Naming the city: on the governing forces of narratives in the formation of security dispositifs

ABSTRACT

Narratives, it is often said, help us make sense of the world. They structure reality and reduce complexity. Yet narratives, we argue, are also visionary. They open up worlds, they allow us to imagine alternative realities and render a matter urgent. In our study of counterterrorism exercises for the German police we examine the ‘governing forces’ of narratives: Narratives help to connect the dots and create a sense of how new forms of terrorism have entered urban life, thus making new forms of security responses seem indispensable. They also help bring the police trainees close to the realness of a threat as well as of the training situation. ‘Naming the city’ where terror attacks have happened works like a vehicle that transports the experience. Bringing approaches of narrative criminology into dialogue with studies of governmentality allows us to capture the forms of subjectivity that the trainings produce. Rather than a top-down endeavour of the state, security is better understood in how it is put into practice – and how the unforeseeable is meant to be embodied.

KEYWORDS:

• Atmosphere
• governmentality
• narrative criminology
• scenario exercises
• security dispositif

1. Scenario techniques of security

‘Imagine you are on duty in Paris’ the police trainer (a) states, ‘and you are being called to a music club. From incoming emergency calls you learned that several shots have already been fired. How would you proceed? Helmets on, training begins’. This is a typical introductory phrase ‘to set the scene’ in a counterterrorism exercise for police officers taking place somewhere in a large city in Germany. The training site, a former public parking lot, has little in common with a club or a concert hall. Yet, story elements that allude to the concerted terror attacks of 2015 in Paris allow for the scenario to ‘breathe’ (Frank 2010), in other words, to come alive.

Scenario-based exercises, Limor Samimian-Darash (2022, 2) contends, are a mode of experiencing and practicing uncertainty, they ‘help us to [be] open and flexible’ in view of the unpredictability of the future. In the context of counterterrorism measures, scenario exercises are designed to put security personnel in the shoes of officers that are actively dealing with the horrors and intricacies of an ongoing attack. Imagination is key to creating and entering such a scene (Samimian-Darash 2016), and it is narratives and story elements that, by invoking past events, help make the scene appear real. In their ability to shape visions of the future as well as to inspire and drive future actions (Fleetwood et al. 2019; Presser 2018; Presser and Sandberg 2015), narratives can be seen as a performative practice, or as Sneath et al. (2009) put it, an ‘imagination practice’. In scenario trainings they operate like a governmental tool, as they contribute to guiding the behaviour of the trainees and ultimately affect how they experience the exercises.

Based on examples of scenario trainings for police officers in Germany, we will take a closer look at what we call the ‘governing forces’ of narratives. The counterterrorism exercises that we are going to examine are part of a training curriculum intended to prepare patrol officers for ‘life-threatening operational situations’.¹ They were developed by the German Federal Police Academy in close cooperation with special counterterrorism units, and in direct response to the terror attacks of Paris and the following incidents in Brussels and Nice in 2016 (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). Our study of recurring story elements that appear in and around those exercises is both empirically and theoretically motivated: On the one hand we are interested in how these exercises could become part of a ‘security dispositif’ (Foucault 2007), and how they shape being a police officer today. In this respect, the exercises themselves can be understood as a governmental technique of dealing with an unknown and uncertain future. On the other hand, speaking of the ‘governing forces’ of narratives means bringing the two perspectives of ‘narrative criminology’ (Presser and Sandberg 2015) and ‘studies of governmentality’ (Bröckling, Krasmann, and Lemke 2011) into conversation with each other. While narratives can be seen as a missing link to understanding how governmental techniques actually work, the notion of government points us to the forms of subjectivation that come along with them.

Both perspectives share what might be termed an intermediate approach: decoupling questions of security from the classical paradigm of state sovereignty, the analysis of governmental technologies does not ‘deduce power’ from the centre but rather follows the disseminating and ‘ascending’ forces of certain practices (Foucault 2003, 30). It asks how security technologies evolve as a response to a particular problem, how they shape modes of dealing with that problem, and ultimately how this affects the state formation. Similarly, narratives are not thought to emerge from a ‘social vacuum’ (Fleetwood 2016, 174) but are drawn from and build on ‘cultural scripts or narrative templates’ that arise from different social worlds (Maruna and Liem 2021, 137). What sets studies in narrative criminology apart is ‘their emphasis on the complexity of stories and storytelling’ (Presser and Sandberg 2019, 135). Narrative analysis is interested in ‘the different voices that can be found in stories’ (Sandberg 2022, 11; see; Frank 2011, 34), how they oppose and complement each other, and how in their encounter they create new forms of understanding and imagining the world. However, despite their interest in forms of subjectivation – or in how people see the world through narratives – what is largely missing to date in both perspectives is an attentiveness to the affective and corporal dimensions at play: how do narratives incite our feelings and affect what we are doing, or as Sveinung Sandberg and Thomas Ugelvik (2016, 130; see also Presser and Sandberg 2019, 139) frame it: how do ‘we interact with them and they act on us’; and how are technologies of government reaching and enlisting certain people, how do they come to work in practice?

