By Rhys Machold
Abstract: In this blog post, author Rhys Machold provides an overview of his recent book Fabricating Homeland Security: police entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel, which was published by Stanford University Press in September 2024. It shows that although the term seemingly concerns domestic security, “homeland security” is not exclusive to the ‘homeland.’ Homeland security represents an important world-making project entangled with imperial forms, past and present.
The term ‘homeland security’ is most commonly associated with the policies of the “Global War on Terror” pursued by the United States in the early 2000s, when the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The DHS has since become synonymous with the seemingly unbridled rise of mass surveillance and its associated technologies of information-gathering and sharing within the United States, under the banner of intelligence ‘fusion’ and an unprecedented spike in expenditure on domestic security. Between the fiscal years 2001–2020, the total outlay for DHS amounted to USD $1 trillion, representing a sixfold increase in analogous expenditures in the twenty years before.
Though the term seemingly concerns domestic security, I argue in Fabricating Homeland Security: police entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024), that “homeland security” is not exclusive to the “homeland.’ It involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. The book excavates the origins, texture, and repercussions of the rise of the homeland security state and its global multiplication under the banner of what I term as homeland security’s fabrication.
The concept of fabrication seeks to capture the relational, politically contested, and geographic process through which homeland security is continuously remade, which takes place in three distinct senses. First is the literal making of the homeland security state and its surrounding global industries (its technologies, logics, weapons, and expertise). Second is the making up of “homeland security” as a new category and so-called “model” of governance in the sense of its illusory, mythical, and ideological dimensions. Third is the weaving together of the various threads that come to constitute homeland security in the world.
Homeland security’s irreducibly transnational elements can be seen within the origins of the term ‘homeland’ itself. While the term ‘homeland security’ first emerged in the United States after 2001, prior to this, notable references to its domestic territory as a ‘homeland’ were historically unfamiliar in the United States. Yet, the term was resonant in settler-colonies beyond its borders, namely that of Zionist settler colonialism and Apartheid South Africa. This underscores the importance of locating homeland security – and security projects more broadly - as projects nurtured by imperial and colonial histories and racialized forms of reasoning.
Zionism’s relations to homeland security, however, are not merely semantic. Homeland security’s emergence as a governmental body was shaped by the efforts of other states – most notably those of Israel – which intervened in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. At this time, Israeli officials proposed that Americans adopt so-called Israeli ‘solutions’ in their wake. For instance, on September 13, 2001, former Israeli diplomat David Rubin was quoted in a Washington Post article arguing that “This question of hijacking of a civilian plane that could cause damage to civilian infrastructure is something that our [Israeli] security establishment is very aware of and has thought about for many years.” Rubin not only praised Israel as an exemplar of security preparedness; he disparagingly contrasted this to the lack of imagination seen in the United States. In the same article, Rubin noted, “In the U.S., this isn’t even in their briefings. I don’t think anyone thought about this [the use of airliners as missiles] happening in a serious way, except for Tom Clancy in his books.”
When the term “homeland security” emerged in the early 2000s, it was rightfully greeted with broad concern from a range of critical voices. It quickly became a metonym for the boundless sense of fear and insecurity. Indeed, the paradigm of homeland security has become associated with an unprecedented acceleration in the “militarization” and “securitization” of everyday domestic spaces, particularly cities, on a planetary scale. “Homeland security” is also commonly associated with the “civil” domain and framed in contradistinction to the security regimes in formal military settings.
Despite its “civil” and “domestic associations,” homeland security has always had clear transnational ambitions. These can be seen within its self-consciously global mission as spelled out in early policy documents. For instance, the U.S. National Strategy for Homeland Security of 2002 declared the mandate of DHS as “an exceedingly complex mission” necessarily based on carrying out activities “both at home and abroad.” Indeed, from the outset, homeland security’s US architects, together with a range of global partners, have sought to remake the entire world. Hence, one of the central frames of the book is to locate homeland security as a world-making project entangled with imperial forms, past and present.
This project has been underpinned by the rise of a sprawling multi-billion-dollar homeland security industry, which supplies and advises governments and corporations. While the United States remains by far the single biggest player in this industry, Israel has emerged as a particularly powerful node of influence as a pioneer and exemplar of “homeland security” to be emulated by others around the world. Indeed, Israel has been credited with developing the totalizing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control that have become associated with “homeland security” well before the term was coined by the Bush Administration in 2002. This includes the vast surveillance and policing infrastructures that Israel has historically employed in its efforts to pacify Palestinian resistance, as well as fortifying its strategic sites, like airports, for instance. As Rubin’s comments further allude to, Israelis have continued explaining away their historic downing of civilian airliners, such as that of a Libyan passenger over the Sinai Peninsula in 1973, as evidence of their (supposed) proactiveness in anticipating and pre-empting the use of such aircraft in terror attacks.
