In Favor of an Indirect Approach
In this blog piece, Ori Swed shows the insights from his article titled “Breaking the Order: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Countersurveillance on the West Bank,” which was recently published in the journal Surveillance & Society.
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When discussing surveillance, establishing the direction of its vector is one of the first things we do. Understanding who is surveilling whom leads us to range of assumptions on the scenario and situation. The reason for that is because there is a power dynamic in surveillance, with the state generally having more power than citizens and activists. The state can use significantly more aggressive and comprehensive tools when observing us. The state actions can be legally justified, funded by massive resources, and enforced by law enforcement and even the military. This power imbalance is also relevant in understanding the ability of actors’ surveilled to response to surveillance. The question of vector and power has been the motivation to my study Breaking the Order: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Countersurveillance on the West Bank. The study focuses on the interplay between military policing in checkpoints and peace activists across the West Bank.
The question of power and vectors in this case is very interesting. Instead of law enforcement we have soldiers, instead of the civilian sphere we have militarized environment, and finally the activists are outsiders to the setting, they are not Palestinians but Israelis, like the soldiers. These parameters foster an intriguing dynamic. The soldiers’ main concern in their work is security, so they will compromise to activists demands on the group up to the point where they feel it jeopardize their own security. At the same time, the soldiers’ response to the activities is ambivalent, seeing them on one hand as friendlies due to their nationality and at the same time as a threat due to their actions.
Looking at this setting, I explored explores the limitations of activists’ monitoring of the state. I tried to figure out when the state representatives push back on oversight and when they accept it. In other word, what is working and what is counterproductive and where this line is drawn. My interviews with soldiers and reviewing the activities’ reports show that there is a line and there is a productive and counterproductive oversight in this setting. The soldiers were most attentive to monitoring that translated into their chain of command. Activists identified an issue and instead confronting the soldiers they reported it to their supervisors that in turn forced them to comply. On the other hand, when confronting the soldiers and demanding a change in action or explanation for the most part was not effective at best and counterproductive at worse. The soldiers did not respond well to high pressure and used coercive leverages to deal with the activists, such as incarceration or putting pressure on the Palestinians (closing all movement in the checkpoint) in way that compelled the activists to back down. This study illustrates that the power imbalance is affecting activists’ ability to force a change via monitoring. Confrontation does not work well. It also delineates the boundaries of what is working and what is not in those situations. An indirect approach has been proven more effective than the confrontational direct approach. Like an old Judo maneuver, using the weight of your rival against him can yield better results.
