Atmosphere, imminence and the Manchester Arena Inquiry: on the affective modalities of becoming situationally aware to urban terrorism

ABSTRACT

Building situational awareness has become a central logic among contemporary security apparatuses for abating no-warning urban terrorism. Situational awareness, we contend, casts the sensory, perceptual and affective capacities of human bodies to decipher their immediate surroundings and attune to the non-representational and more-than-known of an enfolding situation, as essential to its execution. What modalities of sense-making and attunement, then, does this burgeoning security rationality demand? And what sensibilities, affectivities and subjectivities are (re)produced and legitimated across urban life? In this paper, we unpack these questions by examining the ways affective and atmospheric attunement(s) are infused within orthodox and emergent security approaches for developing and honing situational awareness. We argue that affective atmospheres in particular furnish the theoretical architecture for attending to the spatio-affective-material registers through which imminence becomes palpable. Empirically, by analysing the Public Inquiry following the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, we elucidate where the Inquiry advanced discussions on (the limits of) situational awareness and its sensorial, affective and atmospheric dimensions, thereby extending situational awareness into an atmospheric agenda within urban geopolitics. Finally, we reflect on how the impending UK Protect Duty might reconfigure the legal landscape of situational awareness, city resilience, and the affective economies of (in)attention.

KEYWORDS:

• Situational awareness
• security
• affect
• atmosphere
• Manchester Arena Inquiry
• resilience

Introduction

Building situational awareness has become a central logic among contemporary security apparatuses for abating no-warning urban terrorism. Over the past decade, an upsurge of no-notice, low-sophistication and indiscriminate terrorist attacks across European cities – perpetrated by attackers seeking to inflict maximum casualties – has arguably engendered the awareness of a ubiquitous and imminent threat pervading the quotidian spaces of urban life (Coaffee 2021; Europol 2023). From the November 2015 coordinated attacks across Paris to the vehicle-ramming attacks along the Promenade des Anglais (Nice) and at the Breitscheidplatz (Berlin) in 2016, the novel urban vulnerabilities faced by this contemporary terrorist threat – that may unfold anywhere and at any moment – have been thrown into sharp relief (Fregonese 2021). With hostiles increasingly operating outside of established terrorist networks, the modus operandi of urban terror is thus ‘harder to detect and disrupt’ before its materialisation (Fregonese and Laketa 2022). Echoed in the most recent publication of the United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism (CONTEST), ‘Once an individual has taken a decision to conduct an attack, and has the means available, they may do so quickly and without warning’ (HM Government 2023, 13). Securitising the ubiquity of potential targets within the urban realm, therefore, poses unprecedented challenges for city authorities. Ultimately, we are witnessing the burgeoning significance of situational awareness within programmes of urban security governance, particularly through an emerging repertoire of approaches that confront and inhabit the ‘situation’ of enfolding terror to diminish its ‘disruptive potential’ (Zebrowski 2019, 148).

At its crux, situational awareness fosters attentiveness to alleviating urban terrorism and securing life within or through the critical spatio-temporal envelope between its onset and its becoming a catastrophe (Adey, Anderson, and Graham 2015; Arfsten 2020). Those responsible for urban security, emergency planning and city resilience accept the only window of intervention may be the emergent, rapidly evolving shock-‘event’ of terror itself (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). For von der Burg and Krasmann (2023), situational awareness is also an ethos: of embodying and embracing the unpredictability and unknowability of the unfolding situation. It instils the requisite to be constantly poised, ready to (re)act and attuned to any ‘yet-unknown’ happening (Anderson 2016; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). This, in turn, enrols the sensory skills of security professionals and ordinary citizens to better feel the presages, imminence and evolution of political violence, in order to acquire and (re)act with a temporal and strategic edge (NPSA 2024). Situational awareness, we contend, casts the sensory, perceptual and affective capacities of human bodies to decipher their immediate surroundings and attune to the non-representational and more-than-known of an enfolding situation, as essential to its execution.

In this paper, we investigate the role of human bodies and in particular their multi-sensorial apparatuses, capabilities and functions, as a vital locale for assembling situational awareness through, to paraphrase geographer O’Grady (2019, 461), the ‘sensorial encounter with the emergency’. Accordingly, our point of departure lies in the interrogation of the following questions. What modalities of sense-making and attunement do situational awareness demand and, critically, what factors threaten these capacities to attune? What sensibilities, affectivities and subjectivities are (re)produced, sustained and legitimated? And, crucially, how can imminence be conceptualised and what theoretical tools might we adopt to enrich scholarly understanding of this process of becoming?

A burgeoning body of scholarship has investigated the envelopment of the sensorial and affective dispositions of bodies as ‘sites’ of sense-making amidst emergencies and with their inscription into the praxis of security governance and emergency planning (Kaufmann 2015; Laketa 2021; O’Grady 2019; Ritchie 2015). Situated within these literatures, we aim to furnish two central contributions. First, we unpack the aforementioned questions by examining the ways affective and atmospheric attunement(s) and intuiting are infused within orthodox and emergent security approaches for developing and honing situational awareness to urban terror. Then, drawing upon insights developed within scholarship on affect and atmosphere from across urban geopolitics and security studies, we argue that affective atmospheres offer the theoretical architecture for attending to the spatio-affective-material registers through which imminence impresses and becomes palpable. Intertwined throughout the paper, we position our reading of situational awareness against similar and divergent concepts and logics within urban security, including literatures on the logic of ‘response’ (Anderson 2016), ‘anticipation’, ‘preemption’ and ‘preparedness’ (Anderson 2010; de Goede, Simon, and Hoijtink 2014), and on ‘vigilant visualities’ (Amoore 2007). Second, we elucidate where the findings and recommendations published within the first two volumes of the Manchester Arena Inquiry – established to investigate the deaths of the 22 victims of the 2017 Arena attack – have advanced discussions on situational awareness and its sensorial, affective and atmospheric dimensions. We also interpret what the Inquiry uncovered in terms of the (practical) limits of situational awareness and capacities for attunement, from fatigue and complacency to ‘perceptual distortion’. In turn, we analyse how the forthcoming UK Protect Duty (prompted by the Inquiry) might, first, be read through literatures on situational awareness and, second, reconfigure the legal landscape of situational awareness and the affective economies of (in)attention. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the significance of affective and atmospheric attunement(s) within situational awareness, emergency governance and city resilience.

Situational awareness and bodily capacities

The growing significance of situational awareness within urban security governance arguably reflects the contemporary landscape of novel urban threats and vulnerabilities. Situational awareness is understood as an overarching ensemble of orthodox and emerging security practices and techniques that are ‘coalescing in a new composition and with a particular intensity’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 183). Unlike anticipatory and pre-emptive modes of governance, situational awareness does not ‘operate’ in the sphere of preventing dangerous futures and shocks.¹ Instead, city managers are forced to build capacities to ‘withstand’ the unforeseeable and the incalculable, and to respond to unfolding situations of political violence in their amorphous crystallisation on-the-ground (Amoore 2013; Anderson and Adey 2011; Grove 2018; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; O’Grady, Shaw, and Parzniewski 2022). Or, in legislative terms, to ‘protect life [and] contain and mitigate the impacts of the emergency’ (Cabinet Office 2013, 10). In professional lexicon, a situation must be gripped. Central to the enactment of situational awareness and to ‘grip’ a situation, involves assembling, weighing and acting upon whatever information – however fragmentary or contradictory – is available from the surrounding milieu (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019): to deploy and attune one’s sensory and perceptual skills to decipher a situation and the violent potential imbued within it. The term, however, has much longer roots within warfare and military contexts. To illustrate, the ‘spatial’ and ‘perceptual’ skills of fighter pilots were at the forefront of generating situational awareness of an enemy’s movements in managing volatile dogfight situations, boosting their odds of survival (Endsley and Bolstad 1994). Building situational awareness, then, is advanced as an underpinning rationale for enabling effective decision-making in the project of response, to narrow and ‘suppress’ the ‘disruptive spatio-temporal interval and intensity of the emergency present’ (Zebrowski 2019).

