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I am Deniz Yonucu and my guest today is Rees McHolt. Today we'll be discussing Rees's excellent new book, Publicating Homeland Security. police entanglements across India and Palestine-Israel. Thanks for joining me today, Rees. Thanks so much for having me. So I'm going to go ahead with my first question immediately. Can you tell us a little bit about your book? What inspired you to write this book? When did the project originally start?
So it's interesting to think back about sort of how these projects emerged. I guess for me, I think looking back to it as kind of someone who came of age in kind of the global war on terror, I was kind of a teenager in 2001, I think. kind of the onset of the war on terror and the global, you know, global homeland security as kind of a new paradigm was something that very much sort of formed my sense of the world growing up.
But I guess as I sort of grew up a little bit and sort of was in my mid-20s when I sort of started this project, I guess my sense was I increasingly came to wonder about sort of its... presumed globality or or the terms of what sort of worldliness actually entailed so i mean i think we all have a sense you know
people who grew up in North America, about kind of the onset of the war on terror and the ways that had impacted ordinary life. You know, things like airport security and that kind of stuff that became increasingly present in virtually every part of the world that you ever ended up if you traveled. But I guess I began to wonder a lot about what that really meant for this new kind of state form to be multiplied or sort of transnationalized in different localities around the world.
And so that was kind of the personal, I guess, way into it in some ways. But I guess the more sort of intellectual questions that also sort of motivated the project was... When I began my PhD in the kind of early 2010s, my sense was that although a lot of emergent sort of critical policing literature was starting to speak to these general questions, particularly in relation to domestic policing and this.
emerging thing called Homeland Security. There was a surprising lack of discussion about what this actually meant for, I guess, the majority of the world and how that kind of mutated and moved across different geographies. So that's kind of what led me to this. and also thinking about ultimately, I guess, where these things actually come from. Of course, it's sort of intuitive to think about these things as sort of beginning in 2001 after 9-11.
But as I began to sort of wade into these things from an intellectual perspective, it sort of became increasingly clear that starting there wasn't necessarily sufficient, which led me both to think about kind of the geographies, but also kind of the temporality. of Homeland Security and where to begin the analysis, both kind of analytically and politically. Why India? India was sort of a growing interest.
of mine during my master's, I increasingly began becoming quite interested in particularly the city of Bombay that became Mumbai and a lot of the sort of Hindu nationalist. uh sort of onset in that context um and another sort of as i was starting to get more into the weeds of sort of this emerging form of online security at that time there's a lot of growing discussion around um
kind of the implication of urban spaces with military violence. And at the time it seemed that sort of Palestine was a very important locus of this thing that sort of was coming to be associated with sort of radical experimentation. in urban spaces, which is partly what led me to Palestine as a place where these emergent forms of violence and statecraft seemed in some ways to be emanating from.
As India and Palestine are both sort of formerly colonized places, their kind of entanglements became increasingly intriguing, both as places that have sort of common histories, but are also radically different in all kinds of different ways.
I was also going to ask why Palestine, Israel and after India, but you covered that already. And even though you focused on India and Palestine, Israel in the book, in terms of police and security, Your book does an excellent job in going beyond those entanglements and you show us the broader connections in policing and also not only across time.
Sorry, not only across space, but also across time. And you built on the emerging literature on global policing that shows our policing in general as a global enterprise. And you take a lot of... time explaining or explaining how your approach to policing and security is different than mainstream approaches to policing and security. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? How do you approach policing and security?
As I think in the broadest possible strokes, I guess what defines my approach in distinction to kind of more mainstream or conventional understandings of police and security is to very much challenge the idea. of security and policing as sort of inherent human needs or human values. And I think, you know, when you ask most people about what security is, they understand it as something that sort of everyone desires and everyone wants and presumably everyone can have.
But the way that I approach it is quite different and is sort of much more rooted in critical theorizations of police power. I guess my initial starting point for that was thinking with kind of more Marxian inspired approaches.
which kind of foreground the centrality of police power in capitalist social relations. And I think that's in many ways a very good place to start. I think that thing alerts us to... sort of the questions about what police and policing is doing and for whom and the ways it sort of entangled with accumulation and dispossession of various kinds.
