Project Kraken: Surveillance and Liminality 'On the Edge' of Land and Water. Issue 1 (1st January 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Weaver, Duncan
• Is Part Of: Geopolitics. Volume 27:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 333
• Page End: 359
• Publication Date: 2022-01-01
• Subjects: Geopolitics -- Periodicals; Boundary disputes -- Periodicals; Sovereignty -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1755267
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-0045

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Project Kraken, an effort to combat terrorism and crime on the UK water network, is a valuable case that propels knowledge of surveillance. Whilst similar initiatives universalize surveillance participation, Kraken particularises it, occupying specific spaces and recruiting a delimited (maritime) community. Research observed, on one hand, Kraken's spatial liminality, given its occupation of the land/water threshold, characterized by 'edges' through which humans, thought, and resources flow. On the other, agential liminality was observed given Kraken's enlistment of the maritime community: ever 'on the edge' of land/water, peripheral to national security, yet endowed with knowledge useable by state. A marginal actor recruited 'inwards, ' that community possesses a watery consciousness harnessed for raison d'état . Liminality offers a lens through which to assess such particularisation. A liminal approach, foregrounding the edge, helps overcome the binaries of inside/outside, land/water, offering fertile territory on which to revision power flows and more accurately situate the power ful and power less in contemporary social science.