Situational awareness locates bodily capacities to interpret their environs and attune to the non-representational and more-than-known of an enfolding situation, as indispensable to its enactment. So, what precisely do we mean by the more-than-known of a situation? Thinking with philosopher Massumi (2015) on complex emergency conditions, situational awareness entails acting upon whatever situation emerges before knowing exactly the kind or genre of ‘event’ being encountered (Anderson 2016; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). Decisions must be made ‘before it [an emergency] can be known where it will go and what it will become’ (Massumi 2015, 116). However, ‘gaining’ situational awareness – conceptualised as a ‘fixed form’ or an ‘achieved state’ of awareness – is not strictly accurate. It invites critical reflection over whether situational awareness can ever be ‘achieved’, ‘reached’ or ‘obtained’. To be sure, a body of situational awareness can be said to ‘exist’ at a specific juncture, such as that relayed through a situational report (‘sitrep’) or a Common Recognised Information Picture (CRIP) (Cabinet Office 2013). Perhaps, then, it is more productive to think with situational awareness as a logic or objective always beyond reach, it is always ‘becoming’: a project or pursuit of continually seeking to close the ‘gap’ between what is known (and what can be known) and what has happened, what is happening and what may happen. There is always an unknown excess at a particular point in time and so emergency responders must react, grip, and operate amidst the unknowable, or more-than-known, situation in its real-time happening (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; von der Burg and Krasmann 2023). For instance, what situational and sensorial registers – or affective-material ecologies (Anderson 2016) – signal that a terrorist attack has occurred or is ongoing? Finally, the emphasis that situational awareness locates on gathering situational information necessarily calls forth theoretical approaches for understanding the relational, multi-sensorial encounters between bodies and their surrounding milieus.

For this, we turn to literatures on affect and atmosphere. Though affect theory is characterised by varying theoretical perspectives and branches of thought (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), this literature typically draws upon French philosopher Giles Deleuze’s reading of Baruch Spinoza to define affect as the ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ (Anderson 2014). What threads these works is arguably the understanding of affect as a felt intensity: an ‘instinctive reaction’, a ‘fleeting feeling’, a ‘visceral response’, or as we elaborate, the ‘imminence of futurity’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Stewart 2011). Affect, in an ontological sense, does not ‘reside’ in human bodies and, in lieu, emerges and circulates in the ‘encounters’ between bodies and (non-)human materialities, registering through their sensory capacities at a level ‘beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1). Affect theory has offered the lens for analysing the ‘pre-individual’, ‘non-/pre-cognitive’ intensities that permeate the body’s (and subjectivity’s) ‘process of becoming’ and for interrogating its governance and politics (Allen 2006; Anderson 2014; Massumi 2015; Simpson 2020).

To explore the ‘shared’ and ‘collective’ palpability of affect across multiple bodies and across space, geographers have further engaged with affective atmospheres. Drawing upon and developing the work of phenomenologists Gernot Böhme and Mikel Dufrenne, Anderson (2009, 90) forwarded affective atmospheres as ‘spatially discharged [singular] affective qualities’. Within Anglophone human geography, atmosphere has enabled scholars to attend to the specific spatial-affective-material relations and configurations through which a particular space, situation or encounter becomes imbued with, and how multiple bodies become enveloped by, a specific feel, charge, pace or affective ‘tonality’ (Adey et al. 2013; Fregonese 2017; Gandy 2017; McCormack 2018; Paiva and Sánchez-Fuarros 2021). In Atmospheric Things, Derek McCormack engaged with atmosphere as an ‘affective spacetime’: a ‘spatially distributed envelope of feeling, mood or emotion’ (2018, 19). Partly what imbues atmosphere with its theoretical allure rests on its capacity to hold a series of ontological tensions in suspension (Anderson 2014). Notably, thinking atmospherically ascribes agency to both the representational and non-representational and to the material and immaterial (i.e. invisible, intangible, ephemeral) elements that conjure collectively felt dispositions in space (Anderson and Ash 2015; Fregonese 2017; Sumartojo and Pink 2019). Atmospheric analyses are also part of a much broader pursuit within critical feminist approaches, which emphasise the embodied, felt and non-representational dimensions of bodily experience as entwined within everyday (counter-)terrorism and (global) geopolitics (Laketa, Fregonese, and Masson 2021; Pain 2014). For example, a proliferating vein of scholarship has examined the affective and atmospheric dimensions of policies and praxis associated with the policing and securitisation of different environments (Adey 2014; Adey et al. 2013; Ciax and Runkel 2024; Fregonese and Laketa 2022; Neal, Opitz, and Zebrowski 2019; O’Grady 2019; Ritchie 2015; Wall 2019). In conjunction, research has also advanced qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic insights into the (collectively) felt experiences generated by security measures designed to enhance the resilience of urban public spaces (Coaffee, O’Hare, and Hawkesworth 2009). However, what we draw from this work is role of affective and atmospheric sense-making and attunement(s) within urban security and emergency governance.

Recent geographical research has examined the inscription of the sensory and affective capabilities of responder bodies as ‘sites’ of sense-making within security governance (Kaufmann 2015; O’Grady 2019). In UK emergency planning, O’Grady (2019, 456) unpacked the enrolment of ‘affect-based modes of sense-making’ – and response ‘habits’ – as an ‘active agent’ in ‘rendering intelligible’ and pre-structuring arrangements of ‘intervention’ within an indeterminate emergency present. Indeed, affect formed a ‘crucial plane upon which security practices are planned, rendered legitimate and performed’ (O’Grady 2019, 456). Similarly, in the earlier work of psychologists Slovic and Peters (2006), risk perception was partitioned into two distinct veins of ‘cognition’. The first was informed by calculation, logic and scientific deliberation. The second, which the authors termed the ‘affect heuristic’, entailed felt intensities, visceral reactions, intuition, gut feeling, and other aspects of bodily capacity and sensation at or beyond the edge of semantic grasp. Certainly, risk perception, understood as an intuitive and affective construct – and their associated ‘motivations’ for behaviour – has long been recognised as a significant feature of community resilience in the face of disaster events, though they do not synchronise well with rationalist risk assessment approaches (Coaffee and Lee 2016; Wright, Bolger, and Rowe 2002). Thinking with Massumi (2015) in the Politics of Affect, to enrol bodily capacity within regimes of situational awareness is arguably to mobilise that which is ‘immediately felt’ and ‘intuitively understood’; a positioning of bodily sensors to understand and interpret ‘what is happening around them’ (O’Grady 2019, 459). Yet, significant concerns have been expressed regarding the legitimation of intuitive sense-making in relation to the (re)production of racialised bodies (Ritchie 2015). Notwithstanding, what we draw from O’Grady’s (2019) work in particular and later employ to analyse the Arena Inquiry, is this critical interplay between adherence to response protocols, formulating and enacting non-cognitive modes of sense-making and the need to adapt to the situation being confronted.

