All posts by Focaal Web Editor

Blog

Ahmad Moradi: Iran, Year 1404: Chronicles of Planned Chaos

Image 1: Bombing scene in Tehran, 2 March 2026. Anonymous photographer. Shared via the Telegram channel Vahid Online.

No, dear Rira,
my letter must be short,
must be simple,
with no talk of ambiguity or mirrors.
I will write to you again:
We are all well—
but do not believe me.

(Ali Salehi, Iranian poet)

The Sense of an Ending — April 26, 2025

Thick black smoke is rising over the port of Bandar Abbas, where Iran’s largest port is located. A massive explosion has just torn through the area. Authorities urge people to stay indoors, warning of airborne toxins possibly spreading across the city.

We’re watching a local TV station livestream the explosion site. Ambulances move back and forth, firefighters enter and leave the frame, and there is a constant stream of water aimed at the large black billows rising into the sky. “War must be really scary. I’ve thought about it often, for a long time. But yesterday, I realised war is truly terrifying,” Javid tells me. Although we were born during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, we have no clear recollection of the bombings and explosions.

Despite the shock of yesterday, friends call, describing an eerie stillness in the city. The blast was so powerful it shook windows; many initially thought it was an earthquake—a frequent occurrence in this part of Iran. Speculation runs rampant: some fear sabotage by Israel, recalling the devastating 2020 Beirut blast; others blame incompetence by the corrupt regime. The only shared certainty in this divided society is the overwhelming reality of the explosion itself and how devastatingly powerful it was.

I had landed in Bandar Abbas just hours earlier, flying from Tehran. The plane was old, part of Iran’s aging air fleet, historically hampered by years of Western sanctions. Its engines rattled and the seats were worn out, but it got us here. Like much of Iran’s infrastructure, it was fragile, underfunded, yet stubbornly functional. Whatever that means.

Julian Barnes’ book title The Sense of an Ending keeps coming to mind. The explosion feels like a prelude to war, echoing the trajectory of Beirut: first the port explosion in 2020, then full-scale conflict.

Yet my sense of looming catastrophe doesn’t fully align with the general mood of those around me. My family continues to rely heavily on the healthcare system. My mother visits the hospital twice a week for kidney dialysis. Another relative is undergoing cancer treatment. They return home relieved, even cheerful, knowing most of their medical expenses are still covered by public insurance. People persist in their routines, driving their children from school to the gym to music lessons. They adapt. They press on. Rent consumes an entire salary. I keep asking nearly everyone I meet how they make ends meet. Hardly anyone knows precisely how daily life holds together. Nothing quite works, yet everything somehow remains in place. Politically, the atmosphere feels similarly precarious.

In many respects, Iran seems to be experiencing a rare period of calm. For now, a delicate peace holds between the state and society. In Tehran, women without hijabs walk openly through the streets. At night, new cafés buzz with conversation, laughter, and young people lingering into the late hours. A cautious optimism lingers in the air.

Iran and the U.S, the archenemies for over four decades, appear closer than ever to resolving their hostilities. Iran might agree to curb its nuclear ambitions, while the U.S. is expected not only to lift sanctions but also to commit billions of dollars in investment. Such steps would strongly reassure Iran that the U.S. won’t abruptly withdraw again, as it did in 2018 when the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA—the nuclear agreement meticulously negotiated during President Obama’s administration.

The Blown Up Table — June 13, 2025

Except it wasn’t.

Israel launched an unprovoked assault on Iran. In the first few minutes, several high-ranking military commanders and nuclear scientists were assassinated. At that moment, Iran and the U.S. were gearing up for the sixth round of indirect negotiations, with Oman serving as intermediary. Looking back, it is easy to believe the growing reports that the U.S.-initiated talks were a cover for Israel’s surprise attack.

The assault began exactly on the sixty-first day of the two-month deadline Trump had set earlier in a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader. On June 20, days after Iran’s renewed discussions with the European powers—Germany, the UK, and France—the U.S. joined the Israeli offensive. The U.S. bombed three main nuclear facilities. Other targets included security command centers and the so-called “centers of oppression”—among them Basij bases, where I had conducted fieldwork since 2015. These sites range from military compounds to humble bureaucratic offices dispersed throughout neighborhoods. They form a sprawling network under the Revolutionary Guards’ control. For years, these bases played a crucial role in surveilling ordinary citizens, especially during unrest. Now, they are under bombardment, just like military bases, the notorious Evin prison, and state TV headquarters.

They claim it is a liberatory act—aiming to set the Iranian people free. How strangely familiar this rhetoric sounds. The Iraqi invasion déjà vu.

Politics of Rightful Killing — June 21, 2025

An old woman in her seventies darts across a shopping store in Berlin, shouting to her companion in Farsi: “Look, good news. Israel has continued the bombing of Iran.” She is referring to events that unfolded just hours after the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, brokered by the U.S. and Qatar. News circulating on social media reports that the Israeli government instructed a fleet of jets to bomb targets in Iran, allegedly in response to a missile launched from Iran into Israel shortly after the ceasefire began.

A sense of disgust washes over me. Nausea, as Sartre describes it.

In a second episode that day, a friend calls and asks for advice on how to respond to a voice message she has just received. The internet has finally come back after the ceasefire. The message explains that the sender had to rush back to Iran—despite the closure of the airspace—for the funeral of his brother. “He passed away,” the voice says, referring to one of the recent attacks. My friend tells me she has no idea how to respond to the message from her colleague. “Was her brother a member of the security forces in Iran?” she asks. She explains that her colleague had once hinted at her family’s involvement and alignment with the Iranian regime. “Now,” she continues, “I wonder how to respond. If her brother was part of the regime, wouldn’t he have been involved in the mass oppression and killing of protesters just a couple of years ago?”

I suggest she let it go—for now. People from all walks of life were killed in the attacks. I tell her to focus on the simple fact that her colleague has lost a brother. Just offer condolences.

She agrees, reluctantly, and ends the conversation with a quiet question: “In the absence of the regime, how would people treat those who aligned with it?”

Resentment runs deep, and revenge seems to be the only instinct left in our repertoire. Some call it the politics of rightful killing.

Snapback- 28 August 2025

All U.N. sanctions have been reimposed, one of the harshest sanctions regimes laid against any country. Iran has already been under Western-imposed sanctions for decades. It is not yet clear what the effect is going to be.

Lottery — January 12, 2026

It is Monday evening. My phone finally rang. It is my sister’s voice. It has been more than four days of complete blackout. No internet in Iran, no chance to call family back home from abroad. Videos of dead bodies under black covers in the central morgue of Kahriyak in Tehran have been trickling in since Saturday. Those of us abroad with internet have been searching for loved ones in the videos. Someone has smuggled the video out, and then shared it on a Telegram channel. Hundreds of dead bodies have been laid out in the yards of the morgue, and many more are lined up in the compound. I have paused and replayed the videos many times, checking to see if there is a familiar face.

In this total communication darkness, there are reports from Persian-speaking TV channels giving mounting numbers of the murdered. They were all killed with live ammunition on the 8th and 9th of January. Shortly after the beginning of massive protests on the streets of Iran and the internet shutdown, the security forces, the Basij, and members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, in a coordinated act, opened fire.

There were Mossad agents among the protesters. This is what the Iranian state claims. No one knows. The number of dead keeps piling up, by thousands. From the morning of January 12, we know that phones are being restored, and some people on social media say that their families were able to call them from Iran. No word from Tehran yet—does this mean that we have lost a loved one? “It is a lottery,” a friend in Berlin tells me on the phone, waiting impatiently for a call from inside Iran. “When you receive the call, you will ask, ‘Is everyone safe?’ You may hear yes or no. Even if you hear a yes, you are sure that many will hear a no.”

Stockpile — February 27, 2026

“We are going to be fine,” my brother tells me. “They will reach an agreement at the last minute. Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi is in Washington to offer what the U.S. wants.”

“We have stockpiled food for a few weeks,” my brother tells me. “But we have already eaten half of it,” my sister says in the background. “It’s been two months since Trump has wanted to make his decision.”

It is not clear if Iran is refusing to hand in its highly enriched uranium to the US, or according to Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, the Omani foreign minister and mediator, Iran has accepted ‘zero stockpile.’

Having a Blast? — February 28, 2026

They blew up the negotiating table again. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is dead.

I have to confess that for over thirty years, every Newruz, the Iranian new year that happens on 20 March, when all family members rush to come together and make a wish during the countdown, I too always rushed, my mind bubbling, not knowing what I had to wish for. In that moment of chaos, I always wished that this year Khamenei would be dead.

Until the year 1404. This year, I joked to my German friends who are visiting us: “This year I’m not going to wish for his death. For thirty years it was not granted. I won’t do it this year, and maybe that will make my wish come true.”

In the evening of 28 February, it is Netanyahu first, and then Trump, who confirm Khamenei’s death. After several hours, Iranian outlets confirm it too. I have a whirlwind of emotions. There are videos of some Iranians having a blast on the streets. There are other videos of a school ruined by several blasts by the US-Israeli strikes. There are 21 days left until Newruz.

We are only 24 hours into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. I am not sure when the war will end. The consequences are deeply uncertain and potentially chaotic. Violent chaos may very well be the only true objective Trump and Netanyahu have for this country.

Ahmad Moradi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has conducted ethnographic research with the paramilitary organization of the Basij, as well as with Afghan refugees in Iran who fought in the Syrian civil war and were wounded there. His broader research interests include revolutionary politics and the politics of care in contexts of protracted conflict and displacement in the Middle East.

Cite as: Moradi, A. 2026. “Iran, Year 1404: Chronicles of Planned Chaos” Focaalblog March 5. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/05/ahmad-moradi-iran-year-1404-chronicles-of-planned-chaos/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Ana Ivasiuc: ‘I can’t explain, you need to see for yourself’: Matters and senses of insecurity in the campi nomadi of Rome

Image 1: Salone camp 2017. Photo by author

‘What is it like to work with Roma?’ I asked the police officer. He gestured widely, shaking his head and raising his arms and shoulders, suggesting that words could not describe what he was trying to convey. ‘You would have to see for yourself. Once you see how they live, how they smell, what the camp looks like, you will understand everything about the Gypsies. I can’t tell you more. You just have to see yourself, that’s it’. Other officers at the police precinct nodded in agreement. They were all part of a special police unit set up in 2010 by far-right mayor Gianni Alemanno to police Roma encampments in Rome.

The officer’s suggestion that I have to see – and smell – for myself what it was like to work as a police officer in Roma camps dovetails with insights informed by a Latourian approach to materiality and literature subsumed under the umbrella of new materialisms. The securitization of the Roma across Europe is rarely only a mental construct. Rather, material infrastructures and sensorial experiences effectively co-produce (in)security beyond mere representations of danger. Matter and its sensorial perceptions quietly fabricate (in)security, rendering the Roma as dangerous subjects to be perpetually governed through exceptional and ever-multiplying security measures, among which the racial policing that I witnessed in my ethnographic work.

Nomad emergency

In April 2008, the newly elected Berlusconi government triggered the state of emergency in an episode that would be known as the emergenza nomadi (nomad emergency), motivating its decision by the ‘social alarm’ produced by the presence of informal camps of migrant Roma settled in the peripheries of Italy’s largest conurbations. Following the declaration of the state of exception, local authorities received power and resources to set up urban security measures as they saw fit. In Rome, this amounted, among other measures, to the establishment of the special police unit within which I carried out part of my research on the securitization of the Roma in Italy.

In its beginnings, the unit was tasked with policing Roma camps – the authorized encampments set up by the state, but also new informal camps and old, ‘tolerated’ settlements that the authorities let be in the interstices of Rome. Initially, the title of the unit contained the word ‘nomadi’ – the term generally, though erroneously used to refer to Roma in Italy, despite activists’ efforts to debunk the myth that Roma continue to be a nomadic people. The initial title suggests that the unit was set up as a racial police; however, in 2011 its title was changed to ‘Public Security and Emergency-related unit’, and new tasks were added to its mandate. Notably, its portfolio included policing related to unaccompanied minor migrants, as well as the task of carrying out squat evictions.

The unit is composed of about 60 police officers, some of whom have longstanding experience in policing Roma. Consider, for instance, the commander of the unit at the time of my research, Antonio Di Maggio. In an interview he granted me in 2015, he mentioned his 25-year long experience of dealing with Roma encampments. As several officers explained, the setup of the unit in 2010 allowed the commander to gather ‘his men’ up: police from other units with whom he had previously worked, some of whom had also been involved in specific actions of policing the Roma. The officers of the unit are known among Roma in camps; they refer to them as ‘Di Maggio’s men’.

Salone

The camp of Salone sits in isolation beyond the city’s ring road. The nearby train station of Salone is almost always deserted, and only two trains stop – one in the morning, on the way to Rome, one in the evening, returning from the capital. In one of the trains that did not stop in Salone, I overheard someone explain to their friend that the train does not make a halt ‘because of the Gypsies’ (zingari): it isn’t safe. The materiality of a desolate train station where trains do not stop conveys to thousands of commuters daily that Salone is a dangerous place.

Originally designed to host 600 people temporarily, the camp saw its numbers swell to nearly 900 following the aggressive eviction policies around the mid-aughts that gentrified Rome and sanitised the capital’s space of the presence of undesirables. The camp housed diverse and often rival Roma groups, from Serbian and Bosnian families arrived as early as the 1970s, to those from Kosovo and Montenegro who fled the violence that marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and more recent arrivals from Romania following its accession to the EU. Metal and PVC boxes arranged in equally spaced rows, resembling shipping containers, serve as housing units. In fact, that is the name of the ‘houses’: container. Most of them display graffiti, and some bear marks of violence: overcrowding and conflicts over the use of space sometimes result in feuds that leave material traces. Streams from broken water pipes traverse the main alleyway, forcing people to zigzag over puddles and mud. At the entrance of the camp, on the right side, overfilled rubbish dumpsters greet the rare visitors.

Sensorial Securitization

The accumulation of waste surrounding camps – broken objects, car carcasses, construction debris – is a complex phenomenon resulting from neglect, refuse dumping practices, and cost-reducing strategies by non-Roma firms and individuals. Yet, this waste is frequently conceptualized as a cultural marker for Roma, reifying them as abject and connecting them to epithets like ‘peoples of landfills’ (Piasere 1991). The subsequent combustion of this waste, often generating toxic smoke (roghi tossici), becomes the centerpiece of a securitarian discourse in Rome that overtakes concerns of petty criminality. Smoke is infused with meaning through the powerful mediator of dioxin, ingrained in collective memory through the 1976 Seveso industrial accident. Dioxin is a dangerous substance that can be inhaled to one’s unbeknownst. Vigilantes and neighbourhood committees from areas in the proximity of campi nomadi post on social media visualizations of rising smoke – often describing their neighborhood as ‘under siege’ or a ‘zone of war’ where ‘chemical weapons’ are being deployed. Such photos and the accompanying comments generate intense social alarm and fears. They provide fuel for incitement to violence, including exhortations to ‘burn down the camps with everyone inside’, as a comment on Facebook suggested. The powerful connection of fear to sensorial regimes of securitization led authorities to institute fixed surveillance services and police patrols specifically to control the fires.

