Decivilizing Security: Troops on the Streets and Counterterrorism in Belgium
(2018) Global Interdependencies Norbert Elias Conference — Location: Bruxelles (5.December.2018)
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- Abstract
- Since the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris and Brussels, Belgian authorities have implemented unusual security settings: a 4-day lockdown of the capital, a large scale deployment of the army, concrete blocks and fences obstructing public streets, etc. While reminiscent of counter-terrorism practices in the recent past (UK, Italy, Spain…), the presence of military patrols and check-points in a European capital is nowadays rather uncommon forms of securitization. In particular, this low-tech and highly visible security apparatus looks at odds with the less visible and high-tech security coordination fostered by the European Union to prevent further terrorist attacks. Above all, the Belgian counter-terrorist strategy is at odds with Norbert Elias’ civilizing processes theory. Indeed, in it’s famous book On the Process of Civilisation Elias showed how physical violence has progressively been excluded from the common peoples everyday life. Today, in Elias words: “Physical violence is confined to barracks, and from this storehouse it breaks out only in extreme cases, in time of war or social upheaval, into individual life”. Looking at the deployment of the military in the streets of Belgian main cities, the paper aims at exploring this re-enactment of the ‘sovereign’ within the Belgian context, and to confront it with Norbert Elias sociological assumptions. It unpacks the tensions between the civilizing process theory, and the seemingly contradictory ‘staging’ of the Belgian army, which makes tangible the materiality of (in)security and the state monopoly on violence.
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Duez, D., & Thomas, C. (2018). Decivilizing Security: Troops on the Streets and Counterterrorism in Belgium. Global Interdependencies Norbert Elias Conference, Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/172428