I also draw to some extent on some sort of Foucaultian influences on police power, which I think are not entirely sufficient, but I think are worthwhile in terms of thinking about police in a broad sense. in terms of order and social relations, as opposed to simply limiting ourselves to the institution called the police, I suppose. And that work has been very much inspired by particular thinkers who were some of the earliest to sort of...
think about police power critically, people like Mark Neal Close and others. But ultimately, I think, although those are all very good starting points and sort of give us crucial tools to think through.
what police and policing are and how they're connected to this imperative of security. I think we need to also kind of broaden our perspectives a little bit as well. And one of the kind of oversight to some of those other literatures, particularly their early... formulations was I think to overlook the entanglements of police with colonialism and other forms of empire and also sort of signifiers like race and caste and so that's kind of where
Ultimately, my analysis leads, and I try to think very productively with literatures on counterinsurgency and pacification, which I guess, in addition to capitalist social relations, also... deal with the question about insurrection and the roots and origins of police power in suppressing forms of popular dissent. So I think those are all ultimately crucial ingredients to think about police well with.
But I draw from a lot of different sources and sort of the inspirations in terms of how to where to begin the analysis and how to kind of think with it. You also draw on science and technology studies and actor network theory, and you argue that they provide critical sensibilities for denaturalizing and taken for... and challenging taken for granted assumptions about homeland security, both in how it is understood and how it operates globally. What are some of these assumptions and how do...
Science and technology studies and actor network theory challenged them. Right. I mean, I think in the broadest possible sense, I think, you know, the main assumption that the book is kind of working against in some sense is. the idea of homeland security as a kind of new normal that is here to stay and that is kind of everywhere the same. So again, as someone who kind of came of age in the war on terror, I think it's sort of increasingly become taken for granted.
that the ways in which states organize their domestic spaces is through this supposed new paradigm of homeland security. And so my book tries to, in some ways... in different ways, kind of unsettled that. But I guess in more specific terms, I guess, in terms of the scholarly debates on homeland security itself, when this term sort of came into being in the early 2000s and 2002.
with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, I think there was a sense that there was a sort of sea change at foot and the emergence of something potentially altogether new. And there was a lot of discussion at the time about kind of... the geographies of what Homeland Security entailed. So obviously, the term Homeland Security sort of denotes a domestic focus of a kind of security regime. But at the time, there was a lot of discussion about
whether this signified the coming of security from a kind of more international scale to a more domestic one, and the extent to which that really was borne out or not. I guess for me... I think a lot of other associations with homeland securities in terms of so-called militarization or securitization of urban spaces, and much of the literature in the early 2000s was in various ways suggesting...
that this transformation was sort of unprecedented or sort of unlike previous moments in history. I guess for me, the reason that science and technology studies and actor network theory... is so important for my thinking on these matters is I think it takes seriously the potential for transformations to take place, but it also sort of foregrounds questions about relationality more fundamentally in terms of social theory.
So rather than simply looking at relationality as something that pertains to one kind of social form, it thinks about everything as being necessarily connected and being made through those connections. And so for me, I think that was helpful, both in terms of trying to grapple with how this emergent state form was being created and consolidated, but also thinking about how it's connected to other forms.
and the extent to which it is similar or different or the terms of those supposed continuities or breaks. And so I think what science and technology studies and network theory does well is to kind of not assume. that we know where things are or what makes things what they are, but rather kind of to follow the actors involved. And this also sort of gets into the questions about method in terms of how we study things. In terms of presuming that we know, for instance, who has authority and...
where it lies. I think it unsettles the landscape of where we think power is and how we go about studying it. So for me, I think that was quite helpful into not entirely trying to flatten everything. but rather to open up questions which are sort of less interrogated and try to subject them to analysis rather than just sort of assuming them to be one thing or another.
Yeah, I think you do a great job showing these fragmentations, connections, travels and the importance of actors also. I mean, sometimes we can get lost in structures. and actors are really important and I also really and I think the book also does a really good job in showing how Homeland Security or the war on terror has become a fetish. So you deconstruct the fetishization of Homeland Security. And you define Homeland Security as a fabrication in your...
attempt to denaturalize the war on terror and homeland security. And you say that it's fabricated in three interrelated ways, the making of, the making up. and weaving together. Could you elaborate on these dimensions? Yeah. So, yeah, fabrication is kind of, I guess, the fourth theorization of how I think about what Homeland Security is and how it, again, becomes... both fetishized as a thing, but also how it's connected to other sort of forms of police power and security practices.
