There is a growing attention among legal scholars, criminologists, and political sociologists on how emotions shape the law and more broadly the state. The law and emotion literature has explored the role played by emotions in legal reasoning, lawmaking, and judicial decisions on security and crime issues (Reference Abrams and KerenAbrams & Keren 2010; Reference BandesBandes 2000; Reference Bandes and BlumenthalBandes & Blumenthal 2012; Reference HaganHagan et al. 2008; Reference HirschHirsch 2008, Reference Hirsch, Gusterson and Besteman2010; Reference Kahan and NussbaumKahan & Nussbaum 1996; Reference MaroneyMaroney 2006; Reference NussbaumNussbaum 2004).Footnote 1 Criminologists have drawn attention to how emotions undergird penal law and the criminal justice system (Reference BraithwaiteBraithwaite 1989; De Haan & Reference De Haan and LoaderLoader 2002; Reference FreibergFreiberg 2001; Reference KarstedtKarstedt et al. 2011). Political sociology scholarship has contended that emotions affect how state institutions work and how state elites pursue policies and engage publics (Reference BarbaletBarbalet 2002; Reference Berezin and BarbaletBerezin 2002). While these works show that lawmaking and policymaking are not emotionally neutral processes, extending this perspective on law and emotion to include state and nonstate actors, one could say that emotions run through the triadic relationship between state institutions, dominant publics, and targeted people. This is surely the case regarding the questions of personal safety, criminality, and state security. For example, since the terrorist attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the global “war on terror,” Western state elites have claimed the legitimacy of secret surveillance practices and expanded executive power by expressing concern for their citizens' safety. At the same time, public debates about security and crime have become increasingly intertwined and driven by emotions. While nearly absent from policy and public domains and also neglected in scholarly works, targeted people's experience of expanded security enforcement—and of its intersections with crime control practices—is likely to have a strong emotional component.
This article focuses on this latter dimension of the relationship between law enforcement and emotions: how law-enforcement practices can affect emotions among those people—mainly but not exclusively minority citizens or incorporated noncitizens—who are constructed in policy and public debates as dangerous and unworthy outsiders of the legitimate political community. I address the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of emotions in Israel, a country in which law-enforcement practices interact with a key ethnonational cleavage within the citizenry between Jewish and Arab citizens.Footnote 2 Specifically, an ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This profile of collective emotions among the Arab residents of Lod cannot be explained without paying analytic attention to their everyday experiences of law-enforcement practices, especially their subterranean ties with the Israeli security agencies and their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I argue that this emotional climate is the product of: (1) the invisible pressure exercised by the General Security Services (GSS), the main internal security agency,Footnote 3 on residents to monitor their neighbors' attitudes toward local and national authorities; and (2) the further collection of information about “the mood” of specific residents during visible police operations explicitly directed against drug-dealing and criminality. The official law-enforcement discourses justify such practices by conflating petty criminality and potential terrorism when referring to the city's Arab residents.
Addressing the relationship between law enforcement and collective emotions requires problematizing two dominant assumptions in sociolegal studies of security, crime, and punishment: (1) the assumption that modern state institutions are emotionally neutral and driven by rationality and (2) the assumption that emotions among nonstate actors are individual and often short-lived reactions to external events. The law and emotion literature has challenged the first assumption. As Reference Abrams and KerenAbrams and Keren (2010: 2000) put it, “for those [legal scholars] who are prepared to understand emotion not simply as a departure from rationality, but as an affirmative mode of apprehension and response, the law and emotions perspective offers a way by which legal actors and institutions can both accommodate and influence crucial dimensions of human experiences.” In a complementary way, the “affective turn” of the social movement literature has challenged the dominant understanding of emotions as short-lived, individual reactions to encompass emotions binding a collective over a relatively long period of time (Reference Emirbayer and GoldbergEmirbayer & Goldberg 2005; Reference GoodwinGoodwin 1997; Reference GoodwinGoodwin et al. 2001; Reference JasperJasper 1998, Reference Jasper2011; Reference O'HearnO'Hearn 2009). In this view, emotions are “qualities of transpersonal ties, bonds, or relations” and “collective emotional processes … cannot be theorized upon the basis of an individualistic understanding of the emotions” (Reference Emirbayer and GoldbergEmirbayer & Goldberg 2005: 485, 488).
This article extends these insights on the emotional dimension of the law and on emotions as a collective phenomenon to the context of everyday life. It borrows the concept of “emotional climate” from psychologist Reference De Rivera and StrongmanDe Rivera (1992) and sociologist Reference BarbaletBarbalet (1992, Reference Barbalet1998) in order to theorize how law enforcement can shape collective emotions. Reference BarbaletBarbalet (1992: 161) conceptualizes emotion “as a dimension of the relations between persons or social agents rather than as a merely empirical individual psychological or physiological state.” He defines emotional climates as follows:
Emotional climates are sets of emotions or feelings which are not only shared by groups of individuals implicated in common social structures and processes but which are also significant in the formation and maintenance of political and social identities and collective behavior. Emotional climate therefore includes emotional tones and patterns which differentiate social groups or categories by virtue of the fact that they are shared by their members and unlikely to be shared with non-members.
(Reference BarbaletBarbalet 1998: 159)A similar group-based understanding of emotions also emerges from Reference De Rivera and StrongmanDe Rivera's (1992: 200–201) distinction between emotional “climates” and “atmospheres”:
An emotional climate is more lasting than a local emotional atmosphere and does not simply refer to collective feeling and behavior but to how the people of a society emotionally relate to one another—for example, whether they care for one another or are afraid of each other.
