Project Kraken: Surveillance and Liminality ‘On the Edge’ of Land and Water

Abstract

ABSTRACT Project Kraken, an effort to combat terrorism and crime on the UK water network, is a valuable case that propels knowledge of surveillance. Whilst similar initiatives universalize surveillance participation, Kraken particularises it, occupying specific spaces and recruiting a delimited (maritime) community. Research observed, on one hand, Kraken’s spatial liminality, given its occupation of the land/water threshold, characterized by ‘edges’ through which humans, thought, and resources flow. On the other, agential liminality was observed given Kraken’s enlistment of the maritime community: ever ‘on the edge’ of land/water, peripheral to national security, yet endowed with knowledge useable by state. A marginal actor recruited ‘inwards,’ that community possesses a watery consciousness harnessed for raison d’état. Liminality offers a lens through which to assess such particularisation. A liminal approach, foregrounding the edge, helps overcome the binaries of inside/outside, land/water, offering fertile territory on which to revision power flows and more accurately situate the powerful and powerless in contemporary social science.