An orthodox strategy for enhancing city resilience to (no-notice) terrorism has encompassed emergency preparedness exercises, in which affective atmospheres are thoroughly entangled. First, over the past two decades, since the enactment of the UK Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) 2004, emergency and resilience planning has grown in sophistication with the aim of developing urban preparedness and adaptive capacities to adverse shock events, including terrorism. Local resilience forums (LRFs) – such as the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum (GMRF) established in 2005 – are tasked with identifying and assessing local risks through Community Risk Registers, in concurrence with formulating, testing and refining plans to facilitate an effective multi-agency response to major incidents (Coaffee, Murakami Wood, and Rogers 2008). Accordingly, emergency preparedness exercises have grown in popularity as techniques for advancing the smooth interoperability of emergency first responders – ‘Category 1’ responders under the CCA 2004 – with full-scale testing and post-exercise debriefing, to embed learning, an integral component of emergency preparedness structures (Anderson and Adey 2011; Kaufmann 2015). To contextualise our later analyses, GMRF’s Community Risk Register included an assessment of risks relating specifically to the Manchester Arena. And, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015, GMRF worked with the Arena to stage Exercise Sherman: a training event designed to simulate marauding firearms attack in the City Room of the Manchester Arena – where the 2017 bomb would later be detonated (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022).

So, amidst arguments on the limits of planning and preparedness in the face of no-warning urban terror (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019), where do exercises and situational awareness intersect? Practice-based geographical scholarship has contended that emergency preparedness exercises avert their attention from predicting how a future situation would actually unfold. Instead, as Anderson and Adey (2011) held, exercises function to crystalise and attune emergency personnel to the affectivities and atmospherics of an emergency ‘interval’: that critical spatio-temporal envelope between an emergency’s onset and its ‘crossing a threshold’ into disaster. For the authors, exercises served as ‘techniques of affective equivalence’ (Anderson and Adey 2011, 1105). To drill through the affective and atmospheric conditions permeating an emergency interval – urgency, hope(lessness), stress, pressure, chaos, among many others – offered a mechanism of preparing responders by ‘affectively attuning’ them towards the specificity of the ‘conditions’ of an actual attack (Anderson and Adey 2011; O’Grady 2019). As von der Burg and Krasmann (2023) detailed, exercise planners seek intricate methods of ‘exposing’ and ‘sensitising’ personnel to the feel of the unknowability of a situation in profoundly corporeal, phenomenological and affective ways, for example, by introducing misleading and contradictory information to generate atmospheric uncertainty, confusion and chaos and by simulating the feeling of being shot to emphasise the ‘consequences of mistakes’. Exercises attempt to expose responders to the atmospherics of (future) situations – and their more-than-know qualities – to bring them as close as possible to the ‘realness of threat’ and its affective impression(s) (von der Burg and Krasmann 2023, 1), and in developing their capabilities to ‘handle complex life-threatening situations’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 181).

Atmospheric attunement, imminence and non-representational theories of becoming

Emerging approaches to situational awareness demand an attunement to the becoming dangerous of a situation, a ‘sensing of what is about to happen in the here and now’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 187; emphasis in original; see also, Zebrowski 2016). Or, in other words, it entails attuning to the experiential portends of impending danger. In fact, the full ‘multi-sensorial capacities’ of bodies are stipulated to understand what is happening and what may happen before it can be known what form or trajectory a situation may take or how it will evolve (Berlant 2011; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019; NPSA 2024). In this section, by reviewing work on affective atmospheres and atmospheric attunement, we detail where an atmospheric account might enrich scholarly understanding of situational awareness, insights from which we later employ to analyse the Arena Inquiry.

First, traditional urban security planning is largely anchored within earlier notions of ‘situational crime prevention’ that developed in the 1960s and 1970s.² At its core, this literature forwarded that (re)configuring and manipulating the built environment, in combination with fostering social cohesion and generating ‘watchful communities’, could restrict and deter criminological behaviour by making ‘criminal acts harder to commit or get away with’ (Coaffee 2003, 18). However, debates persist over the effectiveness of such designing-out crime approaches grounded upon discouraging certain kinds of crime, especially burglary, for securitising urban public spaces against an evolved terrorist threat, with attackers prepared to ‘die in the process’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019, 182). Nonetheless, current counter-terrorism policy and praxis continue to utilise these earlier insights from the social and behavioural sciences, with explicit attention to the affective role of (built) environments in eliciting behavioural cues from individuals with hostile intentions, as they traverse the urban environment.

A reoccurring leitmotif within much professional guidance released since 9/11 has centred on the importance of (re)configuring built environments and spaces to actively provoke behavioural signals from individuals with hostile intentions preparing to undertake an attack (NPSA 2023a).³ Specifically, it is posited that an appropriately arranged environment can evoke certain affective states within hostiles, including fear, paranoia, anxiety and stress (NPSA 2023a). These affective intensities or ‘spatial forces’ beyond conscious grip (Stewart 2011), are advanced to dispose hostiles towards exhibiting the behavioural signs indicative of hostility and (impending) threat – from ‘facial expressions’, ‘bodily movement’, and ‘physiological’ indicators – that could be detected by trained behavioural detection specialists (NPSA 2023b), or through increasingly sophisticated surveillance cameras with facial recognition software.⁴ These orthodox approaches might certainly be read as an attempt to modulate or govern affect (Massumi 2015): by actively evoking a ‘particular emanation’ (Anderson 2014) within hostiles as a means of developing situational awareness to the abnormal and the impending.

In turn, these orthodox methods within situational awareness are being progressively accompanied by efforts to attune and intuit the sensorial qualities and atmospherics of spaces and situations. A decade ago, geographer Peter Adey argued that security is increasingly engaging atmospheric sensibilities: it is itself ‘becoming atmospheric’ (2014, 834). A critical aspect of emerging conceptualisations of situational awareness, then, involves honing the sensory capabilities of professionals to ‘stay attuned’ and feel for deviations and anomalies (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). As Hentschel, Krasmann, and Zebrowski (2024; this Special Issue) noted in the editorial, situational awareness implies a ‘remarkable effort in atmospheric sensing’. Guidance published by the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA 2023a) situated the necessity for security personnel to develop highly and locally attuned sensualities of the environment(s) within which they operate. Or, as Adey et al. (2013, 302) put it, a ‘becoming highly attuned to the particularities of place’. The Manchester Arena Inquiry (2021) heard that an underpinning rationale of staff security training was to ensure they possessed a thorough understanding of their working environment to ‘better identify signs of risk and threat’. Returning to NPSA guidance, security personnel are encouraged to develop ‘expert’ knowledge of the ‘baseline’ of what is considered ‘normal’ for an environment or spatial milieu (NPSA 2023a, NPSA 2024). Baselining an environment, as it is referred in professional lexicon, is advanced as critical for enabling security practitioners to decipher what feels ‘unusual’, odd or ‘out of place’ (NPSA 2023a). Without this baseline, the guidance claimed, specialists cannot detect deviation. This opens future scholarly inquiry into how deviation registers phenomenologically, sensorially and atmospherically and indeed the kinds of (racialised and gendered) assumptions that become folded into what constitutes a ‘baseline’ and for whom. Turning to Sumartojo and Pink (2019, 7), atmospheric shifts generate a sense of ‘what feels “right” or “wrong” that, whilst indeterminate, remains powerful’.

