Troops on the streets: staging counterterrorism in Belgium

Since the 2015 and 2016 attacks in Paris and Brussels, Belgian authorities have implemented unusual security settings: a 4-day lockdown of the capital, a large scale deployment of the army, concrete blocks and fences obstructing public streets, etc. While reminiscent of counter-terrorism practices in the recent past (UK, Italy, Spain…), the presence of military patrols and check-points in a European capital are nowadays rather uncommon forms of securitization. In particular, this low-tech and highly visible security apparatus looks at odds with the less visible and high-tech security coordination fostered by the European Union to prevent further terrorist attacks. The paper aims at exploring this re-enactment of the local ‘sovereign’ within the Belgian context. It unpacks the tensions between a European technology-driven counter-terrorism discourse that promotes high-tech systems (such as big data analytics and electronic surveillance), and the seemingly opposite ‘staging’ of the Belgian army, which makes tangible the materiality of (in)security. Building on Goffman’s concept of ‘dramaturgy’, the goal of the paper is to stress out the inescapable symbolic dimension of security practices, and to indirectly contribute to critical security studies debates on digital surveillance and security