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'Policing Sport Mega-Events' shows how globalised mega-event security standards have been implemented and adapted in the everyday practices of security officials, at various positions in the Brazilian security apparatus, through first hand insights into the 2014 Men's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

This article reconsiders contemporary urban security governance. Conceptually, it revisits Foucault's governmentality lectures to comprehend how security governance is carried out in places where the use of digital security technologies co-exists with overly lethal and repressive forms of policing. The author advances his analysis by conceptualizing a triangle of security governance in which disciplinary powers of control, apparatuses of security and sovereign/necropower are at work simultaneously, complemented by a fourth dimension that takes into account what Foucault outlined in the lectures as the 'government of things', which is the sociotechnical relationship between the agency of humans and machines. Empirically, the article explores the technopolitical turn in urban security policies in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Using discourses that are embedded in globalized mega-event security standards and legacy claims, authorities in Rio promoted a narrative of new material and non-material security measures that were intended both to secure the World Cup and the Olympics and to help overcome permanently entrenched urban conflicts in the city. By critically analysing these two approaches of new material and non-material security measures, the author shows how new security technologies are perfectly integrated into a continuum of death politics in Rio de Janeiro in ways that are conceptually best appreciated by considering how the triangle of security governance works in the digital era.

This article reconsiders sport mega-event security in the context of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The article essentially argues that the mega-event organizers used a security spectacle to camouflage Rio's politics of death in the many favelas and peripheral neighborhoods. Conceptually, this contribution centralizes different notions of spectacle and camouflage and situates both in the history of violent and racial policing of the poor in Brazil. Empirically, the piece explores, across three sections, how (1) the city was transformed into a spectacular fortress by adapting standardized mega-event security measures to the specific public security conditions in Rio; (2) the Olympic fortress was nonetheless selectively porous and permeable; and (3) the spectacle served to camouflage the other wise deadly police deployments of socio-spatial patterns along lines of class and racial inequalities.

AbstractThis paper argues that at its very core, the policy response to a pandemic such as COVID‐19 is shaped by the search for the right balance between openness and closure, mobility and public safety. More specifically, drawing upon relevant social‐scientific literatures and examples relating to the fight against COVID‐19 in Switzerland, the paper highlights three broad and fundamentally intertwined spatial logics of control and restriction through which differing degrees and modalities of closure and openness are being articulated in the context of infectious disease. These refer to (1) border and access control; (2) the monitoring of people and objects on the move and (3) to the internal organization and monitoring of specific spatial enclaves. The three spatial logics of crisis management and control offer an exploratory framework, the paper argues, to study the functioning and implications of outbreak response both during and after the pandemic.

This article draws upon a large-scale survey of professional (public institution and private company) drone usage in Switzerland. The authors argue that professional drone usage includes a wide range of applications and objectives and, thus, logics of vision and visibility. Instead of being systematic and predictable, the visibilities created by professional drone usage are punctual in occurrence, highly varying in spatial logics and articulations, and, therefore, often unpredictable. This raises important questions and problems with regard to the power dynamics unfolding from the visual and visualising capabilities of the technology that reach far beyond the usual focus on surveillance in current academic engagements with the topic.