“Disasters and major events act as accelerators for security capitalism”: interview with Mathieu Rigouste

Independent social science researcher Mathieu Rigouste examines the developments of security capitalism, policing practices, and the strategies of domination that accompany them. The author of the books La domination policière (La Fabrique, 2012) and La police du futur: Le marché de la violence et ce qui lui résiste (10/18, 2022) is about to release a new documentary film titled We Are Battlefields, an investigation into the arms industry and its multiple connections.

INDEX: In your new documentary, Nous sommes des champs de bataille, due for release in January 2025, you investigate the “security machine” and in particular the Milipol arms fair. What are the aims of the film?

Mathieu Rigouste: The aim of the film is to study the mechanics of the global security business, to build a tool that will enable both social struggles and the general public to understand how it works, so that they can organise and take action against the machines of war and control. It all starts with the fact that I’ve been put on the “S” list (French internal security services can put anyone they deem susceptible of perpetrating “troubles to the public order” on a list called “S List”, which allows increased surveillance of the individual, ed.). I’ll never know exactly how, probably for both my research and my activism. From the point of view of the intelligence services and the forces of law and order in France, but also internationally, this ‘S’ card designates me as an individual likely to engage in violence. And in fact, despite this, I was able to carry out an in-depth investigation inside Milipol, the world’s internal security exhibition. Having worked on the security system for twenty years, I know the language of the industry, the key concepts and the underlying dynamics. This enabled me to film interviews on camera with industrialists and communicators from the major defence and security firms at Milipol.

INDEX: When you talk about “machines of war and control”, what do you mean, exactly ?

MR: The title of the film was not chosen at random. I’m interested in the way we design and develop new technologies for war, surveillance, control and repression. So it’s about specific objects and know-how: algorithms, computer programmes, weapons, vehicles and other equipment. I’m also interested in how they are globalised – in other words, how a manufacturer, most of the time in collaboration with a State, will finance the manufacture of a product and then have it adopted, often by its own State. It is the latter that will validate it in some way, allowing it to be tested, standardised and put into practice.

Once a product has been “combat proven”, it will be legitimised, which will enable it to be sold on the international market.

The principle of the film is to go and see the industrialists and communicators of these big companies to get them to present their wares, and to get them to do so in their own words, their own language, so that they can talk about their strategies.

INDEX: Since we’re talking about weapons, is there anything that you investigated for your film that has to do with the arming of police officers in France, and more generally with changes in policing practices in France?

MR: There are things that correspond to the general dynamic of recent decades, which I summarise as the ‘security age of imperialism’, that is to say, a reconfiguration of imperialism around the markets of war and control. Even if capitalism has always been about war, what we have here is a logic of regeneration of relations of domination and international hierarchy through the markets of war and control. This is what lies at the heart of these big arms supermarkets.

The film is based on footage and interviews I shot in 2017, 2021 and 2023. What’s interesting is that it shows how the industry was preparing for the Olympic Games that have just taken place [in Paris in 2024, ed.]. At the time, we saw them doing everything they could to make the Olympics an opportunity to transform the law and bend the legal frameworks, in the hope that facial recognition would be authorised.

In the end, there was resistance, as well as institutional contradictions, and they refocused on algorithmic video surveillance, VSA in short [from the French “Vidéo-Surveillance Algorithmique”, ed.], which is something that prepares the ground for real-time facial recognition and which is already being experimented with in several cities. But the key issue is its standardisation and the adaptation of the legal framework so that all cities and the entire territory under video surveillance can use facial recognition algorithms.

It was quite interesting to see all these industrialists seizing on the Olympic Games as a great accelerator of legal transformation and as an opportunity for the creation of new markets.

INDEX: How does this link between the legal framework and the security framework play out, in a commercial venue such as the Milipol fair?

MR: Manufacturers are very, very aware of the legal framework because this is what enables them to develop a product and sell it as widely as possible. They also work hard to change the legal framework, lobbying MPs, ministers and politicians to push their agendas. This happens everywhere, not just at Milipol of course, but at this venue one can see how they try to invite politicians and MPs to their stands, and how they organise courses to talk to them about the “new threats” and the “new solutions” they have to offer.

Behind all this, there is something of a subtext, a kind of class connivance. Some politicians are people whose careers take them back and forth between industry actors and the State bureaucracy; and when they are in the latter, they order the goods produced by the former, where they worked when they were in the private sector.

