Authoritarian Surveillance: A Corona Test

Abstract

As the world seemed undecided in praising China’s crisis management through what was formerly called networked authoritarianism (MacKinnon 2011), countries such as Iran showed no interest in extending its notorious political surveillance practices into the public health arena. Consequently, this paper asks if the umbrella term “authoritarian surveillance” used by many Western and non-Western scholars (including myself) can do justice to the practices witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic in countries such as Iran? Could any act of arbitrary or oppressive surveillance be categorised as authoritarian surveillance? Does authoritarian surveillance necessarily correspond to an authoritarian state form? This paper summarily reviews the political theories of authoritarianism and the current discussions on authoritarian surveillance. By scrutinising Iran’s inability to apply its political surveillance tools during a public health crisis, the paper argues for an analytical integration of other socio-political concepts, such as state legitimacy, and economic potentialities, such as infrastructural capacities, into discussions of authoritarian surveillance. Consequently, the paper proposes a situated understanding of authoritarian surveillance contextualised within social, political, economic, and historical interrelations.

Where horizontal and vertical surveillances meet: Sense-making of US COVID-19 contact-tracing apps during a health crisis

“…Similarly, the media has frequently framed the COVID-19 pandemic using war metaphors ( Chapman & Miller, 2020 ). In fact, increased surveillance has been observed across both democratic and undemocratic countries after the outbreak of COVID-19, with varying levels of enforced or recommended (voluntary) measures ( Akbari, 2021 ; Liu & Graham, 2021 ; Marciano, 2021 ; Trottier et al, 2021 ). For instance, the Israeli government took safety-oriented, militaristic approaches as soon as the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic ( Marciano, 2021 ), while the Iranian government showed a less oppressive, minimal response ( Akbari, 2021 ).…”

Surveillance and pandemic governance in least‐ideal contexts: The Philippine case

“…In these conditions, countries find it more difficult to adopt appropriate public health policy interventions (Kaufmann, 2020). Moreover, it has also been observed that such contexts could use COVID‐19 as a precedent to employ surveillance measures, which may be legitimized as policy (Akbari, 2021). Such is the case in the Philippines, which imposed the longest lockdown, and also managed to enact the anti‐terror law amidst the pandemic (Amit et al, 2020a, 2020b; Hapal, 2021; Joaquin & Biana, 2020).…”

Pandemic surveillance and mobilities across Sydney, New South Wales

“…In retrospect, the period from 2020 to 2021 can be analysed by geographers as an unprecedented pause in mobilities and an attendant boom in enrolment of bodies, lives, and relationships in systems of sensory power—ways of governing people through sensors, surveillance, and the data they produce (Isin & Ruppert, 2020). COVID‐19 enrolled many citizens into systems of sensory power for the first time, deepened the enrolment of others, and pressured citizens who refused or sought to bypass certain components by limiting their mobilities and access to public and quasi‐public space (Akbari, 2021). As Lupton (2022, p. 42) points out, usual “habits of moving and emplacing our bodies in relation to others’ bodies and to things were transformed.” For a time, it seemed that the ways bodies move between and dwell in space would be changed forever.…”