The first sense, as you kind of alluded to, is the making. And so this both concerns the very concrete elements of Homeland Security, the things that we can kind of grasp and see in the world, you know, things like small arms, weapons, and so on. CCTV cameras, fences, that kind of stuff. But I also think about the making in terms of things like knowledge and expertise. So how does exactly...
something come to be understood as a form of knowledge that's useful in different places, for example. So it's very much sort of tied up with the questions about, you know, how is online security quite literally manufactured?
as a kind of commodity fetish that other people can buy and sell. The second sense of making up is a bit more sort of... connected to the question about kind of the illusory or the mythical dimensions of homeland security and it's also kind of fetishization as you were kind of alluding to um but also the question about how homeland security actually
becomes a thing in the world. So as I mentioned before, although the term Homeland Security didn't really exist prior to 2002, it's since sort of become naturalized as a kind of central frame of reference in our world. And so the making up part, the second sense is really just about how that negotiation takes place. How does it sort of manifest and become a thing that we all kind of take for granted? And how is that sort of constructed across different?
places or jurisdictions and so on. And the final sense of kind of the weaving together is in terms of kind of how the different threads or elements of Homeland Security are sort of put together in a way that might be analogous to something like weaving a fabric, for example. And I think you can kind of see the blending of the more sort of concrete elements, you know, things like fences and so on together with knowledge that sort of build and meld things across different places.
and kind of make them functions as kind of security systems as such so things like for example safe city projects bring together a whole range of expertise and elements that are both concrete and more kind of ephemeral But they kind of come to function as a singular system, or at least we're supposed to. And so the weaving together kind of tries to understand how those different fabrics or threads are kind of knitted together.
and the extent to which they kind of hold together, both in particular places, but also across geographies and jurisdictions. And I think it's also important to say that although these things can be sort of distinguished conceptually, and I do that... In the book, in practice, I think it becomes much more difficult to actually just say that one element of Homeland Security is just one or the other. In practice, they necessarily become intertwined.
And at no point you can say that it's just the first sense of the third sense, even though certain elements of Homeland Security, I think, lend themselves more to analysis with one of the elements that I sort of define than the other.
so in the book i try to sort of suggest that although these things can be differentiated conceptually and that's useful that when we're actually looking at kind of things in practice they are necessarily sort of melded together in ways that don't enable them to be kind of differentiated so easily.
But you also mentioned that they are woven together. So I think it suggests that they start separate, but then got entangled. And can you tell us a little bit about your research? It's not always easy to... work with police officers, security officers, and you mention that in your book too. How was doing research among with the security officers?
It was challenging in all kinds of ways that I think you're also familiar with from your own work in related fields. I think, I mean, one of the biggest questions I often get asked about this project was in terms of access. So how did you find the people that you wanted to talk to? And in both the primary geographic context where I work, both Palestine, Israel, and India, it was challenging in a variety of ways.
In the case of Israeli experts and sort of arms dealers in that aspect of the book, I will say that their status as market actors made them somewhat more available than some of the other actors. in the book in a sense that they have sort of public profiles. And so finding them per se was not necessarily difficult. Trying to build the trust and access points was indeed challenging.
but because they're all sort of in the world trying to sell their different wares and get publicity, there's a certain kind of public element that they navigate and that you can kind of tap into to some extent. The work based in India, I would say, was even much more challenging in the sense that particularly the state police officials that I was trying to get access to didn't have.
particular reason to talk to me. It wasn't necessarily serving them in the way that it would for the actors, the Israeli actors that I talked to. So that was very much a kind of negotiation in terms of trying to Find personal mobile numbers, for example, trying to find access points and try to build trust. And in that case, being able to spend some time in security trade fairs and that kind of thing.
was really crucial to opening up doors to people that otherwise might have been wary of speaking to me. But the method was a huge challenge at different points. I was also sort of myself questioned about my motives. Basically, people trying to ask me to prove that I was not a terrorist myself or a terrorist sympathizer, which is necessarily an impossible thing to demonstrate.
It was very fraud. It was very uncertain. But through various means, I was able to ultimately access the majority of people that I was trying to find. And I remember reading in Israel, some security officers thought that you were British and that you were among those who brought security too.
Israel, right? Yeah, because I currently work at a British university. One particular contractor sort of thanked me for the British contributions to, I guess, British counterinsurgency in Palestine historically. And then was trying to kind of return the gift by selling me things that he thought he could sell back to my university. So there's this sort of strange moments where I was being read in ways that seemed somewhat peculiar.
