Bangladesh border (Ghosh 2023). With variations, in all these cases the expansiveness of security reason is matched by an expanding policing capability as state security joins hands with ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2017)—setting off a data-colonising arms race stretching from Beijing to Washington, DC (Couldry and Mejias 2019). We see the result from ‘health security’ tracking to migrant or terrorist risk-profiling and ‘social credit’ scoring. Moreover, these fields are overlapping, while security demands and capabilities are also increasingly feeding on one another in a complex systemic manner (Andersson and Keen 2023).

To analyse this expansive security, we must listen closely to the subversive analyses emerging from those at its frontiers of expansion, including the minority or racialised groups targeted in all the foregoing cases. Their understandings frequently point to systemic patterns that we may otherwise struggle to detect. This collaborative analysis must be paired with some perhaps equally subversive systems analyses in anthropology and beyond. Marilyn Strathern has broken a path here in analysing the generative work of sociopolitical systems, ranging from self-perpetuating audits in universities to her rethinking of wider social relations (Strathern 2000a). There are other important inspirations especially where anthropologists breach disciplinary boundaries in the study of power—ranging from Mark Duffield's (2018) scholarship on a ‘post-humanitarian’ world that is becoming less and less ‘ethnographisable’ to William Walters’ (2015) following of security through migrant bodies and vessels. Through such border-crossing scholarship, we may start to build a systemic picture of nefarious systems (of security, of power) that are themselves fundamentally border-crossing in nature.

We need, in short, an anthropology that is not afraid to become monstrous itself. Let us heed Jeffrey Cohen's (1996) fifth thesis on monster culture, ‘the monster polices the borders of the possible’:

The giants of Patagonia, the dragons of the Orient, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one's own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself.

Borders and thresholds—these migratory spaces are not only the turf of the monster-police but are also anthropologists’ natural habitat. Strathern, more than anyone I can think of, has shown anthropology to be a subversive science of the betwixt-and-between. It is the anarchic weed to the neat gardens of the disciplines, yet this very trickster quality also made it useful to colonial and Cold War security projects (Price 2016). Anthropology's compromised history as both servant and subversive offers pathways for examining and challenging nefarious systems of power. So, too, does its old role as ‘science of Man’. The conclusion will tentatively suggest that the inevitably messy study of humankind by humans is urgent at a time when machines are becoming expert ‘anthropologists’ and when this ‘anthropology’ is (once again) being harnessed to a colonising power formation.

But first, let us embark on a journey with three stopovers: the border, the bunker, and biosecurity. These offer a partial vantage point on security based around my own research, which has focused on the securitised relations between Europe and its Others, and which has used the anthropologist's awkward imbrication with power as a central plank. Across this security landscape, we will find self-perpetuating security systems that are being fuelled by demand as well as by growing security capabilities seeking an outlet. Such capabilities are colonising the vital frontier of human life itself. At this frontier, we sometimes find outbreaks of resistance. Yet the further we move into our security landscape, the more complicity seems to substitute for subversion. In this context, learning from the subversive analysis of those at the sharpest security frontier is crucial for us all.

Border Security and an Anthropophagous ‘Bioeconomy’

Two photos have stuck with me from the ‘fight against illegal migration’ in the Euro-African borderlands. One was a local newspaper picture of a basket of kittens: the basket, placed on the tarmac of a Spanish port, had been removed from a stationed truck because the little feline hearts confused the sensors used to scan the vehicle for the heartbeats of hidden migrants. The other image was of a human foot whose living owner was being pulled out from the bonnet of a car, where similar machinery had detected his clandestine presence. Both pictures were taken at the European Union's strangest frontiers: the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa. Yet neither image is any longer strange. They form part of routine border security operations in which detecting and exploiting signs of life have become fundamental to ‘fighting’ migration.

The dehumanisation at work—rendering people thing-like or beast-like—has been noted by other scholars treading onto this violent security frontier. As Shahram Khosravi (2007: 321) puts it, ‘The paradigmatic scene of the world today is undoubtedly a picture of bodies, squeezed between pallets inside a truck’. In my fieldwork on clandestine trails between West Africa and Spain, migrants recalled how they hid amid packets of contraband cigarettes or were deported back down through the deadly desert in cattle trucks. Migrant protests, meanwhile, asserted their humanity against what they saw as being treated as animals.