In our research on the governing forces of narratives, we will explore these questions by examining how narratives manage to incorporate and integrate the unexpected, ruptures, and the seemingly contradictory in a productive manner. We will look at the specific institutional context in which storytelling takes place, how stories affect trainees and decision making, and, notably, how imaginative practices of storytelling create performative effects. It is important here to differentiate between story elements and narratives. According to Arthur Frank (2010), stories are local and specific, while narratives are resources or templates from which storytellers tell their stories. Story elements, basically, are drawn from narratives. We go beyond the scope of narrative criminology by asking what the specific productive elements of narratives are, and how they can be understood as forming part of governmental techniques through which new forms of policing practices emerge and are established.

The notion of security dispositifs (see Foucault 2007, 45–49) is instructive for this project, as it designates an assemblage of heterogeneous forms of knowledge and practices, ‘discursive and material elements’ (Aradau and van Munster 2007, 91) that come to be strategically interlinked in the governance of security (Krasmann 2012). Security dispositifs emerge as a response to what is perceived as a pressing problem – like the scenario exercises and the conceptual and institutional restructuration of police that are seen as an adequate and necessary response to a new form of urban terrorism. Yet, there is no master strategist (see Gordon 1980, 251), no-one actually creating security dispositifs. Rather, security dispositifs are strategic effects of those responses and, vice versa, they produce strategic effects, as the practices and technologies of government that are implemented shape how we think about and act upon security problems.

As a form of social action, storytelling cannot be reduced to a specific function either, it is rarely the result of strategic decisions (see Fleetwood and Sandberg 2022, 253). Narratives, rather, deploy their ‘independent lives’ (Frank 2011, 36): they structure how we tell certain things and connect one story element to another, and thus can also integrate new elements and take on new meaning. However, narrative analysis is mostly interested in how stories help us make sense of the world, how they render things: actions, experiences, intentions plausible and provide coherence and stability. Narratives are said to play an important role in providing actors with a path for navigating through the ‘messy thickets of complexity’ (Annison 2022, 391). In contrast, we would claim that narratives do not actually reduce complexities (Vestby 2022), they do not just impose order on the world, manage emotions (Quinn, Tomczak, and Buck 2022) or create consistencies (Annison 2022). As we aim to show in our analysis of scenario exercises, narratives, rather than helping to calm or stabilise chaotic situations, sensitise trainees to read the situation and literally feel what happens. In other words, narratives open a path for trainees to embrace complexities rather than disallowing them.

Studies of governmentality are interested in the forms of knowledge, the suppositions and theories that render technologies of government rational – and thus contribute to the establishment of security dispositifs. The study of narratives, as we understand it, reverses this analytical move. It dismantles stabilising effects, as it sheds light on the fundamental ambivalence and heterogeneity of stories, on how different narrative elements and fragments of stories are combined and change from context to context and from moment to moment when being recounted. Narratives, on the one hand, are important for the police to come to terms with dramatic events such as a terrorist attack and, indeed, to convey a message drawn out of them. They create ‘reality’, but also what Foucault (1991, 85) calls ‘effects in the real’: as a form of problematisation that finds its truth in ‘real’ incidents (Foucault 2001, 172), narratives can render a problem actionable, even urgent, precisely by being recounted and through the recombination of different story elements (Sandberg 2013); but they can also leave their imprints on social reality as they help implement, for example, certain security measures. In the context of the scenario exercises, on the other hand, narratives operate like a relay by rewinding visions about a potential future back to the practical of the moment: they can help the trainees to enter the situation and to engage in the exercises, as they make the artificial setting appear more ‘real’ – while the lines between what is imagined and what is supposed to be real are constantly blurred and challenged.

What our analysis seeks to bring into view then is the sensual and bodily element in the government of security. As they seek to envision and embrace an uncertain future, scenario exercises produce embodied subjectivities:² ideally, the trainees will have learned through the exercises to deal with unforeseeable, life-threatening situations and are expected to incorporate that ability. After first going through the narratives that helped implement the scenario exercises in Germany we will move over to the practices of the exercises themselves. As it conceives of security as the effect of particular situations and events rather than as something that is just state-made ‘from above’, we also understand our approach as a contribution to perspectives of Critical Security Studies. Instead of asking how a security grammar is applied successfully, our research question is how it deploys its own logic through ‘everyday practices of security’ (Bigo 2016) and, notably, ‘how security comes to be part of a spatial-temporal situation in the first place’ (Bonacker 2021, 7).

2. “Designing the real”: coming to terms with a new threat

City names have become signifiers in the security discourse. Paris and Nice in particular demarcate a decisive shift, namely the emergence of a new form of terrorism that entered the heart of urban life and that, at least at first sight, seemed to lack any pattern. When the truck run along the Boulevard des Anglaise in Nice in 2016 and unwaveringly into the crowd of people who had gathered to watch the fireworks on their National Day, a considerable time interval ensued in which no one could tell what was happening: whether it was a vehicle going astray or an intentional and gruesome attack; or whether one could believe their eyes at all. Nice became the emblem of a type of mass attacks ‘where anyone might be hit at any moment and anything could be turned into a murder weapon’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 182). Whether it was a terrorist act, an amok attack or an accident appeared to be indistinguishable, and to instantly intervene in the emerging event itself became imperative (Anderson and Adey 2011).

