The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe

By Gregory Feldman

Based on rare, in-depth fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team working in a southern EU maritime state, Gregory Feldman examines how "taking action" against human smuggling rings requires the team to enter the "gray zone", a space where legal and policy prescriptions do not hold. Feldman asks how this seven-member team makes ethical judgments when they secretly investigate smugglers, traffickers, migrants, lawyers, shopkeepers, and many others. He asks readers to consider that gray zones create opportunities both to degrade subjects of investigations and to take unnecessary risks for them. Moving in either direction largely depends upon bureaucratic conditions and team members' willingness to see situations from a variety of perspectives. Feldman explores their personal experiences and daily work in order to crack open wider issues about sovereignty, action, ethics, and, ultimately, being human. Situated at the intersection of the EU migration apparatus and the global, clandestine networks it identifies as security threats, this book allows Feldman to outline an ethnographically-based theory of sovereign action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503607668

Gregory Feldman

Gregory Feldman is a political anthropologist at the University of Windsor. He is the author of three books including the The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2019); We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-Hood (Stanford Briefs, 2015); The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union (Stanford University Press, 2011).

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Stanford University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Feldman, Gregory, author.

Title: The gray zone : sovereignty, human smuggling, and undercover police investigation in Europe / Gregory Feldman.

Other titles: Anthropology of policy (Stanford, Calif.)

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: Anthropology of policy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018027720 | ISBN 9780804799225 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503607651 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Human smuggling—European Union countries—Prevention. | Human trafficking—European Union countries—Prevention. | Undercover operations—Moral and ethical aspects—European Union countries. | Police ethics—European Union countries. | Sovereignty—Moral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC JV7590 .F454 2018 | DDC 363.25/551094—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027720

ISBN 978-1-5036-0766-8 (electronic)

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services in 10.5/15 Brill

Cover photo: Refugee tents on a beach in the Mediterranean. IRIN | Ylenia Gostoli

Cover design: Rob Ehle

The Gray Zone

Sovereignty, Human Smuggling, and Undercover Police Investigation in Europe

Gregory Feldman

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Anthropology of Policy

Cris Shore and Susan Wright, editors

For John Harriss and Alec Dawson

Witty and compassionate colleagues who understand what the job is about

For Anna Bailey, Julia Edwards, and Anna Labadze

Women of principle, women of action

For 119 students of International Studies at Simon Fraser University

For signing a petition and saying what they think

The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Contents

Preface

The Argument

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones

1. The Ambiguity of Truth: The Ephemeral Limits of Security Apparatuses

2. Identity and the Investigative Team: Violence, Sovereignty, and Personhood

3. The Thinness of Secrecy

4. Sovereign Actions on a Global Stage

Conclusion: Alternatives Within: The Appearance of the Second Sovereign Form Despite the First

References

Index

Preface

I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. . . . It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

Umberto Eco (1932–2016)¹

I trusted you with my gun, David replied with a mixture of disgust and offense. And indeed he did.

Earlier that day, I drove north out of the city with him and four of his colleagues—Brian, Vincent, John, and Frank. They comprise five out of seven members of an undercover investigative team specializing in transnational crime, which usually involves human trafficking and smuggling, along with prostitution, burglary, begging, and pickpocketing. Based in a southern, maritime European Union (EU) member state, they seek not to arrest street-level players. Instead, their investigations hone in on those controlling the local operations, who are invariably tied into wider networks operating in the margins, gaps, and ambiguous spaces of the EU’s security-migration apparatus. That afternoon, they took me to a shooting range where they could refresh their skills and teach me how to fire a pistol. The range amounted to nothing more than an expanse of hilly terrain with sandy cliffs to catch stray bullets. The team carries Glocks, a well-known Austrian handgun and the first ergonomically designed sidearm. David provided me with thorough instructions. First, with the pistol’s bullets removed, he explained its design: the sensitivity of the trigger; the catch to release the magazine; the slide giving access to the barrel; and the sights through which to align the barrel with the target. He then specified the two cardinal rules of handling a gun and made me repeat them. I reiterated dutifully, One, keep your index finger off the trigger unless you are ready to fire. Until then, it should be extended straight forward alongside the barrel. Two, always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction when it is not in use.