This racialized landscape is always paired with a smell. The olfactory connects the Roma body, space, and materiality to an inferiority that ‘does not belong in and to Europe’ (Racleș and Ivasiuc 2019). Non-Roma interlocutors routinely distinguish Roma by a specific ‘gypsy’ smell (Racleș 2021) as an olfactory distinction that they cannot explain nor describe, but that allegedly ‘everyone knows’.

During police patrols around campi nomadi, officers engage in a ritual of repulsion involving grimaces, covering their noses, and making comments regarding the “puzza” (stench) that they discern upon approaching the camp. This olfactory disgust finds anchors in the materiality of the camp: heaps of waste, overflowing rubbish dumpsters, rats. The officers interpret this squalor as proof that inhabitants are uncivilized and that ‘living like this’ must be a cultural trait. The fear of contamination is visceral: after incursions in camps, police officers half-jokingly invoke the need for ‘epidemiologic checkups’ and the need for disinfection.

In an incident that I recount in more detail elsewhere (Racleș and Ivasiuc 2019), a policewoman, hastening to use disinfectant gel after strip-searching a Roma woman, suggested that the smell ‘stays with you regardless of how much you wash your hands’. The sensorial-material nexus ensures that the spatial segregation and policing of the Roma are repeatedly justified and reified as necessary measures against an inherently abject and dangerous threat at the most intimate, molecular level.

The inhabitants of the camp deplore its material conditions too. They complain about the waste and the irregularity of public services in removing it from the camp and repairing faulty pipelines and sewage. The rats, the foul smells rising up in the hot Roman summers from waste heaps and broken sewage, all of these material conditions are not of their own making and they develop strategies to combat them. One of the women in the camp explained that to combat foul smells and discourage rats from approaching her container, she uses large quantities of bleach on a daily basis: ‘I use a bottle of chlorine a day to clean, it’s so clean you can eat off the floor’. Yet camp inhabitants are painfully aware that their living conditions are leveraged against them to solidify racial stereotypes of uncleanliness and ‘uncivilisedness’.

Conclusion

Processes of securitization are deeply entangled with the sensorial realm. More specifically, sight and olfaction, as expressed by the police officer quoted in the opening vignette, serve as mediators reassembling the Roma in specifically racialized ways. Leonardo Piasere (1991) invokes sensorial perceptions of Roma as ‘antigypsy senses’ (sensi antizingari): racialization patterns where senses are involved in the production of racist tropes of nuisance that must be contained. In Rome, sight and smell quietly fabricate insecurity by linking the Roma body and inhabited space to fears of contamination and pollution. While such fears have been examined in relation to the racialization of the Roma on the symbolic realm, elsewhere I show how contamination and pollution constitute fears that cannot be disentangled from the material realm (Ivasiuc 2019).

As this piece has shown, the materiality of the camp and the sensorial registers used to apprehend it act to embody the Roma as ontologically dangerous. Human and non-human actors (waste, dioxin, vigilantes, police, social media platforms etc.) are continuously drawn into chains of association, re-assembling the Roma as inherently dangerous, uncontainable, and ungovernable, and producing insecurity in a processual and self-perpetuating way. This quiet fabrication ensures that the politics of policing and exceptionality multiply, requiring constant security measures against a threat that is simultaneously material, sensorial, and ontological.

Ana Ivasiuc is a Teaching Fellow at University College Dublin and a Researcher at the University of Ostrava. She carried out an ethnography of formal and informal policing of Roma migrants in the peripheries of Rome.

References

Ivasiuc, Ana. 2019. “Reassembling (In)security: The Power of Materiality.” In Regina Kreide and Andreas Langenohl (eds.). Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and International System. Baden Baden: Nomos, pp. 367–94.

Piasere, Leonardo. 1991. Popoli delle discariche: Saggi di Antropologia zingara [Peoples of the Landfills: Essays of Gypsy Anthropology]. Rome: CISU.

Racleș, Andreea, and Ana Ivasiuc. 2019. Emplacing Smells: Spatialities and Materialities of ‘Gypsiness’. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 28 (1): 19–38. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2019.280105.

Cite as: Ivasiuc, A. 2026. “‘I can’t explain, you need to see for yourself’: Matters and senses of insecurity in the campi nomadi of Rome” Focaalblog March 3. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/03/ana-ivasiuc-i-cant-explain-you-need-to-see-for-yourself-matters-and-senses-of-insecurity-in-the-campi-nomadi-of-rome/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Erella Grassiani and Nir Gazit: The Smell of Fear, The Sound of Relief: Sensing War in Israel/Palestine

Image 1: A police truck fires “skunk” water at protesters during a demonstration against recent home demolitions in Palestinian communities, Ar’ara, northern Israel, January 21, 2017. Photo by Keren Manor

As we write this, in January 2026, there is, theoretically speaking, a ceasefire in place in Gaza. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the war, the genocide, the violence, and horrors have come to a stop as Israel is breaching the ceasefire on a daily basis. Violence and death are still omnipresent in Gaza and the largely overlooked Occupied Westbank. And so are the sights, smells, and sounds that we associate with death: they are everywhere, albeit experienced differently depending on one’s identity, locality, and positionality. These sounds, smells and sights remind us of the multitude of ways in which war and destruction enter daily lives. War habitually comes in the form of deadly violence, destruction, and famine, and makes itself present through ‘daily’ experiences, such as the sounds of the air raid sirens, the smell of death, and the sight of weaponry in the public sphere.

The senses, of course, cannot be separated from broader issues of embodiment. As several scholars working on the senses and embodiment have demonstrated, senses mediate lived reality and help us to understand it, through our bodies, in a political sense (e.g. Howes 1991; Pink 2015). As such, senses are a means of inquiry that help us understand the realities around us and how we feel this bodily. A focus on the senses can tell us something about what smells, sounds or sights make us feel comfortable and secure, which ones alarm us, frighten us, and how such experiences fluctuate over time and/or in different contexts for divergent groups of people. As such, sensory experiences serve as important mediators in violent conflicts.

In this piece we are interested in the ways war and its violence travel from battlefield spaces to civilian spaces. While it is more common to analyse the ways in which the two are blurred, meaning how the war itself invades civil spaces, we will focus on the ways that war, both purposefully and incidentally, enters Palestinian and Israeli spaces through the senses and what political message the senses convey to different actors in divergent contexts. We include several wars, such as the genocidal war in Gaza, but also the other wars Israel has waged and is still waging with other neighbours, such as Lebanon and Iran, and the ongoing violent occupation and increasing annexation of the Westbank. While we will not be able to delve into the relations between these separate fronts, or their own specificities, we will discuss war and violence are mediated through the senses and how sensorial experiences are individually and collectively interpreted.

We focus on two distinct ways in which the senses are attacked and/or affected in war in Israel/Palestine. First, we recognize the intentional use of sensorial attacks where the senses are purposefully weaponized by Israel and its military through the development and use of technologies that attack sight, sound, taste, and smell. Secondly, we will discuss the sensorial ‘byproducts’ of war’s violence and a society’s militarized characteristics. Although often done unintentionally, this also serves to normalize the war and its violence by bringing it into ‘civilian’ spaces. Here smell and sounds also become sources of conflict and security and they start to play a role in the making of the (enemy) other.

During times of emergency, the way we perceive and digest sensorial input is intensified and feelings of (in)security and fear are (re)constructed by, for example, the sounds of sirens warnings that rockets are on their way, but also through the sight of the huge number of weapons that have been flooded into the Israeli civil space in the last two years. For some, feelings of security increase with this sight of weapons, while for many others it is the opposite.

Intentional sensorial warfare

The direct attack on the senses during war is a practice that goes back many years. Think about the use of tear gas by Britain in WWI to help disperse crowds (Feigenbaum 2017), or the use of sound bombs in Brazil’s favela’s, employed by the military police in their ‘pacification’ efforts (Vieira de Oliviera 2019).

Over the last few decades, Israel has put itself on the map as a major player in the sale of defensive security products and knowledge, and as a specialist in technologies of ‘crowd control’, also known as ‘anti-riot’ weaponry, non-lethal, or even less-than-lethal weapons. The Israeli government, as well as several private companies developing such products sell these globally to clients interested in pacifying both external and internal ‘enemies’, such as protesting citizens (Grassiani 2022). Many of such technologies purposely attack the senses; the eyes, the nose, the ears and have been originally developed to disperse crowds in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, such as protests against the occupation and its violent repression. One notorious example of such an Israeli invention is a substance called Skunk, which has a terrible smell that sticks to anything that it encounters. Not only is it sprayed on people themselves, but it is also used as a form of communal punishment as it is sprayed on houses, leaving the stink lingering for a very long time (Joronen and Ghantous 2024). Another example is how Israeli soldiers release diesel fumes from their tanks—originally intended for battlefield camouflage—onto Palestinian civilians.

An additional technology designed by the Israeli military to disperse people is the ‘Scream’, an acoustic weapon also known as the ‘Shofar’, after the religious horn used during Jewish Holidays. It produces a very high-pitched sound that causes dizziness and feelings of nausea and was used by the Israeli military against Palestinian protestors for the first time in 2011.

More recently, during the genocide in Gaza, human rights organizations also reported the use of supersonic boom by Israeli Air Force fighter jets as a mean of deterrence and terrorizing, as well as the use of quadcopters by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). These drones fly very close to windows of houses and tents and broadcast horrific sounds of crying babies, attacking dogs, and constant ambulance sirens. These sounds were purposefully broadcasted as a form of psychological warfare, to terrorize people, and to draw them out of their dwellings (Euromed 2025). In an article in the Guardian, two Gazans relate about the ‘sonic hell’ that is the night in Gaza with the ‘high-pitched whirring that Palestinians call “Zanzana”’ of the drones and the loud explosions (Ahmed and Gonzalez Paz 2024). During the day people receive calls from the Israeli military where a computer voice tells them to evacuate. “You’ve got no option to actually talk to a human being, to ask questions, to negotiate’” says Zaharna in the article (Ahmed and Gonzalez Paz 2024).

Importantly, these technologies have all been designed and intended as an attack on the senses; they are intentional weapons developed and used by the Israeli state and its proxy violent actors.

Sensorial byproducts of war and militarization

In addition to intentional attacks, there are also many more mundane, yet very violent ways senses are targeted in civilian spaces. Those most affected in the case of Israel/Palestine are the Palestinians in both Gaza and the Westbank. Regarding Gaza, it is very difficult to speak about any ‘normal’ civilian space, as almost all infrastructures have been destroyed or damaged. There, Gazan civilians narrate extensively about the smell of death around them, as many bodies of the dead have yet to be found under the rubble. As mentioned above, attacks by sound have been deliberately used as a weapon, but the continuous sounds of the artillery attacks and drones around them similarly have a devastating effect on the civilian population. As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2017) has demonstrated, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is also an ‘occupation of the senses’. She refers to the different mechanisms in which the senses are controlled by the Israeli occupation, such as through camera’s, checkpoints and other forms of surveillance and how these ‘sensory technologies …manage bodies, language, time and space’ (2017: 1279).

It is important to note that Israeli citizens are also affected by the ongoing war, although we do want to stress that this cannot at all be compared to what is experienced by residents in West bank and Gaza. Israeli civilians are affected by the ongoing war, which permeates both public spaces and private homes, not in the least through the government’s propaganda machine and society’s militarized character. Daily siren warnings signal incoming rockets, and the IDF issues additional alerts directly to citizens’ mobile phones through the Tzeva Adom (Red Colour) system. The sounds and sights of war—especially within Israel—dominate the national atmosphere, with television networks transformed into 24/7 news channels focused solely on war coverage.

Image 2: Stickers commemorating fallen soldiers on walls of McDonalds at gas station in South of Israel. Photo by Erella Grassiani

In the streets of Tel Aviv, the presence of conflict is inescapable: stickers commemorating fallen soldiers cover walls and signs, posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza hang on public buildings, shops, and balconies, and yellow flags symbolizing the campaign to free the hostages flutter from nearly every other passing car. The status of war is also evident through the different sounds of ambulances after the Israeli emergency service changed these after the October 7 attack. This change has been made to prevent public confusion and panic, as the traditional ambulance siren was sometimes mistaken for rocket or air-raid alerts, which led people to believe there was an immediate security threat. To address this, emergency services began using alternative siren tones that are more similar to European or international ambulance sounds and clearly distinguishable from military warning alarms. At the same time, however, these exceptional urban sounds have also intensified the sense of emergency among residents.

It is important to realize that there is a high proximity of Palestinian/Israeli spaces that oftentimes completely overlap, and as such, it is difficult to distinguish between them. For example, Palestinian villages and towns that are located within Israel will have similar sensorial experiences as their Jewish neighbours (for example hearing warning sirens or war helicopters flying by), while at the same time they can have a completely different interpretation of these sounds and sights. For one community such sounds might be reassuring, for others they are threatening. Simultaneously, within Israel’s internationally acknowledged borders, some communities are also excluded from the warning sounds from the state that they are part of. This became painfully clear in April 2024, when the only person hurt by the Iranian attacks on Israel was a Bedouin girl, living in an unrecognized village without an alarm system or a proper shelter. In this case, the sound of silence during war time may be interpreted as very alarming and even terrifying.

With such instances, we are not speaking of the deliberate weaponization of the senses, as we do in Palestinian spaces, but rather of the effect on the senses as a byproduct of the militarization of Israeli public space and the normalization of war—its transformation into an ordinary aspect of daily life. This produces a highly selective perception of war, one centred almost entirely on the Israeli (Jewish) experience. In this experience, Gaza appears distant, portrayed as another world rather than a place merely seventy kilometres away, and for some even less. Israeli news coverage rarely addresses the personal suffering or death of individuals in Gaza, and Gazans are shown up close only in sanitized contexts—on the beach, for instance—when the image can be deemed free of visible violence. Although Israeli soldiers sometimes share photos from the fighting in Gaza on social media, and testimonies are increasingly surfacing that expose extreme violence, such images and stories seldom reach the broader public. Moreover, when Israeli activists attempt to circulate pictures of Palestinian child victims, such as on university campuses, they are frequently censured or punished.

Interestingly, the very sounds that evoke fear and terror among Palestinians often carry reassuring or even uplifting meanings for Israelis. The noises of Israeli aircraft and the Iron Dome anti-missile system are perceived as sounds of protection, embodying both national defence and technological superiority. Even the artillery fire directed toward Gaza—audible to Israelis living near the border and at times even in Tel Aviv—is frequently interpreted as a sign of justified retaliation and military strength. Many Israelis describe having developed an ability to discern between sounds that signal real danger and those that do not.