This new form of terrorism could mark public consciousness through the intensity of concerted acts but also by the swift iteration of attacks in European cities and beyond. As much has already been written about the chain of incidents around the Paris attacks,³ for the present context it may suffice to briefly remind us of the speed of the horrible events that occurred: On 7 January 2015, two men forced their way into the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed twelve people. Two days later, a friend of the attackers took hostages in a Jewish supermarket at the outskirts of Paris, killing four Jewish people. The night of 13 November 2015, still in Paris, saw a group of gunmen and suicide bombers almost simultaneously hit the national soccer stadium, the music club Bataclan and a number of bars, killing 130 people and leaving hundreds wounded. Due to its ‘vehemence’, this concerted attack was perceived as a ‘turning point’, a high-ranking German police officer (e) recalls in an interview. The attack in Nice occurred on 14 July 2016, causing 86 deaths. Other cities would follow, such as Berlin, where a truck ran into a crowd at a Christmas market (echoing the attack in Nice) in 2016, and Manchester, London, Barcelona in the following year. 2019 was marked by the massacre committed by a white supremacist in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; in Germany, a right-wing extremist tried to attack a synagogue on Yom Kippur in Halle, and, upon failing to enter the massive front door, murdered two bystanders – one in front of the synagogue and one in a nearby kebab shop – and targeted more people not fitting into his worldview. Although taking place in different states and urban milieus with their respective histories, especially of migration policies, each of these attacks seemed to suggest that this kind of urban terrorism could occur anywhere where many people gather: in cafés, bars and restaurants, on bridges, markets and other transport hubs. It could hit any citizen, guilelessly dwelling through the city. What for long had been brushed away as something happening elsewhere or coming from the outside – ‘them’ attacking ‘us’ – soon had to be recognised, whether willingly or unwillingly, as something that is a part of ‘us’. The narrative of the so-called home-grown terrorism, to be sure, still harboured the racialised figure of ‘the alien other’ and threat to ‘our’ way of life.⁴

The surprise and shock that these events caused still reverberates in today’s accounts of high-ranked German police officers. Particularly conspicuous is the perception of a threat that made itself suddenly present at the heart of urban life, and that time and again takes on a new shape: ‘Woah, now they are here, among us […] now we are confronted with it on a daily basis’ (high-ranking police officer d); ‘Paris was key […] as it happened in the midst of a region one is familiar with’ (high-ranking police officer e), ‘at the heart of Europe’ (high-ranking police officer a), ‘they killed our neighbours’ (high-ranking police officer e). ‘Hence’, a high-ranking police officer (g) in charge of organising and supervising counterterrorism in Germany states, ‘with a few people, substantially armed and with a true will to inflict maximum harm, one can create incredible scenarios’. As a reaction to these events, the German Federal Police undertook a fundamental, though publicly not much debated, restructuration: the introduction of the scenario exercises for patrol officers nationwide. From one day to another, ordinary policemen, who are familiar with handling everyday social problems and petty crime, were faced with the somewhat impossible mission of learning to deal with unforeseeable, ‘complex life-threatening situations’. This was both a strategic and a conceptual shift, as the training has much in common with those of the elite counterterrorism and special operations unit of the German Federal Police. It aims to enable the officers to shift to an urban warfare like situation: moving with a 360-degree awareness between buildings, analysing their surroundings for possible cover or threats and, most importantly, be prepared to shoot instantly and at the same time to act cautiously. In the emergency event of a terrorist attack or a shooting rampage, it was said, police can no longer wait for the special forces. Patrol officers therefore must expand their skills into unfamiliar territory and get used to equipment such as ballistic vests and helmets as well as sub-machine and long guns.

Within months following the attacks in Paris and Brussel, the first so-called ‘anti-terror packages’, specific frameworks for amendments in the legislative and judicial conditions, were passed in several German states, such as Saxony, Berlin, Bavaria and Hamburg. Along with the security packages following the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, this second generation of anti-terror measures is among the most far-reaching structural changes enacted in the history of the German police. The packages included not only the purchase of new protective equipment, such as bullet- and stab-proof vests, ballistic helmets, and plate carriers that can withstand military style weapons, but also new service weapons (handguns and semi-automatic rifles) for police officers (Saxon State Ministry of the Interior 2017; Press and Information Office of the State of Berlin 2017). Apart from the usual build-up in security personnel and equipment after a striking event, police in some states even acquired new armoured vehicles like the ‘Survivor R’, obviously a prestige project which gives police the appearance of military-like importance. The vehicle can drive directly into hails of bullets to drop off police forces or rescue wounded civilians (Saxon State Ministry of the Interior 2017; Press Office of the Ministry of the Interior of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; Tack 2018). According to the police, these measures were required to protect citizens from ‘a new dimension of terrorism’ that has entered our cities with the ‘inhuman’ terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussel and Nice (Staatsregierung 2016).