An “emotional climate” perspective grounds the complex relationship between emotion and cognition within people's historical and present-day predicaments. Neuroscience research supports the idea that the brain system reacts to stimuli, stores memories, and produces perceptions in two ways: unconsciously and immediately through the “emotional brain” and, more slowly, through conscious cognitive processes (Reference LedouxLeDoux 1996).Footnote 4 The role of unconscious appraisal in the context of emotionality also finds support in psychology (Reference LazarusLazarus 1991). These findings have informed recent social theorization about the distinction between “affect” as unconscious sensations and “emotion” as conscious recognition (Reference GouldGould 2009: 18–42; Reference MassumiMassumi 2002). In my view, while unconscious appraisal and conscious recognition are not reducible, focusing on their conceptual separation reinforces the unwarranted assumption that unconscious learning is unmediated by cultural and political factors and that conscious recognition is separated from bodily sensations.Footnote 5 By contrast, understanding how unconscious appraisal and conscious recognition are linked and how they influence one another—a difficult question for any discipline studying emotionality—requires connecting people's bodily impressions as well as their conscious processing of emotions to their social environments and historical trajectories. A focus on collective emotions helps develop such a perspective by situating unconscious responses and cognitive perceptions within past and current relationships within and among social groups.Footnote 6
Reference FoucaultBuilding on Foucault's (1979) conceptualization of penality as a force producing new realities rather than merely repressing what is already there, I identify law-enforcement practices as key factors in the production and reproduction of emotional climates. This attention to the emotional dimension of contemporary penality differs from Foucault's theorization of the disciplinary logic of modern punishment. Foucault argues that past forms of punishment produced fearful subjects via the intermittent and violent display of state power, while modern punishment works through control rather than emotionality, thus producing people that monitor themselves rather than relating to the law through fear. By contrast, in my view, emotions still play a crucial role in the logic and the effects of punishment today. For example, mass incarceration in the United States deeply affects the emotional relationships between incarcerated people and their families, their communities, as well as out-groups (Reference ComfortComfort 2008; Reference GoffmanGoffman 2009). Similarly, lawmaking on sexual criminality has a clear affective-moral foundation (Reference WacquantWacquant 2009: chapter 7). More broadly, in the post 9/11 world, discourses of “civilization survival” and “just war” against carriers of allegedly incommensurable values—the terrorist, criminal, and uncivilized others—have increasingly saturated the public sphere of many countries as well as the international arena. These discourses, which (re)produce fear among dominant publics (Reference Lutz, Gusterson and BestemanLutz 2010; Reference SimonSimon 2007), are routinely mobilized by state officials to justify practices such as the increase in covert policing, the adoption of “pre-crime” national security measures,Footnote 7 and the use of military agencies in policing incorporated people including citizens (Reference Andreas and PriceAndreas & Price 2001; Reference McCulloch and PickeringMcCulloch & Pickering 2009; Reference WacquantWacquant 2008).
Put differently, modern punishment is not the outcome of a progressive acquisition of “civilized sensibilities,” which have expunged violence and emotion from punishment (Reference GarlandGarland 1990). Far from being a solid acquisition in modern legal cultures, “civilized sensibilities” become particularly frail and are likely to be suspended “in situations where dominant groups feel threatened and insecure,” where “out-groups are regarded as less than fully human,” and where there is no “intra-group identification or solidarity that links punishers to punished” (Reference GarlandGarland 2005: 830). These conditions for the suspension of “civilized sensibilities” roughly apply to the predicament of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who, despite their limited citizenship rights (Reference Shafir and PeledShafir & Peled 2002), have been historically framed as dangerous people and have mainly been managed by the Israeli state's policing and security agencies because of their status as outsiders of the Jewish Israeli nation-building project and their ethnonational and family ties with noncitizen Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.Footnote 8
The Palestinian-Israeli case is, thus, a compelling case for studying how law-enforcement practices shape long-term emotions binding a collective and fueling ethnonational division. Indeed, ethnonationalism has historically colored how Israeli policy makers have approached questions of security and criminality, often blurring the boundary between the two. Thus, for example, Israeli authorities—from judges to police officers—often attribute ethnonational motivations to criminal actions committed by Palestinian citizens (Reference AjzenstadtAjzenstadt 2002; Reference CohenCohen 1989). At the same time, Palestinian citizens' “acts of protests and political opposition are signified in nonpolitical terms as threats to the law and public order” (Reference KornKorn 2000a: 580). Furthermore, since its establishment, the Israeli state has developed a complex emergency jurisprudence, which has become an internally incongruent but highly effective “governing tool” to manage Palestinians, including those with Israeli citizenship (Reference JiryisJiryis 1981; Reference MehozayMehozay 2012; Reference ZureikZureik 1988). Given the label of “dangerous people” attached to Israeli Palestinians, Israeli law-enforcement agencies, especially the GSS, have for decades intensively if often invisibly intervened in the lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel (Reference CohenCohen 2010; Reference Sa'diSa'di 2003). As this article demonstrates, these interventions continue today. As a result, while Jewish Israelis share a positive emotional attachment to the state law enforcement agencies, especially the GSS, which they consider as institutional anchors for their search, understanding, and definition of security; the interventions of the GSS and the police in the lives of Palestinian citizens have different, mainly negative, emotional effects.
I begin my analysis of the link between the Israeli law-enforcement agencies and the emotional climate among Lod Palestinians with some reflections on how my experiential “discovery” of this climate was a key moment in my theorizing the law enforcement's production of emotions. I then embed the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. Third, I discuss the parameters of my fieldwork in Lod's Arab districts. The fourth part of this article develops my empirical analysis of distrust and fear as the two emotions that structure the climate within these districts. The conclusion discusses how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and argues for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
The “Discovery” of an Emotional Climate: Theorizing the Relationship between Law Enforcement and Emotions
When I was transitioning to the city of Lod from the West Bank in February 2008, I was viscerally struck by the intense fear and distrust, which were the dominant emotions in the everyday lives of Lod Palestinians. After living in a West Bank refugee camp full time for eight months,Footnote 9 I traveled back and forth between the camp and the city twice to transport some of my belongings. I received help from Salim,Footnote 10 a young Palestinian man from Lod who came to pick me up at a West Bank village just over the Green Line from Lod. Before crossing the checkpoint manned by Israeli soldiers, this man coached me about what to say and what not to say to people I would meet in Lod:
There [in Lod] it is different, you can't speak politics … I don't want problems, and you too don't want problems, forget the [popular] committee.Footnote 11 There [in Lod] you don't know who is in front of you, maybe a “spy,”Footnote 12 and if today he hears you speaking about the camp in political terms, tomorrow you will have the police (shurta in Arabic)Footnote 13 at your door and then they will come to my place because I gave you a ride and they will also take your computer.
