Beyond Battlefields and Conventional Research Agendas: The Importance of Understanding Surveillance Activities and Practices During Long-Term Armed Conflicts

Abstract

As the character of war has changed, surveillance studies scholars need to rethink and reimagine the meaning of surveillance activities and practices during long-term armed conflicts. Never-ending wars in Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Colombia, Lebanon, and Somalia are showing us that one characteristic of contemporary conflicts is the increasing duration of violent and non-violent confrontation. Under these current long wars, numerous armed groups—including national armies—gain more from violence itself than from winning, expanding the expected length of the conflict. This is creating new sociocultural conditions for the development of surveillance activities and practices, where battles between armed groups are rather rare and most violence is directed against civilians. I argue that there is an urgent need for the surveillance studies field to create novel theoretical and methodological tools to comprehend surveillance activities and practices during long-term armed conflicts. I believe it is crucial to establish a more fluid dialogue with other disciplines, in particular, epistemologies related to the sociology of emotions, the demography of armed conflicts, and the militarization of civilians in contexts of war. This emerging research agenda will help us to fully comprehend the meaning of surveillance where the surveillance agent and the surveillance subject interact for extended periods of time (years or even decades) under new forms of social interaction. In this contribution to the Dialogue section, I present three dimensions of this emerging research agenda. I will be highlighting key theoretical relations and their relevance and addressing the former Colombian armed conflict to illustrate some of their characteristics.