The adoption of the anti-terror packages was accompanied by legislative changes in various federal states regulating the use of operational resources in the event of a terrorist attack by the police. In Baden-Wurttemberg, Saxony and Bavaria, for example, the police was now allowed to use explosives, such as explosive projectiles and hand grenades, from a distance to avoid entering a hazardous space (State parliament Baden-Württemberg 2021; Staatsregierung 2022, 2020). What is notable is not only the speed with which new operational equipment was procured and legislative changes passed, but also the amount of funding allocated to the packages. Depending on each federal state, between 15 and 45 million euros were spent. The fact that these packages were also implemented ‘differently than usual’, namely ‘almost […] overnight’ (high-ranking police officer a), emphasises the perceived urgency associated with these changes. From the police perspective, it was essential to adjust to the new ‘reality’ where ‘anything can happen at any time’ as quickly as possible (high-ranking police officer b). In order not to be ‘overrun’ (high-ranking police officer c) by the next terrorist attack, a ‘rethinking of tactics and strategies’ (high-ranking police officer a) was said to be indispensable, as well as providing enhanced armament and protective gear for police officers. This is because today’s terrorists are, as high-ranking police officers state, yet ‘of a different calibre’: they are ‘militarily trained’, ‘heavily armed’ (c), use ‘explosives’, ‘Kalashnikovs’ and other ‘weapons of war’ (d). From previous forms, today’s terrorism also differs, it is said, in that the range of modi operandi has amplified, from ‘spontaneous’ to concerted, well planned and heavily armed attacks. In order to counter these ‘unpredictable acts’ (high-ranking police officer a), the interviewees agree, new approaches are needed that take this ‘new form’ (high-ranking police officer e) and ‘new dimension’ of terrorism seriously (high-ranking police officer f).

3. Scenario exercises: setting the scene and getting serious

Paris, Nice or Berlin have become metonyms for a perceived shift in the nature of terrorist threats. These city names are not only key to the processes restructuring the European security landscapes, but also to the scenario exercises devised by law enforcement. The horror of the attacks experienced is conveyed through these names, especially Paris and the sites of the 2015 attacks. In scenario exercises, trainees are given prompts such as: ‘Think of Bataclan. You are being called to a disco by radio. From eyewitnesses you learn that heavily armed men have entered the building. You are at the rear entrance. Helmets on, training begins’ (trainer b).

There are two types of scenario exercises in the German police. Large-scale exercises are expensive and require long-time planning (a task force has to be assigned to plan and coordinate the exercise, a suitable site has to be inspected, nearby residents must be notified etc.). Smaller training units are less cost-intensive and tie up fewer resources. While the latter are designed to train ordinary police officers in dealing with terrorist threats, the former aim to identify the weak points in the organisational interaction of the various police forces (e.g. federal police, riot police, state police) in the event of a terrorist attack (high-ranking police officer a). Due to the enormous effort involved, large-scale exercises are the exception and play only a subordinate role. Some high-ranking police officers even question their practical effects and suggest that they have more to do with building up the ‘public image’ of the police rather than the readiness of individual police officers for the next attack (f). Smaller exercises, by contrast, can be carried out with a handful instead of hundreds of police personnel. In addition, they are considered more appropriate for a training that ultimately all patrol officers shall go through at least once, and at best repeatedly, since the focus lies on individual police officers and not on the organisation as a whole. Hierarchies in the police, to be sure, are well-structured. Yet to give space to the dynamics of the training situation the police officers are urged to organise themselves. Hierarchies are kept ‘flat’. At the beginning of each counterterrorism operation, task forces, consisting of three to four officers, in a brief tactical meeting decide whom to entrust with taking the lead of the squad, a tactic that is called ‘leading from the front’ (high-ranking police officer a).

Even the execution of small-scale scenario exercises throughout Germany presents some considerable challenges. Since resources in the state police forces are notoriously scarce (high-ranking police officer g), or inadequately distributed, well-equipped exercise sites are rare. Often abandoned buildings or parking lots are used.⁵ Imagination is needed to get into the situation. As one script writer involved in the creation of scenarios details, the scene must appear ‘real’ and the situation become tangible so that the trainees are able to fully immerse themselves in the exercise (trainer c). Moreover, the streak of terror attacks between 2015 and 2019 seems to be far away, in the German province same as in many cities today, not so much in a temporal sense but remote in that similar attacks cannot be fathomed here and now. Short video clips recorded by police officers during counterterrorism operations as well as detailed media footage of recent attacks shown at the beginning of a training week therefore serve as a complementary technique. A documentary on the November 13 attacks in Paris,⁶ for example, screened on the first day of a three-day counterterrorism training course, depicts the dramatic attacks through the eyes of witnesses and first responders (e.g. police officers, paramedics) as they recount how they survived and risked their lives to save people. The message is not to encourage the trainees to become heroes, nor to intimidate them, but to literally put them in the picture. Indeed, the emotionally powerful images do just that, as one trainee recaps: The film impressively illustrates ‘what to expect’ when on duty. ‘I hope this will never happen, but […] if this day happens, I want to give everything to save the one or another life’ (trainee a).

A further technique to get a taste of what to expect is to replay audio recordings of the police radio from the day of the Paris attacks. Although the recordings are in French and the police officers understand relatively little, the chaotic and hectic atmosphere of the situation becomes palpable (high-ranking police officer f). Video clips and audio recordings constitute a powerful tool of mobilising affect and ‘making unknown futures present’ (Christensen 2022, 9), but it is imperative that they relate to ‘real’ happenings.⁷ Naming the city, or site, at the beginning of the counterterrorism exercises then serves to instantly revive the images of the film the trainees have seen, or to raise their own awareness of the attacks, and to set the scene. It reminds them of the realness of what is now going to happen and gives them a sense of the seriousness of the exercise. The initial and initiating phrase ‘helmets on, training begins’ underscores this move: it makes the seriousness of the situation palpable for the trainees: now they are ‘in’.