Concluding remarks

Conflict and war cannot be fully understood through geopolitical or military strategy alone; they must also be grasped as a deeply embodied and sensory reality. By centering the senses, we illustrate how war and violence migrate from the battlefield into the most intimate of civilian spaces, mediating how individuals and communities interpret their lived reality. We draw from the concept of the ‘occupation of the senses,’ by demonstrating that state power is exercised not merely through the management of land and borders, but also through the governance of bodies and sensory perception. Following Judith Butler (2009: 51), we conclude that the sensory regime in Israel/Palestine functions to differentiate ‘the cries we can hear from those we cannot,’ effectively pre-determining whose lives are deemed worthy of grief and defence. The sensory experiences discussed—from the ‘sonic hell’ in Gaza to the ‘uplifting’ sounds of artillery in Israel—serve as somatic evidence of this political chasm. Ultimately, by attending to the smell of fear and the sound of relief, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how war inhabits the body, ensuring that the violence of the conflict is felt—and remembered—long after the sirens fall silent.

Moving forward, we encourage further analysis of the long-term somatic effects of these sensory assaults on both populations. Future research might explore how the ‘olfactory duration’ of substances like Skunk water or the sounds of drones shapes the psychological landscape of survivors long after the physical violence ceases. By the same token, it is essential to analyse how those living under a sensory regime develop modes of ‘sensory resistance’ or alternative environmental interpretations to maintain agency and community. As militaries continue to deploy ‘less-than-lethal’ technologies, there is a pressing need to study how these sensory weapons are being adapted for use against protesters and marginalized groups globally, transforming the human body into an additional domain of war.

Erella Grassiani is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the Israeli military, the Israeli security industry and non-state violent groups. She is currently working on a new project on aroboreal nationalism.

Nir Gazit is a senior lecturer at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the Ruppin Academic Center. His research interests include civil–military relations, political violence, and vigilantism.

References

Ahmed, Kaamil and Ana Lucia Gonzales Paz. 2024. ‘I hate the night’: Life in Gaza amid the incessant sounds of war. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2024/oct/17/i-hate-the-night-life-in-gaza-amid-the-incessant-sounds-of-war

Butler, J. 2009. Frames of war. When is life grievable? London: Verso Books.

Euromed. 2025. ‘Israel intensifies use of quadcopters to terrorise and target civilians in Gaza, with terrifying sounds and home invasions’. https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6747/Israel-intensifies-use-of-quadcopters-to-terrorise-and-target-civilians-in-Gaza,-with-terrifying-sounds-and-home-invasions

Feigenbaum, Anna. 2017. Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today. London: Verso Books.

Grassiani, Erella. 2022. “The Shifting Face of the Enemy: ‘Less than Lethal’ Weaponry and the Criminalised Protestor”. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 4 (3): 323–36.

Howes, David. 1991. “Sensorial anthropology.” In: Howes, David (ed.) The varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in the anthropology of the senses ( 167-191). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Joronen, M., & Ghantous, W. (2024). “Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine”. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(3): 1122-1141.

Pink, Sarah. 2015 Doing sensory ethnography. Sage Publications.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. 2017. “The Occupation of the senses: the prosthetic and aesthetic of state terror”. British Journal of Criminology 57: 1279-1300.

Vieira de Oliveira, Pedro J. S. 2019. “Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise.” Design and Culture 11 (2): 193–211.

Cite as: Grassiani, E and Gazit, N. 2026. “The Smell of Fear, The Sound of Relief: Sensing War in Israel/Palestine” Focaalblog February 17. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/02/18/erella-grassiani-and-nir-gazit-the-smell-of-fear-the-sound-of-relief-sensing-war-in-israel-palestine/

Blog

Ståle Knudsen: The Invisible Hard Toilers of The Green Transition in The Maritime Sector: Shipyard Workers in Turkey

Image 1: Narrow spaces for shipyards in the bay of Tuzla. Photo by author

How do companies handle responsibilities to people and the environment when they operate abroad? What tools do they use, and what are the effects? These have been throughgoing concerns in my work during the last 10-15 years of research in Turkey. I have investigated how the ‘corporate social responsibility’ work of Austrian energy company OMV helped them gain social license to operate in a community in Turkey, and how the Norwegian energy company Statkraft sought to address ‘project affected people’ in a hydropower project through ‘IFC performance standards’. This research agenda culminated in the comparative project Energethics and the book Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism (Knudsen 2023). When I realized a few years back that the construction of Norwegian boats in Turkey had become big business, I became curious about how Norwegian boat owners and state institutions handled the ethical dilemma involved in the praiseworthy effort of constructing ‘green ships’ under less praiseworthy labour conditions in Turkey. How is responsibility handled in such a context?

Dependent on Turkish shipyards

The green shift in the Norwegian maritime sector is largely considered a success. The electrification of car ferry connections is particularly highlighted: there are now over 80 battery ferries in operation in Norway. The authorities have provided significant support for this shift in order to achieve goals for reducing CO2 emissions, but also to position the Norwegian maritime industry for export within a new fossil-free maritime future. Through direct support via state institutions such as ENOVA (tasked to facilitate the energy transition in Norway) and Innovation Norway (promoting Norwegian export), ‘battery surcharges’ on ferry concessions from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, and loan guarantee support from Eksfin (Eksport Finance Norway), the Norwegian authorities have made this green transition possible. However, Norwegian shipyards have not had the capacity to build all these new green boats and have been dependent on foreign shipyards, especially in Turkey. In addition, Norwegian shipowners save 10-30% when building at Turkish shipyards. In 2021, Turkish shipyards surpassed Norwegian shipyards in terms of volume of Norwegian newbuilds.

One may reasonably claim that the green shift in the maritime sector in Norway is partly being carried by underpaid and accident-prone Turkish workers. With 100,000 workers in the Turkish shipyard industry and an unclear social and political landscape, it is very difficult for shipping companies to clarify whether the conditions for the workers are satisfactory. With a background as a social anthropologist with good knowledge of Turkey, I have written a comprehensive report that attempts to deepen and nuance knowledge about the conditions at shipyards in Turkey. This blog post is based on that report.

Subcontractors

The most important thing to know about the shipyard industry in Turkey is that 80-90% of the workforce works for subcontractors. These workers are often migrant workers from other parts of Turkey, they work on short contracts, change shipyards frequently, live in overcrowded ‘bachelor dormitories’, and feel most connected to other workers from the same hometown and linguistic-ethnic group (many workers are Turkish Kurds and Arabs). These workers are paid daily wages, and as seasonal workers they prefer to work as much as possible. Some manage to establish small businesses themselves that have contracts with the shipyards, but most struggle with poor and unstable wages and are exposed to dangerous working conditions in many shipyards.

Image 2: The struggle of unions. Photo by author

Under such conditions, it is difficult for workers to cooperate and organize. It also does not help that laws and regulations in Turkey make effective union organizing in this sector difficult. There are two active unions at the shipyards in Turkey. The largest, DOK Gemi-İş, is politically and religiously conservative and relatively close to the authorities. They organize workers ‘on the floor’ who are directly employed by the shipyards, and have collective agreements with many shipyards. The other union, Limter-İş, has very few members, is politically positioned far out on the left, and mainly organizes workers employed by subcontractors. They often take an active role in coordinating and leading the many spontaneous protests that arise in response to lack of pay or in reaction to fatal accidents. Some shipyards actively oppose unions, and one of the largest shipyards, which also builds a lot for Norwegian shipowners, has even forced the conservative union out of their shipyard.

While the workers are very poorly organized, the employer side is represented by three organizations with significant resources and great influence with the political environment and authorities. In contrast to the union representatives, employees in the employer organizations are highly educated, have good command of English, and often represent the shipyards in international contexts. Recently, however, the Turkish Competition Authority opened an investigation into two of these organizations as well as 33 shipyards for alleged collusion to hold down the wages of shipyard workers.

Occupational accidents

Turkish shipyards have been notorious for many accidents and deaths. There are various explanations for this. While shipyard owners and their organizations, the conservative trade union, authorities and some academics point to a lack of education and ‘culture’, the radical trade union and other academics focus on structural reasons, particularly related to government policies and the large subcontracting sector. In the report, I argue that both of these explanations are valid. Since 2010, a number of measures have also been implemented that have improved conditions to some extent. It is likely that pressure from Norwegian shipowners has contributed to this. Nevertheless, the death toll has been on the rise again. According to the NGO Health and Safety Labour Watch/Turkey (İSİG), there were 19 and 17 deaths in fatal accidents at shipyards in 2022 and 2023 respectively (no official registration). By 2025, the number had fallen to ten deaths. However, these numbers exclude accidents in the large and often informal side industries. In December 2025, at one O’clock at night, a 16-year-old youth died in a fire in a workshop located in the ship industry site in Tuzla in the outskirts of Istanbul. They were producing pumps for ships.

What are Norwegian shipowners and authorities doing?

Many Norwegian shipowners have received loans from Eksfin for their construction projects in Turkey. In such cases, the shipowners must comply with a detailed guide for assessing employee rights at shipyards. This involves extensive ‘due diligence’ and follow-up inspections, which gives Eksfin and the shipowners ample opportunity to guide and, if necessary, put pressure on the shipyards.

Although there are probably significant differences between the shipyards, it is also difficult to know which shipyards are preferable. It also does not help that Norwegian shipowners who have boats built in Turkey rarely mention this in their reports in accordance with the Norwegian Transparency Act. Some shipowners with large construction contracts at Turkish shipyards do not mention at all that they build a lot in Turkey. At the same time, it is also the case that neither the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, ENOVA nor Innovation Norway set any special requirements for due diligence assessments. It is time for Norwegian shipowners and other relevant institutions to take a closer look at how they can together contribute to ensuring that the conditions at the shipyards they use in Turkey are satisfactory.

The limits of soft governance

Standards, certification and audits as operationalized by for example Eksfin may have some impact on labour conditions and safety, but these tools only enable insight into and influence over certain ‘immediate’ concerns, some of which are results of deeper dynamics which are beyond the reach of these tools. The subcontracting system, for instance, is one major driver for many of the challenges in the sector. However, the way shipbuilding is socially organized is beyond the reach of standards, certification and audits. Thus, the structural frames that ensure that the subcontracting system is reproduced, including the politics upholding those frames, and the capitalist system itself, are not addressed. Rather, the particular way of organizing capitalism in Turkey may indirectly be legitimized through these exercises.

Ståle Knudsen is professor at Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen where he pursues work in political ecology based on ethnographic work in Turkey and Norway. Recent thematic interests include energy, aquaculture, shipbuilding and corporate responsibility.

References

Knudsen, Ståle. (ed.)(2023). Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism. Berghahn Books.

Cite as: Knudsen, S. 2026. “The Invisible Hard Toilers of The Green Transition in The Maritime Sector: Shipyard Workers in Turkey” Focaalblog January 28. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/28/stale-knudsen-the-invisible-hard-toilers-of-the-green-transition-in-the-maritime-sector-shipyard-workers-in-turkey/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Alice McAlpine-Riddell: Zap, Dazzle and Pink! The Aesthetic and Vibrant Enchantment of Tasers

Image 1: Marysol holding one of her pink tasers. Photo by author.

It is the summer of 2022, and I am volunteering with Wes at a queer multi-purpose community space in Brooklyn, New York City. The space is bright pink, adorned with colourful rainbow motifs, hand-painted floating clouds, and neon signage. Today, our responsibilities are to keep the space open for community members to hang out and to sell thrifted, donated, and locally made clothing. Wes is performative, energetic, and talkative. He is an aspiring musician, and we often spend our time together styling him in the clothes for sale in the space which he wears to perform trending dances for his TikTok videos.

Wes grew up in a Haitian household in Connecticut. During his upbringing, safety was rarely discussed, as his family would turn to prayer to address concerns instead. Upon moving to the city, he rarely feels safe: “I don’t think I’m ever really safe, walking around in Brooklyn, to be honest with you.” To provide a certain sense of safety, Wes employs certain safety practices while moving through the city, and this includes carrying a pink taser, a hand-held weapon that uses electrical current to temporarily incapacitate a person.

His pink taser is revealed to me during that afternoon after a young woman walks in and exclaims, “I had to come in cos this place looks gay as hell!” before sitting on the couch and chatting with us. Within a few minutes, seemingly unprompted, she whips a baby-pink object out of her bag. She turns the object, which I’m unable to identify, on. It makes a loud crack and sets off a bright white flash, like an aggressive fly-zapper. I jump, but Wes remains calm, and without missing a beat, he proclaims: “I have the exact same taser!” forging a connection through the sonic and the pink. They both smile knowingly at each other, acknowledging the shared experience, before the conversation moves on.

When discussing this encounter with him later on, I mention that the noise and lights really took me by surprise. He responds, “Yeah, that’s actually helpful, because when people see it, they are like ‘oh okay!’ and I’ve never had to use mine on anyone, but I’ve walked with it ready to go. I’ve just felt better walking and holding it”. For Wes, the jarring crackle and bright white lights attract attention, signalling caution to be taken by others walking on the street while simultaneously instilling a sense of well-being in himself. He concludes, “plus it has a little flashlight too. And it’s pink!”

My conversation with Wes highlights the sensorial nature of objects of security, of pink tasers which zap, crackle, and flash. During my ethnographic fieldwork in Brooklyn, I regularly encountered the ownership of safety gadgets amongst my female and queer interlocutors. These safety gadgets include tasers, pepper sprays, and kubotans, which are plastic blunt stabbing objects frequently attached to keychains.

These security objects are often coded as feminine, by both the producers and consumers, from pink tasers and pocketknives adorned with text reading ‘PRINCESS’ to kubotans shaped like cat’s ears and alarms described as looking like “cute Tamagotchi’s”, small handheld digital pet games prolific in the early 2000s. Like Wes, my other interlocutors commonly reference pinkness and cuteness in conversations about their gadgets/weapons, expressing feelings of enchantment, comfort, safety, and excitement.

In this piece I explore the power of pinkness and other captivating visuals, alongside the jolting zap of the taser, to dissect the aesthetics and sensations of (in)security that operate powerfully in the potential. Seeing as none of my interlocutors have ever used their gadgets functionally in self-defence they rather operate across multiple enactments; infusing senses of reassurance and wellbeing, enabling sociality and connection while also securitizing imagined Others on the street who are situated as a potential threat.

Image 2: Pink and sparkly stun guns and pepper sprays for sale in the U.S. Photo by author.

Security aesthetics and enchanting technology

Security is not just a force to be subjected to but also an aesthetic, a mode of sense perception. Security feels, smells, looks, sounds, and tastes certain ways. It encompasses subjective judgements of taste (Ghertner, et al., 2020) and normative aesthetic assumptions, like the statement ‘pink guns are for girls.’ From enclosed architectures of gated communities to the haptics of drone warfare, encountering and performing security is an embodied and sensorial experience. To feel unsafe or insecure itself is an intuitive and embodied sensation, often described as a gut instinct or a sixth sense (Elbek, 2025; Sisnowski, 2026).

