ABSTRACT
Critical security studies and surveillance studies have a lot in common, but they rarely interact with one another. Surveillance studies is now a specific field of research in sociology that has been initiated by sociologists such as Gary Marx and David Lyon, which has expanded far beyond its original focus concerning activities of surveillance and control of minorities by police and intelligence services. 1 Surveillance technologies, as well as attitudes towards constant monitoring of activities, have shifted and greatly expanded to become routines of everyday life, rather than exceptional practices. The idea of an Orwellian society in the making, through a ‘liberal’ agenda, has been much discussed. Michel Foucault uses the term ‘panopticon’ to describe both the development of the Orwellian society and its transformation, as it moves from a society of discipline to a society of management and monitoring the life of populations encapsulated in a territorial container controlled by the state. Critical criminology has engaged in discussion about the accuracy of using Michel Foucault's ‘dispositif’ 2 notion of the panopticon, which some authors view as too government-focused, to Deleuze's notion of the ‘assemblage’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have developed the approach of the assemblage, and I have discussed the limits of the Foucaldian notion of the pan-opticon in an earlier piece by proposing the notion of the ‘ban-opticon’ (Bigo 2005).