The scenario exercises are shaped by several tensions: they are to make appear real what is in fact an artificial training situation; they put the trainees under stress, without allowing the situation to get out of control; and they prepare trainees to shoot in a precarious situation while, in a way, making them always think twice. Brief safety instructions at the beginning of each training session seek to evoke a team spirit. The trainees are encouraged to take care of each other, not only to prevent injury, but also to learn that they rely on each of their colleagues in highly complex and chaotic situations. This involves protecting each other (e.g. provide covering fire), giving emotional support, treating injuries, and if necessary initiating life saving measures. In short, the trainees are deemed to trust each other ‘blindly’ and to be able to work side-by-side with colleagues previously unknown to them in emotionally fragile settings (trainee c). Bolstering trust is also essential for them to ‘go home with an overall good feeling’, as one police trainer (c) pointed out, as well as for the long-term impact of the training.

After each trainee makes sure that their equipment is properly fitted and the scenario is brought into picture with some operational information about the site (for example, the incident occurs in a shopping mall, a concert hall, or the centre of a major city) and the current emergency situation (what is known from incoming calls), the training starts. Depending on what they assume, the trainees begin to move quickly or slowly through the training site to clarify the situation, stop an active shooter and defend innocent lives. Usually, these initial scenes are accentuated by simulated radio calls, which provide further story elements and contribute to making the scenario as realistic as possible, but also to cause stress. They make the trainees ‘live in the situation’ and mimic the inherently chaotic conditions of terrorist attacks (trainer a). Hence, from the radio calls first-responders are fed with different, often conflicting and misleading pieces of information to enhance uncertainty and confusion (e.g. varying numbers of perpetrators or different information about where the perpetrator was last seen). The challenge for the trainees is to deal with the flood of incoming information, to endure its contradictions and to embrace its complexity. In other words, the job is to decide what can be trusted upon and what cannot.

A related technique to expose trainees to chaotic situations and to test their ability to cope with them is to make the appearance of civilians and offenders indistinguishable. Within a split-second the trainees must decide whether to fight a person, or to stun or restrain them, or whether to protect them. Based on the experience with the Bataclan attacks, so-called ‘disruptors’ are tasked with distracting the officers so as to cause stress, for example, by clinging to their uniforms, screaming in pain or loudly begging for help. For a trainee in such situations, it is almost impossible to fully avoid mistakes. As one policeman recalls the diverse demands the officers are faced with: ‘There is simply too much that affects you in a moment like that. My skills are limited. I just don’t have three brains and 26 hands’ (trainee b). Perfection, indeed, is conceded to be unattainable, the requirement is to avoid as many errors as possible. In other words, police officers are not expected to have ‘superpowers‘ (three brains and 26 hands) but to be able to face highly complex situations and make quick and reasonable decisions. In Paris, officers were confronted with similar challenges of not being overwhelmed by desperate cries for help while trying to distinguish terrorists from civilians in the dark of a concert venue.

To further augment the felt realness of the operation the body of the trainees itself is literally targeted. ‘FX marking cartridges’ is the name of the tool. They were developed for so-called ‘force-on-force’ training programs to not only visualise where a trainee has been hit, but also to give them a painful sensation of being shot. The idea is to enhance learning from mistakes through their ‘real’ corporal consequences. Accordingly, mistakes that could have been fatal in the field should not only be the subject of debriefings, but also experienced first-hand, as one police instructor put it: so as to ‘internalise’ them (trainer d). The pain caused by a hit of FX ammunition augments the stress the trainees are exposed to and, to be sure, it gives them a tangible taste of the seriousness of anti-terrorism operations. It is a slightly painful attunement to upcoming life-threatening situations. To further promote learning from mistakes, in some cases officers are removed from the exercise after being ‘fatally shot’. Yet, there is no standing procedure. Depending on the training objective, officers can continue to take part in the exercise even after being hit. From a training perspective, this can make sense, since the officers are also required to assist their seriously injured colleagues in treating their wounds. First and foremost, however, the trainees are encouraged to help themselves (e.g. by applying a pressure bandage, a so-called ‘Israeli bandage’ or a tourniquet), as the primary aim is to prevent the aggressor from taking any further harmful actions.

Sceptical voices among the police raise concerns about the sustainability of the trainings (trainee b; d) that are offered to each trainee at best once a year and are thus not integrated into their everyday practices (high-ranking police officer g). Moreover, some maintain that the inherent artificiality of the exercises cannot be negated (trainer d; e; trainee b). Nevertheless, despite the poor conditions under which the trainings take place, trainers (a; c) and trainees (b; d) agree that the procedure of the training ‘is great. […] There is not much more to get out of it’ (trainee b). As police instructors consistently emphasise, the experience of uncertainty, of ‘not knowing what happens next’ is what gives the exercises their seriousness (trainer c). It is essential therefore, ironically, that the scenarios be well planned to make them develop in a way that cannot be anticipated by the trainees. Systematically caused disorientation, stress and confusion help them immerse in the training situation and give rise to what Samimian-Darash (2022, 55) calls ‘processes of indetermination’.