While situating “homeland security’s” formal origins in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in the United States, the book’s primary empirical lies elsewhere. It traces Indian and international state and corporate actors’ attempts to remake Indian security in the image of homeland security. This happened in the decade after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, known in India simply as “26/11.” The 26/11 attacks sparked a major public backlash against the Indian political class and generated pressure to adopt “modern” homeland security approaches from the Global North.
The event is widely seen as a turning point in the ways that matters of security have been imagined and governed in India ever since. Through multi-sited ethnographic engagements across India, Palestine/Israel, and the United Kingdom over more than a decade, the book uncovers the existing connections forged between India and other places under the banner of homeland security in the immediate aftermath of 26/11 and the years that followed. In doing so, it illuminates the little-known relations that have emerged between India and Palestine/Israel on domestic surveillance and policing projects, which have received limited scholarly attention to date. The story of fabricating homeland security in India is necessarily entwined with the ever-deepening bilateral alliance between India and Palestine/Israel. Yet while these two stories overlap, they are not reducible to one another.
The book shows that the various efforts to implement Western style “homeland security” came to fruition and did particular kinds of important work. This includes the media production of 26/11 as an exceptional geopolitical event and moment, which signalled India’s need for foreign homeland security “solutions.” And in the years after 26/11, homeland security’s global mission has served some global and Indian constituencies rather well. Local state actors were able to police the crisis of authority that 26/11 gave rise to under the banner of police modernization rather effectively. Other manifestations of the efforts to bring homeland security to India include the creation of India’s National Intelligence Agency (NIA) in 2008. The NIA has worked to advance mass surveillance and the Indian state’s permanent counterinsurgency war against its political enemies.
Yet the mission to remake India and Indians in the image of homeland security did not materialize in ways that many, including Israelis, initially imagined or desired it would. Despite all of their best efforts to exploit 26/11 as a moment of opportunity, the Israeli homeland security industry’s attempts to (in their words) “penetrate” India mostly came up short. In the book, I profile a number of Israeli homeland security purveyors who struggled to get major contracts in India, particularly with state agencies. While a few had some success, the majority of these actors complained of an unfavorable Indian “business culture,” as well as insurmountable differences between conditions on the ground between India and Palestine/Israel. Thus, after some years of efforts focused on India, most conceded defeat.
Indian capital’s broader strategies to “educate” a new Indian homeland security market in the image of the modern West also faced significant challenges. These have included the fraught corporate efforts to radically increase demands for new homeland security “solutions” by overcoming the (supposedly) uniquely “backward,” “Indian” sensibilities that such actors understood as standing in the way of efforts to modernize India’s domestic security infrastructures. And to the extent that homeland security materialized in place, for instance in the city of Mumbai, it has done so in highly patchy, ad-hoc, and often questionable ways.
For instance, major Mumbai train stations like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) and Churchgate had installed metal detectors at their main entrances after 2008. Although the metal detectors were ostensibly installed to reassure commuters that their security was being taken seriously, their manifestations seemed to signal a tacit admission by the local state that securing the facility was impossible. At CST and other Mumbai train stations, passengers could pass through the scanners without being stopped, even if they had triggered the machine’s alarms. Many such stations and entrances lacked scanners altogether, and even in instances where a scanner was installed, passing through the scanners was entirely voluntary. Where scanners were present, there were often large physical gaps between them, which enabled commuters to walk around the machines if they desired.
Based on these findings, the book thereby works to unsettle homeland security as a coherent, all-encompassing, and inevitable project. It argues that, when read carefully, efforts to fabricate homeland security in India offer new ways to unsettle the notion of homeland security and the “models” thereof, which go beyond abstract critique. When we pay attention to the strategies to fold India into the global war on terror as a singular totality, we repeatedly encounter enactments of multiple, sometimes rather incompatible worlds or reals, reflecting global incommensurabilities between places and peoples but also, crucially, between security regimes. Attention to these rifts and tensions, the book argues, can help to destabilize the universal pretences of homeland security, and also security at large.
Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024) and is incoming Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security.
