Colonial Surveillance Mechanisms: Past and Present

Summary

Science and technology have played significant roles in modern colonial management through various surveillance activities. To extract natural resources and mobilize or replace populations in colonies, myriads of technological methods have been invented and utilized, such as map, census, registration, pass, permit, identification card, bookkeeping, photography, tattoo, fingerprinting, or other forms of biometrics. These modern tools have made natural resources and local or migrant populations legible to the imperial powers and helped colonizers watch over resources and people to exploit, conform, assimilate, or eliminate. Intelligence activities by the colonial administrations and policing agencies have been also central to population control in maintaining racial hierarchy and restraining resistance by local people. The surveillance technologies have produced a particular type of knowledge to expand markets and normalize racial capitalism, the Orientalist discourse on the colonized as “irrational,” “depraved,” and “childlike,” which in turn legitimated the rule by colonizers as a superior group, as “rational,” “virtuous,” and “normal.” These institutional interventions to the lives in colonies can be defined as racializing surveillance that classifies the population into who is in and out of place. The former colonies and occupied areas by the Western powers have been often test beds of novel surveillance technologies to this day.

Surveillance studies focusing on techniques and technologies for colonial management emerged around the 2000s, provoked by the Western “War on Terror” and the rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs). While many studies illuminate unprecedented capacities of ICTs in data collection, retention, and use, such as closed-circuit television, facial recognition systems, drones, or networked databases, historical studies explore political economic origins of digitized technologies and aim to unpack consequences of colonial surveillance for subjected people, because surveillance activities are often invisible. Historical surveillance studies tend to raise tensions with Foucauldian understanding of modern power or biopower, because of the predominantly repressive character of colonial population control. With details on institutions and actors, these studies demonstrate stark differences from the Western biopolitics, and the more necropolitical experiences of rationalized violence in colonies.