Scenario exercises are messy, rather than ‘clean’ technical processes. The trainees have to familiarise themselves with stressfully unpredictable situations, a near impossible task. They are told that the worst case can indeed happen and that they must be prepared and able to swiftly scan and identify a situation where what appears to be normal can ‘suddenly’ turn disastrous. As the leading police officer (g) from the State Security in Germany expounds, scenario bits from different terror events are blended together so as to render the scene even more vivid and complex. The image of the Synagogue door in Halle, that became famous for withstanding the attack of the frenzied perpetrator, for example, can be used to add an unexpected detail, once it is presented as being easily to trespass. In order to gain confidence in their own skills and be able to react both instantly and judiciously to chaos, police officers learn to ‘blindly recall’ the required motion sequences to handle a high-calibre weapon (trainees recalling the effect of the exercises). As one police trainer (d) concludes in the feedback session, alluding to a misplaced ideal of masculinity: ‘Don’t be a Rambo. Be the opposite: a problem solver. Go with your gut. Be careful, but also courageous and responsive at any time’. Moreover, as another police trainer (e) insists, for the experience of the counterterrorism exercise to stick, it is important that the training be intense, confusing and pressing, and thus challenges routine behaviour and pushes the officers to their limits, while also maintaining an atmosphere of familiarity, ease and fun. If the trainees are ‘punished’ at all, this is to make them immediately aware of their mistakes (e.g. letting them feel the pain). Yet the microphysics of the exercise is to keep its divergent moments of creating intensities, obtaining toughness and establishing a team spirit in the balance. It is a form of governing through incentives with recognition as the final reward: towards the group that was able to manage the defiant situation, and, more indirectly, towards the individual police officer who can be proud of doing this responsible job. To calm down at the end of each scenario exercise, the situation must be brought back to normal. The phrase ‘Break. Secure weapons. Remove helmets’ always terminates the operations. The final part consists of a brief joint feedback session where positive affirmation is crucial to building confidence. Scenario exercises are a risky endeavour, as affects are by nature not easily controlled. The challenge is to find a balance between preparing police officers to jump into a highly dangerous unknown situation and not evoking the image of a militarised police that knows no alternative to drastic measures.

4. Affective realities

As our analysis suggests, naming the city, such as Paris, Halle or Berlin has a double effect. While it introduces the ‘real’ world to the scenarios and thus stresses the seriousness of the exercises, it also triggers the trainees’ imagination and creates certain ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2009). The dangers that are supposedly all around, and the threats that can materialise, are not just present, they ‘must […] be made present’ (Bonacker 2021, 19) – and felt. Yet as Sara Fregonese and Sunĉana Laketa (2022) point out, affective atmospheres do not hover above or ‘over’ an environment or people, nor are they effectuated from the top down to shape ‘collective moods’ (Fregonese and Laketa 2022, 2) or to excite public ‘fear’ (Massumi 2005). Affect does not reside in certain bodies but is what happens and circulates between bodies (Ahmed 2014; Massumi 2002), and atmospheres are not tools that can be applied. But they can be created and fostered through certain ‘atmotechniques’ (Wall 2019) such as soothing background music in shopping malls or producing noise to enhance stress as in the counterterrorism exercises. They are a form of attunement where a certain sense of being in the situation diffuses and aligns multiple actors and actants, people and things across different spaces and scales (see Wall 2019, 146). Atmospheres are volatile (see Fregonese and Laketa 2022, 2; Sumartojo and Pink 2019, 17), and what makes the notion pertinent for our analysis is that it captures the ambiguities and tensions of a situation that is shaped by what is present and absent, concrete and abstract, singular and general at the same time (see Anderson 2009, 77).

The scenario exercises create atmospheres on a temporal and spatial level by zooming in on terrifying past events at particular sites – notably the chaotic and tense situation police officers were faced at the music club Bataclan – and compiling scenes from different events, thus bringing to the present what happened in the past and associating Paris with provincial towns in Germany. Atmospheres gain momentum in the dynamics that unfold between the trainees and in their reactions to stressful situations: in their encounters with strange objects or false information, as they feel the reassuring touch of their colleagues, or as the bullet that hits their body forcefully throws them into the reality of pain and reminds them that they have made a fatal mistake. The reality the trainees find themselves in is multi-layered: what is real and what is fictive overlaps in the scenarios, real incidents and the stories told about them, re-imaginations of what once happened and the perception of the present situation in the scenario exercise constantly intermingle. Even the idea that a scenario should be plausible to appear real is fictitious (see Samimian-Darash 2022, 43; Krasmann 2015): it is created by story elements (e.g. ‘heavily armed terrorist’) and in artificial settings such as a parking lot – where it takes on the shape of a real and presumably highly dangerous, if not explosive, situation. Indeed, the scenarios create a specific situation of intensively tangible insecurity in the here and now that extends to the future as the training produces a specific awareness. What is ‘only’ an exercise (trainee b), in some decisive moments comes to be felt as real (‘for me, it is real’, trainee (d) comments, a sentiment shared by many) and gives the police officers an idea of the ‘real realness’ of the next terror attack they are expected to be prepared for.

