Governing Youth Politics in the Age of Surveillance

Maria Grasso, Judith Bessant, Maria T. Grasso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138630123
• eBook ISBN: 9781351807562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on case studies from around the world, contributors to this ground-breaking book explore a major contemporary paradox: on the one hand, young people today are at the forefront of political campaigns promoting social rights and ethical ideas that challenge authoritarian orders and elite privileges. On the other hand, too many governments, some claiming to be committed to liberal-democratic values, social inclusion and youth participation are engaged in repressing political activities that contest the status quo.

Contributors to this book explore how, especially since 9/11, governments, state agencies and other traditional power holders around the globe have reacted to political dissent authored by young people. While the 'need' to enhance 'youth political participation' is promoted, the cases in this book document how states are using everything from surveillance, summary offences, expulsion from universities, 'gag laws' and 'antiterrorism' legislation, and even imprisonment to repress certain forms of young people's political activism. These responses diminish the public sphere and create civic spaces hostile to political participation by any citizen.

This book forms part of The Criminalization of Political Dissent series. It documents and interprets the many ways contemporary governments and agencies now routinely use various techniques to repress and criminalise political dissent.

Part I

Dissent and democratic practice

Chapter 1

Governing youth politics in the age of surveillance

Judith Bessant and Maria T. Grasso

Drawing on case studies from around the world, contributors to this book explore a major contemporary paradox: on the one hand, young people today are at the forefront of political campaigns promoting social rights and ethical ideas that challenge authoritarian orders and elite privileges. On the other hand, too many governments, some claiming to be committed to liberal-democratic values, social inclusion and youth participation are engaged in repressing political activities that contest the status quo.

Contributors to this groundbreaking book explore how, especially since 9/11, governments, state agencies and other traditional power holders around the globe have reacted to political dissent authored by young people. While the ‘need’ to enhance ‘youth political participation’ is promoted, the cases in this book document how states are using everything from surveillance, summary offences, expulsion from universities, ‘gag laws’ and ‘antiterrorism’ legislation, and even imprisonment to repress certain forms of young people’s political activism. These responses diminish the public sphere and create civic spaces hostile to political participation by any citizen.

This book forms part of the ‘Criminalization of Political Dissent’ book series. It contributes to that project by documenting and interpreting the many ways contemporary governments and agencies now routinely use various techniques from mass surveillance (much of it extra-legal), to extending the reach of criminal law and introducing tough antiterrorism laws through to violent physical repression. Contributors explore how governments across the political spectrum are ‘criminalising’ and proscribing traditional dissent and new kinds of political engagement.

The focus is on young people because they are playing a key role in re-generating new kinds of politics (Pickard and Bessant 2017). This, in part, is because young people have been bearing the brunt of hardship brought about by decades of neo-liberal policies in ways that older generations are not (Grasso 2018). Young people are adversely affected by increasing social inequality, high unemployment and joblessness, soaring education debt and unaffordable housing (Bessant, Farthing and Watts 2017). Young people more than most other groups are also being affected by radical changes in the labour market as human labour is displaced by digital labour, information capital and robotic technologies. All this is contributing to a growing disaffection, disillusionment and ‘civil unrest’ that are said to be expressed particularly by young people. This in turn elicits expressions of concern from many governments and intra-state agencies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum and the OECD who treat young people’s disaffection as evidence of a threat to ‘the political consensus’ (Lipton-IMF 2017; WEF 2017; OECD 2017).

As a large body of research now testifies, digital media is being used by many young people to mobilise support for a range of political agendas as they play lead roles in expanding the repertoire for political action in ways that are also transforming the political landscape. The advent of new technologies has also brought new constituencies into being, and novel opportunities to participate in ways they have not previously been able to. The new digital and social media has enabled young people who have historically been marginalised or even excluded from the public sphere to participate in increasing numbers.

The cases documented here point to important challenges to the well-established conventions about the relations between citizens and their governments. They raise questions about whether we can take for granted democratic rights like freedom of expression and movement; privacy and the rule of law principles are still important in the context of the rise of the ‘security state’.

Governing young people

Young people have long been one of the most intensely regulated groups. They have long been subject to various forms of governance of different kinds in ways that would not be tolerated if they were applied to any other group (Rose 1999). Whatever else has changed since Nikolas Rose made this observation in the late twentieth century, the contemporary ways of seeing and responding to young people and particularly their politics, points to strong continuities with the persistent interest in their governance.

As Foucault argued, the capacity to govern a group relies on the ability to shape the ways those categories of people and social reality is known and talked about (1979). That is, how we categorise and determine how certain individuals and groups like ‘youth’, ‘the unemployed’, ‘terrorists’ and so forth are named and represented is the first step in their governance.

