Webs, Walls, Watchmen: Counterinsurgency Policing and Digital Authoritarianism in Pakistan

• In Event: Global Webs of Counterinsurgency Policing

Abstract

This paper considers how counterinsurgency policing intersects with and transfers onto digital policing, technology, and surveillance infrastructure. Over the past decade, Pakistan has been developing and deploying an extensive repertoire of tools and technologies to digitally monitor, police, and criminalize political dissent and activism. These include smart city initiatives and legislative initiatives. These projects highlight convergences between counterinsurgency policing and “digital authoritarianism” in two significant ways. First, these technologies evidence how transnational policing interlinkages enable domestic policing institutions to consume and deploy global counterinsurgency policing strategies, logics, and projects (including surveillance of suspect populations, data collection, and border control). Second, they demonstrate colonial continuities in postcolonial counterinsurgency policing practices, given the strategic, systematic, and routine criminalization of political speech, assembly, and opposition, which shape state narratives, legitimize legal and extralegal police work, and undermine democratic growth and political participation. In the digital domain, state consumption and application of transnational counterinsurgency policing strategies and projects, coupled with security-centric narrative framing and criminalization processes that further colonial policing and pacification techniques, constructs an intimate relationship between counterinsurgency policing and digital authoritarianism. This paper thus contends that counterinsurgency policing strategies and tools enable states to cement authoritarian control in the digital realm through a variety of processes, frameworks, and institutions, highlighting the local and potentially long-term impact of counterinsurgency policing and its mainstreaming.

Author

• Zoha Waseem, University of Warwick