Take the example of Cédric O, one of the Macronie’s pundits [Secretary of State for the Digital Economy between 2019 and 2022, ed.] on artificial intelligence and new technologies: he is a former employee of Safran, whose “Identity & Security” branch has become Idemia, one of the world leaders in surveillance technologies, which is working hard to market and impose its facial recognition “solutions”. Idemia is headed by former prefects. The Milipol expo is itself organised under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior, but it is run by the giants of the sector: Thales, Atos, Orange, Airbus and Idemia. It really is a co-production between the State and the military-security firms.

INDEX: In your book La domination policière, you highlighted the fact that innovations in police techniques often precede legislative developments. In other words, techniques such as “pare-chocage” [when police officers use their cars’ bumpers to stop motorcycles, often causing dangerous accidents, ed.] or the use of certain weapons are first practised without a legal or regulatory framework, and the latter is more likely to result from the dismissal of cases by the courts and/or laws that provide an a posteriori framework for these practices. Did this tension between the technical and legal spheres also resurface in this latest survey of the arms industry?

MR: This back and forth is highly structured. All manufacturers maintain contact with what they call the “end users”, who are basically the police, if it’s police equipment. More specifically, they have regular exchanges with the purchasing departments of the Ministries of the Interior and Defence, with headquarters, and with rank-and-file officers. In particular, it is in the hands of the latter that they put their equipment, to consult them, to find out what they think of it, if it works well, if they like it. But also to find out what they might want. For example, I conducted a series of interviews over several years with Axon, the company that produces tasers. Axon develops and updates its electric guns, cameras and algorithms by constantly working with police officers in the field to find out what they want. So there’s an induction mechanism, a search for what police officers want, to find out what they would like. All this feeds and stimulates a certain desire for power and violence.

Also, once certain units have new equipment, other units want it too. If one unit has a slightly more powerful flash-ball [a kind of rubber bullet gun, ed.], the other units will want it too. And then, if the police have it, the gendarmerie will want it too, and so on. So there is a game of standardisation and internal legitimisation that is exploited by manufacturers.

The Titus, for example, is an armoured vehicle developed both as a war vehicle in the Sahel and as an anti-riot, anti-crime and anti-banditry vehicle. It was supplied to the RAID [an élite unit of the French police, ed.] free of charge by Nexter [now KNDS France, ed.], a giant in the land armaments industry. This enabled the RAID to proudly display this large armoured vehicle, to play with cutting-edge equipment, which no doubt flattered the virility and esprit de corps of its officers. But it also allowed Nexter to test the vehicle and show potential buyers that the Titus was used by the French police’s special units.

INDEX: You mentioned the Olympic Games as a moment that was eagerly awaited by these manufacturers. Can you describe how these major events are used as showcases? And what about riots and other revolts, such as those that followed the murder of Nahel Merzouk or the repression of the independence movement in Kanaky – how do all these events act as showcases for the industry?

MR: Major sporting events, such as the Olympic Games, the Football World Cup or the Rugby World Cup, are great moments of experimentation and standardisation, as are major disasters. At the last two Milipol events, the main theme was disaster management. Mind you, the industrialists taking part are not trying to prevent disasters; they want to sell governments the means to manage them effectively. To achieve this, they offer everything from tetrapod robots, drones and inflatable balloons to “smart fences”, fences at sea or in rivers, anti-exile surveillance technologies and gas markers. Health and climate disasters, like major events and projects, are seen as formidable accelerators of security capitalism.

During riots, the police test new devices directly in the field. For example, at the last Milipol exhibition I attended, a police officer from the RAID, who was clearly acting as a demonstrator and communicator, told me that the drones used by the gendarmerie during the uprisings that followed Nahel’s murder did not suit them. So since then, they have launched a partnership to develop new drones better suited to “maintaining order in urban environments”.

Military-security companies are doing everything they can to ensure that their products are used during uprisings so that they pass the combat test, the field test. In fact, that’s one of the questions I often ask arms manufacturers, namely whether they use an equivalent concept for homeland security than “combat proven”, which is a strictly military concept. They love this question! Because there is no real concept of “combat proven” for homeland security, but they love to be seen in this light, to compare themselves with the military domain, to see themselves in a continuum with war, with the real thing.

For example, the head of GICAT, the major French defence and security industry lobby, answered “yes” to this question. He told me, “Yes, there is a principle equivalent to ‘combat proven’ for homeland security, but there are still too many constraints, the State still imposes too many constraints on us to be able to sell our equipment just about everywhere”. It’s interesting to see that the armaments industry feels that it is still being held back by the French state, and that they want even more freedom to manoeuvre.

INDEX: Are there any other examples of terms used to legitimise the use and sale of these weapons and technologies?