Atmospherically baselining environments reverberate with literatures on ‘vigilant visualities’ and the envelopment of a watchful politics in the ‘War on Terror’. Monitored through increasingly intricate cloud-based and algorithmic software, Amoore (2007) examined the ways everyday transactions and circulations were subjected to modes of watchfulness; generating a normal ‘threshold’ or ‘background’ against which deviations could be detected and secured through pre-emptive logics of governance (see also, Amoore 2006; de Goede, Simon, and Hoijtink 2014). To be precise, a behaviour becomes algorithmic: it becomes ‘encoded so that deviations can be identified and decisions can be taken’ (Amoore 2007, 221). In emergent situational awareness approaches, we clearly observe the potency of ‘baselines’, ‘thresholds’ and ‘backgrounds’ – though in the realm of the phenomenological, atmospheric and ephemeral rather than through quantifiable indices – as bodily 'tools’ for identifying and sensing the abnormal, the disruptive and the imminent as it comes into being (Anderson and Ash 2015; Fregonese and Laketa 2022; Krasmann and Hentschel 2019).

What we are especially attentive to here is the role of ‘atmospheric attunement’ as a modality of sense-making and building situational awareness across urban contexts of unfolding insecurity. ⁵ Owing much to the work of Kathleen Stewart, atmospheric attunement is understood as a form of understanding and environmental knowing derived from bodily sensors and sensations of those ‘incommensurate elements [that] hang together in a scene’ (Stewart 2011, 452). Similarly, to paraphrase Kenner (2019, 1115), atmospheric attunement refers to an ‘embodied episteme based in sensation’. Thinking atmospherically affords scholars a specific spatial-affective-material conceptualisation of forms of becoming as having a ‘tactility’, a ‘tangibility’, animated by a ‘felt, half felt, or barely felt sense of something happening’ (Stewart 2011, 449). Recent empirical research has unpacked how individuals – from military personnel through to ordinary urban inhabitants – attune to, intuit and decipher the affective spacetimes through which insecurity registers and becomes palpable, including conflict escalation (Fregonese 2017), uprising racial tensions (Young and Bruzzone 2018), and among protest crowds (Wall 2019). This work is pivotal for two reasons. First, atmosphere has furnished the lens to interrogate how reconfigurations of atmospheric elements engender shifts in collectively felt dispositions that signal threat (Anderson and Ash 2015; Fregonese and Laketa 2022): impending insecurity is (collectively) felt through ‘Material-sensory somethings forming up’ (Stewart 2011, 452; see also, Adey 2014). Second, it foregrounds questions on the attempted governance of affect and atmosphere. For instance, Wall (2019, 155) detailed how police liaison teams are tasked with attuning to and intervening upon the affective spacetimes of protest crowds as a way of gauging situational awareness of their ‘preparedness for action’ and defusing uprising tensions. Similarly, Neal, Opitz, and Zebrowski (2019) have analysed the affective and territorial aspects of ‘kettling’: a UK policing strategy employed to encircle protestors and mobilise ‘debilitating’ affects – notably fear and boredom – to ‘drain’ their affective potentials and political energies. As the authors stated, ‘Much seems to depend on sensory intuition about what kinds of events a situation might harbour and how it might unfold’ (Neal, Opitz, and Zebrowski 2019, 1054).

Our understanding of the relations between atmosphere and situational awareness can be deepened in a number of ways. Firstly, atmosphere affords a specific conceptualisation of imminence: one that extends beyond discursive and linguistic statements of an inevitable and impending threat and instead embraces its ephemeral, intangible, invisible, pre-cognitive (not-quite-graspable) and non-representational dynamics, and its collective and spatial qualities (Fregonese and Laketa 2022; Pink 2015). Thinking atmospherically focuses on how impending shocks and evolving emergency situations become infused with a particular collective feel and pace (panic, confusion, unease, calm, suspense, disorientation, tension, to name but a few). And, as Fregonese and Laketa (2022, 9) argued, it opens analyses to the ‘presences’ and ‘absences’ and ‘situational changes’ that denote imminent threat. Critically, the agency of affective bodily capacities, sensors and sensory intuition is clearly enrolled within professional approaches for building situational awareness. For instance, described in NPSA guidance on responding to marauding terrorist attacks (MTAs), ‘People who are already in the midst of an attack […] will gain more value for their own senses’ (NPSA 2023b, 15).

Certainly, building (shared) situational awareness is a core preoccupation at the level of legislative, planning, and preparedness approaches within emergency governance. Establishing procedures, protocols and decision-making models – from military-style communication strategies, rapid situational assessments and CRIPs – are integral features of preparedness planning and event ‘readiness’ (Cabinet Office 2013; Zebrowski 2019). They are formal and rational structures designed to ‘grip’ and ‘bring order’ amid the inevitable chaos pervading the emergency event (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). However, the atmospheric dimensions of emergency response have yet to be fully and empirically unpacked. The official, publicly available Arena Inquiry reports and witness testimonies – which forensically examined the feelings, (in)decisions and (in)actions of emergency responders – furnished an unparalleled opportunity to critically examine and interpret the place of atmosphere and atmospheric attunement within the governance of, and response to, a specific terrorist incident. In particular, what is the role of sensation in understanding what has happened and in interpreting a situation’s possible trajectories? Through what sensibilities, affectivities and materialities does imminence, threat and unfolding terror become palpable? And, perhaps most critically, can atmosphere and atmospheric attunement be said to enable, prefigure or preclude certain forms of situational awareness, behaviour(s), (re)actions, (in)attentiveness and decision-making, or indeed guide event suppression, and what does this mean for its governance and politics? Finally, with these questions in mind, our ensuing analyses of the Manchester Arena Inquiry strives to explore the role of atmosphere and attunement within situational awareness, in conjunction with unpacking the role of sensory capacities for shaping event intervention.

Manchester Arena Inquiry

On 22 May 2017 at 22:31, a suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) in the City Room – an area of egress and one of four main access points – of the Manchester Arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert. 22 people were killed and hundreds injured (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021).⁶ In October 2019, the UK Home Secretary commissioned an independent public inquiry – the Manchester Arena Inquiry – to investigate the deaths of the victims. Subsequently, three separate volumes of the Arena Inquiry have been officially published, including Volume One: Security for the Arena (June 2021), Volume Two: Emergency Response (November 2022), and Volume Three: Radicalisation and Preventability (March 2023). Together, the reports detailed a plethora of ‘mistakes’ and ‘missed opportunities’ that, the Inquiry weighed, could have abated or even prevented the attack. In turn, the Inquiry provided over 150 recommendations (HM Government 2023), spanning the everyday practices of local security personnel through to the restructuring of national counter-terrorism policy. In fact, situational awareness was directly cited over one hundred times in Volume Two. In what follows, we home in on specific findings and recommendations from the first two volumes of the Inquiry, that illuminate the entanglements between affect, atmosphere, situational awareness and capacities to attune.⁷

In Volume One, the embodied alertness, vigilance and complacency of the private security personnel operating at the Arena on 22 May 2017, were at the forefront of the Inquiry’s findings. Private security staff, the Inquiry evaluated, were not ‘adequately’ attuned nor attentive to the national terrorist threat level, which was set at ‘severe’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021).⁸ Security staff ‘failed’ to perform their duties with the ‘requisite’ state of alertness: the threat was not embodied at the ‘forefront of their minds’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021). With the attacker spending over an hour in a CCTV blind spot within the Arena complex, security patrols – designed to detect divergent behaviour as staff traverse through space – also featured centrally. During these pre-egress checks/patrols of the City Room, security personnel had ‘ignored almost entirely’ the terrorist threat and that, crucially, ‘There needed to be at least one experienced officer on duty […] to ensure that nobody forgot the threat level and carried out their instructions with it in mind’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021, 151). In turn, no security worker on duty understood the ‘need to be alert to the possibility of an attack’ and that the ‘necessary’ alertness had not been instilled into their everyday operations (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021). Quite simply, the Inquiry weighed, the counter-terrorism messages and security-oriented aspects of their everyday duties were absent from ‘conscious, proactive thought’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021, 148). Where Volume One began to hint towards the non-cognitive dimensions of attunement and alertness was in its assertion that staff training should have ‘become part of “muscle memory”’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021, 165), to which we later return in our analysis. Ultimately, if security personnel had possessed the requisite embodied attentiveness in space, combined with committing their training to ‘muscle memory’, then ‘more steps’ would have been taken to have prevented, abated or even deterred the attack(er) (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021).