There was a dual task here for the researcher of bordering operations, as I saw it. The first task was quite prosaic—to catalogue how the globalised world of ‘flows’, studied by anthropologists in the 1990s, was paradoxically generating a globalised border business. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, new walls had popped up at an astonishing pace. Built to keep people out rather than in, they targeted particular travellers, reinventing Cold War and colonial divides (Gupta 2015). Coming back to our working definition of security, politicians were substituting border security for a genuine political arrangement over migration. The human consequences were stark, etching lines of race and class into the landscape (Samaddar 2020). On the one side were Zygmunt Bauman's (1998) ‘tourists’, rich citizens of the world whose mobility was worn as a badge of honour. On the other side were the ‘vagabonds’ or undesirable poor, whose mobility stuck like a stigma. Inspired by Bauman and a wealth of emerging borders scholarship, I found that the ‘illegal migrant’ was actively being manufactured by a growing border security industry that increased danger manifold while fuelling stigma, suffering, and a transnational smuggling business (Andersson 2014). Hunted like prey, tracked like a stray animal, stacked into trucks like a commodity—the fight against migration was generating a monstrous human reality.

The ‘vagabonds’ themselves denounced those who profited or ‘ate’ from migration. Among the eaters was myself, as deportees in Senegal made clear. Confronted with this realisation, my aim became to explore ethnographically how clandestine migration had been constituted as a field of intervention and knowledge-gathering—which included examining how academics were becoming complicit in the border security industry. In recent years, critical migration scholarship has similarly reflected upon academia's role in perpetuating security and emergency interventions (Cabot 2019). While the decolonial turn has pushed this growing awareness towards anthropologies of accompaniment and activism, I kept to the focus raised by the deportees—the industry that gained from their misfortune.

A systems perspective is crucial here. Power does not like to analyse itself, Mark Duffield reminds us, and having the voices of security implementers in the picture alongside target groups seemed to me fundamental to open analytical space (cf. Duffield 2018). It was striking in this regard how, in conversations with migrants and border guards alike, I was routinely left with a shared critique of border security's voracious appetite. Numbers confirm this. Frontex has gone from a budget of €6m in 2005 to €845m in 2023—a staggering increase. This growth is merely a small indication of the massive stakes in the global border security business stretching from the US Homeland Security behemoth to India and Saudi Arabia building fences against their poorer neighbours (Samaddar 2020).

So much for the prosaic task: to examine the deadly and profitable border business, its winners and losers. Now, the more ‘poetic’, or perhaps simply anthropological, task was to understand the deeper human story amid this world of walls. It was clear the wall was full of cracks—or as one Frontex operative told me, ‘the emperor is naked’. Migrants were subverting the national order of things: skirting radar systems, clambering up fences, reasserting their humanity in the face of a monstrous security apparatus. It was tempting, for many of us studying borders and migration, to build a hopeful narrative where the ultimate vagabonds somehow came out as postmodern heroes. Some scholars went further, seeing in the clandestine migrant a revolutionary historical agent. Yet I believe we have erred in the poetry. In a research proposal, written amid Europe's 2015 ‘border crisis’, I had briefly suggested that migrants’ capabilities to move might be outpacing states’ capabilities of control. This, it turned out, was not the case; quite the opposite. Those of us working in the prosaic mode had correctly identified, I think, the self-sustaining nature of border security: once up and running, it would keep growing, feeding off its own crises and failures. In this cycle, a particular kind of monstrous poetry was starting to infuse border security itself, both in its narration (recall Biden's ‘wolves’) and in its speed of innovation.

The growing border security capabilities involved new invasive techniques of surveillance which I labelled, with a nod to Rose (2007), bioeconomic. The term helps us see how value (financial, political, institutional) is being extracted from human life and vitality itself rather than just from human labour (Andersson 2018). To return to Ceuta and Melilla: rather than sending migrants into the informal economy of the Spanish mainland, as in earlier years, policing operations were increasingly keeping them stranded, appropriating their lived time and bodily signatures for policing, political, and economic ends.

Today, these Spanish operations are but rudimentary parts of a wider bioeconomy for exploiting life on the move. While new technologies have made this economy more invasive, the shift is principally political rather than technological. In Ceuta, the bioeconomic logic ranged from temporal appropriation to advanced surveillance, echoing similar enmeshments of bodies and borders in intimate economies of migrant detention (Conlon and Hiemstra 2017) or in border security complexes spanning paperwork, patrols and everyday encounters (Ghosh 2023). The exploitation of suffering is central here. Consider how US border operatives fight migration via econometrics—explained via graphs that measure the impact of different deterrence measures at the US–Mexico border. If migrants were given some sub-standard orange squash to drink, operatives joked as we met, the ‘deterrence’ value might rise; similarly so if their detention was extended or their expulsion made more dangerous. All such ‘consequences’ could be modelled, the better to show where to funnel ‘border protection’ funding.