Safety gadgets like Wes’ taser are technologies of security that entice the senses. Situating pink tasers as a security aesthetic connects to Alfred Gell’s theory of art and agency. Gell gives the example of an elaborately decorated Trobriand canoe in which the decoration appears impossibly intricate, serving to beguile, intrigue, and impress, enhancing the social and political power of the canoe and its creators.

Gell uses this example to develop his theory of technologies of enchantment. The enchanting power of art lies in the technical processes they embody. In turn, technical processes cast a spell over us, making the world appear enchanted (2006, 163). The pink taser exhibits this two-way technological enchantment as both an aesthetic and technical object, as captivation through pinkness and brightness and as an electrifying weapon.

Similarly to the design of the Trobriand canoe, pinkness enacts power. As an aesthetic, pink is potent and over-determined, saturated with normativity and intersecting power dynamics. It is the socially constructed colour of vulnerability, femininity, and cuteness. Pink is of the body, it allures and entices as ‘the pan-racial color of erotic orifices,’ (Yano, 2013, 34), sites of pleasure and pain, of birth and shame. Pink can also be ironic and seditious, operating as a defiant punk aesthetic that winks back (Yano, 2013) at sexual normativity and gender stereotyping. Similarly, cuteness evokes powerlessness or weakness but also a secondary sense of exploitation or manipulation (Ngai, 2012), and a feeling of being hood-winked. In this sense, pinkness mobilizes expectations of passivity and pliancy which can function as a means of subversive protection.

Such pinkness is enacted in diverse ways. For example, for Rosa, a young trans woman, visibly carrying her pink pepper spray on the street adds to her level of ‘passing’ and her sense of safety, due to the normative gendered association of pink as an aesthetic choice. For both Wes and Rosa, the pinkness of their safety gadgets subversively winks back, as what appears cute and pink and therefore, vulnerable, unthreatening, and unassuming, are in fact the very opposite, as potentially harmful weapons.

As the potential for violence is concealed, power dynamics become troubled, as categories like aggressor and aggressed increasingly blur. In this sense gender and sexuality are at once mediated and weaponized, performed and subverted, through safety gadgets as technologies of aesthetic security.

Dazzling weapons

Gell further describes art as weapons of psychological warfare which dazzle (2006). A historical example being the dazzling camouflage painted onto warships in WW1 to confound and beguile submarine periscopes, as waves crashed confusingly against the ship’s razzle dazzle designs. Similarly enchanting designs are now being employed by anti-surveillance artist-protestors to avoid facial recognition technology (Roderick, 2019 – 2021).

Image 3: Photograph of British Kil class patrol gunboat HMS Killour painted in dazzle camouflage. Photo by Oscar Parkes from the Imperial War Museum collections.

Dazzling pink and zapping, flashing tasers capture attention while simultaneously producing perplexity, as a technology of enchantment that captivates as both a psychological weapon and a weapon in potential. The visceral sounds and visuals further exude a vitality. It radiates what Jane Bennett describes as thing-power (2010) which demands attention, provoking both joy and fear through its presence. In this sense, materiality has the capacity to act and affect, to vibrantly exert power, and do things in the world across assemblages of entangled people, objects, relationalities, and modalities (Bennett, 2010). In the case of the pink taser, such vibrancy and vitality allure the senses, enacting a sense of well-being and safety for Wes while affecting other bodies in diverse manners, from shock or excitement to connection or attention.

The power of the potential

These vibrant and pink security aesthetics in turn also (de)construct and socially situate divergent bodies. Queered and gendered bodies vibrate between insecure and threat, as the visual wink of the pink plays on the supposition of vulnerability interrupted by crackles of potential violence.

The term potential is of significance here, as the location of such enchantment and vitality. The power and potency of the pink taser operates in its potential to harm, as Wes states above, he walks with his taser “ready to go” but he has never discharged it and stunned anyone in self-defence.

Rather, for Wes a feeling of improved well-being is achieved through just “walking and holding” his taser, as enchantment functions through (in)animation in the sense that the aesthetics and vitality of the taser simultaneously animates the object and instils the potential to inanimate and disarm others.

While operating in the potential, the taser is enacted in multiple ways; as a technology of enchantment but also as a means of sociality, as a vibrant accessory to present to and connect with others. The aesthetic potency of sound, colour, and brightness entices the senses across divergent relations; between Wes and the unknown other on the street, and between Wes and the other taser owner; but also between myself and Wes, as an ethnographic learning opportunity through my moment of shock, and as an encounter with self, as Wes exclaims “and its pink!” demonstrating his own enchantment.

Indeed, none of my interlocutors have ever discharged their safety gadgets functionally to disarm, stun, or stab. Unlike Wes, sometimes other safety gadgets remain unused at the bottom of their handbags. For example, Fernanda is a born and bred New Yorker who grew up on Staten Island. She is very safety conscious and attributes this to her upbringing in an immigrant family, where conversations surrounding personal safety were constant throughout her childhood. Fernanda owns an array of safety gadgets including a kubuton, which she describes as a “stabby stick” and is often relegated to the bottom of her bag.

As she explains, “walking with friends and everyone else is fine and you are there walking with this little shank in your hand, it’s weird, it’s uncomfortable for everyone.” Objects mediate social relations, and this includes expectations and normativity. Fernanda doesn’t feel comfortable having her kubuton out of her bag. In her hand, the kubuton runs contrary to the social norms of her friendship group and she worries that her modality of feeling (un)safe misaligns with those of her friends which could make them feel uncomfortable.

Another young woman, Marysol, is in her late twenties and moved to Brooklyn for her postgraduate studies. She owns two pink tasers and usually carries one with her whenever she is moving through the city. One day she witnesses a violent subway attack. When she tells me about the incident she concludes exclaiming, “the one day I don’t have my taser, I legit see someone get stabbed!”

Here her taser is noticeable in its absence, however, I am left thinking what would she have done if she had her taser with her as she normally does? Intervening and inserting herself in the situation with a taser has the potential to make herself and those around her more unsafe. Others shared my concerns, in particular worries about being disarmed, a lack of training, and the close combat that necessitates use of certain safety gadgets. Perhaps the comfort of things (Miller, 2008) is a comfort of the presence and potency of safety gadgets in the potential; of a stabby stick at the bottom of a handbag to avoid social discomfort and judgement, of the reassurance of just having one’s taser with them or carrying it flashing and zapping as a warning to potential or imagined attackers.

To conclude, safety gadgets like pink tasers demonstrate the entanglement of (in)security and the sensorial. From the attention-grabbing pinkness and brightness of a zapping taser that entices the senses to senses of well-being, comfort, and enchantment produced by carrying tasers on oneself while moving through the city. By operating in the potential, these gadgets infuse a sense of reassurance into their carriers while also securitizing imagined Others on the street who are sensed and situated as a potential threat.

Moving beyond care or control, protection or punishment, Wes’ pink taser exists at an intersection of security, sensoriality, and sociality. It is an object that invokes excitement, connection, and enchantment, but also attention, caution, and violence. The pink taser troubles which bodies are imagined as insecure and as threatening, by playing into tropes of queer sexuality, femininity, and vulnerability, intermixed with a fear of the Other, by a dazzling wink of the pink and a crackle and zap with the potential to electro-cute.

Alice McAlpine-Riddell is an anthropologist and early career researcher whose work focuses on practices and experiences of safety, security, and surveillance for gendered and queered bodies in urban spaces.

References

Bennett, J., (2010) Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things, London: Duke University Press.

Elbek, L. L. (2025) ‘Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells’, Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Ghertner, D. A., McFann, H. and Goldstein, D. M., (2020) ‘Introduction: Security Aesthetics of and beyond the Biopolitical’, Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life, New York, USA: Duke University Press.

Gell, A., (2006) The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, London School of Economics Monograph on Social Anthropology, E. Hirsch (eds). Oxford: Berg.

Miller, D. (2008) The Comfort of Things, London, UK: Polity Press.

Ngai, S., (2015) Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Roderick, E., (2019 – 2021), ‘The Dazzle Club, 2019 – 2021’, Emily Roderick (website) https://emilyroderick.com/work/the-dazzle-club/

Sisnowski, M., (2026), ‘Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services’, Focaalblog January 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/23/maja-sisnowski-gut-feeling-adrenaline-and-fried-onions-sensing-aggression-in-german-health-and-welfare-services/

Yano, C., (2013) Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Cite as: McAlpine-Riddell, A. 2026 “Zap, Dazzle and Pink! The Aesthetic and Vibrant Enchantment of Tasers” Focaalblog January 26. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/26/alice-mcalpine-riddell-zap-dazzle-and-pink-the-aesthetic-and-vibrant-enchantment-of-tasers/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Maja Sisnowski: Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services

Image 1: Bunk beds in shared accommodation. Photo by Luistxo

“I don’t know how to explain it”, Caro told me in an interview, “but you develop a sense [Gespür] for when you can keep standing in front of the person, because you know: Okay, they are going to shout at you for ten minutes, and then they have used the valve that they needed. And then there are situations where you feel: Okay, I better take a step back, because it might not stay like that.”

Caro was working in one of several emergency shelters in which I observed, participated in daily tasks, and interviewed staff members as part of an ethnographic study on de-escalation practices in German health and welfare services. De-escalation is a common answer in health and welfare facilities to the question of how staff should react to aggressive behavior in a professional setting. My research project asks how de-escalation is promoted as a workplace safety measure, how it is learned and taught in de-escalation training, and how it is practiced on the ground – specifically in overnight emergency shelters for unhoused people in Berlin.

A remarkable aspect of de-escalation, especially in the context of health and welfare settings, is that it approaches aggression at a conflux of care and security practices. Many of my interlocutors, staff members in shelters and de-escalation trainers alike, understood aggression in health and welfare contexts as both potentially dangerous and as a stress response in need of caring intervention. This understanding appears even in the minute sensitivities, such as the awareness of interpersonal space, that Caro brought to situations with palpable tension: she considered both the potential needs of the other person to express frustration and the risk of the argument turning physical. For Caro as for other staff members, sensing aggression in the shelter environment was an integral part of their job. At the same time, their daily work was not in fact defined as security work, but revolved around issues such as organizing food, clothing, and access to places to sleep. In this blog post, I trace how aggression is sensed in the shelters to show how the sensing of in/security is entangled with institutional care and welfare provision.

Security, following Laufenberg and Thompson (2022) and the long line of feminist, anti-racist and abolitionist thinkers they draw on, is a powerful and expansive formation of governance, deeply intertwined with capitalist modes of producing crisis and insecurity. A critical analysis of security asks what versions of security and safety are being produced, whose safety is prioritized, and who is constructed as a threat. Such questions are integral to studying how aggression is sensed and encountered, given the uneven attribution of aggression in conjunction with the production of gendered, racialized, classed and dis/abled difference (Longino 2013; Metzl 2011; Rollins 2021; Chen 2023). In the context of health and social welfare services, the production of difference in relation to aggression is also enmeshed with the apprehension and management of aggression in institutional spaces, especially those designated for particular populations, such as homeless people. Tracing how emergency shelter staff senses aggression can help articulate how aggression is present in institutional spaces, and how it is apprehended in caring and securitizing registers.

A Situated Sensorium for Aggression

The shelters in my research formed part of a perpetually precarious and semi-professional emergency service meant to protect people from cold-related harm at night. They were usually sought out by people who could not access housing and were excluded from or rendered precarious within Germany’s regular social support system. Winter emergency shelters require people to eat and sleep in shared, crowded and regulated spaces that are usually only open during the winter months and during the night. Responsible for enforcing the rules of shelter space, shelter staff were also tasked with keeping the space “free of violence”. This entailed intervening in case of conflict and asking people who were violent to leave the premises. In many shelters, this was done in cooperation with externally hired security staff. In this context, many staff members told me that they were attentive to loud voices to detect a potentially escalating situation. Susanne shared:

When I sit in the office for example, or also at night when I sleep there, then I always listen a lot to what is happening. So I hear when people are having a conversation, and I really pay attention to whether someone is raising their voice, and then I always have to wait whether that is part of the conversation, because someone is telling a story, or whether that is because a conflict is happening.

Aggression, in other words, was not simply heard, it was actively listened for. This active sensing was not practiced in isolation, but in a particular spatial arrangement and within an institutional context where staff could not be everywhere all at once yet bore responsibility to intervene when someone showed aggressive behavior. Sensing aggression, this example shows, is a matter of practice, to be distinguished from the idea of sensing as a passive perception of a given object which comes to the senses. While people in my research certainly had different sensitivities and attunements to aggression, there were commonalities as well, shaped by institutional roles– one could call it a situated sensorium. Notably, as with the sensitivity for raised voices, this sensing of aggression amidst everyday interactions such as a loud conversation also constituted a form of low-tech surveillance in the shelters.

Sensing Stress, Constituting Risk

A situated sensorium encompasses multiple sensitivities, for sounds, touch, embodied states, and institutional routines and atmospheres. Another staff member, when I asked if escalating situations could be sensed beforehand, explained:

Yes, when an argument blows up a bit, then you can hear from the kitchen that it’s somehow getting louder in the eating area, then yes. Of course adrenaline enters into it as well: “Oh God, I’ll go check what is going on there.”

As “adrenaline enters into it”, this staff member’s description introduces a sense of her own embodied response. The sensorial repertoire of sensing aggression in the shelter importantly included such interoceptive sensitivities. Adrenaline was one shorthand way of describing physical sensations of stress (Roberts 2024) to be sensed in oneself, but potentially also in others. Interestingly, adrenaline itself is given agency in this description, causing an impulse to go and check out what the noise is about. Several staff members explained how being aware of their own stress was important for them to be effective de-escalators, and de-escalation training would usually sensitize participants to the signs that they themselves were under stress.

But even more central to staff members was the stress of others. They often described having an awareness for people’s moods as well as for more general atmospheres. They sensed risks of aggression in long waiting times in cold weather, cramped spaces, interrupted sleep, and the small violences of what Goffman has aptly called “batch living” (Goffman 1961 [2022], 10) remarking that certain experiences would make them angry and impatient, too. This sensitivity, I would argue, renders aggression palpable as material-semiotically constituted risk in the institutional space of the shelters, not simply monitored and managed, but also related to vital needs such as sleep, warmth and dignity.

Dis/orienting Gut Feelings

Another register of interoceptive sensing within staff’s situated sensorium, and one I encountered frequently in my research, was gut feeling. Like adrenaline and stress, gut feeling presents as an internal sensation, metaphorically sitting in the pit of the stomach. Akin to the sense [Gespür] that Caro described, gut feeling and related notions were used by research participants to describe modes of knowing that, being grounded in experience and context, resisted articulation in general terms. In the realm of police work, the use of neurobiological discourse (Keesman 2022), as well as reliance on experiential knowledge (Abdul-Rahman et al. 2020, 34) has been critically analyzed as to how it can function as a refusal of articulation and accountability (see also Elbek 2025). In my research, where staff had markedly different mandates and powers, gut feeling served to denote a sense of being oriented and secure in one’s fast and intuitive assessments. In this vein, for example, several staff members explained that they would tell new colleagues to rely on and follow their gut feeling, especially to sense whether a situation was dangerous.