Salim repeated his instructions so many times that I grew anxious and almost decided to track back to the refugee camp rather than cross the checkpoint that day. This was in stark contrast with the everyday emotional climate of defiance toward outsiders and mutual trust among fellow refugees that I had experienced in the camp. As I would learn first-hand, Lod had a new climate marked by fear of Israeli authorities and distrust toward fellow Palestinian urbanites. Another example of how fear and distrust became palpable before I moved from the West Bank to Lod stems from the feedback that camp dwellers with relatives in Lod obtained from their relatives when they contacted them by phone to ask if they would help me get settled in the city. In the words of refugees, like most Palestinians in Lod, their relatives “were afraid” and “didn't want to have problems” with the Israeli authorities.
The transition from the West Bank to Lod constituted an important empirical component of what Reference SwedbergSwedberg (2012: 10, 33) calls the theorizing phase of a study, that is, the process of producing a theory: “theorizing is a form of practical knowledge” through which “an organic link between theory and facts is established from the very beginning.” Moving from the West Bank to Lod deepened and sharpened my theorizing about how the law can shape and solidify group emotions. It pushed me to theorize—and investigate empirically—the productive powers of law-enforcement agencies not only in terms of subordinated people's differential access to rights and material resources but also in terms of their emotional lives.
As a result of this theorizing process, this study contributes to those few attempts to conceptualize emotions as forces operating at the intersection of macrostructures and microinteractions (Reference BarbaletBarbalet 1998; Reference CollinsCollins 2004; Reference ScheffScheff 1994).Footnote 14 First, by turning attention to the law enforcement's production of emotions, I extend power and status theories of emotions (Reference KemperKemper 1978, Reference Kemper, Scherer and Ekman1984; Reference Kemper and CollinsKemper & Collins 1990) beyond the level of individual interactions, thus calling for more research on how emotions binding privileged segments of a population might differ from those binding marginalized segments. Second, by exploring how subordinated people experience law-enforcement practices on the ground, I situate the production of “emotional energy” via “interaction rituals” (Reference CollinsCollins 2004) within the realm of everyday encounters between people and state institutions including those encounters that people experience as imposed upon them (Reference Summers-EfflerSummers-Effler 2002). I develop this theoretical engagement with the emotional effects of security and police interventions in the next section, where I give a historical-legal account of the relationships between Israeli law-enforcement agencies and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Israeli Security and Policing Agencies and Palestinian Citizens: Tracing the Historical–Legal Roots of an Emotional Climate
National security is usually studied as a distinct state domain. Along these lines, in the Israeli case, scholars focus on the relationships between different institutional actors and on the state responses to “external threats” (Reference Ben-MeirBen-Meir 1995; Reference Cohen and CohenCohen & Cohen 2012; Reference FrischFrisch 2011). Yet, security practices and discourses inevitably move from the policy-making arena to the ground where they permeate the fabric of everyday life. The incorporation of state practices of security and discourses of suspiciousness in everyday life—which, in the Israeli context, includes everyday practices such as spotting “suspicious” people on buses and driving circuitously around “dangerous” neighborhoods—has important emotional components. From this perspective, while Jewish Israelis' fear of danger, especially of bombings, is an emotional response to external events such as terrorist attacks (Reference Bar-Tal, Halperin and de RiveraBar-Tal et al. 2007; Reference De Rivera and PáezDe Rivera & Páez 2007; Reference HalperinHalperin 2011; Reference Spilerman and StecklovSpilerman & Stecklov 2009), their constant hypervigilance and heightened alertness are mainly the product of state security practices. As Reference OchsOchs's (2011: 12) compelling ethnography of everyday security shows, the Israeli state has intensified—rather than alleviated—alertness and vulnerability among Jewish Israelis by “transforming emotions of suspicion into traits of good citizenship” and by pushing them to “embody suspicion.” With my focus on Palestinian citizens, I explore the productive powers of two components of the Israeli state's security framework that remain at the margins of Ochs's ethnography because they are specifically oriented toward Israeli Palestinians: the use of informers and the convergence between security and police agencies and their resources.
The Use of Informers: Israeli Palestinians' Everyday Experience of Law-Enforcement Practices
Reference GreerGreer (1995: 510) puts forward a typology of informing based on the relationship that those providing information have with the people upon whom they inform and with the policing agency that receives information from them. Thus, while informing can include any instance of a report to the police by a person outside the police, here my focus is on people (“informers”) who establish a relatively long-term relationship with a law-enforcement agency based on their supply of information about people they know and with whom are often in close contact.
In liberal democracies, informing has typically been approached, by scholars and publics alike, as a useful law-enforcement tool for the success of criminal investigations, particularly on drug-dealing (Reference GloverGlover 2001; Reference Harney and CrossHarney & Cross 1968; Reference MarxMarx 1974). Beyond criminal investigations, informing has also been studied from a “norm-focused” perspective as a policing technique that can help undermine the prestige attached to certain criminal behaviors, for example, the public display of illicit guns among youth (Reference Meares and KahanMeares & Kahan 1998). More recently, sociolegal scholars have focused on the negative communal effects of informing on the groups within which it is most widespread, especially poor and minority communities (Reference NatapoffNatapoff 2009; Reference RosenfeldRosenfeld et al. 2003). Less developed but growing is the study of “political” informing against social movements or in terrorism prosecutions (Reference CunninghamCunningham 2004; Reference JeffriesJeffries 2002; Reference SaidSaid 2010). In the contexts of political violence such as Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine, the question of political rather than criminal informing has taken the lead even if the available research pales in the face of the prominent role played by informers in these contexts (Reference CohenCohen 2010; Reference Cohen and DudaiCohen & Dudai 2005, Reference Cohen and Dudai2007; Reference DudaiDudai 2012).
This article draws attention to how, in the case of a “suspect population” (Reference Cole and LynchCole & Lynch 2006: 39–40) such as that of Lod Palestinians, criminal and political forms of informing operate simultaneously and reinforce each other because illegal activities and political activism are both likely to be interpreted by state elites and dominant publics as harboring hostility against the state. Put differently, when an entire class of people has been defined as “suspicious” or “dangerous” for their shared traits such as ethnoracial, ethnonational, or ethnoreligious membership, informing as a policing practice is likely to straddle the boundary between political control and crime control.Footnote 15
Informing is perhaps the most important (and least studied) feature of the Israeli law-enforcement system separating Israeli Palestinians' experience of the law from that of their Jewish Israeli counterparts. It is central not only to Arab citizens' everyday encounters with the Israeli security agencies and police but more broadly to (the limits of) their experience of citizenship. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, those Palestinians that had managed to remain within the borders of the newly established Israeli state—about 160,000 out of about 900,000 Palestinians—were simultaneously given legal citizenship and placed under military rule (Reference Leibler and BreslauLeibler & Breslau 2005). From 1948 to 1966, the military government, which was composed of representatives of the GSS, the police, and the army, imposed rigid travel restrictions on Arab citizens (Reference KornKorn 2000b; Reference LustickLustick 1980). It also formed a network of informers in Arab localities inside Israel: informing “was a carefully calculated system through which the security agencies tried to ‘educate’ Arab citizens in what they were permitted and what they were forbidden to say” (Reference CohenCohen 2010: 235).