And I was not expecting them to sort of imagine me as one of their possible collaborators or business partners. And you highlight the fragmented nature of both research and data on homeland security, as well as the fragmented nature of homeland security itself. Could you elaborate on that, please? Yeah, so, you know, the analytic of fragments and literal fragments is something that I sort of spend a lot of time with, particularly in an introduction of the book and very much structured.
the course of the writing and the research as well. I think some of it's already kind of alluded to in terms of the questions about secrecy. So, you know, when you work on policing and security projects and regimes and related actors. There's the most challenging thing initially that you face is questions about what is accessible and what is not. While some things are publicly said, much of the ways these regimes are sort of constructed and operate is sort of behind closed doors.
and often subjects to various restraints. And so although my research was comprehensive and I covered a lot of ground, I think there were certain things that I simply couldn't find out. and wasn't in a position to gain access to. So that's kind of the most obvious nature that many people have written about this, that doing research on policing and security regimes necessarily has.
preclusions and silences and gaps that are sort of fundamentally insurmountable. But the second aspect that I think that I tried to think with a bit more fruitfully, I think is the question. about the particular stories that I tell in the book. So in my case, I was initially trying to sort of trace the attempts to kind of export homeland security from Palestine, Israel to India.
And some of your listeners may know that at a bilateral level, India and Israel have incredibly close geopolitical relations that have been developing over many years. And India today is the biggest purchaser. of Israeli armaments in terms of conventional weapons. And so when I initially started out on this project around the year 2010 or so, my sense is that the efforts to export homeland security to India
after the 2008 Mumbai attacks would sort of follow more or less in lockstep with that broader geopolitical relationship. But for a variety of reasons, the Israelis that I was following, the Homeland Security. salespeople and trade representatives and so on, ended up having a quite challenging time in the Indian context, much to my own surprise. And so the initial story
that I thought I was following, which seemed like a rather smooth one, ended up to be a rather fragmented and fragmentary story of sort of misconnections and deals gone awry and so on. And so in the book, in many cases, you know, because it was quite a struggle to sort of follow the story and make sense of it, one option would have been to simply conclude that nothing at all happened and that there was, in fact, no story to follow. But ultimately, in the book, did I try to embrace?
the fragmented nature of these connections that both happened partially and sometimes didn't happen and try to think with these fragmented relations and these fissures more productively in terms of how we understand the way in which sort of the multiplication or sort of transnationalization of Homeland Security happens in general. And so I tried to kind of embrace other scholars who tried to think with fragments as a kind of analytic to think through.
questions about global connection in ways that don't dismiss it as a kind of afterthought or simply as a failure. Yeah. I mean, in the book, you show that efforts to adopt... American or Israeli homeland security solutions were actually unsuccessful in India. A lot of security officers were resistant to that and critically reflecting on Israeli security. Apparatus, could you explain why? Yeah, so this is a big part of the book and was honestly difficult to actually think.
through and then quite challenging conceptually to understand what sort of I found. As I mentioned, you know, there are lots of things that didn't happen in the ways that particularly Israeli Homeland Security contractors expected that they would and they weren't always greeted with the same kind of
welcome that they anticipated in some ways. And so I tried to kind of think through how we might understand that in different ways. I think at the most basic level, the sort of most simple answer to this, which is partly true. is the radical ways in which India and Palestine and Israel are simply dissimilar or different in different ways. And anyone who's ever spent any time in those two contexts would immediately recognize some of those things.
in terms of the scale, in terms of population, in terms of landscape, the places in many ways couldn't be more dissimilar on their face. And so the fact that things didn't always align, I think to some extent does reflect those.
geographic and sort of cultural and you know all kinds of other differences that that manifest one story that i sort of tell in the book that i think highlights this point quite well is that an israeli trainer sort of who came to the city of Mumbai in 2009, was taken down to the main railway station in South Bombay or South Mumbai to kind of look at the rail system and had a particular idea.
of how he thought it should be managed in terms of protecting against certain kinds of bombings, for example. And he was kind of immediately dismissed by the Indian counterpart who basically said, this site cannot be secured. There's too many people. There's too much going on. There's insufficient resources to sort of contain this in a way that the Israelis imagined they could do. And so I think there's an element of truth in that that certainly does explain a lot.
But I think it's also important to realize that simply focusing on radical difference is sort of insufficient for a variety of reasons. The most, maybe not most obvious, but an important element is kind of what I talk about in terms of the homologies between. Palestine, Israel and India in the sense of sort of shared colonial histories and how those things have manifested in the present. So, for example, common legal structures that criminalize particularly Muslim.
bodies and livelihoods in in ways that are quite analogous so although there are radical differences there's obviously also important very significant similarities even though they don't necessarily manifest exactly the same ways all the time. And so I think simply, you know, both Israel as well as India sort of operate as forms of kind of ethnostates. And those synergies are also as important as the differences. So there's certainly...
plenty of alignment. But in the book, I think what in some ways explains the fates of some of these Western contractors and particularly Israelis is kind of the questions about how their respective authorities were negotiated and didn't set up unfold in the ways that they imagined that they would. So I think while a lot of the Israeli actors expected to be sort of welcomed with open arms by their Indian counterparts, they were treated with a...
a level of skepticism that they were not really anticipating. And I think this sort of fractured their sense of vanity as kind of these all knowing experts. And in the negotiations that I follow in the book by talking with. the Indian officers, as well as the Israeli trainers who were involved, I got a sense that there were a lot of rifts and tensions and disagreements, and that ultimately the Israeli claim to expertise was destabilized.
in various ways by that lack of deference. So I think while all of those considerations are important, the authorities of the different actors were kind of unsettled in ways that might seem surprising.