Volume One delivered recommendations for ‘guarding against complacency’, that we interpret as strategies for engendering a legitimate and baseline orientation of embodied alertness in space (see also, Pettinger 2023). For example, the Inquiry urged that security personnel are ‘briefed’ on the terrorist threat before every event (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021). However, not only must the counter-terrorism message be ‘constantly reinforced’, but security managers themselves must remain highly alert to the risk that staff become ‘desensitised’ to, or even ‘forget’, the counter-terrorism components of their role (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021). To attract, clutch and retain the attention of security staff, the Volume One report argued that managers must pursue original methods for communicating and refreshing threat. Yet, against the backdrop of a constant threat level – effective since August 2014 – the Inquiry specified that it becomes increasingly ‘difficult to ensure that people maintain the high level of alertness required in relation to potential danger’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021, 150). What this unveils is the threat of fatigue and inattention: a becoming ‘desensitised’ to risk undermines the necessary embodied alertness through which every (uncertain) moment and situational dynamic must be read, evaluated and acted upon. For Tom Pettinger, the Inquiry served to articulate acceptable forms of being-in-space that ‘displaces the visual gaze as a tool of security by an altogether more affected – or emotionally-charged – body’ (Pettinger 2023, 6). In conjunction with the forthcoming Protect Duty, future research might analyse how these strategies operate through the affective modulation of (in)attention (Ash 2012) and by thinking with literature on fostering ‘atmospheres of vigilance’ (McCormack 2015).

The Inquiry also uncovered staff confidence as an element undermining effective situational awareness. Specifically, the Inquiry heard that a member of security staff who had received a hostile reconnaissance report from a member of the public – though delivered without ‘panic’ or ‘worry’ – was forced into a position of balancing the risk of losing their job (for vacating their assigned post to summon assistance) with not acting upon the situational information being received (OPUS2 2020). The situational circumstances, for security staff, were not ‘regarded as an emergency’ (OPUS2 2020). And the Inquiry sought to meticulously interrogate why these situational elements – including the attacker (re)entering the City Room multiple times, the report of hostile reconnaissance, the ‘nervous’ behaviour of the attacker – did not constitute a palpable enough sense of danger for the security staff to assess and confront the violent potentialities within the situation being encountered. Staff training should have developed their capabilities to identify threat and immediately know ‘how they should react when confronted with a potential terrorist situation’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021, 104). A becoming highly, spatially attuned to sense and intervene upon ‘even the slightest difference or anomaly’ encompasses a central rationale of situational awareness (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). Yet, the Arena Inquiry clearly positioned fatigue, distractions, complacency, desensitised awareness, confidence and the uncalibrated attunement to threat, among other factors, as undermining the sensibilities, affectivities and subjectivities demanded by situational awareness.

Turning to Volume Two, the Inquiry weighed that ‘communication failures’ had undermined the (shared) situational awareness necessary for effective decision-making and a coordinated, multi-agency emergency response. Under the CCA 2004, the Integrated Emergency Management (IEM) and Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles (JESIP), act as the legislative frameworks and decision-making models for emergency response to major incidents in the UK. Conventionally, emergency responders have adopted military-style communication strategies in an effort to quickly and concisely convey critical situational information and build shared situational awareness across responder agencies (JESIP 2023; O’Grady 2019).⁹ Volume Two, however, determined that JESIP had failed (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Neither British Transport Police nor the North West Ambulance Service shared their METHANE declarations with other responder agencies, and an inter-agency communication ‘network’ had not been established (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Here, a METHANE (mnemonic) message is designed to share critical situational awareness with the intention of bringing ‘structure’ and ‘clarity’ amidst the complex, chaotic and volatile atmospherics of a situation. Indeed, certain responder agencies, including Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, were unaware that Operation Plato (the codename for a suspected MTA) had even been declared (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). What emerged, then, was a situation whereby different agencies possessed ‘different levels of situational awareness’ of the rapidly evolving and desperate situation unravelling in the City Room (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 93). This ultimately contributed to ‘serious’ and ‘unacceptable’ delays in deploying other emergency services to the City Room to assist and evacuate casualties in a life-threatening condition (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022): with delay undermining both the effort and promise of emergency response to ‘suppress’ its spatio-temporal extent and intensity (Anderson 2016; Zebrowski 2019). In the first 44 minutes that elapsed since the explosion, one paramedic was at the scene. To deepen our analysis, we turn to the emergent atmospherics throughout this unfolding situation and critically unpack their relationship with sense-making, intelligibility, decision-making and forms of intervention.

As Greater Manchester Police firearms officers arrived at the Arena, they endeavoured to ‘take in their surroundings’ and gain a feel for the situation (OPUS2 2021a). Initially, the Inquiry learned that officers recalled a sense of ‘relative calm’, an atmospherics contradictory to the original reports of a large explosion and gunshots (OPUS2 2021a). Observing concert-goers egressing the Arena calmly and with no particular urgency or panic, officers did not feel anything out-of-the-ordinary . Such initial event impressions were only reinforced by a report from a concert-goer claiming that fireworks were being lit inside and when speaking with a member of Arena staff, who had ‘nothing particular to report’ (OPUS2 2021a, 16). This constellation of situational elements, the firearms officers evidenced, generated a sense of hope that, despite the initial reports (and the declaration of Operation Plato¹⁰), this was simply a false alarm.¹¹ Upon entering the Arena, however, officers’ perceptual and sensory skills immediately intuited that such hopes of a false alarm would only be short-lived. Specifically, by detailing their ability to smell an odour resembling cordite (which emanates from explosions and gunpowder) and its intensification as they approached the City Room, they were, quite literally, able to smell that an attack had transpired (OPUS2 2021a). As the firearms officers explained, emergency response entails sensitising to the multi-sensorial milieu of the emergency, a relentless mode of drawing upon one’s sensory skills to interpret any cues or signs of what has happened, what is happening and what may happen: ‘you are looking, you are listening for anything to indicate a direction that you can travel, which will give you a more direct route to take on that threat […] You’re looking for signs that will help you to identify where the person is or may be’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2021a, 17–18). On these olfactory cues, the officers issued ‘advance mode’, speeding up their pace towards the smell’s origin whilst embodying a heightened state of alertness to neutralise any perceived threat encountered.

What, then, is the relationship between the volatile atmospherics in the City Room and the spatial logic of zoning? Firearms officers recalled their ‘sheer disbelief’ about the desperate and deteriorating situation they found in the City Room (OPUS2 2021a). Their primary responsibility was to neutralise threat(s) and develop an awareness of, and to subsequently relay, the ‘situational picture’ to operational command networks. Without underestimating the difficulty of interpreting the multitude of situational indicators and inputs contributing to perceived threat and imminence, amidst the quantity of abandoned bags from the initial evacuation, responders evidenced heightened fears that a secondary device could not be discarded without a specialist explosives dog (OPUS2 2021a). In conjunction, pieces of misleading information, rumours and impressions – especially those uttered by a fleeting remark of a ‘second male’ potentially accompanying the original bomber – circulated and heightened the lingering sense of imminence of a subsequent attack(er) in the City Room (OPUS2 2021a). As such, a combination of the initial reports, the discourses, the speculations and the (non-)human materialities – held together in a relational infrastructure of in-betweenness – all intensified the hanging sense of imminent threat.