On the face of it, this was a Foucauldian security that is not simply about punishing or disciplining but about risk management—reaching optimal ‘rates’ of social goods and ills by acting on the milieu of a population. Yet it wasn't producing much besides itself. It was cannibalistic: security was becoming its own end. Crucial in this emerging modality of power was the extent to which migrant lives were used as sites of experimentation. Life itself was incorporated into the economic equations used to fine-tune deterrence. This data could then be traded, sold, and used in chains of public–private exchange relations that we may call bioeconomic as we ask: What price life?

Leviathan's Children

Let us bring back our monsters to understand what kind of bestiary we may situate security's bioeconomic manifestations within.

A natural place to start would be with old Leviathan: Hobbes’ monstrous image of the sovereign state, emerging from the primeval soup of European modernity. This Leviathan was less as a Biblical sea creature than an ‘automaton’—a machine made of men, operating through territorial jurisdiction and through a gradual embrace of its citizen-population (Figure 2). This embrace took time to gestate: it was only amid the First World War that the ‘crustacean nation’ was born, in Torpey's (2000) words. Somewhat ironically, this creature found a friendly habitat in the globalising twentieth century, separating legitimate from illegitimate movement through the carapace of the hard border.

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Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Citation: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 42, 2; 10.3167/cja.2024.420209

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If this container-Leviathan sat astride modern nation-state borders, at the colonial frontier, sovereign power appeared in an altogether beastlier light. The resource frontier is an expansive terrain of expropriation and exploitation, as Tsing (2005) reminds us. In the terrains outside the writ of the ‘crustacean nation’, border-crossing primitive accumulation was the rule in a dark flipside to the order instituted ‘within’ (Fraser 2022; Mbembe 2019).

This resonates with today's security business, which is busy breaching vital frontiers the better to capture and control life on the move. Indeed, migrants themselves frequently point to the expansive nature of the border economy and its histories. In a remarkable variety of settings, migrants describe themselves as being ‘goods’, as Marthe Achtnich (2023) found in Libya, or as being the source of a ‘business’ or ‘slave trade’, as I heard from Ceuta to Dakar. This analysis translated into subversive acts. In Ceuta in 2010, migrants staged a protest that they called a ‘strike’: they were refusing to work for the reception and policing system that, in their analysis, made a killing out of their misfortune.

Such analyses point to longer histories of extraction and exclusion familiar from current scholarship on race, capitalism and colonialism. However, we must also link the hungry border to a broader political picture. First, many non-Western states have launched into border securitisation for their own exclusionary ends. Security stands here as the guard at the gate of a new, volatile geopolitics. And second, the hyposurveillance that we see in the policing of migration resonates with a wider (bioeconomic) logic of capture. I'll deal with each in turn at our next stopovers, the bunker and biosecurity.

Bunker Security and the Franken-War

Travelling to borderlands or liminal geopolitical spaces may tell us something about wider historical shifts. On the one hand, here security operations have been able to experiment on vulnerable human life without the usual safeguards. On the other, however, here historical relations of dominance are also fracturing. This became clearer to me once I focused on the making of global danger zones, with a focus on the West African Sahel. In the bunkered-up landscape of violent conflict and deep crisis in Mali, security alternately appeared as protector and violator in a runaway process drawing in more and more actors, to the point of overturning the geopolitical aims of Western powers.

The proliferation had begun with the ‘monstering’ of geopolitical Others. As the Cold War ended, US neoconservatives argued that America must ‘go abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Eventually it did, unleashing a monstrous war on terror proliferating in new Franken-forms from Afghanistan to Somalia. Mali was soon in the crosshairs. By the mid-2000s, monsters were actively being conjured in the Sahara, first through military imaginings of a ‘swamp’ needing to be drained (Keenan 2009) and next through the NATO-backed ousting of Libya's Gaddafi, which helped light the tinder of separatism in Mali's north. Jihadists, for their part, played their monstrous role to perfection, staging brutal violence as they piggybacked on the separatist rebellion. The monsters were becoming real.

As the French intervened in 2013, following rebel takeover in the north and a coup in the south, Mali was becoming a security laboratory. Here ever-metamorphosing jihadist factions mingled with Tuareg separatists and with smugglers of contraband, arms, and people. Targeting them was an equally complex constellation of security interventions. French and US counterterror operations jostled with EU military trainers, border police, and a sprawling UN peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, pushed at the behest of Paris. However, the security proliferation hid a more subtle withdrawal. Having conjured the monsters, the interveners were trying to bolt the door. External actors were distancing themselves from danger, the better to contain and control it. Border policing was part of this containment—and so was the drone in the sky and the bunker in the field, the interveners’ enclosure against the perceived dangers of local society.