For me as a researcher, gut feeling became especially tangible when I noticed my own senses of in/security morph and shift throughout my research. This happened for example when I moved from a small shelter where I had previously worked to larger shelters with more security staff, or when I noticed myself grow impractically sensitive to the risk of aggression after participant observation in a great number of de-escalation training sessions. Having prior work experience in a shelter, these small disorientations made me aware of how much I did rely in practice on a well-working gut feeling, but they also gave me an embodied notion of how senses of in/security are grounded in specific social arrangements.

Entanglements of Care and Security

Importantly, within the context of the shelter environment, as well as in de-escalation training, I also came across registers of sensing in/security that were not oriented towards sensing danger. When I asked Britta about whether escalating situations announced themselves beforehand, our conversation turned to food:

When [people] know good food is coming, they are looking forward to it. But when it’s announced that there is rice…or couscous…! (Laughter). We are not friends anymore then. […] The first time in my life, I was homesick because I was on a trip and the food was bad […] One time, I was frying onions for dinner, really a lot of onions. And onions always smell so incredibly delicious. And then, [X] came in, and said: (sniffing the air) Home, sweet Home. Polska. Or something like it, he signaled that it smells like home […] And that’s a good feeling, because I think everyone knows this, some smells are just familiar and the smell of fried onions brings humanity together. (Laughter)

Throughout my research, I came not only across sensitivities towards danger and risk, but also encountered sensitivities to smells, tastes, or touch, that feel safe or give a sense of home, connection or pleasure. Including such sensitivities in a sensorium for in/security sheds light on entanglements of care and security while also opening possibilities of thinking security beyond efforts of securitization and surveillance. Laufenberg and Thompson describe how abolitionist and care-ethical criticisms of contemporary security regimes attempt to redefine security: “In this vein, not more carceral security – and hence more police, more punishment, more surveillance and more sealing of borders – is the appropriate answer to (social) insecurity, but more care – and thus more resonance, connection, and responsivity, more care, responsibility and solidarity.” (Laufenberg and Thompson 2022, 32, my translation).

What, against this backdrop, does it mean to grow sensitive to loud voices, to prize gut feeling, sense adrenaline, and smell the fried onions?

For one, attending to staff’s situated sensorium for aggression in the shelters highlights the ambivalences and confluences of care and security within the asymmetrical power relations of institutional encounters. It shows subtle ways in which policing and securitization is present in spaces of care or welfare provision. At the same time, I suggest, this sensorium can be read as reaching – without being able to transcend its institutional context – for ways of feeling safe beyond carceral security.

Maja Sisnowski is a PhD candidate with the Health, Care and the Body research group at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests move in the fields of feminist science and technology studies, critical disability studies, care and security.

References

Abdul-Rahman, Laila; Espín Grau, Hannah; Klaus, Luise and Tobias Singelnstein. 2020: Rassismus und Diskriminierungserfahrungen im Kontext polizeilicher Gewaltausübung. Zweiter Zwischenbericht zum Forschungsprojekt „Körperverletzung im Amt durch Poli-zeibeamt*innen“ (KviAPol). Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 11.11.2020, https://kviapol.rub.de.

Chen, Mel Y. 2023. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire. Anima: Critical Race Studies Otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478027447.

Elbek, Laust Lund. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and How The ‘Police Nose’ Smells.” FocaalBlog, December 24 https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Goffman, Erving. 1961 [2022]. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Books.

Keesman, Laura Danique. 2022. “Primordial Brains and Bodies: How Neurobiological Discourses Shape Policing Experiences.” Body & Society 28 (4): 80–105. doi:10.1177/1357034X221134440.

Laufenberg, Mike, and Vanessa Eileen Thompson, eds. 2022. Sicherheit: rassismuskritische und feministische Beiträge. 1. Auflage. Forum Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung, Band 49. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

Longino, Helen E. 2013. Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Metzl, Jonathan Michel. 2011. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston, Mass: Beacon.

Roberts, Celia. 2024. “Adrenaline.” In Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary, edited by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcom, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts, 15–23. Bloomsbury UK.

Rollins, Oliver. 2021. Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Sisnowski, M. 2025. “Gut Feeling, Adrenaline and Fried Onions: Sensing Aggression in German Health and Welfare Services” Focaalblog January 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/23/maja-sisnowski-gut-feeling-adrenaline-and-fried-onions-sensing-aggression-in-german-health-and-welfare-services/

Blog

Aaron Kappeler: On the Kidnapping of a President

Image 1: Photo shared by Donald Trump on social media of a handcuffed and blindfolded Nicolás Maduro aboard USS Iwo Jima.

Anyone who knows Venezuela knows that things happen fast there. It is a function of the hectic pace of urban life in a society that is highly subject to the play of global energy markets. It is also a feature of the nation’s position in the world system––one in which imperial powers are always ready to take advantage of Venezuela’s internal political battles in order to capture a share of its resources. In this light, it is hardly surprising that Venezuelan leaders often find themselves contesting those manoeuvres and that they can rise and fall just as quickly as the price of oil. Something akin to this recurrent dynamic has unfolded in Venezuela over the last six months as the United States has sought to pressure the Venezuelan government into submission with a large naval flotilla, the sinking of multiple small vessels, and now the kidnapping of the country’s head of state. Contrary to what some imagine, however, such a turn of events is in no way new or unprecedented. Just ask Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president of Haiti.

Venezuela is no stranger to gunboat diplomacy. In the early twentieth century, the combined naval forces of Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded the Venezuelan coastline for three months in retaliation for non-payment of debts stemming from the decline of the coffee economy (Roseberry 1985) and the internal political struggles surrounding the dictatorship of Cipriano Castro (Tinker-Salas 2009, McBeth 2001). This blockade was one of the events that led to the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the US could interfere in the affairs of Latin-American and Caribbean nations if the actions taken by any government “loosened the ties of civilized society.” Needless to say, “loosening the ties of civilization” is an extremely broad and loaded phrase. But the key point is that the doctrine now justified not only the expulsion of European powers making territorial claims in the Americas, but also active US intervention in the commercial activities and political disputes of fraternal republics. The “Donroe Doctrine,” as some are now calling it, adds very little to this original formula.

Many observers have correctly diagnosed Trump’s geopolitical strategy as one of US retrenchment in the Western Hemisphere. But most don’t understand its overriding logic. This strategic reorientation is frequently misread as an expression of isolationism or the “paleoconservatism” of the 1930s, which gave voice to anti-communism and latent sympathies for fascism. Others read this strategy as a slightly crude update of the otherwise-august statement by George Washington that the US should “avoid foreign entanglements.” I don’t believe either of these appraisals is entirely correct. The purpose of this retrenchment is to improve the economic and military position of the US, the better to make war on the rest of the world, not to sit quietly on the other side of the Atlantic. In recent decades, the US has been outflanked by China and Russia in multiple world regions, and its investors are slowly being pushed out of Africa, the Gulf States, and of course, parts of Latin America.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are now trading oil in yuan; Russian and Chinese firms have invested heavily in Venezuela’s petroleum sector, and Russia’s shadow fleet has helped to deliver Venezuelan oil to markets across Asia. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, continues to lay down blacktop on four continents. These developments, combined with Russia drawing closer to Iran in the context of the war in Ukraine, are all unacceptable to US capital and its military planners. Venezuela sits at the crossroad of all these dynamics, making the Bolivarian Republic a key node in a global network that seriously threatens the US empire. Republican strategists thus hope to draw a defensible line or “trench” around the Western Hemisphere from which to relaunch the struggle for global supremacy. The Trumpists and the neoconservatives are of one mind on this.

Some commentators have suggested that with oil hovering around 60 dollars a barrel there isn’t much incentive for US-led transnationals to invest in Venezuela. Indeed, the CEO of ExxonMobil has complained that Venezuela is “uninvestible” without a rewriting of its hydrocarbon laws. There’s some truth to these reports, but the sceptics may be missing the bigger picture. Venezuelan oil has historically played an important role in preserving the US empire outside the Americas, and prices won’t stay the same forever. Remember, things move quickly. Hemispheric oil is essential to securing US energy supplies and the capacity to offset any price increases following renewed or long-term conflict in the Middle East. In truth, this is an old playbook. In the 1980s, with the OPEC crisis still fresh in his mind, George H.W. Bush made an informal agreement with the Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez, which stated that in the event of war or another embargo in the Middle East, Venezuela would open the oil spigot and turn it on full blast to offset any price spikes or supply problems (Mitchell 2011). This quiet agreement, which was in fact implemented during the First Iraq War, was torn up when Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. Instead, Chávez worked tirelessly to revive OPEC and to forge linkages with the Arab states and Iran, as part of his push for greater returns on Venezuela’s natural resources.

In the event of a wider war in the Middle East, Iran can block the Strait of Hormuz and prevent around a quarter of the world’s oil from leaving the Persian Gulf. If the US wants to topple the Iranian government, or carry out protracted campaigns against its other enemies, control over Venezuela’s oil is a must. Maduro had to go. Trump has already said that he expects Venezuela to deliver between 30-50 million barrels of oil from its crude reserves to the US, and he has been fairly transparent about his objectives beyond Venezuela. In the press conference after the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, journalists asked if the US would cut off Venezuelan oil to Cuba. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was evasive and offered a vague response. But Trump’s answer was an unequivocal, “Yes.” Trump hopes to overturn the Bolivarian Revolution to increase pressure on Cuba and to strengthen his hand in negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. Trump is also waving the big stick at Colombia and Mexico since their presidents dared to question Washington’s dictates. Yet, however much we should despise Trump and Rubio, a share of the blame for this dark turn of events also belongs to Nicolás Maduro himself.

Authoritarianism is not an analysis

It’s extremely difficult to provide a comprehensive analysis of a political process as complex as the Bolivarian Revolution, and it is impossible to give a detailed explanation of all the events that have led up to where we are now. But even a few snapshots from Venezuela’s recent history can reveal the deficiencies in the standard accounts. One diagnosis commonly heard on the left today is that there was “too much centralisation of power” in Venezuela and that the economy was “state-centric”––the magic recipe for disqualifying the Bolivarian Revolution as “authoritarian.” I not only think this analysis is wrong, frankly, I think it’s lazy. Even Stuart Hall (1985) came to qualify his use of the term “authoritarian populism,” saying it could never provide a general explanation of Thatcherism, only the forms of its hegemonic politics. I’m not even sure it can do that in Venezuela.

“Authoritarianism” has become a liberal swearword, used to signify forms of power or government that one finds distasteful. I also consider it tacitly consistent with neoliberal ideology––the sort of “State bad, non-state good” analysis one used to get from the now-confirmed CIA agent, Jim Scott (1998). In most cases, critiques of statism or authoritarian populism in Venezuela are rhetorical moves, based on schematic moral oppositions, not empirical investigation. Such analyses tell us very little, for example, about the labour relations or productive processes in state industries or how Venezuela’s public-sector functioned––or didn’t as the case may be. They also tell us next to nothing about who was calling the shots. What classes or interest groups were in charge in particular spaces and moments? What types of institutions were they trying to build? What types of political consciousness or participation did decision-makers and grassroots activists seek to promote? Those critiques which avoid all these essential questions must be dismissed out of hand. It is also a myth that Venezuelan socialism ever closely resembled the political economy of the Soviet Union.

Based on my experience of working in multiple state enterprises in the 2010s, I arrived at the opposite conclusion: Venezuela’s economy looked more like France in the 1930s, in the days of the Popular Front, than Stalin’s Russia (cf. Smilde 2011). The energy sector, transportation infrastructure, and some of the heavy industries and banks were in the hands of the state. There were also significant welfare programs to protect the poor, along with an ambitious housing construction program (which mostly created individually titled units). Some inroads were also made against landed property. But there was no meaningful central planning of the home market. Venezuela’s socialist economy failed in part because it was decentralized. Decisions made in state enterprises were frequently based on the highest return for the individual farm or factory, not a coherent division of labor or national allocation (Kappeler 2025). In many cases, this decentralization not only resulted in duplication of services or unnecessary competition, but also in state enterprises forging commercial relationships with private capitalists. This hardly helped to reduce Venezuela’s oil dependency or reshape the rentier state (Coronil 1997).

Lack of clarity on these basic questions ultimately made the country vulnerable to imperial predations when oil prices dropped. After Chávez’s death, Maduro presided over the conservatization of a stalled revolutionary process. In turn, Maduro’s government attacked striking workers, backpedalled on land reform, and cut backroom deals with the political opposition. The herds of cattle in my main fieldsite were literally carted off by the military, and the farm’s leadership positions were given to members of the opposition to silence them. When I visited Venezuela in 2016, I had to watch friends weep bitter tears over the stripping of their enterprise. By that time, millions of Venezuelans had already left the country or grown tired of hearing Maduro’s pious words about “the great socialist patria.” The Bolivarian Revolution has been dead man walking for at least ten or twelve years now, and Maduro gave the US the opportunity it needed.

The moves inside Venezuela, required to enforce Trump’s new policies, are obviously very complex and hard to interpret by anyone outside of the ruling circles. Will the US try to force elections to get rid of the Interim President, Delcy Rodríguez? Or will they select another figurehead, like Edmundo González, and try a coronation? Will the Venezuelan military step in and impose its own conception of order? It is hard to say. Many Venezuelans and international observers thought María Corina Machado was the heir apparent after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (see Striffler 2025). However, in some ways, Machado stuck her neck out too far in advocating neoliberal policies. She is on record calling for the privatization of all Venezuela’s state enterprises, including PDVSA, the state oil company. This is a non-starter for most Venezuelans, and I dare say for the military as well. If the cash-cow of the state oil company is cut up, the military will lose many of its privileges. Machado is also one of the most vociferous and reactionary anti-communists, and Venezuela’s political leaders, military officers, and rank-and-file Chavistas must know that there could be reprisals if she gains office. They would likely have no other choice but to fight her, and it could, in fact, start a civil war. For this reason, Trump seems to have dismissed Machado as a transition leader––although if she gives Trump her Nobel Prize medal, he may change his mind.

Where to from here?