By examining these situational components, a core preoccupation of the Inquiry involved interrogating and establishing whether the City Room should have been assigned a ‘hot zone’ or ‘warm zone’, and the extent to which that situational awareness was accurate, updated and effectively communicated. In technical terms, a ‘warm zone’ would permit the presence of non-specialist emergency responders to treat casualties; a ‘red zone’, by contrast, would not grant this permission given the active and imminent threats (perceived to be) posed to life (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). The Inquiry heard the shared palpability of not just the horror but of the enduring urgency among firearms officers, if not desperation, to get paramedics on scene. We thus observe a clear situational dilemma. As Krasmann and Hentschel (2019, 190) reminded us, situational awareness is not simply the enactment of ‘automated procedures, but [involves] a range of ethical decisions’ when tackling a situation’s idiosyncrasies. Despite technically constituting a ‘red zone’ for a period of time, firearms commanders ‘were never going to tell them [those few non-specialist emergency personnel on scene] to leave and then watch people die’ (OPUS2 2021a, 33). It illustrates that critical interplay between enacting protocol and perceived threat, where threat as a perceptual, affective and atmospheric impression sat somewhat uncomfortably against threat as an objective assessment of danger as stipulated by the Inquiry, thoroughly entangling the need for (pre-)structured protocols, ethical decisions in the moment and the capacities to adapt to the situational conditions at hand.

A. But it was just the atmosphere in the room at that time. Q. Not conducive to making the right decisions, the atmosphere, was it? A. No. (OPUS2 2021b, 94)

With the above quotation in mind – forming part of an emergency responder’s testimony – the Inquiry learned that first responders were ‘quickly overwhelmed’ by the atmospherics of the situation. Where the Inquiry, again, illuminated the limits of situational awareness was in its, albeit fleeting, examination of ‘perceptual distortion’. Here, perceptual distortion surfaced as, whilst enveloped by a situation’s atmospherics, ‘things that you [a firearms responder] may think have happened what hasn’t happened or you may not have said that to the person that you think you may have said it to’ (OPUS2 2021, 23). Accordingly, the pressure, intensity and urgency in the City Room – combined with a palpable sense of imminence – arguably contributed to a series of misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the role of different responders and, critically, breakdowns in multi-agency communication. On balance, the Inquiry assessed that some responders did not sufficiently seek the ‘superior’ situational awareness of other agencies to inform their own decision-making (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Thus, misunderstandings, mistakes, misassumptions, alongside instances of perceptual distortion, meant that moments to (re)calibrate situational awareness – critical given the divergent perspectives of the situation held by the varying agencies – were missed (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Indeed, responders were not ‘seeking new information proactively’ nor understood the importance of ‘capturing and communicating proper situational awareness’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). In many instances, existing situational awareness was simply ‘recycled’. Information received by emergency coordination networks did not ‘increase situational awareness’ and commanders were often ‘learning nothing new’ about the rapidly evolving and deteriorating situation; who typically received only ‘second-’ and ‘third-hand situational awareness’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 640). Ultimately, the breakdowns in multi-agency coordination and communication, the Inquiry evaluated, conjured a situation where those responsible for decision-making and deploying emergency resources were not receiving the situational information from those in the ‘best position to provide the necessary situational awareness to assess that risk [in the City Room]’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 135). As such, mistakes, misunderstandings and misinterpretations, and their relations to the atmospherics of the situation (e.g. confusion), were cast as prolonging the situation’s severity; against a backdrop where, the Inquiry claimed, it should have been possible to get medical assistance on-scene rapidly (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022).

Terms such as ‘recycling’ and ‘second-’ and ‘third-hand’ situational awareness certainly extend our conceptual vocabulary and tools for critical analyses. Crucially, Volume Two detailed that ‘When under the enormous pressure in an emergency, the Joint Decision Model will be much harder to follow. It needs to be part of the “muscle memory” through training and exercising, so that it becomes instinctive’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 101). The Inquiry weighed that JESIP was not ‘embedded’ in the ‘muscle memory’ of officers operating at the scene (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Muscle memory, as detailed by the Inquiry, refers to the idea that a ‘particular way of behaving has become ingrained and instinctive’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 44): a kind of ‘resilience habit’ (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019’O’Grady 2019). Thus, the Inquiry located and advanced the pre-cognitive capacities of bodies – outside of conscious thought – as a modality of ‘rendering intelligible’, behaving and (pre-)structuring forms of situational awareness, decision-making and event intervention to no-notice urban terror. Non-conscious bodily capacities or instinctive, intuitive sense-making, were thus clearly positioned by the Inquiry as a specific locale in responding to a situation – and the becoming habitual of decision-making models as a core prerequisite for effective situational awareness – when it is not-yet-known what genre a situation may become or how it will evolve (Anderson 2016; Massumi 2015; O’Grady 2019), and an effort to address ‘perceptual distortion’.

Together with forwarding pre-cognitive modes of sense-making – and problematising the notion that decision-making models were not habitual (see O’Grady 2019) – the Inquiry also claimed that despite a number of preparedness exercises conducted by GMRF in the preceding years to the attack, there were ‘ineffective’ debriefing processes and learning (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Overburdened commanders or delays in certain declarations that surfaced during the Arena response had been identified in previous exercises (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). Of central relevance here, however, is the Inquiry’s recommendation that emergency response networks consider the introduction of regular ‘high-fidelity’ training to furnish emergency responders with ‘better experience of the stress, pressure and pace of a no-notice attack’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 100). Despite emphasising that nothing could have prepared the responders for the situation they would face in the City Room, high-fidelity exercising would assist with preparing responders for the ‘significant assault on their senses that the incident will involve’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 100). Underpinning this recommendation is that such exercises will enable responders to train through the atmospherics of no-notice terrorism, including its pace, intensity and abrupt onset: to ‘test decision making in an intense, dynamic atmosphere’ (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022, 387).

Martyn’s Law and the emerging landscape of situational awareness

The Inquiry contributed significantly to the emerging national counter-terrorism policy landscape in the UK, by recommending the implementation of the forthcoming Protect Duty legislation – formally known as the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, or colloquially as Martyn’s Law.¹² In its current morphology, the Bill proposes to place those responsible for qualifying public premises and events under a statutory obligation to assess and periodically update their assessment of the terrorist threat facing their premises, and to adopt ‘reasonably practicable’ mitigation measures (Home Office 2023a).¹³ Whilst the impetus for a UK Protect Duty – to roll-out protective security nationally – has existed for over a decade (Coaffee 2010), consulting protective security guidance has previously been strongly encouraged, though ultimately premised on a voluntary basis (Home Office 2023b). Specifically, the legislation proposes to ensure that all qualifying spaces develop preparedness plans and ‘procedures to be followed if acts of terrorism were to occur at, or in the immediate vicinity of, the premises’ (Home Office 2023a, 6). However, much ambiguity persists surrounding its precise remit, implementation and anticipated effectiveness and proportionality (Home Affairs Committee 2023). Moreover, the Bill’s emphasis on building preparedness certainly raises questions over how this legislation can be analysed through literatures on situational awareness: a logic that fundamentally embraces the limits of planning and preparedness in the face novel vulnerabilities (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019).