After the removal of the military rule in 1966, the techniques of state control over Arab citizens did not change dramatically (Reference LustickLustick 1980). While the 1980s and more so the 1990s witnessed a period of “political liberalism” toward Israeli Palestinians due to the judicial activism of the Israeli Supreme Court (Reference BarzilaiBarzilai 1999), the GSS has continued to play an important role in the lives of Israeli Palestinians, especially after their mass protests in October 2000.Footnote 16 While an analysis of how the Israeli security agencies' involvement in Israeli Palestinian lives today compares to their activities in the period 1948–1966 remains beyond the scope of this article,Footnote 17 my fieldwork has documented how informing about other allegedly dangerous Arabs continues to play an important role in the relationship between the Israeli law-enforcement agencies and Arab residents of Lod.
The GSS-Police Nexus: Legal In-visibilities and Institutional Convergences
The state is not a homogenous entity and different state agencies might have different or even diverging institutional logics and interests. This can also be the case for the law-enforcement agencies. For example, in the United States, local law-enforcement officials have at times declined to support the efforts of federal immigration officials to deport undocumented migrants arrested for low-level crimes (Reference McDonaldMcDonald 2003: 237–39). In the Israeli case, the question of how the relationship between the GSS and the police—or the army for that matter—has evolved over time remains under-researched. The view from Lod's Arab districts today is one that provisionally points to an institutional mechanism of police support to the GSS activities. Lod Palestinians experience everyday law enforcement as a source of anxiety-triggering confusion about what state agents they encounter and what information and activities these agents are after. A couple of examples will suffice. Salim, the Arab man from Lod who helped me move from the West Bank to the city, whom I introduced in the previous section, used the term “shurta” (police) rather than “Shabak” (the GSS) when he warned me that speaking about the refugee camp popular committee would put me (and him) in trouble with Israeli authorities. However, having contacts with West Bank Palestinian “terrorists” constitutes a clear breach of security, thus fitting squarely with the GSS' mandate. Along similar lines, official statements by local authorities often justify policing practices toward Arab residents in terms of security concerns. Take the case of the confiscation of illegal guns among Arab residents in Lod. This goal is presented simultaneously as a practice to reduce the high degree of violence within these districts and as a preemptive action driven by an overall security concern about “too many guns” in the hands of Arab residents.
Glimpses into the institutional convergence between the GSS and the police can be found in the literature. In their study of the GSS in the period from 1948 to 1969, criminologists Reference Perliger, Hasisi and PedahzurPerliger, Hasisi, and Pedahzur (2009: 1284) find that “because the GSS had no operative detention authority, most of its operations were carried out with the assistance of the police … This frequently led police in some Arab villages to follow the instructions of the local GSS coordinator.” The authors also argue that the convergence between the GSS and the police has persisted over time and that the police have become a privileged recruitment pool for the GSS. In his discussion of how the GSS operates today, Reference Feldman, Gordon and MartonFeldman (1995: 85–86) defines the GSS as a “legal ghost” because of its lack of legal authority: “Legal authority for the actions which are necessary for the execution of the GSS's work—search, arrest, detention—is absorbed from the police, the prison services, and the Attorney General's office.” While in 2002 the Israeli Parliament adopted a law—the GSS law—that, for the first time, explicitly recognized and regulated the GSS' legal authority, Feldman's account of the GSS's relationships with other state agencies still resonates with the everyday experience of law enforcement within Lod's Arab districts as documented in this study. If it might be true, as Reference ShpiroShpiro (2006) argues, that the new law indicates an increase in parliamentary scrutiny over the GSS' activities, it is also true that the law remains silent about important components of the GSS' modus operandi, including its recruitment and management of informers, as well as its methods of interrogation.Footnote 18
Interrelated with the widespread use of informers, the institutional convergence between the GSS and the police affects how Arab citizens of Israel perceive and deal with law-enforcement issues. While Jewish and Arab Israelis express a similar desire for police protection, they differ in their perceptions of what the police priorities are, in their receptivity toward the police, and in their attitude toward visible contacts with the police. Arab citizens are more likely to perceive that police are interested in monitoring political activities, less likely to call the police to their homes, and more likely to consider crime reporting as a form of “informing” on people (Reference Hasisi and WeitzerHasisi & Weitzer 2007). In order to understand these differences, it is necessary to keep in mind that, unlike Jewish Israelis, Arab citizens of Israel encounter the police often within a broader set of ambiguous and often invisible ties with the GSS and within a dominant discourse that attaches to them the label of security threat.
Lod Palestinians: A Predicament of Legal Insecurities
Lod Palestinians are particularly vulnerable to the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement and to the use of informing as a policing practice. Their heightened vulnerability is the result of four factors. First, their housing condition is precarious. About 50 percent of them live in illegal structures built without a building license. Many live in segregated, underserviced, and “unrecognized” districts built on state-owned land and thus under the threat of demolition. While the housing situation of Lod Palestinians is mainly the product of the demographic upheavals, the drastic change in land tenure, and the “ethnocratic” urban planning that followed the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, and the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 (Reference YacobiYacobi 2009),Footnote 19 I want to emphasize that the precariousness of their current housing predicament intensifies their fear of unwanted attention from Israeli authorities. Second, Lod Palestinians are poor and most of them seek employment in the low-skilled labor market or the informal and/or illegal economies. Those working in the informal economy, the family members of people arrested for drug-dealing and all those with a criminal record, experience heightened insecurity because they are concerned that their proximity to crime might generate further state scrutiny of their lives. Third, the Palestinian minority in Lod contains a substantial number of Bedouins that relocated in the city from the Negev, a large desert area in Southern Israel, in the 1970s. This migration was caused by a pull factor—the low-skilled market in Lod and nearby Tel Aviv—and a push factor—the state attempts to evacuate the Negev's Arab-Bedouin villages and relocate its inhabitants in towns.Footnote 20 For the sake of this article, it is important to note that the presence of Bedouin newcomers has intensified the distrust within Lod's Arab minority mainly because of their stigmatized reputation as “Israeli soldiers” in the eyes of many other Palestinian citizens. Indeed, unlike other Israeli Palestinians, Bedouins can serve in “ethnic” units of the Israeli army. Fourth, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as West Bank and Gaza Palestinians engaged in an uprising against the Israeli military rule (the first Intifada), Israeli authorities relocated hundreds of informers and their families from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Israeli territory.Footnote 21 The Arab districts of Lod received a significant number of these West Bank and Gaza families. While these people have not necessarily continued their activities as informers after their relocation, which for many was surely a traumatic experience, their presence has intensified Lod Palestinians' widespread perception that informing has penetrated their lives.