The question that now concerns most is the nature of any deal between the US and the Venezuelan military, which remains the real power behind the throne. Was there a quid pro quo involved in Maduro’s removal, and if so, what was it? Rumours are circulating that Venezuela’s military allowed Maduro’s capture and that its units could have fired Russian and Chinese-made antiaircraft weapons at the helicopters flying over Caracas. But the guns were silent. The fact that these weapons were fired a few days ago is an indication of that possibility and a potential signal that the US only gets one “freebie,” i.e. it should not push matters further. If the US actually tries to deepen the coup or threaten the military’s position, the brass might respond. Again, this is only a hypothesis, and I have no way of knowing the specific terms of any deal. But my suspicion is that any future consensus surely includes the severing of Venezuela’s energy-market ties to all of the US’s foes, along with a promise to end any real participation in OPEC. The reestablishment of diplomatic ties with the US points in that direction. Such a deal also likely prohibits oil exports to China––and perhaps India––as well as energy collaborations with Russia and Iran. It is worth repeating that Maduro bears more than a little responsibility for this outcome and having let himself be captured in Caracas. Hugo Chávez always said that if faced with a US invasion, Venezuela’s forces would retreat to the interior of the country to fight a guerilla war. Maduro clearly wasn’t listening.

The situation in Venezuela today remains highly unstable, and many average people are afraid to leave their houses. While there have been pro-government demonstrations in cities and towns across the country, these have generally not been as large as in previous years, and they are certainly nothing like the mass mobilizations that helped to defeat the US-backed coup against Chávez in 2002. The colectivos, or pro-Chavista militias, are prepared to suppress Venezuela’s opposition to ensure PSUV control. But how secure can the PSUV leadership really feel? Probably not very. Delcy Rodríguez’s father was murdered by the state-security services during the Fourth Republic (1953-1999), and she must be aware of the tenuous nature of her position and that of her brother, who is the current head of Venezuela’s National Assembly. Between the hammer of Trump and the anvil of Venezuela’s military, the PSUV officialdom could find itself crushed, and it doesn’t have much economic breathing space either.

Hugo Chávez wisely tried to forge ties with countries that had their own frictions with US imperialism. But like so many other decisions in the Bolivarian Revolution, these temporary alliances or stopgap measures were mistaken for something more permanent or lasting. The terms upon which China is willing to oppose US interests in Latin America, for example, have always been relatively limited. It is important to note that China did not even recall its diplomatic staff from Washington in reaction to Maduro’s kidnapping. The Chinese government lodged some protests with the Trump administration, but they didn’t expel the US Ambassador. That’s the minimum they could have done in response to military action of this sort. It’s also important to understand the two-sided nature of China’s stance towards Venezuela. For its own reasons, the Chinese bureaucracy has seen fit to invest in the country, chiefly to secure access to raw materials and markets for its industrial products. Venezuela has equally benefited from this relationship, and it is my view that neither Maduro nor Chávez would have survived as long as they did without Russian or Chinese help. Anyone who tells you that Venezuela had a choice other than seeking terms with these powers is living in a dream world. But the reality is that China is not going to stick its neck out too far for Venezuela––just as Russia didn’t stick its neck out too far for Assad in Syria.

Superficial ideological similarities aside, the CCP leadership quickly became impatient with Maduro and Venezuela’s non-payment of loans. At one point, China cut off Venezuela’s credit line. So, it’s crucial to understand the limits of this financial and diplomatic relationship. As a matter of fact, I don’t preclude the possibility that China will attempt to sign deals with any Venezuelan government––whether civilian or military––that succeeds Maduro, Rodríguez, or other PSUV leaders like Diosdado Cabello. Beijing’s potentates care more about Venezuela’s oil and creditworthiness than they care about its socialism. This brings me to one last point.

In the final analysis, Venezuela only has the strength of its working people and the international solidarity movement to defend its sovereignty and democracy. Venezuelans have paid a very high price for showing the rest of the world that it was possible to resist the Washington Consensus. In my opinion, anyone who calls themselves a socialist––or even a consistent democrat––owes Venezuela a tremendous debt of gratitude. Sadly, sectors of the left academy have failed in their duty to oppose the overthrow of yet another Latin-American government by the US, and they have mindlessly repeated the new Pentagon-speak of “authoritarianism” to dismiss any leadership the US finds inconvenient. As I have written elsewhere (Kappeler 2024), the defects of Venezuela’s political leaders do not justify US intervention, and any excuse for the kidnapping of Maduro amounts to collaboration with imperial violence. The threat that Venezuela posed to the US was never great in material terms, but one should not underestimate the power of example. The Bolivarian Revolution showed the peoples of Latin America that Thatcher’s dictum of “no alternative” was a lie the moment it was uttered. There were alternatives, and the US is busy trying to kill what’s left of one right now.

Aaron Kappeler is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on agrarian reform, natural resource politics, energy, and environmental struggles in Latin America. He has carried out fieldwork in state enterprises and cooperatives across Venezuela. His latest project explores indigenous land tenure and the redistribution of extractive rents. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and Instructor at the University of Toronto.

References

Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1985. Authoritarian Populism: A Reply. New Left Review. 151(1): 115-124.

Kappeler, Aaron. 2025. “Towards Neo-Structural Socialism? Social Profit and Dependency in Venezuelan State Enterprises,” Economy and Society. 54(3): 457-479.

–––––2024. Tropical Leninism or the Eighteenth Brumaire of Nicolás Maduro? Dialectical Anthropology. 48(4): 459-474,2024.

McBeth, Brian. 2001. Gunboats, Corruption and Claims: Foreign Intervention in Venezuela, 1899-1908. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Roseberry, William. 1985. Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Smilde, David. 2011. Socialism and Neoliberalism in Chávez’s Venezuela. Contexts. 10(4): 70-72.

Striffler, Steve. 2025. How Trump got his Nobel Peace Prize after all. Al Jazeera. October 16th. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/10/16/how-trump-got-his-nobel-peace-prize-after-all

Tinker-Salas, Miguel. 2009. The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Durham: Duke University Press.

Cite as: Kappeler, A. 2025. “On the Kidnapping of a President” Focaalblog January 12. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/01/12/aaron-kappeler-on-the-kidnapping-of-a-president/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Laust Lund Elbek: Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells

Image 1: Police officer in residential area. Photo by Rigspolitiet

Suspicion appears to sit largely in the nose: we might say that something ‘stinks,’ ‘smells off,’ that we ‘smell a rat,’ or perhaps ‘something fishy.’ Such suspicious smells may, in turn, compel us to ‘sniff out trouble’—at least until we ‘lose the scent.’

While these metaphors can seem curious or quirky at first sight, they do map onto two domains of meaning directly related to suspicion: universal perceptions of danger (decay or spoiled food) and images of searching and tracking (a dog on a trail). The association between the sense of smell and suspicion is further reflected in the olfactory system’s function as a bodily warning system triggered by smoke, bad food, leaking gas, and so on (Ramšak 2024).

It is from this general metaphorical terrain of olfactory suspicion that I take my cue. Based on fieldwork with Danish police officers, I reflect on what is colloquially known as the police nose (“politinæse”)—a ubiquitous term in Danish police lingo that refers to officers’ ostensible unique ability to “catch a whiff” of something suspicious on their beats.

I suggest that while the police nose can be understood as a particular kind of ‘craft’ rooted in accumulated sensory experience, it also connects to wider public and scholarly debates regarding the dilemmas of the police’s discretionary powers. To anchor these thoughts,I begin with a brief ethnographic trip to Hill Park, a marginalized housing project in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to take a closer look at one specific police nose in practice.

‘The Nose’ In Action

In the early spring of 2024, I joined Detective Jensen, a calm and friendly man in his early forties, on a routine patrol around the estate. Around 10 am, the skies on the fringes of the city were as grey as the concrete blocks themselves. The estate, which is home to roughly 5,000 residents, most of whom come from immigrant and/or working-class backgrounds, had not quite awoken from its winter slumber yet.

As we rolled slowly past a kindergarten, Jensen smoothly brought the patrol car to a halt. “What’s that over there?” he said, narrowing his eyes. He had spotted an inconspicuous, grey car parked partly out of sight behind a shrubbery. “It’s just, you know, why is it parked there?” he asked, staring firmly in the direction of the vehicle. He motioned for me to follow him as he opened the door, got out, and walked toward the grey car. When I caught up, he explained: “After a while, you develop a police nose, you know, a kind of sixth sense. When you’ve pulled over so many cars or seen them parked in funny places, it triggers your attention. Why is it parked here? Has it been deliberately hidden? Has it been stolen? What’s up with it?” “Have you seen that car before?” I asked. “No,” Jensen said, walking around the car and reaching for a door handle to check if it had been left unlocked. “I haven’t seen it before, and we know the area well. So, I’m just having a look around now, you know—checking what’s on the ground, what’s on the floor, is it unlocked, does it have something to do with some of the familiar kids from the estate, yes, no…”

Jensen reached for his phone to scan the car’s license plate. “I’m just checking who owns the car,” he explained. “And then I’ll check what we know about that person. It’s 10 o’clock now, right? Is it someone who lives in the area, or someone who comes from the outside? That’s the sort of thing I want to know. Right now, things look peaceful enough, sure. But we always take a look around.”

He took another inspection round and then got down on one knee to have a look underneath the car. “What do we have here? Is that an unpaid parking ticket? And this right here definitely looks like a mixing tray of some kind,” he said in a slightly triumphant tone. Pointing to the shrubbery surrounding the car, he said, “If it had been dark out, this place would have been completely out of sight, right?”

The ‘Police Nose’ as Embodied Skill

Jensen’s discovery of drug paraphernalia in Hill Park was itself an unspectacular event, yet his explanation of the process behind it—that he had followed his police nose—opens an ethnographic window onto the importance of sensory inference and the ability to detect subtle environmental cues in everyday policing.

Indeed, the notion of the ‘police nose’ is no idiosyncrasy of Jensen’s, but a familiar phenomenon among Danish police officers that has also been noted by other ethnographers (e.g. Sausdal 2018). Police representatives themselves also assert that “everyone in the Danish police knows what the police nose is.” In the British context, a direct parallel exists in the form of the copper’s nose, which refers to officers’ allegedly unique ability “to sense when something doesn’t feel right” (Quin 2025, 11–12). Related sensory idioms of police officers acting on gut feelings or a ‘sixth sense’ (a term that Jensen also used) abound across the world.

Now, because of its vague and arguably somewhat self-elevating character, one could be tempted to dismiss talk of a unique ‘police nose’ as mere occupational folklore and mystique. I suggest, however, that it also points to a rather less arcane skill; namely, a developed capacity for decoding environments in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. As Jensen put it, the police nose materialises once “you’ve pulled over so many cars, or seen them parked in funny places”—an observation that also implicitly invokes the well-known ability of smells to awaken past experiences(Ramšak 2024). And certainly, to an outside observer such as myself, the car parked in Hill Park would, if registered at all, probably index “someone left their car here.” But to Detective Jensen, it also indexed the possibility that “someone tried to hide their vehicle—let’s investigate.”

From this perspective, the idea of the police nose (like its various cognates) invokes what Tim Ingold has referred to as a process of enskilment, which denotes the gradual and practical “embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents” (2002, 5). Not at all unlike the Arctic hunters that originally inspired Ingold’s concept—hunters whose “perceptual system […] is attuned to picking up information, critical to the practical conduct of [their] hunting, to which the unskilled observer simply fails to attend” (Ingold 2002, 55)—Jensen and his colleagues gradually learn to sense subtle cues in their surroundings that may, or may not, refer to something of police interest. The police nose, from this perspective, could be understood not as a mysterious ability magically conferred by the badge or uniform, but as an occupational shorthand for an ‘enskilled’semiotic process of quickly scanning the environment for signs.

Pride and Prejudice?

The police nose, however, is more than just a skill; it is also a source of professional pride and identity. As Jensen’s remarks on its development also seemed to suggest, ‘having a nose’ for detecting trouble is closely tied to understandings of what it means to be a good officer. From this perspective, the semantic link between ‘smelling’ and ‘suspicion’ speaks not only to a generalized imagery of danger and detection, but also to a vocational ideology among police officers that values intuition, fine-tuned senses, and personal experience. Yet, the reading and interpretation of signs and cues in one’s surroundings—arguably the key ‘task’ of the police nose—is never a neutral endeavour but is always-already embedded in social-political contexts (Eco 1979). To illustrate this, let us briefly return to Hill Park and the car half-concealed by a shrubbery.

As Jensen finished his inspection of the vehicle and its surroundings, we got back into the police car, and he continued his reflections: “It’s broad daylight now, of course. And early in the morning. So, the person in question may be asleep, or perhaps at work or something.” “It’s not that early, though, is it?” I said (it was approaching 11 am by now). “Yes, yes, to some it is, it depends on who you ask. To you and me, it’s not very early, of course,” Jensen replied. “But to some of the citizens we encounter often, 11 o’clock is very, very early. These are people we typically only see after 3 pm. If they don’t have anything to do—no school, work, or education—then we see them in the streets at 3, and then they’re probably awake until, I don’t know, 1, 2, or 3 am, no matter what day it is.”

Jensen’s remarks reveal an acute awareness of the temporal and social rhythms of the neighbourhood, which is part of his regular beat, as well as of those well-known residents he deems to be of immediate ‘interest.’ And while it is precisely such contextual familiarity that renders the police nose useful in practice, it also follows that its inferences are often situated in a social field shaped by unequal relations of power. Put somewhat bluntly, to most police officers, a car parked in an affluent neighbourhood would be unlikely to index the same thing as it would in Hill Park. And so, regardless of its accuracy in specific situations, the ‘police nose’ thus also speaks to long-standing debates concerning the classed nature of suspicion and its broader implications regarding the trade-offs between discretion and accountability in policing.

I should interject here that this is not to suggest that Detective Jensen or any of his colleagues operate on prejudice—I have no indication to that effect whatsoever. My intention here is simply to leverage Jensen’s reflections to illustrate how what the police nose ‘smells’ is inevitably embedded both within broader structures of meaning and power as well as individual officers’ accumulated sensory experiences.

This tension has not gone unnoticed in Danish public debate, either. During the 2011 Roskilde Festival, for example, police requested that 25 Romani individuals identify themselves, and when questioned critically by a newspaper journalist, the on-duty officer explained: “It is our police nose that compels us to check up on the Roma bunch.” The reportage does not mention whether officers managed to ‘sniff out’ any illegal behaviour, but it stands to reason that few ethnic stereotypes are more tenacious than the one linking ‘Gypsies’ to petty crime and delinquency.

Eleven years later, Amnesty International explicitly flagged the possible association between the ‘police nose’ and the phenomenon of ‘ethnic profiling’ in Danish cities (Amnesty International Denmark 2022), following a publication documenting that “the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 27% higher for immigrants than people of Danish origin. For descendants of immigrants, the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 45% higher than it is for people of Danish origin” (Søndergaard and Hussein 2022, 3). The publication also led to this potential ‘dark side’ of the police nose being discussed by national politicians and police chiefs at the high-profile political festival on the island of Bornholm.

The smell of (ir)rational bureaucracy?

