Sonic lawfare: on the jurisprudence of weaponised sound

Parker, James

doi:10.1080/20551940.2018.1564458

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Against democratic citizens outside of war, sound WSRs have been utilized by police on protesters in Georgia in 2007, at G20 protests in Pittsburgh in 2009, at G20 protests in Toronto in 2012, at Ferguson in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, in New York in 2014 following the police killing of Eric Garner, and at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests during 2016-2017 (for further examples, see English, 2016;Parker, 2019). Many kinds of injuries result from sonic warfare including ear ringing, disorientation, nausea, temporary deafness, nosebleeds and dizziness.…”

Section: Weapons Of Sensory Repression (Wsrs)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democracies

Kaul,

Cachelin

2024

Security Dialogue

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This article examines the use of ‘non-lethal’ weapons (NLWs) by liberal democracies to govern dissent in non-war contexts. We argue that NLWs can enable sensorial governance, specifically through sensory repression of dissent. Although accented as non-lethal, NLWs are better conceived of as what we term ‘Weapons of Sensory Repression’ (WSRs). From tear gas to sound cannons to skunk bombs and more, WSRs target the human senses – visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioceptive – and impose debility not death, thus enabling the use of technologies of repression against dissenting collective assemblies at lower threat thresholds than conventional weapons, arguably disincentivizing alternatives to repression. Since law enforcement in liberal democracies is not explicitly linked to political control and such democracies derive legitimacy from responsiveness to public opinion, it is worth highlighting what WSRs make im/possible in this regard. Empirically, WSRs create and confirm subordinate citizenship in liberal democracies for those who are already de facto lacking in certain rights. Emphasizing that liberal democracies renew themselves through challenges involving mass mobilization, we suggest that the employment of these weapons transforms problems of political change into problems of technological crowd management by dehumanizing those that propose alternative logics for dominant economic, nationalist or racial orders.

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Section: Weapons Of Sensory Repression (Wsrs)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democracies

Kaul,

Cachelin

2024

Security Dialogue

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“…Lived sonic experiences in prison, as well as the lack of desired sound experiences (cf. Cusick, 2013;Parker, 2019), not only carry information but produce the listener's sense of self. In addition, infrastructural sounds in prison not only define the daily rhythm from the night rhythm or indicate activities (e.g.…”

Section: Sound Spaces and Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The sonic atmosphere of prisons is a punishment (cf. Parker, 2019) but may also be used as a form of resistance. Rice (2016) shows how UK prisoners shouted to locate one another and connect in an unwanted prison environment.…”

Section: Sound Spaces and Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

Making and unmaking masculinities in Cairo through sonic infrastructural violence

Malmström

2021

Urban Studies

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This article explores the Egyptian state’s production of desired manhood and destruction of unwanted masculinities in relation to home and displacement through audio-focused analysis and a focus on sonic infrastructures. While sonic infrastructures can be used as a form of political control and violence, my work in Egypt also shows how people, through sound and sonic resistance, navigate and shape sonic landscapes of insecurity, violence and liminality, as well as resisting displacement and claiming space. In Cairo, where political unrest over the past decade has produced new imaginaries and maps of belonging, men opposing the politics of the current regime have been expelled by the state from their own city; deprived of rights, safety, status and dignity. The institutions of state power employ sound as a political representation, and control, monitor, limit as well as threaten the population through the sonic. All of these sound systems operate at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. There are countless examples of how materialised sonic experiences are consciously constructed and used by the autocratic military regime in Egypt to discipline and ‘produce’ its subjects, through for example forbidding particular music; monitoring its residents and thereby employing control by listening; using unbearable loud sounds during torture; or closing downtown bars, cafes and bookshops and thereby sonically controlling and limiting parts of the cityscape of Cairo. These sonic materialised experiences are connected to how gendered bodies are excluded, un/remade, produced, expressed and negotiated.

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“…Silence then becomes an intricate mechanism of sensory manipulation and spatio-temporal dislocation—a paralytic force, almost an ontological threat; inmates are dispossessed of “familiar sensory patterns” (Cusick, 2008: 5) and are set adrift in some strange limbo, cut off from the relational space which we know our world to be. Writing on Saydnaya’s “deathly silence,” James Parker draws an analogy with musical torture and the self-annihilation mechanisms this brings into play: “As with the use of music in detention, this kind of silence involves a certain dislocation from the world, a denial of acoustic agency and a gradual assault on the prisoner’s mind and body” (Parker, 2019: 78).…”

Section: “[A] Kind Of Silence You Can’t Conceive”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

Ristani

2020

Violence: An International Journal

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This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya—an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors’ ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison’s interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. Sonic weaponization in Saydnaya has not been much addressed in the existing academic literature, except for discussions of its extreme silencing tactics, which this study intends to complement by a further inquiry into the sound/silence interchange in the Syrian prison, as well as into the ways in which the listening mode per se is turned into a mechanism of surveillance and torture, and also (paradoxically enough) of re-action and survival. To explore these issues, I draw upon existing theoretical perspectives on sound, silence, and listening per se—all measured against the actual backdrop of the Syrian prison. Herein, Saydnaya is theorized as an acoustically surveilled place of extreme listening and deliberate partial sensory deprivation, of weaponized silence and acousmatic violence, that is, a violence whose sound has no visually identifiable cause. Such practices form no exceptional case; Saydnaya rather joins, in this light, the sadly endless list of sonic warfare cases—the dark history of sound—as this has been recently brought to light by a number of critical sound theorists drawing attention to sonic weaponry, and more specifically to the all-powerful acoustics of incarceration. This study relies on ex-prisoners’ aural testimonies as published in Amnesty International Reports and not on self-conducted primary research, and thus many of the points raised here retain the character of hypotheses, pointing to directions of further research that may fully test them out.

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Sonic lawfare: on the jurisprudence of weaponised sound

Cited by 17 publications

References 37 publications

Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democracies

Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democracies

Making and unmaking masculinities in Cairo through sonic infrastructural violence

Sound prisoners: The case of the Saydnaya prison in Syria

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