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

Abstract

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