Academic withdrawal was symptomatic of this ‘no-go world’ (Andersson 2019). The postcolonial period had ensured quite unimpeded access worldwide, especially for Western researchers; yet now the gate was slamming shut, as much through rigid insurance procedures and travel advice as through rising geopolitical risk. As I eventually joined the fray (obscene insurance payouts deducted), I saw how Bamako itself was becoming a bunkered holdout. The French embassy was surrounded by anti-blast ‘HESCO bastions’, blocking roads to local drivers’ dismay. So did the bollards and queues of SUVs over at the hotel headquarters of MINUSMA, which worked closely with the French counterterror forces. The interveners had imposed an alien security model upon Bamako's benevolent sprawl, creating a parallel urban geography of walls and safe routes, clusters of bored security guards and no-go zones—including, for most organisations, all areas outside the capital. Fear coursed through this geography. The EU military mission's hotel base was surrounded by fenced-in walkways and barriers, yet the officers—many fresh from Afghanistan—complained that protection was too basic compared with Kabul.

Security drastically changed relations between intervener and host. Aid officials said strictures increasingly prevented engagement with local society. While migrant ‘expats’ ran operations by ‘remote management’, in Mali's north, risk was dumped on largely unprotected African humanitarians and peacekeepers. In the cocoon of Bamako—modelled on Afghanistan's ‘Kabubble’—security officials imported from the military sector watched upon their expat charges. At night, they all partied on a closed circuit of restaurants, mixing with soldiers yet separated from the society they were supposedly serving. ‘How is this helping Malians?’ asked one former tourist guide serving drinks to peacekeepers and NGO workers. Officials knew their distancing was harming aid efficacy and local acceptance. ‘It's security that justifies everything’, said an aid chief; managers ‘eat all resources, produce reports and create new little strategies…. They have to justify their salaries!’ UN officials complained that operations had to get out of the bunker. Soldiers were equally scathing. MINUSMA, one peacekeeper said, was ‘a giant with a bloated head and clay feet’. High-level officials congregated around Bamako's poolside HQ while UN forces lurked behind high walls in the north, all too rarely emerging to keep civilians safe from attacks by insurgents, militias, or the Malian armed forces.

The bunkers of Bamako offered a window onto an emerging global security architecture (Duffield 2018). Interveners were drawing distance to danger, and to local society, through remote surveillance and socially distanced bunkering. But subversions were afoot. NGOs weaselled out of military escort; freelance journalists crossed the red line; and Malian aid workers were scathing about the whole enterprise. ‘Humanitarianism is just a business like any other’, said one worker, who himself had been forced to flee the north as tensions rose. For the obsession with security was not just disabling human engagement but was actively heightening risk. The bunkering of powerful interveners had predictably shifted insurgent attacks towards softer targets, including humanitarians and locals. Further, the security focus of the internationals provided the Malian armed forces with a justification for militarising more territory (Bagayoko 2019). In this repressive context, Malian analysts noted, pastoral communities were turning to ‘jihad’ as a form of self-defence (Sangaré 2016). Counterterror, state repression, and tensions over land use were creating a monstrous symbiosis—the very spectre the French-pushed military operations were meant to protect against.

The distancing also fuelled political risk. Protests escalated against the international presence, which Malians at times saw as simply ineffective and self-serving, at others as actively colonial (Traoré and Diop 2014). Bamako's barriers were turning into rallying points. Holed up inside their sandbagged embassies, fenced-off hotels or tank-guarded headquarters, the interveners looked out, fearful of the society they were supposedly defending. Yet each new protest or security incident justified further reinforcement, sending the interveners deeper into their bunkers. Until one day, they were ousted.

Small Is Nice

What monsters were being conjured in Mali? We see here how, as sociopolitical relations were redrawn and withdrawn, security started colonising the resulting voids. Geopolitically, the search for ‘monsters to destroy’ had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the civilian side, obsession about security risk had sundered social relations, fuelling further insecurity. The result was a complex systemic escalation through which security was fast outrunning the objectives of the interveners.

For one, security was becoming a privileged language for investment and intervention. The mobilisation of fear and insecurity for political and institutional ends drew in more and more actors, from aid officials to the Malian state, which used its weaker position to both subvert and play into security agendas. As President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (IBK) warned in a call for sustained French military investment: ‘Mali is a dam, and if this dam breaks, Europe will be flooded’ (Soudan 2017). Meanwhile, counterterror operations kept generating new ‘monsters to destroy’. By 2023, the wider Sahel had become heavily securitised, with state repression, international security and local militias engaging in a mutually reinforcing cycle of escalations and violence.

