Globalizing Control Research: The Politics of Urban Security in and beyond the Alaouite Kingdom of Morocco

• Published in: Journal of global security studies 2021-12, Vol.6 (4), p.1
• Main Author: Hagmann, Jonas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Globalization; Political aspects; Security management
• ISSN: 2057-3170; 2057-3189
• DOI: 10.1093/jogss/ogab004

How do urban security assemblages evolve? Scholars inspired by Deleuze's Control Thesis detect profound shifts in the ways security operates. Different to Foucault's disciplinary logics, they argue, security assemblages now rely intimately on expanding casts of policing agents, digital surveillance, and statistical knowledge(s). They reach beyond enclosures and national borders, and they challenge democratic politics ever more forcefully. Whether this general trajectory of security management holds true across the global cityscape is yet far from evident. Not only do most studies of contemporary control draw conclusions from European and North American cases exclusively. Many also reproduce and project abroad distinctively Eurocentric assumptions about state--society relations, governance, and insecurity. This article foregrounds and problematizes these penchants. It then looks at the Moroccan city of Marrakech to detail how urban security assemblages may evolve in different ways, at other speeds, and following different steering logics than what is generally set out by research on control. The article concludes with a discussion of how insights offered by places such as Marrakech contribute to more robust, analytically refined, and globally inclusive research on the contemporary politics of urban security.