References to a ‘police nose’—or what is variously referred to in other contexts as a “sixth sense,” “gut feelings,” “hunches,” or even “intuition”—circulate among police officers as a shorthand for an almost instinctive ability to read and respond to subtle environmental cues in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. The olfactory character of the metaphor, in turn, does not appear semantically incidental, as it evokes suspicion, vigilance, and an intuitive mode of noticing that something is ‘off’ before it is consciously articulated as such. This contrasts with visual and auditory metaphors, which often seem to signal rational processes—“I see” can mean “I understand,” for example—and resonates with the idea that “the sense of smell has fewer and less deep metaphorical connections with the mental domain” (Sweetser 1990, 43). The ‘police nose,’ indeed, seems to denote a pre-reflective rather than purely rationalistic mode of knowing and engaging with the world.

On the one hand, the ability to act on a fleeting je-ne-sais-quoi is a crucial part of the craft of everyday policing and is a skill that officers hone in practice as they immerse themselves in the rhythms, histories, and social makeup of their daily beats. On the other hand, the police nose is clearly not a neutral bureaucratic instrument, but rather a visceral pattern recognition tool that operates within structures of power and experience that co-condition what counts as ‘suspicious’ in the first place. As public and scholarly debate has highlighted, references to a police nose may thus run the risk of concealing implicit bias in discretionary policing behind a linguistic veil of vaguely defined expertise.

The police nose thus presents itself as a double-edged sword. As a professional ideal and sensory skill, it highlights the real importance of officers’ heightened situational awareness and responsiveness. At the same time, some contexts may be automatically assumed to “smell” more than others—and what smells, and to whom, is to a considerable extent shaped by a politics of inequality. And while no obvious silver bullet is available for resolving this tension, it remains something to be mindful of, as even the sharpest nose may lead us down a path that does not quite pass the sniff test.

Laust Lund Elbek is assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of social anthropology and political science, with a focus on state-citizen relations in highly securitized contexts.

References

Amnesty International Denmark. 2022. ”Det er jo en offentlig gabestok, og jeg ved godt, hvad Hr. og Fru Jensen, der kører forbi, tænker”. Copenhagen.

Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2002. The perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

Quin, Emily. 2025. ‘The Copper’s Nose’: A Grounded Theory of a Policing Phenomenon, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.

Ramšak, Mojca. 2024. The Anthropology of Smell. New York: Springer.

Sausdal, David. 2018. Everyday Deficiencies of Police Surveillance: A Quotidian Approach to Surveillance Studies. Policing and Society 30(4):462-478.

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and CulturalAspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Søndergaard, Jeppe Kirkelund, and Tarek Hussein. 2022. Etnisk Profilering: Hovedresultater fra tre undersøgelser. Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Cite as: Elbek, L. L. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Susana Durão and Tilmann Heil: Care, Cordiality, and Control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil

Image 1: Gated community ‘Vila Inglesa’ in São Paolo. Photo by Cornelius Kibelka

In urban Brazil, portarias–entry halls and porters lodges–and their staff absorb the circulation of people and goods as they pass between the streets and domestic spaces. In Rio de Janeiro’s and São Paulo’s middle-class neighbourhoods, the relative calm at the portaria turns into a hustle and bustle at certain times of the day. In a block of small apartments, the rhythm of movement picks up in the evenings, when domestic and maintenance workers leave the premises, residents return home from work to pick up their orders and mail, and deliveries from restaurants, shops, and pharmacies arrive in ever shorter intervals.

Doormen strike a delicate and demanding balance of control, cordiality, and care, attending to the routine coming and going as well as to specially tailored requests. For example, although building regulations often demand the residents to pick up their own orders, in many buildings, porters patiently pass on the codes to the delivery boys, carefully guard the goods until pick up, or even dispatch them in the elevator to the recipient. It is only late in the evening when the sensorial overload in the interstitial zone of the portaria dies down. Later at night, nothing remains but the quiet perseverance of the night porters who, struggling with their fatigue, attend to people returning home late and night time visitors, who arrive in the dark and leave before dawn.

In cities where private security workers like doormen and their equipment are part of the ordinary (White and Diphoorn 2024; Durão 2023), the doormen’s accounts of the world they inhabit disclose the density of the socio-techno-material relations in portarias. Often derived from brief and localized tasks and encounters, the sensory density builds up over time and enriches the socio-techno-material mediations of urban inequality (Heil et al. 2025).

As Northeastern migrants in the country’s richer Southeast, racialized men and women most often constitute the staff at portarias. Their stories unravel the material and sensorial making of more-than-security in the urban. Shaped by the interplay of care, cordiality, and control, we ask how more-than-security is constitutive of the social, racial, gender, and material hierarchies that grow out of colonial and neoliberal logics. We argue that the socio-material worlds of porters as well as their embodied and multisensorial engagements with this world reveal a subaltern archive of the making of (in)security in contemporary urban Brazil. While the infrastructure of portarias materially provides for the provision of hospitality and security, the multisensorial and embodied practice of porters foregrounds the intricate entanglements of care, cordiality, and control in these transit spaces and the interactions with the people who pass.

By engaging in dialogue with those who breathe life into portarias, we account for the subaltern registers of the urban that, according to Ananya Roy (2011), describe significant features of contemporary dynamics, which urban theory has been unable or unwilling to account for. We draw from our continuous long-term fieldwork on private security in São Paulo (Durão) and on social hierarchization and difference in Rio de Janeiro (Heil), starting in the 2010s. Attending to the logics of control, cordiality, and care in portarias in urban Brazil, anthropology can learn about the everyday layering of neoliberal and colonial logics as well as the material, sensory and embodied experiences that reproduce and reconfigure the social, racial, and gendered hierarchies at stake at the threshold from public to private.

To (not) care

At first glance, the infrastructure of portarias facilitates both hospitality and security. Providing for hospitality, it taps into a hotel aesthetic with shiny receptions and uniformed staff who greet hosts and guests, manage registration devices, and announce someone’s arrival. In contrast, special security devices disrupt the smooth material surface of hospitality. For example, double gates, fencing, and turnstiles interrupt the circuit of people and things, performing the securitization of buildings, their inhabitants, and their assets.

Workers who attend to the coming and going of people, services, and things are always (expected to be) already present at the entrance (Durão 2023). This holds for nearly any residential arrangement in urban Brazil, from social housing to the utmost luxury homes. While there are contemporary discussions about a complete virtualization of control in such spaces, especially among the middle class, such systems of remote doormen are far from comprehensive implementation. At best, more elaborate gadgets–from responders to biometric recognition and outsourced security cameras that are part of networked digital vigilance across the whole city–are added to existing security assemblages that porters are a part of. Porters themselves reproduce the discourse of those residents who believe that it is them–the cordial and caring staff –who are needed for it to feel right when arriving back home. As one doorman said: “Nothing compares to our presence at the front desk; no technology of a remote gatehouse takes care of the residents or the building itself when there is a problem” (emphasis added).

Image 2: Portaria of a vertical condominium. Photo by Tilmann Heil

A middle-aged man from the country’s Northeast, Junior, served the afternoon-evening shift at the portaria of a middle-class condominium in Rio de Janeiro’s privileged southern zone with some 100 small apartments. Every night, he was feeling exhausted from the swell of deliveries that arrived with vain motor boys. Their behaviour could be intimidating or simply unnerved but, for Junior, it did not amount to being offensive. Most of the time, Junior was light-hearted at work and cultivated decent relations with residents and everybody else who stopped by. Not only did he receive and dispatch deliveries for the recipients, but he also compensated for regular technological glitches and badly designed spatial setups to best attend to the inhabitants’ needs and sensibilities. Normally up for a joke to cheer people up, Junior also knew well when a calmer and more careful approach was appropriate or in his best interest. Like Junior, many doormen were convinced that attuning to the cordial routines of the coming and going was more important than technology. This also held true when they swiftly attended to the expectation of informal care and when unknown people and behaviour demanded vigilance and control.

Delivery boys were a case in point. To Junior, they were a security risk who, protected with helmets, could carry out a quick raid in the building. The owners’ assembly had debated whether to keep motor boys out of the building by making it mandatory for residents to receive their orders at the gate. However, the residents decided against it, letting convenience overrule the emergent sense of insecurity. Junior had adapted to the decision but in private left no doubt on his part: he would not risk his life for the residents in the event of an armed burglary. Keeping his views to himself, he avoided any unnecessary stress by maintaining a sense of cordial care.

While Junior was ready to frequently go out of his way, he could become irritable and upset when residents and visitors imposed their desire to have him serve them instead of doing his job. Having to wait in the rain for a moment while Junior attended to another immediate demand, Ligia, a resident, lashed out that the building’s standards left much to be desired. Why had Junior not rushed to the gate with an umbrella to protect her? Junior had jokingly asked where she had seen such service performed by an average doorman. He still found the expectation absurd and a breach of both common sense and respect for him and his work. For Junior, Ligia was among the two or three “crazy” residents with anachronistic expectations who seemed to be a rule of any apartment building. All that remained between Ligia and Junior were minimally cordial greetings.

While Junior was still directly employed by the building, Julia worked as an outsourced access controller (controladora de acesso) in a gated community of some 330 residents in São Paulo. Having moved to São Paulo as a young married woman, she had followed her sister-in-law’s advice and started to work at a portaria. She had timidly adopted the protocols and routines of politeness and control from her co-workers. She struggled with the feeling of being permanently compared with her sister-in-law who worked alternating shifts, was already known, and had more experience on the job.

If someone unknown arrived, Julia greeted and, in painstaking fashion, requested all key information – destination, purpose, full name, ID, previous visits. After completing a facial registration and announcing the visitor, she provided them with the information on how to leave later. While everything had been going well, Julia felt increasingly exposed to blackmail from one of the residents. The resident claimed to be dissatisfied with Julia’s lack of friendliness and her apparent inability or unwillingness to show more affection and attention whenever he entered or left the condominium. Julia felt she was being accused of failing to be welcoming, something she highly valued in her interactions with residents.

Increasingly under pressure, Julia began to fall ill, gain weight, and suffer from nervous breakdowns. The day she missed work to see a psychiatrist, without prior notice, she was fired “for just cause” by her service company. After the fact, she realized that her dismissal was due to the same resident, for whom Julia had never felt right. He had asked the condominium manager to make her redundant, which the service company used to end her contract with them. Julia assessed the work at portarias as follows: “Outsourcing is a cruel world because everyone considers themselves our bosses: the employer, the supervisors, the building manager, the caretaker, the residents, and even their children.” While she had initially found the role of providing hospitality as part of access control agreeable, she had come to develop a strong dislike of the system that had effectively rendered her a disposable resource.

Image 3: Portaria of a horizontal condominium. Photo by Susana Durão

A good-looking young black man, Zé was a janitor acting as a doorman in an upper middle-class building in Rio de Janeiro’s southern zone. During conversations, Zé had shared numerous stories of doing residents a favour as well as working extra hours and additional shifts. During a shift as a porter, a son of a resident ordered Zé to look after some belongings he had temporarily placed on the sidewalk for pickup. While generally feeling inclined to go out of his way, Zé had disliked the way the request had been posed, eventually halted the task, and returned to his actual duties. Zé was aware that his refusal to outperform for an ill-tempered son of an owner might get him into trouble. And so it happened. When the son returned, he verbally attacked Zé and almost physically assaulted him. This entire experience conflicted with Zé’s love for looking after the building and its inhabitants in the best way possible.

Yet, to care had to feel right. Young, gay and black, Zé had no illusions about the place in society to which the son had tried to forcefully assign him: racialized servitude, that is, a colonial fantasy of hierarchy prevalent among Brazilian middle-classes and elites. The portaria was one of the spaces in which they could try to subordinate people to feel authority, guarded and cared for. Those for whom Zé went out of his way at least maintained an appearance of basic respect and appreciation for the care he gave.

On the day, Zé sought the resident warden to relay his view of the incident. Rather than the lack of what Zé would normally judge to feel right based on a demonstration of respect and appreciation, he foregrounded the risk of physical violence after rejecting to deviate from his contractual tasks, namely, to deliver security-hospitality in the premises of the building. It clearly transpired that Zé knew his rights, so he obtained what he demanded: two weeks off with full pay.

When Zé returned to work, a lingering tension prevailed whenever the resident passed, yet it was buried under the performance of a rather cold hospitality. The incident inscribed itself into multiple layers of abusive behaviour in which society’s colonial dependence on servitude materialized. The worst behaviour emerged when contempt for the staff made residents behave as if anything was allowed. Such were the moments when Zé, acting as janitor, once more found himself ambushed: responding to complaints about a sickening smell, he eventually tracked down human faeces hung outside an open corridor window as the cause of the nuisance in an explicit attempt to humiliate Zé. It remained unclear who had played a trick on Zé, reinforcing the sense of how widespread the contempt was for Zé and other workers in precarious conditions like him.

Conclusions

From failing to be friendly enough behind a glass window or providing immediate shelter from rain, to fearing physical violence or deliberate humiliation, the stories of the workers of portarias like Julia, Junior and Zé are plenty. Their stories provide deep insights into the socio-material and sensorial logics of more-than-security in urban Brazil. The porters’ embodied experiences and sensory memories linked to the portaria, its devices, and types of encounters reveal how they experience the pleasures and discontents of cordially providing a sense of security and hospitality as well as informal care. The entanglements of acts of cordiality, care, and control performed by doormen in portarias show the confluence of the effects of neoliberal outsourcing and the country’s colonial past that establish a net of unequal interdependence and servitude. Their interplay specifies the multiple tensions in which the hierarchies of class, race, region of origin, and gender continuously co-constitute one another.

A first contradiction emerges from the ever-more widespread material security infrastructure and the confident affirmations of doormen that they are effectively and affectively indispensable at the portarias. In contrast to security personnel trained to defend while providing hospitality (Robb Larkins 2023), the porters are aware that the care work they perform for the people is vital for the coming and going in portarias precisely because it extends beyond a narrow provision of security.

Yet far from simply feeling appreciated, let alone recognised for the complex and multiple duties performed, doormen put up with the local effects of the multi-layered history of service and servitude in Brazil and their colonial and neoliberal roots. Junior, Julia and Zé were all from the country’s Northeastern states and had come through family networks to work in the Southeastern metropoles. While unobtrusive routine prevailed, specific encounters made them easily feel the logics of racist subordination in which the aspiring and traditional middle classes of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo engaged, also – but not only – when faced with the hard-working Northeastern “Others” (Schucman 2012). Such subordination showed the violent effects of the intersections of class, gender, region of origin, and race. For Julia, the exigencies to be overly nice and pleasing were distinct from the risk of physical abuse, as in the case of Zé.

Given specific visceral reminders, porters could hardly forget the multiple hierarchies into which they were placed. The enduring impact of the colonial past was particularly evident in how workers of portarias navigated the provision or denial of care in spaces that were otherwise characterised by a calming sensation of hospitality-security. For doormen, all they expected was to treat (and be treated) well, based on a bare minimum of reciprocity and respect. Yet too often service was demanded on the terms of servitude. However, the conflicting influence of growing neoliberal outsourcing and formal workers’ rights could alter the course of events. Those directly employed, such as Junior and Zé, were able to voice their dissatisfaction and give space to their emotional push back against what seemed to be utter abuse. They firmly believed that the more-than-security they provided was not easily outsourced. In contrast, Julia was already employed through a service provider, which enhanced her precarity. Still affectively abused, she was simply made redundant, with no opportunity to push back.