Studying the Law Enforcement's Production of Emotions: An Ethnographic Approach
Ethnography is a methodology that is ideally situated to capture the productive powers of law-enforcement practices, especially those practices such as the use of informers, which operate at the level of everyday communication and relationships. Ethnography also becomes a privileged methodology if one aims to include everyday perceptions and experiences of “ordinary” people in the study of the law (Reference FanFan 2008; Reference MacaulayMacaulay 1987; Reference Sarat and KearnsSarat & Kearns 1993).
This study is based on six months of fieldwork in Lod's Arab districts. This fieldwork was preceded by eight months of fieldwork in a West Bank refugee camp. During my stay in Lod, I routinely visited the West Bank. In a collective reaction typical to all things related to ethnonational membership, Lod Palestinians approached my fieldwork in the West Bank with feelings of anxiety. On one hand, given their lack of agreed-upon and legitimate “gatekeepers” to be trusted for scrutinizing outsiders' intentions and identities, my connections with reputable West Bank Palestinians, often with relatives in Lod, eased their concerns about my presence in their everyday lives. However, they were also keenly aware that “the West Bank” evoked images of terrorism within the local and state public and policy arenas. Thus, I often found myself in interrupted conversations with embarrassed and restless interlocutors as I unknowingly answered questions or told stories with words and expressions that my interlocutors—all very experienced in the craft of “seeing like the state”Footnote 22 —deemed as likely to put me, and more importantly them, in trouble with the Israeli authorities.
My lack of Israeli citizenship and family ties in Israel also contributed to the gradual convergence toward the label of “foreign student” or “journalist,” which was how Lod Palestinians normalized my presence among them. In the polarized Israeli-Palestinian terrain, membership in the Jewish Israeli ethnonational community, and especially experience in the military, is an important factor in obtaining access to Israeli security officials and state documents (Reference Gazit and Maoz-ShaiGazit & Maoz-Shai 2010). By contrast, my status as an outsider helped me obtain access to Lod Palestinians' everyday encounters with the state security and penal agencies. Yet, given the pervasive climate of distrust and fear, my possible connections with the Israeli law-enforcement agencies, especially the GSS, were never ruled out during my fieldwork, even if my role as informer became increasingly implausible. A young man clearly explained his distrustful attitude toward me almost as an instinctual bodily response beyond his will:
If everyday you are served hot tea, you get used to blowing the cup of hot tea before drinking it … So you can't possibly be from the Shabak but to my lips you are hot tea no matter what.
In Lod, security assumes a crucial invisible component. The city has a public reputation as major hotspot of criminal activity and the policing of arms-trafficking and drug-dealing are often visible. Yet, at the same time, Arab residents of Lod experience subterranean encounters with the Israeli security agencies. My fieldwork allowed me to at least partially capture the effects of these invisible encounters on social relationships and everyday communication among Lod Palestinians. Indeed, as I followed them to their workplaces or accompanied them on errands and travels, I documented how they made copious daily references to the “Shabak” and to informers when making decisions or when describing ordinary aspects of their lives, such as looking for a job, paying a parking or speeding ticket, applying for a building license, or participating in district meetings about neighborhood problems.
Ethnography provides considerable “informational yield.” Invisible security practices become visible and thus researchable if one examines how targeted people define the place where they live, the extent to which (and how) they express their ideas and opinions to others, how they behave in public spaces, and how they navigate the surrounding environment. In this sense, the methodological argument about “the benefits of being there,” which Reference TopeTope et al. (2005) make in the case of studies of work, can be extended to the study of security and policing practices; this is especially true if one is interested in how these practices shape individual behaviors, norms, and subjectivities, as well as group dynamics.
The Day-to-Day Emotional Climate in Lod: In-Group Distrust and Out-Group Fear
As Reference BarbaletBarbalet (1998: 151) puts it, “emotion inheres simultaneously in individuals and in the social structures and relationships in which individuals are embedded.” This section gives an ethnographic account of how in-group distrust and out-group fearFootnote 23 have inhered in relationships and sites that comprise the day-to-day life of Lod Palestinians.