In Mali, a familiar political ‘extraversion’ was being repurposed towards security ends. As international relations securitised, however, national governments found themselves increasingly able to exert their own geopolitical agency while undermining the aims of the interveners. In Mali, IBK was ousted in a coup and the new junta went on to break ties with France while subversively inviting Russian mercenaries to opprobrium from Paris. This is what spelled MINUSMA's end, too. The tectonic plates of geopolitics were shuddering. One early tremble was the anxious lockdown of Mali's interveners. Another was the decolonial discourse of popular protest, now swiftly taken up by the region's new military rulers from Mali to Niger and Burkina Faso.

The abrupt rupture in the Sahel suggests that we must not exaggerate neocolonial dominance. As with migration control, the legacies of territorial colonialism are of course palpable in Mali's failed interventions. Yet for all their echoes, these were not a re-run of colonialism 1.0. Instead of being signs of a powerful Western ‘Security Empire’ (Besteman 2017), the bunkers and borders had arguably signalled fundamental weakness and retreat. ‘Partners’, ‘hosts’, protesters and enemies were taking note that fear, not expansion, was driving Western-led intervention. But even as Dr Frankenstein was ousted, the security system kept growing, now under new ‘mixed management’.

In an influential polemic, Táíwò (2022) argues that the decolonial turn has failed to ‘take African agency seriously’. While the decolonial debate would require another essay, the Sahel's fracturing (geo)politics suggests that security is not a simple top-down imposition. Rather, it is being actively co-created, transformed and subverted in the interplay of international, national and local actors (Andersson and Keen 2023). Ethnography can help us see nuances in this struggle—including over whose security is to be safeguarded (Frowd and Sandor 2018). Security, after all, remains a fundamental public good. The UN system, despite its failures, could lay some claim to supporting civilians before its gradual withdrawal. The new Sahelian juntas can claim they are establishing control over their territories. But we should not miss the larger political picture, which shows large-scale human suffering continuing under the guise of a complex and mutating security system exhibiting runaway qualities.

This system's escalating quality recalled, to me, not just Frankenstein's monster but a children's story I read as a boy. Small Is Nice is about a little dragon who, afraid of other animals in the forest, starts to eat as much as he can to grow big and strong. He gets bigger and bigger. He's growing new heads, much as the proliferating security operations in Mali; his toxic piles of faeces make the forest unliveable. The animals eventually confront the voracious dragon, protecting public good against private interest. Is such a coalition of protection the way forward? It turns out that this may be harder than it looks, as we'll see at our final stopover.

Biosecurity and a Beastly Desire

We have seen how security has transgressed vital boundaries in the service of border policing and how it has reshaped international relations while generating further disorder on its destructive path. We have noted green shoots of subversion and resistance at the borders and the bunkers, while also suggesting that such subversion has frequently helped feed the beast. What emerges here is a picture of various intersecting political projects coalescing around security, confounding old coordinates.

This is where I had ended up myself in 2019. Book published, I had retreated from the geopolitical ‘red zone’ back into Oxford. Soon thereafter, the pandemic hit. COVID-19 revealed to wider publics what was becoming evident in the liminal spaces of borders and bunkers: the idea of keeping monsters out there, clawing at the threshold, was a fantasy. Hic sunt dracones: the wild things now lurked in bars, parks and classrooms in the heart of capitalism. The red zone had come home to roost.

Yet despite having just spent years researching overbearing security, I was initially failing to see how securitised the COVID-19 response was becoming. In my defence, at least I had noticed some parallels between the red and green zones in a concluding anecdote to my book. It went like this. In Oxford, I live in a College-owned house with one downside: fire alarms that blare across our terraced row as soon as someone starts frying a steak. Its beastly roar may even start for no reason at all: a bit of condensation in the attic will do. Why would anyone put in place such a system? Well: from the College's viewpoint, the overkill is rational. Fire security limits liability and insurance premiums. For the insurer, it's their business model. I argue with the managers: ‘But the system generates larger risks! Have you never heard of the boy who cried wolf?’ But it's to little avail: such problems are invisible on the College's balance sheet of risk.