The ensuing effects are perverse: on the one hand, the subaltern multisensorial archives of portarias reveal the increased vulnerability of workers when neoliberal logics intersect with colonial social and (infra)structures. On the other hand, the limits of neoliberal profit maximization become apparent in the thorough investment of residents in the personal and potentially abusive touch of relations of care, cordiality, and control that still define the circulation of people and other things in the entry halls and porters’ lodges of urban Brazil.

Susana Durão is Professor and Researcher in Anthropology at the State University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Tilmann Heil is a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at the University of Leuven and Principal Investigator of the Global South Studies at the University of Cologne.

References

Durão, Susana 2023. Conviviality in Inequality. Security in the City (São Paulo). Mecila Working Paper Series 62.

Heil, Tilmann, Fran Meissner, and Nikolaus Vertovec 2025. Techno-Material Entanglements and the Social Organisation of Difference. Ethnic and Racial Studies: 1–17. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2469694.

Robb Larkins, Erika 2023. The Sensation of Security. Private Guards and Social Order in Brazil. Police/Worlds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Roy, Ananya 2011. Slumdog Cities. Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2): 223–238. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x.

Schucman, Lia Vainer 2012. Entre O “Encardido”, O “Branco” E O “Branquíssimo”. Raça, Hierarquia E Poder Na Construção Da Branquitude Paulistana. Doctoral Thesis, Social Psychology, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.

White, Adam, and Tessa Diphoorn 2024. The Everyday Political Economy of Private Security. Policing and Society 34 (1-2): 1–9. doi: 10.1080/10439463.2023.2268256.

Cite as: Durão, S. & Heil, T. 2025. “Care, Cordiality, and Control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/susana-durao-and-tilmann-heil-care-cordiality-and-control-multisensorial-encounters-with-more-than-security-in-urban-brazil/

Blog, Features, Sensing (In)Security: New Materialism and The Politics of Security

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique

Image 1: Photo of an election poster for former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza. The poster burnt down and destroyed in relation to the uprisings in Maputo 2010. Photo by author

Introduction

The pots and pans that were banged at night in Mozambique in late 2024 and early 2025 are now silent. However, their legacy is neither muted nor forgotten—reflecting similarly the trajectories of other forms of protest the last decades which has shaken Mozambique and, especially, its ruling party (see Bertelsen 2014).

What unfolded was extraordinary: The country’s heavily contested presidential and parliamentary election of 9th October 2024 was followed by loud street-based protests and riots across Mozambican cities which were often met with brutal violence by police and security forces. The clashes between young men and the police left around 400 dead and thousands injured.

Here I would like to draw attention to a form of protest that was somewhat eclipsed by the street-fighting, namely the banging of pots by female protestors in their homes and on the street. These female protestors engaged the collective sensorium of urban citizens and shifted the very sense of security and insecurity in this highly unpredictable political situation. Beating pots—on balconies, in courtyards, in kitchens with open windows and in the streets—mediated the population’s sense of insecurity, amounting to a gendered form of collective rejection of the violence of the state apparatus. For Mozambique, this marked a definite shift in terms of both the participation and the format of political opposition in the country, the noise also, crucially, instilling fear in the erstwhile security apparatus and the police

Maputo 2024 and 2025: Protests, rhythm, collective security

Centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and violence ended with liberation in 1975 at the hands of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo – Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). In the half-century that followed, Mozambique has seen ongoing civil war conditioned respectively by Cold War dynamics (1976/77-1992), experiments in Afrosocialism (1980s), and multiparty elections from 1994 onwards. Given the merging of the Frelimo party with the Mozambican state apparatus in this period (Bertelsen 2016), few were surprised when Frelimo won in October 2024, securing the party elite victory in both the parliamentary and presidential elections.

However, in Mozambique’s last election Frelimo attained a majority so improbable that it defied even the most cynical of expectations among experts and citizens alike. For instance, ghost armies of voters—politically loyal subjects conjured from the realms of both the living and the dead—were called up to attain majorities for Frelimo in districts widely known as opposition party strongholds. Rampant ballot-stuffing bolstered other draconian moves, including manipulation of the country’s complex vote-counting system and widespread voter intimidation.

Formal complaints by the opposition were initially quashed, deepening the unpopularity of Frelimo. Protestors rapidly took to the streets and engaged police and security forces in sustained battles. By 27 January 2025, 313 protestors were registered as killed. While there had been protests against previous elections, the scale, form and distribution surpassed these (Feijó and Chiure 2025a, 2025b).

Central to the protests unfolding over several months was how Venancio Mondlane—popularly called VM7 and the founder of a new opposition party—emerged to contest the result. His firebrand speeches drew heavily on his background as a pastor in the Pentecostal church Igreja Ministério Divina Esperança. VM7’s dramatic contestation included well-orchestrated social media broadcasts from his exile in South Africa and a dramatic heroic re-entry into Maputo on 9 January 2025 where he was greeted like a hero—all cast, recast and morphed on social media.

Revisiting such events in November 2025, these months of unrest and protests also assumed a new and, for Mozambique, unprecedented shape—or, better, shapelessness. Evading the violence of the streets and residing within their apartments, on balconies or in courtyards, every night, female citizens banged their pots and pans for hours, chanting slogans against the Frelimo regime and the stolen election, sometimes accompanied by blowing whistles. In many video clips circulating on social media, one may see that the officers from the police force and the security apparatus are visibly affected by the noise surrounding them, treading more carefully and being visibly nervous.

The format, scale and space of these protests and how they affect also those meant to exert control on the streets, mark a shift in the Mozambican political landscape as the rhythms of protest were also emitted from areas of Maputo inhabited by segments of the population often characterised as wealthy or upper middle class—groups commonly perceived as allied with or integral to the Frelimo-state and not previously having been important parts of protests. Further, it is equally surprising, therefore, that Taela (2025: 6) and others suggest that it was initiated in Eduardo Mondlane University’s student housing—where banging pots was accompanied by throwing books and papers out of the windows onto the streets. Clips of protests have continuously filled the pluriverse of social media and across Maputo residents were informed about what was happening, including both wealthy areas downtown, as well as poorer areas, such as in the bairros Mafalala, Maxaquene, and Chamanculo. Some of the first images and clips surfaced immediately after the election and soon came to visually and graphically dominate several of the popular digital channels Mozambicans follow.

In the weeks and months to follow, the banging of pots rapidly turned into a massively popular mode of protest, mobilising especially women and girls and inserting them into a politics of resistance against the stolen elections. As Taela notes (2025: 6, my translation from Portuguese):

The pots and pans only came out of the cupboards at night, after protesters faced extreme police repression on the streets during the day. Banging pots and pans, known as panelaço, emerged as a strategy for those who wanted to protest but did not want to do so on the streets.

As shown in the many clips on social media, noise started after dark and the rhythms churned out from households were often rapid and intense — rhythms sometimes layered, with sounds ranging from the metallic drum of cheap aluminium pots to the deep humming of cast iron kitchenware. Many clips capture entire neighbourhoods banging in synced rhythm—but, crucially, with few of the protestors being visible.

The repeated banging of pots generated a sense of unification, collectivity, and participation mirroring the mass congregations that usually define street protests but in this case often marked by becoming heard, not seen, as well as being nocturnal, not diurnal. On the street in the same clips, one may see the heavily armed state security forces moving uncertainly through the dimly lit streets, navigating endless cascades of drumming and humming being poured over them. In some clips, the same forces nervously fire teargas grenades against balconies only to be met by a more massive wall of noise.

In many respects, Maputo’s panelaço of 2024 and 2025 constituted an act of resistance that transcended electoral and party-political registers: By amplifying and transmogrifying the soundscape of food-preparation from the individual households and into the public sphere, also collectivizing the sounds, what was repelled by noise was not only ghostly voters but also ossified politics, societal structures, and the gendering of space. This was also an explicit subtext in the many items on social media, namely that women were banging pots to be audibly present as a collective and that women’s politics should be recognized. In many of the acts, including during daytime, women set up kitchens in the streets where they cooked for protestors— extending the private realm of the kitchen onto the violently contested public spaces. Thus, these protests and practices may also be seen as extending care for others in its most inclusive sense. The symbolic importance of the pots should not be underestimated, as noted in a Facebook post by Zito Ossumane that was widely shared in Mozambique (translated from Portuguese):

The pots and pans, in a desperate gesture, decided to speak. They sacrificed themselves, banging against each other in a metallic hymn, invoking the god of kitchens and stoves. It was a collective prayer, a cry for help that spread throughout Mozambique, as if the noise of one neighborhood could travel through the bowels of the entire country. […] The revolution of the pots and pans has already begun. May the revolution of everything else come.

Panelaço: Shifting timespace, generative noise, sonic agency

The nocturnal banging of pots and their rhythm—synchronicity and non-synchronicity, collectivity and not—is not unique to Mozambique nor to postcolonial Africa. Writing on Paris and the 2016 nocturnal Nuit Debout protest—a form of charivari protest well-known from across Europe and North America—Shaw (2017: 117) notes “that the move to the night might be seen as an attempt to find a timespace in which a more open and creative politics is possible, strategically responding to the reduction in the freedom to protest in the more heavily surveyed day.”

Precisely the evasion, the slipping away into the night, the search for other than a securitized and striated space, is central here; in Paris the hypersurveilled urban spaces and in Maputo the security forces and their oftentimes indiscriminate diurnal violence exacted on protestors and civilians. Both index long-standing practices of evading statist domains of control, surveillance and, ultimately, notions of security defined by a central government. Further, in such evasion there is also a blurring of the public and private as protestors would often be confined to homes due to the imposed nightly curfew, left to consume news on TV or social media. Engaging in banging pots and pans may, in some sense, be interpreted as an inclusive, low-stakes form of protest, reflecting other social media activism as a facile way to “vent frustration” by protesting from the comfort of your home. However, here the Paris and Maputo cases diverge somewhat as in the latter those banging the pots were constantly fearing teargas grenades and shots launched at their balconies—as well as the volatility and violence of the situation being underscored by the number of casualties in daytime street protests.

Within contexts that are increasingly conditioned by non-democratic forms of securitization—including places like Mozambique—we, as anthropologists, also need to shift our attention to include the full sensorium: our own and of the fellow humans we engage. This includes exploring also what is entailed by “radical listening”, as Brandon LaBelle has called it. He also notes that “from an insurrectionary urgency, gestures and acts are made that force into being a heterogeneous space of social becoming, whose weakness or invisibility, whose transience or strangeness upset or elide established structures to produce what I think of as unlikely publics” (LaBelle 2018: 14-15).

Arguably, the nocturnal beating did produce what we might, with LaBelle, call “unlikely publics” with noise, rhythmicity, and the rearticulation of the quotidian kitchenware into powerful messages of distrust, assertiveness, collectivity. These forms also carved out yet another terrain for a gendered and classed form of political agency in a violent, state-orchestrated security state environment, instilling fear in the powers-that-be and their agents in the streets

Noise against the nocturnal body of democracy

The political theorist Achille Mbembe connects the nocturnal to various capacities and dimensions of the postcolony in many of his writings (Mbembe 2003). Crucially, he draws our attention to what he calls “the nocturnal body” of democracy. This is a form of organ constituted by the (often hidden) violent parts of democracy and statecraft, exemplified by the plantation and the penal colony.

The image of the nocturnal body aptly captures the shape of the postcolonial state of Mozambique and its long-standing impulse to deploy violence against its citizens—both at day and night (see Machava 2025). However, what is spectacular about the protests in Maputo in 2024 and 2025 and the many incarnations of citizen-led uprisings before that (Bertelsen 2014; de Brito 2017), is that the body of the populace unites through rhythms the source of which is invisible yet tangibly, corporally, and sensorially experienced.

The paradoxical combination of tangible and elusive in the nocturnal acts of panelaço showcase protests that are multivocal, yet highly gendered through transforming quotidian objects into vessels for resounding, collective rhythms of resistance and protests. Crucial here is also the enshrouding in darkness of protestors, effectively obscuring the waxing and waning numbers of those who beat the pans—although the many deformed pots and pans are there for everyone to see during daylight. It also underscores the possibilities inherent in the pliability of the political that is attained via collective (but not organized) efforts, indexing also the forms of articulation available in the restrictive political ontology dominating Mozambique (cf. Sumich and Bertelsen 2021).

This in situ generation of a sensorium of security beyond both the state and the marketized commodity form of metal gates, guards, guns, and alarms is significant and is a form of protest with long historical roots that has become globalised—from Argentina to France, from Canada to the Philippines. In Mozambique, its collective format is poised against the massive nocturnal body of the one-party state and its street-level presences. Finally, if noise should be approached as generative, as suggested by Serres (2007 [1980]), then the nocturnal beating pots, the rhythmic banging and its endless recursivity, as reproduced and shared by digital channels, generates an enduring, common sonic space of collective security against the violence of the state’s nocturnal body.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has published on political violence, postcolonialism, urban transformation, and socio-cultural dynamics, most of which is based on his long-term research in Mozambique since 1998.

References

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2014. Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique. Ethnos, 81(1): 25–52.

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2016. Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique. New York: Berghahn Books.

de Brito, Luís, ed. 2017. Agora eles têm medo de nós! – Uma colectânea de textos sobre as revoltas populares em Moçambique (2008-2012). Maputo: Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025a. “Afinal ‘foi só Maputo’? A geografia do protesto pós-eleitoral”. Destaque Rural #324. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Feijó, João, and Rita Chiúre. 2025b. “Quem saiu às ruas? Uma análise dos actores em protesto durante as manifestações pós-eleitorais”. Destaque Rural #331. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural (OMR).

Machava, Benedito Luís. 2025. The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990. Ohio University Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola.” Research in African Literatures 34(4): 1–26.

Serres, Michel. 2007 [1980]. The parasite. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shaw, Robert. 2017. “Pushed to the margins of the city: The urban night as a timespace of protest at Nuit Debout, Paris.” Political Geography 59:117-125.

Sumich, Jason and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2021. “Just out of reach: Imminence, meaning and political ontology in Mozambique”. Current Anthropology, 62(3): 287-308.

Taela, Kátia. 2025. “A ‘Revolução das Panelas’: Mulheres, Crise de Cidadania e Protestos em Moçambique Contemporâneo”. Destaque Rural #337. Maputo: Observatório do Meio Rural

Cite as: Bertelsen, B. E. 2025. “Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/bjorn-enge-bertelsen-pots-that-go-bang-in-the-night-noise-and-rhythm-as-enacting-popular-security-amidst-political-protest-in-mozambique/