MR: There’s a term that’s quite interesting: “acceptability”. It’s a term they use a lot. “Acceptability” means doing everything possible to ensure that a new product is well accepted by the public. For example, during an interview with Axon, I clearly asked them the question: “Have you done any work on acceptability, because we know that tasers raise questions, people are a bit scared, etc.”. And they explained to me that they do indeed have departments dedicated entirely to ‘acceptability’. When they try to supply all French and European municipalities with tasers, they actually promise to deploy a service ensuring that when they are implemented, they will go door-to-door in the municipality, with leaflets to explain to people that everything is fine, that it has been properly tested, and so on.

At the same time, they are developing a whole field of communication, i.e. slogans and narratives that are absolutely post-truth. Axon’s main slogan is “protect life, record the truth”. This is a response to the slogan used in struggles against state violence, which says “justice and truth” [“vérité et justice”, ed.]. They say “we protect life” because they maintain the founding myth that tasers replace firearms – but we now know that this is completely false. In fact, tasers are used in addition to firearms. Driven by the neo-liberal dynamics of racial capitalism, the number of people killed by the police with firearms continues to rise – they are still mainly non-white proletarians – but now people are also being mutilated or seriously injured by tasers.

The company also maintains that its body cameras help to “record the truth”. But here again, in the interview I conducted with Axon’s Director for France, she made it clear that these cameras are primarily used to support the officers’ version of events, to justify their actions or their use of weapons. This also explains why police officers have direct access to an on/off button on the pedestrian camera they are wearing, so that it can be said that the device has not been switched on if the images recorded are inappropriate. In reality, the device is designed to support the police officers’ discourse, not to reveal the truth.

INDEX: The notion of ‘safety’ is at the heart of the communication strategy of the arms and control technology industries. But safety for whom?

MR: Basically, safety is always the safety of the ruling classes. They are the ones who need to be protected and made safe. The discourse is always constructed in this way: we announce that we are protecting the population, but we protect them by capturing them. Let’s take the example of barbed wire: when, at the end of the 19th century, American industrialists marketed barbed wire, and it was used by the British colonial army in the first concentration camps, it was said that the aim was to protect the population, to keep them safe from guerrilla warfare. It’s a rhetorical technique, a mystification. From a historical point of view, it’s about protecting the ruling classes from social uprisings, resistance and popular counter-attacks. But security is also a central concept for the regeneration of the system of power and accumulation through the dispossession and dependence of the dominated classes.

INDEX: This brings us to address the notion of “collateral damage,” which is also central in this kind of discourse, specifically the one deployed retrospectively to justify and legitimize acts of violence committed in the name of security. According to your research, how is this notion used today within the security industry and apparatuses?

MR: The founding discourse of Western imperial modernity is to say that you don’t hit civilian populations – savages do that, but not civilised peoples. This has always been false: in the colonial sphere, civilian populations have always been hit, targeted as such. The question is rather how far we want to target them.

From a material point of view, the effects of weapons are studied in detail, both by the arms industry and by the forces that use them. We know perfectly well that a given weapon will affect a given proportion of civilian victims if used in a given context. On this basis, decision-makers – police, military, political – make their choices. We can see this with the war in Gaza at the moment: Israeli decision-makers, supported by the Western powers, have chosen to use weapons that cause unprecedented numbers of civilian casualties. Hence the recurrent use of one-tonne bombs on so-called ‘humanitarian’ zones where families are crammed into tents, or on ten-storey residential buildings, creating craters twenty metres in diameter…

This issue is constantly evolving. Over the last twenty years, there has been a rapid change in the legal framework that is supposed to govern the actions of the various armies and police forces, and a considerable broadening of the civilian targets that are considered legitimate to be struck, hit or targeted. In France, a good example is the so-called “refusal to obey” [“refus d’obtempérer” – a situation where a driver doesn’t stop during a police control. The conditions establishing the use of weapons by the police in such an occurrence was broadened in 2017, ed.]: in 2017, a legal regime was installed that allows people to be put to death on the pretext of preventing them from fleeing. Of course, this is linked to a context of socio-racial domination; the police do not shoot social groups that they consider legitimate. Another example: the Israeli army produces a discourse according to which all civilians present in such and such an area are suspected of being supporters of terrorists, who thereby lose their status as civilians and can legitimately be shot. These are systems of justification – legal and discursive – which broaden the scope for the use of extreme violence. This extension of the realm of ferocity benefits both the most unequal regimes and the merchants of war and repression.

[Interview conducted by INDEX on 20.08.2024].