There are many vested interests at play in escalating security beyond reasonable limits. Some of these are nakedly self-interested, but some are of a more well-meaning sort. In Mali, rigid ‘duty of care’ protections made local relations and aid delivery next to impossible. We are familiar with such harm management in academia, too. Audit culture (Strathern 2000a) has come to involve treating research as a harmful activity circumscribed by increasingly legalistic rules. Some harms are real enough, in aid as in academe. Yet liability and bureaucracy are frequently pushing harm expansion beyond reasonable limits, as with our fire system. Crucially, bureaucratic vested interests are here accompanied by ordinary people's investment in harm management. To see this, let's return to the health security response to COVID-19.

Lockdown had arrived, and suddenly our little Oxford garden was eerily empty. Playgrounds were surrounded by hazard tape. As the world map turned red, I was like others holed up, running ‘home school’ while managing degree chaos by ‘remote management’ much like Bamako's aid officials. The words of one newspaper interviewee rang in my ears—‘I never thought the apocalypse would involve so much admin’.

We were all stuck in a bunker; yet it was constructed not just legally and through a state-corporate security apparatus but also through our own emotive participation. The pandemic has left me, and I'm sure others too, with a nagging feeling not just over lost time and lost lives but also about this participatory quality. For social science, there's a cautionary tale here of how many of us stayed silent as the social fabric was rupturing. As for myself, after years of analysing extreme risk management, I found myself pining for a shutdown. Britain's school closure couldn't come too soon, and I admonished my home country of Sweden for not instituting it while telling my elderly parents to bunker up. We were all retreating, willingly or not, into a cut-price version of the bunkers of Bamako or Kabul, now democratically extended to all humankind.

The alarm wasn't fake: millions have died from COVID-19. There were good reasons to feel unsafe as a largely unknown virus lurched monstrously across our thresholds. Yet I will leave aside a wider stock-taking of the costs and benefits of pandemic intervention (itself a shockingly delayed business) to focus on the security logic at play in the dominant response. I would like to suggest that reasonable fear for the unknown, combined with a ‘progressive’ embrace of harm discourse and official ratcheting up of the alarm, was pushing many societies into an untested solution. The solution was to see security as the way to combat a health crisis, much as borders and bunkers had served as salves to crises out there.

Notably, hard health security fed upon the welfare voids left by austerity. It also found fertile soil in the geopolitical shifts gleaned already in the Sahel. The originator of the hard health security model, after all, was China, which had launched a ‘People's War’ on the virus using its draconian population management system. COVID-19 dystopians have painted the Chinese surveillance state as the beastly future coming for everyone. However, as in the Sahelian case, hard health security ran up against local political variation, not least in liberal democracies. Let us also note—pace dystopians including Agamben (2021)—that controls have been rolled back, from track and trace to vaccine passports. The pandemic nevertheless enabled (bio)security to extend its reach further into intimate human life than even many security critics could have imagined (Lyon 2022). In the United Kingdom, which remains my very partial case study, I am surely not alone in remembering how neighbours feared being ‘pinged’ through the walls, making it impossible to travel and see close relatives; or how locked-down citizens gladly migrated into a Zoom metaverse, surveillance-amplified through Big Tech and ‘bossware’ as human connections dwindled.

Again, we must avoid techno-fetishism. Globally, hard health security ranged from the blunt—as in the forcible relocations of India's migrant workers (Sur 2021)—to the intimate, as in the usage of employers, brokers and neighbours to monitor their Chinese counterparts (Xiang 2022). Bureaucracy played a huge role, too, in fixating on targets while costs added up off the books (Andersson and Keen 2023). Strathern's (2000b) felicitous phrase ‘the tyranny of transparency’ seems apt here, as well as her insights into what such transparency (and visibility) may conceal. For a long time, risks to mental health and to children's wellbeing remained quite unaccounted for while globally, the devastating consequences of harsh restrictions among the poor were relegated to a no-go zone socially distanced from evening news and scientific reports.

One can discuss the real costs of the pandemic with prosaic numbers and figures; yet there was also a poetic loss to sociality, even our common humanity, in this health security landscape. The pandemic response, Duffield (n.d.) has suggested, was fulfilling the promise of the ‘smart’ city in making movement increasingly predictable and ‘robotic’. Protest was becoming increasingly futile. Consider Shanghai: in haunting images from April 2022, a robo-dog roamed the empty streets while the voice of a drone trilled among the high-rises, where increasingly hungry and desperate residents took to singing from their balconies in faint protest at their hard lockdown. The drone would have none of it. ‘Control your soul's desire for freedom’, its female voice admonished. ‘Do not open the window or sing’.

Release the Kraken?