Distrust: “He Is Not Clean”
The physical characteristics of Lod's Arab districts resemble those of the West Bank refugee camp where I conducted fieldwork before moving to Lod; there are unpaved or bumpy roads, a precarious sewage system, and mounds of trash. Yet, similar physical spaces can be imbued with very different meanings by their inhabitants as well as by external observers. Thus, while Israeli journalists often evoke the image of “the refugee camp” to describe the physical appearance of Lod's Arab districts (Reference Galili and NirGalili & Nir 2000), what impressed me the most was the circulation in Lod of another, more symbolic, type of “dirt”: Palestinian residents' perceptions that their fellow Palestinians in the city were “not clean” due to their ties with Israeli security agencies. Reference DouglasDouglas' (1966) seminal study of “purity rules” shows how rituals of purification target not only the physical body of group members but also the group's body politic; how the treatment of “matter out of place” is aimed at the protection of the group's moral core. However, in Lod, “cleanliness” and “dirtiness” do not constitute parameters for group boundary formation. By contrast, they have become major components of in-group social relationships. Unable to wholly and permanently remove the symbolic “dirt” continuously imposed on them by informing, Arab residents experience a pervasive sense of ambiguity, which is reaffirmed rather than alleviated every time that they attempt to take distance from those among them who are allegedly “unclean.” Their elusive search for a way out of ambiguity resembles what Reference KristevaKristeva (1982: 4) calls “abjection”: “It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Kristeva's analysis of “abjection” centers on the permeability of the human body, which renders the expulsion of bodily secretions a constantly needed and viscerally experienced practice in the subject's elusive search for “purity.” A similar dynamics marks the relationships between Lod Palestinians and Israeli authorities: the permeability of Lod Palestinians' body politic to informing frustrates their attempts to create a stable group boundary and inscribes ambiguity in their everyday relationships.Footnote 24
The multiple legal insecurities that Arab residents experience perpetuate their sense of “abjection” because they generate limitless opportunities for the emergence and circulation of rumors about other residents' possible contacts with the Israeli police or GSS. Take, for example, how Majid, an unemployed resident in his early thirties, interpreted his failed attempt to secure a job. Majid ended his account of how he failed to obtain a license for selling second-hand clothes, how he decided to sell them informally from his garage, and how he was then obliged by the police to renounce to this informal activity with this comment: “if I were to go to the police station right now, they would give me the license; I have to become a spy if I want to open a shop.” Majid's comment reveals his understanding that informing relates to law enforcement not just as a policing practice but rather as a mechanism that Israeli Palestinians can use to obtain rewards and avoid punishment. This perception is widely shared by most Arab residents of Lod. While the distribution of rewards and punishment by the state might be much more erratic and less intentional than perceived by Arab residents, my point is that their shared perception of the link between access to resources (or lack thereof) and informing is conducive to a climate of mutual distrust and recriminations.
Another example of how real or alleged contacts with law-enforcement agencies build in distrust in neighborly relationships was narrated to me by Yusef, a middle-aged man, who tried to organize residents into a local committee to discuss problems such as street noise and trash disposal. Yusef complained that, out of jealousy for his initiative, three neighbors had circulated rumors about him, telling people that he wanted to establish this local committee just because the police had asked him to do it. He accused the three neighbors of being police informers, calling them “spies” (jawasis) and claiming that “the spies think that all people are spies like them.” However, after complaining about these supposedly unjustified rumors, Yusef told how years earlier he had accepted funding for an after-school program from a renowned “spy” (in Yusef's words: “everybody knew that he [the donor] worked with the police”). Thus, while Yusef stopped speaking with the neighbors that had accused him and renounced the idea of setting up a local committee, he defended his decision to secure funding from a “spy” for another project he was involved in. Sure of his good intentions (“my goal is to help children”), he drew a line between informers (those who actively give information to the police) and his acceptance of support from an informer.
Distrust impeded residents' attempts to address their problems collectively starting with the pressing question of illegal housing. In the aftermath of a house demolition in spring 2008, some residents decided to meet regularly to make a list of requests to the municipality with the goal of at least knowing more about the authorities' intentions in terms of further demolition (e.g., which houses, where, when). The question of finding “clean people” was central to how participants commented on their experience mostly in negative terms. One young man was discouraged by the presence of what he identified as “one of those” [informers] and expressed his frustration with these words:
We don't discuss military secrets. We just want to organize ourselves and ask the government, the municipality, and the land department to find a solution [to the housing situation] … We are searching for some good and clean guys to help the people. We want to help ourselves and others.
He also suggested that leaving the committee without a head might defuse distrust among participants and undermine perceived or real attempts by the state to co-opt it: “We [should] stay at the same level … A leader will bring us problems.” In his opinion, the appointment of a committee head would generate deleterious and energy-sapping rumors about the appointed head's motivations.
The internal division between Bedouin and non-Bedouin Arabs further entrenches distrust as the main logic of social relationships among neighbors. The state military conscription rules play an important role in the activation of this intra-group ethnic division as a catalyst of distrust. Most Arab citizens of Israel are excluded from the Israeli army on the basis of their ethnonational membership. However, two ethnoreligious subcategories of Arab citizens are included in the army: the Druze are under mandatory conscription,Footnote 25 while the Bedouins have the option of volunteering in “ethnic units.” Druze and Bedouin soldiers qualify for all the material benefits that serving in the army grants to other Israeli citizens. At the most basic level, serving in the army gives access to a secure income. Thus, for example, given the chronic condition of unemployment among the Bedouins, those who serve in the army are simply known within Bedouin communities as “employed” (Reference KanaanehKanaaneh 2009: 39). Interestingly, unlike those who have remained in the southern desert area of the Negev, many Bedouins who have moved to Lod do not volunteer in the Israeli army. However, other non-Bedouin Arab residents of the town easily attach the label of “informers” to them. For example, Jamila, a Palestinian middle-aged woman, used the figure of the informer to express her distrust toward her Bedouin neighbors:
They [Bedouins] became more aware. But they can snitch to the police. This is normal for them and they don't feel ashamed about it. That's why people don't feel secure with them. They are not only Bedouins but also spies.
Ironically, the essentializing discourse about Bedouin Arabs which circulates among other Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel—that they are informers, soldiers, or, in any case, that they lack political awareness—also serves as the non-Bedouin Arabs' justification for their own attempts to cultivate “good relations” with the Israeli authorities. Let me illustrate this point with an example about illegal construction. During a visit to a family, I was showed the nice garden that the family had made in the back of their house by fencing-in a lot of land which they knew they did not and could not own because it was officially designated as state-owned land. Throughout my one-day visit, different members of the family explained how they were informally monitoring another lot of land near their house to prevent Bedouins from building there. They expressed their opposition to having Bedouin neighbors; yet, they also repeatedly mentioned that their main goal was to obtain the authorities' tacit approval of their garden. While it was not clear whether or not any of them had raised the question to local authorities, it was evident that they all agreed that there was a connection between the monitoring services they “provided” to the state and their goal of preserving their garden. Amid these dynamics, the ethnic divide between Bedouin and non-Bedouin Arabs helped this family justify why they would prevent fellow houseless residents from building on the empty lot of land next to them.
This discussion of everyday social relationships among Lod's Arab residents reveals how the above-mentioned metaphor that a young Palestinian used to compare my presence to a bodily experience of “hot tea burning his lips” can be extended to how Arab residents experience their in-group interactions and communication. Their almost systematic mobilization of the label “informer” signals that they react to one another's actions and words via a defensive mechanism recognizing other members of the Arab collective first of all as potential dangers. This mechanism cannot be fully grasped without a focus on how the GSS penetrates their lives. It indeed reveals the productive powers of the GSS that Arab residents often refer to their “Shabak education” as a major source of their socialization. It is through their encounters with the GSS that they learn how to be cautious, how to monitor their words and behaviors, how to stay away from collective action, and how to distrust their friends and neighbors. The next section will address the dominant out-group emotion stemming from this “education.”