Certainly, such security measures and event-procedures should not solely be analysed through literatures on preparedness (Anderson 2010). In June 2023, the UK Government published draft guidance for ‘Standard Tier’ premises, encouraging security managers at publicly accessible premises to complete a six-task action plan. Encapsulated within this plan are ‘simple measures’ that premises should consider (in the interim period before royal assent) to abate the consequences of an emerging attack (Home Office 2023c). For example, Task Two suggested security managers consider building and implementing plans to lock-down all or parts of a premise to ‘slow the progress of an attack’ (Home Office 2023c, 6). Guidance covered the mechanisms – from the types of doors and locks to install – that practitioners might adopt when constructing a ‘rapid lockdown capability’ (Home Office 2023c). To be sure, these security techniques are not novel (NPSA 2023b), though they may plausibly be read as techniques for acting within and upon the emergent envelope of political violence to dampen its effects. Where Martyn’s Law proposes to intervene is by mandating this requirement to assess and, if necessary, implement such security procedures that operate within these event-happenings. A further rationale underpinning the Bill, then, is to ensure that local security personnel and staff are ‘prepared, ready to respond and know what to do in the event of an unfolding attack’ (HM Government 2023).

As the draft guidance detailed, this will include (re)training security personnel on recognising the signs of a ‘suspected attack’ and that ‘an attack is in preparation or occurring’ (Home Office 2023a, 3). Yet, in gaining a feel for the event, situational elements – as interconnected or disconnected they may appear – must be collated to inform decision-making on whether a course of action is suitable under the immediate situational circumstances (Krasmann and Hentschel 2019). Security personnel must decipher whether a particular event-intervention – such as lockdown or enacting pre-established evacuation plans – will exacerbate the situation by leading individuals towards an emerging threat (NPSA 2023b). Thus, the guidance casted the ‘rapid decisions’, situational awareness and actions of local security personnel as a central ‘site’ within national counter-terrorism practice (Home Office 2023a; Pettinger 2023). Here, there is currency in thinking about rapid situational decisions with Krasmann and Hentschel’s (2019) point on ‘feedback loops’. Specifically, the moment of decision(-making) entails a judgement: a situational assessment of whether a course of action may actually open or ‘block a trajectory’ (Massumi 2015, 120). In foregrounding the decision, a series of critical points are posed. First, this necessitates scrutiny over how the responsibilisation of local security personnel and ordinary venue staff is being (re)cast within regimes of situational awareness. It also draws attention to the legal geographies of embodiment and the programmes of affective and atmospheric modulation that become entwined within efforts to cultivate acceptable and legitimate forms of attunement and awareness in/to space.¹⁴ As Pettinger (2023) reminded us, the Inquiry forced local security staff to defend their every movement and perception under oath; requiring critical, philosophical scrutiny of what a judgement or decision entails and a broader consideration of the feminised assumptions imbuing the concept of intuition. For example, how did the non-representational elements of sense-making fit within the Inquiry’s discursive realm of obliging responders to explain and defend their decisions through rational and representational mediums, and of conceptualising decisions as the outcome of deliberative logic and reasoning? Or, to what extent was the non-representational sphere defendable-under-oath within the Inquiry (see Pettinger 2023), and how has this shaped or prefigured the ways in which intuition, instinct and gut feeling are enlisted as part of Martyn’s Law? Must the performativity of security be something that is capable of being expressed and rationalised through linguistic devices? And, ultimately, how can one rationalise, for the purpose of Inquiry scrutiny, the bad or negative affects that are so often inscribed as intensities to be acted upon within situational awareness?

Conclusion

Many years ago, political scientist Durodié (2005, 4) emphasised that ‘policymakers and emergency planners must learn from the literature examining human behaviour in disasters’ (see also, Durodié and Wessely 2002). In this spirit, a key aim of this paper has been to merge sensorial, affective and atmospheric literatures from across geography, geopolitics and security studies to the discussion of situational awareness and security governance, by analysing a specific event-happening and contemporary developments in counter-terrorism policy and praxis. As illuminated throughout this paper, traditional approaches to situational awareness and disaster resilience are generally top-down and premised upon a conventional command-and-control approach, with the aim of developing a better adaptive capacity to adverse events. Orthodox approaches to situational awareness tend to be reliant on a narrow range of stakeholders, overly techno-rational pursuits and with social, cultural, sensorial and affective processes not adequately represented by, or synchronise effectively with, the quantifiable indices that characterise disaster risk assessments. Against this backdrop, we aimed to advance two central contributions. First, by offering a specific spatio-affective-(im)material conceptualisation of imminence and its impressions, we have begun to situate and qualify the role of affective atmospheres and atmospheric attunement within situational awareness, and their potential for enriching scholarly understanding of political violence in its ‘coming into existence’ and evolution (Stewart 2011, 445). For instance, on the spatial logic of zoning, we illustrated the entanglements between the atmospheric impressions of threat, (pre-)structured protocols, ethical judgements and feedback loops, and the capacity to adapt to the situation at hand. Second, we strived to advance discussions on the limits of situational awareness approaches, interpreting the Inquiry as positioning fatigue, perceptual distortion, distractions, and complacency, among other aspects, as core threats to the kinds of attunement(s), sensibilities and subjectivities demanded by situational awareness. The Inquiry also evidenced the role of mistakes, misunderstandings and misinterpretations in undermining situational awareness and the promise of emergency response, whilst advancing that the becoming habitual of certain response protocols and decision-making models, namely JESIP, is an essential prerequisite for building effective situational awareness to abrupt, no-notice urban terrorism.

Situational awareness, then, certainly raises questions on capacities for attunement. Prompted by the Inquiry, there is clear scope for future research to investigate where the forthcoming Protect Duty will manifest at the level of attunement and attention, and (re)configure the legislative landscape of situational awareness. Without suggesting that affect and atmosphere can be successfully or effectively engineered and manipulated (Anderson 2014; Barnett 2015), this brings to mind legal geographies of bodies and embodiment, and an attentiveness to the possible modalities by which the Duty will operate through and upon affective life – such as heightening capacities to attune through the ‘affective modulation of attention’ (Ash 2012), or by sustaining ‘atmospheres of vigilance’ (McCormack 2015) – in order to formulate acceptable and legitimate bodily dispositions in space. This also calls for critical attention to the factors that heighten and, critically, interfere with capacities to affectively and atmospherically attune. This might include work on the economies of retention and the ways in which emergent programmes of situational awareness work to narrow the possibility of affective responses, conjure locally attuned sensualities and target de-sensitivity and un-/dis-attunement to threat (Ash 2012). Again, this raises broader questions on how the demand for (effective) attunement and retention fits against a backdrop where so much is competing for our attention in everyday life. Indeed, with the Duty likely to partly manifest in the regular refreshing of e-learning awareness courses for security staff, is there a risk that the everydayness and banality of undertaking such courses serves as counter-productive for heightening awareness and the capacities to attune?