Faint protests aside, the larger thing to be explained is the consensus that swiftly developed around biomedical security (Green 2021). I keep falling back on my own experience here. Moving so fast from writing a book on the dangers of obsessing about a singular threat to obsessing about one myself suggests that many of us were quite happy to play our role in the Psychopolitics (Han 2017) of crisis. Indeed, well before the pandemic, we glean from books such as Bying-chul Han's our willing submission to increasingly invasive systems of surveillance, which the health crisis simply escalated.

Like Han, Bernard Harcourt (2015) makes this complicity his subject while taking us back to the monstrous reach of security. In Exposed, a tale of transparency in the age of social media, he contrasts two monsters. One is our familiar Leviathan. The other is another sea creature, the octopus—a familiar monstering trope that Harcourt turns round with the help of the logo of a US surveillance satellite (motto: ‘Nothing is beyond our reach’). The ‘proper metaphor’ for power today, Harcourt suggests, ‘is not the government agent at his console, but a large oligopolistic octopus that is enveloping the world’ (Figure 3). Instead of a ‘surveillance state’, he writes, we face ‘an amalgam, an oligarchy, or a knot of tentacular statelike actors that see through us and our desire-filled digital lives’ (Harcourt 2015: 78–79).

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NROL-39 surveillance satellite logo, National Reconnaissance Office.

Citation: The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 42, 2; 10.3167/cja.2024.420209

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Fellow monsterologists Fredona and Reinert (2020: 183) offer a name for this tentacular figure: the Kraken. This grasping cephalopod has a long mercantilist and imperial history, they note, and indeed we can connect it back to our colonial frontier. Yet returning to our axes of security demand and supply, there is something peculiarly monstrous about its present capabilities. Octopoidal power breaks down vestigial boundaries: South and North, inside and out, tourist and vagabond. The new architecture of power encompassing state and corporate capabilities further throws into doubt the very notion of the state and destabilises old political borderlines. To Harcourt (2015: 21), citizen-consumers’ desire to be seen and to connect is to the driving force, or as he puts it, ‘all the formerly coercive surveillance technology is now woven into the very fabric of our pleasure and fantasies’. In the context of ‘permacrisis’, however, perhaps the largest pleasure of all may well be the desire for protection—the promised fulfilment of an escalating demand for security, cost what it may.

Fear of the monster is just a kind of desire, Cohen (1996) suggests. With this in mind, and cycling back to subversion, perhaps it's not surprising that we don't see more protestation across the emerging security landscape. Protests grew amid lockdowns, yet (somewhat like the subversions in Mali and in migration controls) they were scattergun and tended to reinforce security rationales. Those protesting—Canadian truckers, anti-vaxxers, et cetera—were not infrequently ‘monstered’, especially by the left and the self-proclaimed centre. Yet our political evaluation of each subversive case needs some serious ethnographic bracketing, in my view. If some subversions have been linked by anthropologists to an emancipatory politics of resistance, others have tended to be regarded as beyond the pale. This points to another subversive thing we can do, which has frequently been neglected. That is simply to acknowledge our confusion and to listen especially to those with whom we don't agree or who we don't immediately understand—the art at the heart of ethnography. Anthropologists, more than any, have a duty not to pre-judge; not to think we already know; or, worse, that we know best! Listening to lockdown protesters, Malian coup leaders and migrants alike, we may well note the frontier character of their incipient subversions—and what it may reveal about coming battlegrounds over a future under the sign of security.

Monsters, Inc: Recolonising Anthropology?

In conclusion, let us move briefly from monsters to their opposite: the human. And that means returning to our favourite topic as anthropologists—anthropology itself!

Given its disciplinary history, anthropology must be alive to new kinds of colonising power formations. To push the point, if old anthropology was the awkward handmaiden of territorial colonialism, today a ‘new anthropology’ is coming into existence: a (quasi) ‘science of the human’ situated at the confluence of algorithms of artificial intelligence; advanced mechanisms of risk management and surveillance; and the fractured geopolitical world emerging amid the Western project's gradual demise. Besides profit, security is its driving rationale—and, more specifically, control over the human future. Anthropologists beware: the ‘new anthropology’, with its powers to colonise life in its granularity, is fast outrunning us oldies. The infrastructures of power-knowledge are shifting inexorably toward the state-corporate surveillance nexus at play in settings as diverse as migration management, social credit scoring, global health security, or corporate risk management, including in our very own universities. In the process, ‘old’ anthropology—which once hoovered up knowledge systems to the frequent benefit of colonialism—now finds its own knowledge hoovered up by a power formation that to some significant extent surpasses our frames of analysis.