Fear: “People Are Afraid”
The overuse of informing as a policing practice within a specific ethnonational or ethnoracial segment of the citizenry creates a tension among those subjected to it between their status as citizens and their status as members of the targeted category. In this sense, the anti-snitching campaigns that have emerged among poor African Americans constitute “a natural extension of the innate human aspiration to be loyal”: “the refusal to cooperate with the police represents a privileging of community loyalty over loyalty to the state” (Reference AsburyAsbury 2011: 1258). These campaigns also signal the lack of legitimacy that the police have among poor African Americans.Footnote 26 While, like African Americans, Lod Palestinians have weak bonds with the police, the view from Lod's Arab districts is that the police's scarce legitimacy has been matched with fear rather than defiance. Indeed, informing is widespread and state legitimacy is weak; yet, there are no visible and vociferous cultural or political campaigns against informers. This absence stems from the affective foundation of Lod Palestinians' everyday lives: as I showed above, “community loyalty” is weak, while, as I address here, fear has solidly “inhered” in the relationships between Lod Palestinians and the Israeli law-enforcement agencies.
Arab residents shy away from public critiques of the use of informers or other police practices.Footnote 27 This orientation is strengthened by the uncertainty about the identity of the people they interact with in terms of both horizontal relationships with fellow residents and vertical relationships with state authorities. Indeed, a recurrent theme in residents' narratives about their predicament of distrust-cum-fear is that in Lod “you don't know who is in front of you.” Fear of Israeli authorities is the other side of the distrustful relationships that they have with fellow residents. The link between in-group distrust and out-group fear is exemplified by stories that circulate in the Arab districts about how informers, especially young men, infiltrate friendship circles to solicit information about those who criticize the state and express desire to take action against it. Let me illustrate this point with an example. Khaled, an unemployed and uneducated young man, told me that he monitors what he says even when he is with his friends because his older brother was arrested as part of a security investigation relying on informers:
When my brother was 18–19 years old, he was going with some of his friends to drink and smoke hashish. They [the GSS or police]Footnote 28 sent someone to join them and to spy on them … The guy [the informer] made them speak about politics and they started saying that they had to do this and that [something against the state] … So they all got arrested, about 20 people, some were imprisoned for 2 years and others for 3 years …
Khaled ended his story about his brother's security-related arrest with a comment about how residents experience a constant state of fear: “people are afraid to say anything.” Residents particularly frown upon expressions of admiration for Palestinian movements in the Occupied Territories. They also ascribe to the state a certain level of intentionality in making people “speak politics” to then target them. This is evident in Khaled's perception that his brother and his friends had fallen into a sort of trap:
They [his brother and his friends] were just speaking, but words can have consequences here … They [the GSS or police] lured them by words.
More broadly, state authorities are perceived as agencies of power to be feared because they can affect people's lives at their total discretion. In the words of another young resident with a criminal record for drug-dealing:
Today power is the law. The police … can imprison, release, and kill. Today the police can do all these things … They are a government of power.
Perceived arbitrariness is accompanied with confusion as to which state agencies residents encounter and why these agencies initiate these encounters. For example, Reham, a stay-at-home mother in her mid-forties, told me about an anxiety-fraught dialogue she had with a man that had approached her near a small park where her children were playing. The man engaged her by commenting that in his opinion services for children were the best antidote against drug-dealing in the district. He continued, asking if she thought that having more child-centered activities would be a good idea. She agreed and then asked him if he “was working” with the mayor. He replied that he “was working” with the police and then he asked her if she would like to be involved in helping with the planning and fund raising for these activities. In recalling how she replied to this question, Reham emphasized how she felt an urgent desire to disengage from this man but also a concern about not antagonizing him. While he offered to give her names of some possible donors, she called her children apologizing that she needed to go home to prepare dinner.
As it emerges from Reham's telling of this encounter, confusion about “who is in front of you” extends to residents' vertical ties to Israeli authorities, thus it surrounds their public and institutional interactions with a generalized sense of fear. Convinced that the man that approached her had some kind of institutional role—and not necessarily in the police as he had said—she remained doubtful about whether he had spoken to her randomly or because he was interested in knowing more about her and her family. Like Reham, Arab residents are fearful about their encounters with state agencies, but more broadly, they are fearful in general about their actions in the public sphere because they feel unable to fully grasp the meanings that institutional encounters and public actions might acquire in the eyes of state authorities.
The fear of doing or saying something that in the eyes of the state might signal hostility extends to the question of criminality. On one hand, some residents have experienced interactions with law-enforcement officers clearly policing the divide between security and crime. Thus, for example, a middle-aged man with drug-dealing and arms-trafficking in his past described how once when he was arrested, his interrogators—whom he thought were from the Shabak—explicitly warned him with comments such as: “Do whatever you want to do … but don't touch the country's security.” He was convinced that his interrogators were not concerned about his illegal activities but about his potential involvement with arms-trafficking between Israel and the West Bank. On the other hand, Israeli state officials and dominant publics tend to attribute ethnonational motivation to crimes committed by Arab citizens against Jewish Israeli citizens, especially violent offenses such as murder and sexual assault (Reference KornKorn 2000a: 580). This perceived connection between criminality and ethnonationalism extends to the realm of moral corruption. For example, Israeli police officers approach drug-dealing among Arab citizens as an ethnonational threat because of its perceived aim “to drug the Jewish population” (Reference CohenCohen 1989: 132).Footnote 29 More broadly, Arab offenders have historically been perceived by state officials as both immoral and (potentially) disloyal people (Reference AjzenstadtAjzenstadt 2002).