Concern about young people’s political engagement – or ‘disengagement’ – is not new (for detailed discussion of the issues at hand in this respect see Grasso, 2011, 2013, 2016). Indeed, contemporary arguments about the various threats ostensibly posed by the political action of some young people bear a conspicuous resemblance to older interests in the governance of young people that have deployed a full range of the theoretical models of deviancy, to delinquency to its more recent incarnation ‘youth at risk’.

When young people act politically in ways that fall outside the domain of state-expert sponsored or managed forums like ‘youth round tables’ or similar devices, the response of governments typically involves retreating to an older discursive tradition about the inherently troubled and troublesome nature of ‘youth’ and the need for their governance. Historians like Pearson document the long tradition of popular fears and the way each generation believes itself uniquely threatened by new forms of degeneration caused by the proclivities of young ‘transgressives’ (Pearson 1983). Moreover, the defining features of youth-adolescent in the West include being crisis-ridden, troubled, socially irresponsible and defiant. As such, ‘youth’ are constantly ‘at risk’ of being diverted off that rickety and perilous ‘transitionary path’ towards responsible adulthood and towards irresponsibility, and even criminality (Stanley Hall 1905). By 1942, the sociologist Talcott Parsons was defining ‘youth culture’ in terms of ‘youthful irresponsibility’ (Parsons 1942/1963). It is an account that has been reinforced by various experts and mainstream media reports that represent young people as ‘trouble’ because of their supposed inherent dispositions towards ‘youthful disorder’. As ‘folk devils in the making’ or ‘lords of misrule’, they have long provided copy for media-sponsored ‘moral panics’ (Cohen 1979). By the 1990s, a new discourse of ‘risk’ had silently taken over the old discourse (Bessant et al. 2003). Yet, while there are certainly challenges to be met in being young, particularly in the contemporary context, young people are no more troubled or troublesome than any other sector of the population.

Theorising surveillance

As contributors to this book highlight, the governance of young people and their politics now implicates states, private corporations and even universities and schools. It entails a full range of regulatory and management techniques and crucially, it now includes the gathering and use of unprecedented information about the lives of citizens (Chamayou 2015). Civil society long deemed to be the space of private or free practices oriented to public opinion formation and deliberation is now being subjected to permanent and total surveillance.

It will be recalled that drawing on Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon as a metaphor, Foucault argued that modern society deploys surveillance to regulate the lives of citizens and promote social order (1979). Bentham’s Panopticon was a design principle that enabled the observation of inmates of a prison or some other institution while eliminating the visibility of the guards. The inmates of such an institution, unsure of whether or not they were subject to guards’ gaze, were always governed and thus they acted at all times as if they are watched so as to avoid punishment. This became an internalised practice as they came to govern themselves. For Foucault, the Panopticon entails a ‘set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal … which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him’ (Foucault 1979: 199). In this way, a Foucauldian account of surveillance provides a useful framework for theorising the impact of perceived government surveillance on young people’s political activity as well as allowing for a range of reactions to surveillance, like docility or political resistance.

Mass surveillance has now become a fundamental aspect of contemporary industrialised societies carried out by states, intelligence agencies, private corporations and even universities and schools (Marsden 2014). For Staples, surveillance involves ‘keeping close watch on people’ or generally a ‘watchful gaze’ (1997: ix). As Chamayou (2015: 78) observes, we live now under a ‘constant geo-spatial overwatch’ by ‘the institutional eyes’ of Google, or the National Security Agency that monitor our everyday lives by collecting and ‘processing personal data, whether identifiable or not for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered’ (Lyon 2001). Internet-based surveillance techniques used by governments conform in many ways to this Panopticon model as it provides highly effective disciplinary means requiring a few to watch the many while preventing the many from watching the few (Boyne 2000). Conversely, internet users can also watch their watcher. As Boyne argues, ‘the machinery of surveillance is now always potentially in the service of the crowd as much as the executive’ (2000: 301).

Lyon observes that, increasingly, surveillance does not involve embodied persons watching each other (2001: 2). It has come to incorporate everything from visual observation by CCTV, genetic testing, the collection of biometric data and use of facial recognition systems, electronic monitoring, (e.g. opinion polling, metadata analysis of emails and phone calls), and the collection of social statistical data to observe trends in social conduct (like crime, unemployment) and so on. Most surveillance operates abstractly and at a distance: it can be characterised as a form of remote and impersonal watching. In this way, it separates watching from witnessing. And increasingly, the watching, analysing and interpreting is automated and reliant on algorithms. In these ways, surveillance has become both ubiquitous and normal.