The perception of a new form of urban terrorism that is characterised by its suddenness, its ordinariness and unpredictability blends into a broader narrative of changing forms of terrorism in the West. According to this narrative, broadly speaking, 9/11 demarcates a turning point after which terrorism became increasingly global and gradually moved from discriminate acts with relatively clear political messages towards more and more diffuse forms that tend to elude sense making (Kessler and Daase 2008) – and note, it was the date, not the city name, that denoted this shift at the beginning of the new millennium. If we were to analyse the changing political responses and security conceptions to these forms of terrorism, it would be instructive to conceive of this narrative as a storyline. Storylines that bound different ‘emblematic’ events and discursive elements together ‘provide meaning’. They help to ‘make sense’, that is, to decipher developments and make related problems urgent as well as respective security measures plausible (Annison 2022, 391, with reference to; Hajer 1997). Seen from this angle, ‘naming the city’ can be understood as naming emblematic events that also feed into certain storylines of governing security and explaining shifting forms of terrorism. Yet the notion of storylines itself is a form of sense making that seeks to bind disparate elements together and to somehow make them coherent. Storylines produce stories that could also be told otherwise. Moreover, as could be seen, the scenario exercises themselves follow a storyline in their sequence of ‘setting the scene’, creating a turbulent situation, and accomplishing a conciliatory atmosphere in the final feedback session.

By contrast, examining the practice of ‘naming the city’ as a performative act in scenario exercises allows us to comprehend security dispositifs as forceful strategic effects. The forms of subjectivation that are created in the counterterrorism exercises, we argue, cannot be dissolved from the corporeal practices of habitualization: once the unforeseeable cannot be averted, it must be ‘incorporated, literally lived’ (Aradau 2014, 77). What these exercises produce then are not ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1977) or obedient police officers that function like a cog in the machinery of the disciplinary society or ‘the security state’. Rather, the training aims to open the senses and to build up capabilities that prepare officers across the country for unforeseeable catastrophes. In contrast to the logic of prevention, preparedness limits itself to stopping ‘the effects’ of a disruptive event (Anderson 2010, 791). But it is also an ethos, or a form of subjectivation, that requires one to be constantly prepared to face and fight the horrors of a terrorist attack. Moreover, if situational awareness, as a ‘multisensorial attentiveness’, is a new paradigm of security and an expectation that addresses security personnel and ‘ordinary citizens alike’ (Arfsten 2020; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 187), the corresponding subject is able to deal with contradictory exigencies: they must be prudent and courageous at the same time; they are adept to endure highly stressful as much as indeterminate or ambiguous situations; and they must act decidedly while being devoid of a stable set of rules or norms. Security in this sense implies insecurity (Ivasiuc 2023): there is no security without dealing with insecurity, with hazardous and dangerous situations, and the policemen are trained to embody that awareness of insecurity. Insecurity makes itself present in the struggle for security.

5. Conclusion: embracing the unforeseeable

Narratives and storytelling play a critical role in the implementation of security measures and in the police counterterrorism trainings in particular, where stories constitute the basis, so to say the ‘lifeblood’, of the exercises. While our analysis takes inspiration from narrative criminology, we go beyond the limited focus on actors, be they state actors in the criminal justice system or offenders (see Don and Alayna 2019, 321). We also differ from the majority of police studies that is concerned with the formation of ‘cop cultures’ and with how narratives shape behaviour and police identity (e.g. Kurtz and Upton 2017; Van Hulst 2013). By contrast, we approach narratives at an intermediate level through their hinge function, as they contribute to the formation of tactics, strategies and, more generally, new security practices, and as they help put security into practice. Naming the city here assumes a double function: as the condensation of a narrative of what security personnel have perceived and designated as a new form of terrorism that entered urban life, it helps enforce new security measures; and in the scenario exercises it serves as a trigger to revive that experience. It gives them a sense of realness, one that must be instantly retrievable in the event of an actual terrorist attack. Furthermore, bringing narrative criminology and studies of governmentality in this field into conversation with each other, allows us to see how the exercises, and the stories tied to them, produce certain forms of subjectivity. The police officers are expected to behave like prudent warriors who are able to make momentous decisions despite the complexity of the situation and to intervene intrepidly while at the same time taking care of themselves and their fellow colleagues. Attentiveness goes in all directions. ‘Affect’, finally, not only helps bring into view the ‘sensorial registers’ (Ivasiuc 2023, 51) that are invoked when chaos is brought about in the training situation and (in-)security comes to be embodied through the exercises. As Ann Laura Stoler (2018, 211) put it in a different context, affect also ‘opens to and locates the technologies of governance with precision’, as it zooms in on ‘the sites of their making’.

The German case is not singular. The re-organisation of police and policing as a response to new threats is something that happens all the time, and if policies resemble each other across different countries, this is, to be sure, because professionals and institutions exchange experiences and concepts; but it is not a question of just ‘one-way’ transferrals or top-down implementations. Concepts travel and models circulate, and they do so on multiple levels. They must be translated and appropriated when incorporated into local policing practices, where they take on a specific meaning. And what Maya Mynster Christensen designates as ‘transnational boomeranging’ (Christensen 2022, 3) are processes of models, concepts, practices – and narratives – scattering back and forth in different directions and to different sites where they are modified in the very moment of application to a particular problem. Moreover, speaking of ‘boomerang effects’, according to Foucault (2003, 103), suggests that exported security models may accomplish their mission even more forcefully on their return, or when circling back and forth. This might entail that practices of (racialised) othering in the fight against terrorism are being reinforced, or that life in urban spaces is increasingly affected by counterterrorism measures.⁸ Paris is not Berlin, Accra or Christchurch. And yet, security’s logic is that it alludes to that which is unknown and threatening; and the more sudden, i.e. unforeseeable, and harmful the next attack is anticipated to be, with actual gruesome incidents reminding of the ‘realness’ of the threat, the more the claim sticks that we always have to reckon with it. ‘The same’ can happen anywhere. It cannot be calculated but one can try to be prepared. Security dispositifs that emerge out of such processes bring about their own forms of subjectivation, and figures such as the considerate warrior (not the swashbuckler) in the German police. Nonetheless, security dispositifs are not a thing, but must be understood as the interplay of several heterogenous tactics, practices and technologies that are in ‘perpetual (re)elaboration’ (Anderson and Adey 2011, 1107), and susceptible to error (Maguire and Westbrook 2021). As imperfect as the scenario exercises in Germany are, uncertainty and failure, our analysis indeed suggests, constitute systematic elements in today’s rationales of governing security.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jasper Janssen and Stefano Mazilli-Daechsel for a careful reading of a previous version of this article and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their instructive comments. Our thanks also go to our interlocutors at the German police for their openness to share with us parts of their professional life and experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of a larger research project on “Situational Awareness”: Sensing Security in the City” funded by the German Research Foundation under Grant number 431354515.