Because of this entanglement between crime, security, ethnonationalism, and morality, Lod's Arab residents fear that drug-dealing in the Arab districts might be considered a security threat especially when Jewish Israeli addicts enter their districts in search of drugs. With a striking resonance with official discourses conflating crime, morality, and ethnonationalism, Lod Palestinians perceive that the coercive state agencies are particularly active in “rescuing” Jewish Israeli citizens from “dangerous” interactions with them. For example, a Palestinian told me that when he was a teenager he dated a Jewish girl for several years. When she started her military service, they decided to break up. However, while she was still serving in the army, this woman asked him if they could meet up during a three-day break from her service. They spent two days in a coastal city near Tel Aviv, but the third day he wanted to attend the wedding of a friend inside the district. The visit of this Israeli “soldier” to the district triggered a chain of reactions of fear and alarm among both the residents and the Israeli police. First, he described how some of his friends panicked when they saw her:
I took her there [to his district] at night because no one could recognize us … So when we were there I met some of my friends … They all escaped … They were afraid of the Shabak; they also asked me if I was crazy and if I had kidnapped her.
Then, according to him, someone called the police and the police searched for them inside the district. Finally, he concluded his story saying that he told the girl “Look, you are bringing troubles” and then they fled the district and went back to the coastal city.
Fear also permeates Arab residents' reactions to news about Israeli Palestinians allegedly planning to harm their Jewish Israeli counterparts. During a conversation about police-Arab minority relationships, Majid, an Arab resident of Lod, commented on the negative image that Arab citizens have in the Israeli media. He specifically referred to a newspaper article reporting, in his words, that “[Israeli] Arabs who work in the restaurants want to poison the Jews [Jewish Israelis].” He expressed fear that news stories like this one are a symptom of the increased policy and public support for the intensification of security and police penetration of the lives of Arab citizens of Israel. Reference BarbaletBarbalet (1992: 151) emphasizes how emotion has a temporal dimension: it “connects different phases of social structure through time. It arises in the pattern of structured relationships and forms the basis of action which then consolidates or modifies the social structure at a later stage.” In the Israeli-Palestinian case, mass displacement in 1948 and military rule between 1948 and 1966 are the two main memories that come to mind for Arab residents of Lod when confronted with news about their alleged ill-intention.
Similarly, local and state discourses about the necessary role of security agencies in crime control policies reinforce Arab residents' fear of a strengthened security rule, curtailed citizenship rights, and even expulsion. Take the following announcementFootnote 30 made by the Israeli Minister of Public Security in October 12, 2010 after a string of unsolved violent deaths among Lod Palestinians:
Permanent checkpoints at the entries to the city, observation balloons above Lod, strengthening Magav Footnote 31 forces, helicopters patrols, and hundreds of cameras on top of utility poles: this is how the police plan to bring back security to the residents … We will use ‘mista'arvim [Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs in order to carry out military operations or to gather intelligence] and Yamam forces [counter-terrorism elite unit of the IDF].
Another newspaper article published in October 5, 2010 announced the involvement of the Shabak in police operations against illicit arms-trafficking in Lod:
The Shabak will be joining forces with the Israeli police in their war on illegal weapons in the Arab sector … According to official estimations, most stolen weapons are in the hands of criminal elements in the Arab sector and are hidden until being used …Footnote 32
While these statements might be directed to Jewish Israeli publics, which consider security agencies as more efficient and “tougher” than the police, the announced involvement of key components of the state's security apparatus—Magav, Mista'arvim, Yamam, and Shabak—in the crime control arena deepens the emotional climate of fear among Arab residents of Lod.
Conclusion
The case of the Arab residents of Lod shows that emotions can bind people together and structure their relationships over a protracted period of time. It also illustrates the importance of studying emotions as collective phenomena deep-rooted in everyday interactions among people as well as between people and state institutions. Furthermore, it demonstrates that law enforcement is an important productive force in the context of emotionality. The “emotional climate” approach to the effects of law enforcement, which I have developed in this article, builds on Reference FoucaultFoucault's (1979) thesis of punishment as a productive force while, at the same time, extending it to people's emotional lives.
Exploring how security and crime control practices affect emotional relationships among people—for example, shaping whom they trust or distrust and whom they feel threatened by or have confidence in—is a necessary step toward a better understanding of the role of policing and security agencies in processes of symbolic and material inclusion and exclusion. An analytic approach on how the state security apparatus—in its interactions with crime control enforcement—shapes people's experiences of citizenship is particularly urgent today due to the increasing diffusion of “pre-crime” legal regimes, which are “concerned less with gathering evidence, prosecution, conviction, and subsequent punishment than in targeting and managing through disruption, restriction, and incapacitation those individuals and groups considered to be at risk” (Reference McCulloch and PickeringMcCulloch & Pickering 2009: 631). How does this use of the law to target people on the basis of suspicion affect the salience and the scope of their citizenship and shape their relationships with out-groups and with state institutions? By focusing on how emotions run through the interactions between state actors, dominant publics, and targeted people, an emotional climate perspective is useful for studying divergences between dominant and subordinated groups in their affective orientations toward the state, their feelings of belonging, and their participation in the public sphere.
Put differently, an emotional climate approach extends Reference SomersSomers's (2008) argument about the corrosion of citizenship rights by an unchecked market to one that highlights the role of an expanded security apparatus distributing degrees of dangerousness to different segments of a citizenry in the (re)production of symbolic and material exclusion. As this article demonstrates, in the Israeli case, a law-enforcement model blurring the line between evidence and intelligence via expanded covert policing and via the convergence between policing and security agencies has effectively bifurcated the meanings and experiences of citizenship along ethnonational lines. On one hand, it has substantially restricted Israeli Palestinians' citizenship rights. It has pushed them away from the public sphere and rendered them uncertain and anxious about their interactions both within and outside their community. At the same time, by identifying Israeli Palestinians as a “suspicious population,” the Israeli law-enforcement regime has reinforced Jewish Israelis' fear toward Arabs and made them reliant on the security apparatus for their own claims to safety and recognition as citizens (Reference OchsOchs 2011).
Understanding how law-enforcement agencies participate in broader processes of exclusion from the public sphere and restriction of citizenship rights also requires connecting political control and crime control (Reference OliverOliver 2008). A focus on collective emotions allows for this connection. On one hand, it allows for a better understanding of how, in the case of a “suspect population,” crime control enforcement becomes intertwined with the state management of perceived political threats and with public support for expanded coercive interventions. On the other hand, an analytic attention to the link between law enforcement and collective emotions is useful for studying subjective orientations toward politics, criminality, and legality (Reference BrisbinBrisbin 2010; Reference HarcourtHarcourt 2000) among members of subordinated groups that are targeted by state interventions straddling the line between politics and crime often invisibly and preemptively.