You were also in the book underlining how Israeli officers were perceiving Indian officers as through a colonial racist lens and logics. Yeah, that was another thing that I... I must say I found somewhat unexpected, not necessarily the racism of Israeli actors per se, but rather the way that they disparage their Indian counterparts, sometimes on the record in ways that were...
incredibly blatantly racist and dehumanizing. And I think that speaks back to what I was talking about just a minute ago in the sense of, I think that was probably a reaction to the ways that their authority was questioned and contested. by their Indian counterparts, and they kind of resorted to sort of classic racist tropes of kind of the slippery native who didn't abide by their reasoning and didn't kind of do what they were told.
And so a lot of my interlocutors from Israel sort of seemed to retaliate against that questioning of their authority in ways that kind of resorted to sort of classic racist tropes. And speaking of racism, your research finished just before Modi got... elected. And under the Modi government, as you know, concerns have grown about rising Hindu supremacism, anti-Muslim racism, and
as some call the Israelization of India. How do you see these dynamics unfolding today? So as you mentioned, I mean, I sort of try to qualify this particularly in an epilogue at the end of the book. by saying that, you know, the vast majority of the research I conducted for the book was prior to Modi's election. And so I try in some respects to kind of not entirely bracket those questions off, but to...
I guess own the fact that the majority of the research was done prior to this moment and that I don't want to sort of stretch it too far into the present sort of conjuncture. That being said, I think the questions about Israelization are... are very significant, particularly in Kashmir. And the mutual synergies around Hindu supremacy and Zionism are very deep and longstanding.
And particularly kind of at a discursive and ideological level, those things manifest and are sort of very present to this very much. If you go on something like Twitter, for example, some of the most enthusiastic supporters.
of the current genocide in Palestine are often of Indian background. And so that's certainly not lost on me, and that's certainly not insignificant. That being said, I think some of the tendencies to... I guess collapse the two places into each other or imply that there are no difficulties I think is possibly misled and I think
The ways in which different things are read across different contexts as being simply springing from the same source may not always be terribly helpful analytically or politically. And so the book, in many ways, tries to sort of insist that although things are indeed changing, and there are certainly prospects for these linkages to become deeper and more significant, that there are tensions particularly.
in the ways that domestic security is organized versus the kind of bilateral relations at the sort of binational level. And so I argue that there's a distinction, for example, between selling stuff like selling simply weaponry or other kind of gadgets versus entering into partnerships around training and consulting and so on. And that the latter are sort of more dependent on seeing eye to eye.
Whereas simply buying and selling equipment might be easier or more seamless. So I guess in broad stroke, I take seriously these claims about Israelization. But I also suggest that the book's findings, I guess, trouble the extent or like the parameters through which these forms of synergies might operate going forward. I guess the spatial dimensions are important here, as in the case of Kashmir, for instance. Do you continue to work on India and Palestine-Israel race? I do, in different...
ways. In the Indian context, my work has kind of ended up going sort of backward historically. I've been grappling with a lot of kind of the early histories of counterinsurgency. practice and thinking in the Indian context and thinking both through kind of the overlaps and synergies between a colonial counterinsurgency and sort of post-colonial counterinsurgency, but also where those breaks.
took place. It's not well known, but India's waged a sort of continuous counterinsurgency battle from 1947 after independence onward. And although these are not often thought about when we think about it, for example, the frame of long wars or sort of continuous counterinsurgency campaigns. I've been trying to sort of think with some of these archives about where sort of centers of authorities reside on.
these kind of origins of contemporary police power and how India and South Asia is, to some extent, not entirely overlooked as a location or theater, but often seen as peripheral or sort of tangential to colonial. centers of authority. So I've been trying to think through that. And then in relation to Palestine, I also continue to think and write actively on that. Excellent. I am looking forward to reading.
about your new research. And thanks for joining me today. It was a pleasure to have you here with us today. Thanks so much for having me. Enjoyed the conversation.