Notes on contributors

León von der Burg

León von der Burg is junior researcher at Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg. His doctoral thesis is on “Governing through stories: researching a security paradigm in the German police force”. His main research interests are Policing and Urban Governance, Security Policy, Scenario Technology, Imagination and Uncertainty.

Susanne Krasmann

Susanne Krasmann is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, Universität Hamburg. Her fields of research are Sociology of Security, Law and Its Knowledge, Architecture in the Anthropocene, Vulnerability and the Political. She has published in international journals such as Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, Cultural Studies, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Leiden Journal of International Law, Punishment & Society, Security Dialogue, Surveillance & Society, Theoretical Criminology.

Notes

1. Data collection was conducted between 2020 and 2023 through participant observation of counterterrorism exercises of the German police and interviews with police officers. In total, we conducted more than 20 training observations and more than 30 interviews. Although some police officers highlighted the importance of policewomen in police work in interviews, women are still underrepresented in the police force. The male-dominated nature of the police was also evident in our research. We encountered only a handful of policewomen in management and high-ranking positions. To protect the identity of our interlocutors, we categorised them as follows: trainees, trainers, and high-ranking police officers. The category ‘high-ranking police officers’ includes police officers who hold a leadership position in the state or federal police (e.g. police chief, deputy police chief, police commander, etc.) or in other agencies that are part of the domestic security architecture, such as the Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), or counterterrorism coordination units.

2. To the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic coupling of the two approaches of Narrative Criminology and Studies of Governmentality, let alone one that integrates the affective-bodily dimension. Nonetheless, we benefit from Samimian-Darash’s (2022 work on scenario exercises in Israel, that also focuses on the forms of subjectivation scenario exercises produce and the relevance of ‘narrative building’ to create ‘plausible futures’ (see in particular chapter two and four). Scenario techniques, Samimian-Darash (2022, 22) holds, demarcate a shift in our time from risk-based to uncertainty-based technologies of governing the future.

3. Catto (2016); Krasmann and Hentschel (2019); Miller and Hayward (2019).

4. On the notion of ‘racial governmentality’ as a phenomenon integral to the securitisation of immigration, see Moffette and Vadasaria (2016). For a critique of a deeply embedded colonial and racist gaze not only in liberal security thinking and practices but also, silently, in critical security scholarship, see Coleman (2021). It is precisely due to the centrality of security in our hemisphere, Coleman argues, that ‘systemic, racialized relations of violence’ are overlooked, particularly in securitisation theory, with a tendency to naturalise the lifeworld of the non-white and poor and to reproduce civilizationist accounts.

5. This observation is also shared by Kretschmann’s (2022) study on protest policing training in mock cities across Europe. Compared to England, France, and Northern Ireland, larger scenario exercises are much more infrequent in Germany, where the majority of the police trainings, for example in Lower Saxony, are held in places such as ‘offices, accommodations, classroom etc’. (Kretschmann 2022, 16). See also the images depicted by photographer Paul Shambroom (2006) of the well-resourced counterterrorism training for first responder and law enforcement officers in post 9/11 America taking place in villages and camps that have been bought and established specifically for that purpose.

6. The three-part documentary ‘13 November: Attack on Paris’ (available at: https://www.netflix.com/de/title/80190097), made by the same directors who became famous for their internationally successful film about the 9/11 attacks, intimately portrays the sensation of the people who were directly affected by the attacks: the sounds they hear, the smells they perceive and the impression of losing their sense of time.

7. As Christensen (2022) in her study on counterterrorism measures and everyday practices of pre-emptive policing shows, similar techniques of awareness training also apply in Ghana where civilians are taught ‘how to remain alert and suspicious’ in order to identify ‘signs of danger’ (Christensen 2022, 9). Ghana is an interesting case: Although, unlike other countries in Africa, it ‘has not been hit by terror on home soil [it] is a main target of foreign counterterrorism interventions owing to its strategic location and role as an anchor of stability in West Africa’. In order to give civilians an idea of a possible threat, video clips are shown that portray recent dramatic terrorist attacks near the Ghanaian border. Counterterrorism measures and related categories, such as the figure of the enemy, are adopted in everyday life and thus rendered mundane while related phenomena remain extraordinary.

8. See Laketa’s (2023) insightful study of today’s Paris shaped by a permanent state of emergency.