Whilst our analyses focused largely on the attunement and awareness, or lack thereof, of security professionals and emergency responders, there remain pressing questions on the public’s role within the logic of situational awareness. In fact, the Inquiry commended those concert-goers who displayed remarkable acts of bravery and courage to treat the injured – many of whom wished they possessed the necessary medical skills – and assist with the casualty evacuations using whatever materials they could find, including billboards as makeshift stretchers (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022). This certainly accentuates the role of ingenuity, initiative and improvisation for attending to situational excesses and in those periods of delay. Notwithstanding, a wider scholarship has interrogated the subjectivities and forms of citizen(ship) being (re)produced, such as the elevation of ‘heroism’ and ‘combatant’ logics to urban life (Batley 2021; Jusué 2022). Nonetheless, situational awareness and the requirement to attune have been directed at the public, with longstanding research on the responsibilisation of citizens within counter-terrorism, such as e-learning awareness training (Adey et al. 2013; Batley 2021; Coaffee and Fussey 2015; Coaffee, Murakami Wood, and Rogers 2008). As CONTEST argued, the public are an integral stakeholder for ‘reducing loss of life in the event of an attack’ (HM Government (2023), 46). With citizens encouraged to ‘stay alert to their surroundings’, ‘trust their instincts’, and ‘report anything that doesn’t feel right’, among other messages (Counter Terrorism Policing 2023), public vigilance and awareness-raising campaigns are evidently enveloping and enrolling the affective and sensorial capacities of subjects and the felt, non-representational and pre-cognitive aspects of bodily experience (Laketa 2021). Such downscaling to citizens’ bodily capacities has led scholars to contend that a ‘further wave in the evolution of resilience is among us’ (Fregonese and Laketa 2022, 9). In fact, such campaigns are posited to enable citizens to ‘make better decisions and improve their chances of survival and the chances of those around them’ (Home Office 2023a, 38). Despite many governments implementing widespread ‘warning and informing’ risk communication approaches, research shows that citizens’ risk awareness, knowledge and preparedness remain low. What follows, then, is how to attune the public to recognise emergencies and prevent the de-sensitivity to, or forgetting of, threat? Again, critical questions remain on where the Inquiry itself positioned the role of the public and their responsibilisation to act upon bad and negative felt intensities.

However, far from a ‘neutral’ security logic, there are arguably a series of assumptions that scholars utilising the lens of situational awareness must critically interrogate. Under what conditions – discursive, affective, atmospheric – is a situation sensed, assessed, and framed as a terrorist attack versus a different event or becoming? Without wishing to risk (re)producing taken-for-granted assumptions and pre-given notions on what constitutes a terror threat and for whom, we recognise there are ‘situations’ of political violence – especially everyday domestic violence – that fail to be ‘recognised’ and ‘sensed’ as a ‘situation’ by state authorities, including emergency responders (Pain 2014); thereby sustaining particular affective and atmospheric notions of what constitutes terror. In mind are also situations forwarded as ‘slow emergencies’; which sit ‘uncomfortably with what is felt as an emergency situation’ and fail to cross a kind of ‘affective threshold’ to mobilise emergency response apparatuses (Anderson et al. 2019; Grove et al. 2021). And though atmospheres ‘belong to collective situations’ (Anderson 2009), they register individually, differentially and often unevenly in the sensory capacities of bodies (Leff 2021). As such, there is clear scope to unpack the racialised and gendered assumptions folded into situational awareness, whether that be in tools such as ‘baselines’ – especially when thinking with work on the angled nature of atmospheric arrival (Ahmed 2010; Leff 2021) – or through the legitimation of instinctive sense-making and the racialised politics of intuition. From these examples, first, we urge critical reflection on how the very context(s) within which situational awareness is put to work (re)produces particular assumptions over what constitutes a terrorist threat, and therefore its accompanying affective and atmospheric expressions and impressions. Second, situational awareness’ enrolment of the sensory capacities of bodies must necessarily deconstruct sensing as a neutral, objective assessment of danger, and interrogate the racialised and gendered assumptions folded into what bodies, behaviours and situations are constitutive of, and sensed as, abnormal.

Finally, what is the wider significance of mobilising affective and atmospheric attunements? The Inquiry’s findings filtered into the latest CONTEST strategy, which sets out to ensure that JESIP are ‘embedded in the mindset and muscle memory of every emergency responder’ (HM Government (2023), 45). This highlights important questions over what it means to not only embed protocols and decision-making models into the ‘muscle memory’ and reflexes of responders, but with how this can be achieved, measured and governed in practice. Is the embedding of decision-making models into muscle memory something that can be evidenced? In another vein, what kinds of resilience habits or muscle memories are demanded within projects of situational awareness by the public? And, conversely, which muscle memories and habits potentially serve as counter-productive and need to be unlearned? In this paper, we set out to detail what a more-than-discursive and non-representational approach can bring to professional, emergency and public policy on security and situational awareness. Finally, we have identified critical questions that future scholarship and critical studies on security might pose to analyse and interrogate the impending Protect Duty and its significance for situational awareness, city resilience and the sensorial, affective, habitual and atmospheric economies of attention and attunement.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Susanne Krasmann, Chris Zebrowski and Christine Hentschel for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to reiterate our appreciation to Susanne Krasmann and Christine Hentschel for organising the workshop “Situational Awareness: Sensing Insecurity and Coming Catastrophes” at the University of Hamburg in April 2023, from which this paper originated. Finally, we are especially grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful and instructive comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Tom Lewis is in receipt of an ESRC-funded Studentship, through the Midlands Graduate School Doctoral Training Partnership [project reference. 2740592].

Notes on contributors

Tom Lewis

Tom Lewis is a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research examines the interactions between counter-terrorism and COVID-19 pandemic governance in cities, and on questions of the affective and atmospheric dimensions of emergency governance @tomwilliamlewis.

Jon Coaffee

Jon Coaffee is a Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. His research, over the last 30 years, has centred on the effectiveness and acceptability of international urban counter-terrorism policy and practice @ResCitiesLab.

Notes

1. On the etymology of situational awareness in urban security, see Krasmann and Hentschel (2019). A thorough discussion of the onto-epistemological ‘boundaries’ of a situation are beyond the scope of this paper.

2. With pivotal works including ‘eyes on the street’ (Jacobs 1961), ‘defensible space’ (Newman 1972), and ‘crime prevention through environmental design’ (Jeffrey 1971).

3. The behavioural detection landscape in the UK ranges from Project Servator – composed of detection specialists operating nationally – through to trained security staff and ordinary citizens (NPSA 2023a).

4. See Nishiyama (2018) on crowd behavioural analysis technologies. By creating pinch points, for instance, specialists can observe the reactions of individuals to overt security measures (NPSA 2023a).

5. See Adey’s (2014) critique on atmospheric intuiting and misleading atmospherics.

6. The deadliest attack in the UK since 7 July 2005 (‘7/7’), when four suicide bombers targeted London’s transport networks, killing fifty-two people (BBC News 2015).

7. Volume Three, which evaluated if the attack(er) could have been prevented by the Security Service (MI5) and Counter-Terrorism Police, is beyond the remit of this paper.

8. Indicating that an attack is ‘highly likely’ – the second-highest threat level in the UK.

9. ‘Category 1’ responders to the Arena attack included British Transport Police, Greater Manchester Police, North West Ambulance Services, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service and North West Fire Control.

10. Declared given the nature and volume of reports being received (Manchester Arena Inquiry 2022).

11. See Fregonese and Laketa (2022) for an atmospheric analyses of a ‘false alarm’ at a commemorative event at the Place de la Republique (Paris) following the November 2015 attacks.

12. In tribute to Martyn Hett who was killed in the attack and the campaigning by his mother, Figen Murray.

13. Currently, public premises and ‘qualifying’ events with a capacity between 100 and 799 will fall under ‘Standard Tier’ guidance and those exceeding 800 would fall under ‘Enhanced Tier’ guidance (Home Office 2023a).

14. The Draft Guidance also urged venues to consider how to communicate alerts during an emergency in ways that avoid generating mass panic and movement (Home Office 2023a), alluding to questions on the role of ‘atmotechnics’ (Wall 2019) within event intervention.