The old anthropology may have little power to shift the dial of the new. Yet I want to come back to our compromised discipline's trickster quality, its messiness, and its love affair with liminality—in this, perhaps, lies its power. Anthropology at its best is a subversive science; yet to continue to be subversive, we must take on security, and we must move into the new frontiers and conflicts, the more uncomfortable, the better. So how can we revive this subversion? I have one prosaic and one poetic wish:

Prosaically, I believe we must take systems much more seriously. To channel Viveiros de Castro (2015: 12), we cannot afford to be afraid of the wolf—or, rather, we cannot resort to familiar categories in explaining (and thus explaining away) that which we cannot quite grasp. We need to revive our capacity for wonder, in the vein of the ontologists, yet instead of reinventing alterity among humans, we may find it in the exotic, awesome, frightening systems of power whose capabilities to control and re-shape life currently outstrip our capacities for analysis. By naming this monstrosity, we may yet stand a chance to tame it. An analysis based on our own compromised history may lead the way—as long as we don't think we can simply apply a historical template to an emergent reality.

Enter, one last time, the monsters. ‘The monster is the harbinger of category crisis’, Cohen (1996: 45) wrote, and this is what makes it so useful: it resists incorporation into our existing political or analytical schemas. As we have seen, the monstrous stands astride (already flimsy) boundaries of state and market, polis and oikos, external and internal, self and other, left and right. Giving the Strathern lecture on which this article is based, I was asked whether I would offer a typology of monsters. It's an intriguing thought and of course we can proceed, in the manner of the old butterfly collector, to categorise the monstrous and the beastly; the humanoid and the alien; the fanged and the winged and so on, running the gamut from Leviathan to Kraken and beyond. Yet our monsters are but one way of putting a name to premonitions about something still quite ungraspable about the relations of power that are taking shape around, and crucially through, us all. By labelling the monstrous, we may start getting a grip on it; yet tighten the grip too much and the thing may well vanish, slipping out of our fingers like another wet tentacle.

My second humble plea is not to forget the anthropos of anthropology; its human poetry, perhaps. We hear more and more about a post-human(ist) anthropology, along with calls for dismantling the discipline owing to its not-so-original sins. This mirrors a wider turn away from liberal humanism across left and right. We certainly need to rid ourselves of reductive notions of the ‘human’, as Tsing (2016) has suggested. Yet a post-human turn is not the only answer to the demise of Man. The human, Anthropos, Homo—whatever name we use—does not have to be figured as a ‘planet-destroying CEO’, as Haraway (2016: 32) puts it; and reducing the human, as she does, to soil (humus) or critterdom is not necessarily a liberating prospect. If the pulling apart of the human is analytically productive in many ways, it may well end up dovetailing with the ‘new anthropology’ of security and data science, which is also moving beyond the human(ist) subject with its troublesome privacy, autonomy, dignity. Such tensions and contingencies, of course, are fundamental to Strathern's work, and it is in homage to her daring explorations at the borders of the (in)dividual that we may ask ourselves, quite simply: is the future human?

Perhaps not, our monsters suggest. The monstrous, as premonition, warns us of a possibly non-human (or ‘transhumanist’) future. While the old Leviathan was, in theory, a monster-machine serving humans through mutual covenant, the monsters we have journeyed past rather fragment those whole human-citizens: they feed on bits, literally and metaphorically. This suggests the human may well be turning into one resource among others, a bioeconomic clump thrown on the compost heap, and not in Haraway's good way.

Yet I think there's hope, especially once we recognise our own imbrication in power, whether as citizens or anthropologists. It's sometimes easy to forget, especially in times when the monstering of others has become so prevalent, that Foucault himself pointed attention inwards rather than seeing power as simply an external phenomenon. Notably, Gramsci's original ‘morbid symptoms’ were also directed inwards, towards the militant left of his day (Achcar 2022).³ While this doesn't necessarily lighten the picture, anthropologists’ own complicity in power doesn't have to lead to misanthropology. It can rather revive our curiosity. The anthropology of security has shown that even the most monstrous of security systems are still made by humans—fallible, often doubtful, and most importantly, challengeable and changeable. One day, I show the video of Shanghai's robo-dog to my students. Its shouting of stay-at-home messages to a human-free cityscape is dystopian to the bone. Yet as I pause the video, we see that the robo-dog's voice emanates from a megaphone clumsily gaffer-taped to its back. We all crack up. Like with the part-cuddly, part-scary monsters of children's movies, we can poke fun at security. We may exaggerate its monstrosity the better to subvert it—even or especially when we recognise that, at some fundamental level, ‘the monsters are us’.