Traditionally, when political science engaged with political surveillance, it tended to be framed as a defensible response to small, well-defined groups of dissidents or criminals (Cunningham 2004). This naivety became less feasible after 9/11 when states began to mandate mass surveillance by agencies like the National Security Agency (Scheuerman 2016). In the USA, the passage of the USAPATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) removed any barriers that prohibited the government from intercepting electronic mail, net activity or mobile phone use (Berkowitz 2002; Bauman et al. 2014). It is now understood that governments in Europe, Australia and the USA regularly subject their own citizens and those of other nation-states to total surveillance of their electronic communications (Gardner 2016; Stoycheff 2016). Snowden’s revelations highlighted how the National Security Agency, through its PRISM project, has engaged in mass online surveillance programmes since 2004 in America and globally. PRISM allows US intelligence agencies to direct albeit ‘backdoor’ access to companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, and others, introducing the potential for surveillance of Americans without warrants (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013).

Surveillance has also become a normal feature of workplaces, schools, homes and communities. The once private space of the home has been well and truly entered by home-based media as we create possibilities for fully integrated surveillance systems that track our consumer and other activities. In the home, keyboard strokes are harvested, media preferences are collected, individual interactions with information technologies are now stored, tracked and logged by platforms like Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, ‘data miners’ monitor the ‘mood’ of the Internet via real-time analysis of online conversations, blog-posts, Tweets, Facebook posts and other activities.

The rise of neo-liberal economic regimes also coincided with more punitive approaches to crime and welfare. Public spaces like our streets and city squares are covered by networks of CCTV cameras and other governance technologies. Neoliberal governments also initiated the harsh and often repressive treatment of welfare claimants in a ‘new paternalism’ reliant on measures like ‘activity tests’ designed to target areas of substantial socio-economic deprivation, underpinned by a costly bureaucratic surveillance, monitoring and infrastructure of sanctions (Bessant et al. 2017; see also Dunn et al. 2014, Grasso et al. 2017).

The availability of new technologies that automate the collection and analysis of material in the context of the ‘security state’ has seen an expansion of the concept of ‘security threats’ to a situation where everyone becomes a potential threat.

Finally, we asked whether what is happening presents an opportunity for reflexivity by those claiming disengagement from electoral politics is evidence of young people’s apathy, justifying measures to govern by mandating ‘correct behaviour’.

What is and what ought to be the role of the social sciences in the debates about the ‘civic crisis’ (Hay 2007)? Is the modernist self-portrait of the social sciences as handmaiden to the state in helping to manage or control recurring social order problems and crises through ‘scientific’ research still relevant or warranted? This raises ethical-political questions about the social sciences and the ‘human interests’ that inform them. Are they informed by an interest in control and domination or by a preference for promoting freedom and political autonomy (Habermas 1971)?

The social sciences have become central to the normalisation of surveillance technologies now employed to govern the politics and, more generally, the lives of young people often understood as a high-risk demographic. It is an observation that invites some questions about the politics of social scientific research and intervention of professionals in the lives of young people using categories like ‘youth at risk’, ‘problem youth’ and ‘social capital’ to warrant actions designed to mitigate the risk.

Book structure

The chapters in this book identify how many young people are engaging in political activism as well as the responses to this by the state and other key social institutions.

In the next chapter, ‘Theorising student protest, liberalism and the problem of legitimacy’, Rob Watts (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University) helps set the scene for many of the subsequent chapters when he suggests that the problem of legitimacy is central to, though not always fully explicated in, the relationship of young people’s dissent to the attempts to regulate or repress it. He draws on three case studies of student protests in Malaysia, Sussex, England and Québec, Canada between 2012 and 2014 to highlight some important issues about the commitment on the part of liberal democracies to liberal principles like freedom of expression or the right to dissent. In each case, student activism was subject to repression by university authorities and even criminalisation by states. Watts argues that liberalism, far from being preoccupied with liberty and rights, has a long-term commitment to security that always trumps freedom. The tendency of liberal-democratic states and authoritarian states to prioritise security, leads them to regard young political actors like those engaging in ‘human rights activism’ pro-democracy, ‘anti-Austerity’, anti-privatisation and freedom of speech campaigns, as antagonistic to the ‘national interest’ or ‘public safety’. In this way, what starts as stigmatising young activists as a threat to ‘national security’ or ‘public order’, frequen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I: Dissent and democratic practice
• Part II: Youthful protest and repressive law
• Part III: Antiterror legislation and the youthful other
• Part IV: Resisting and creating new public spheres
• Index