After he had coached me through a few rounds without bullets, David then walked me to a spot twenty feet before the target so that I could fire a gun for the first time in my life. I learned that when shooting, one must slightly bend the knees to stabilize the body, like a shock absorber, from the gun’s discharge. The weak hand steadies the strong hand holding the grip, but with strong thumb on top of the weak thumb. Align the front sight notch so that it appears between the rear sight’s two posts and so brings the target into the line of fire. Gently press the index finger against the trigger: not too strongly and not too weakly. David stood behind my left shoulder. Relax, Greg. Just breathe. BANG! Even a relatively quiet pistol startles a first-time shooter, but one regroups quickly with the coach’s encouragement. Good. Just relax, breathe, and shoot again, Greg. BANG! And on I went until the fifteen bullets in the magazine had buried themselves in the sandbank behind the target. David continued his instruction. After firing the final bullet, first, press the catch to release the magazine from the grip; second, pull the slide back to expose the inside of the barrel, verifying that it is empty; and third, pull the trigger while pointing the gun in a safe direction so that it releases its cocked pressure.

David remained unarmed as he instructed me on how to fire his gun. While Brian, Frank, and John milled about, Vincent stood fifteen feet diagonally behind my right shoulder, just outside my peripheral vision. His Glock remained in its holster, perched on his belt. He kept his arms folded as he stood on guard, ready to defend David should I have gone off the deep end. Cops back up their colleagues much like one chess piece protects the square of another that has advanced toward the opponent’s line.

During the car ride to and from the shooting range, they had been telling me stories about breaking laws during countless investigations. I had heard many such stories already during the previous two weeks when I first began fieldwork with them: illegal entries, illegal detentions, illegally accessing information, blackmail, extortion, and so on. Two weeks proves a long time in this type of ethnographic fieldwork if measured in actual contact hours. The team spends most of their time on surveillance operations, which last anywhere from three to twelve hours straight. On balance, these operations are excruciatingly boring because their suspects, like most people, do not really move around that much. Most of the operation involves sitting in a car or a café while waiting for suspects to go somewhere to meet someone. So, the hours of downtime are spent talking . . . and talking . . . and talking. The team keeps no secrets from each other, and I had very few left in me by the end of fieldwork.

Yet, before then, I was unsure of the amount of skepticism I could show with my questions. That evening at dinner, Brian spoke of a plan, to gain them access to a Chinese-run brothel, that seemed both elaborate and harebrained to me. These brothels are particularly difficult to investigate because they only cater to Chinese clients. Such challenges push the team to the limits of their creative powers, and their legal ones. Yet, after Brian’s idea, I had finally heard one story too many. I yielded to my skeptical impulse, feeling confident that the question I had to ask would neither offend them nor cost me the unusual access they had granted me. In any case, I would have been academically irresponsible to not press them on the matter. I asked incredulously, How do I know these stories aren’t all bullshit? To be fair, the stories they tell can hardly be made up. Truth is stranger than fiction, as the saying goes. But enough was enough. Brian and Vincent belted out a hearty laugh at the deadpan delivery of my question. David took it to heart.

Greg, I trusted you with my gun. Yes, he had, and, unarmed himself, he had taught me how to deliver a fatal gunshot should I ever need to. I could have made him my target. My incredulity offended him: if he trusted me enough to hand over his gun, then why couldn’t I trust what he said? Strictly speaking, he had put his life in my hands, and I gave him skepticism in return.

I do not expect this vignette to compel the reader to believe that the team never stretched the truth, or that they never dramatized to impress, or make fun of, the naïve ethnographer. I do expect, however, that this ethnography be held to the same standard as any other. It is tempting to think that an accurate understanding of people’s daily routines is harder to obtain when they work clandestinely for the state. However, ethnographic interlocutors of all backgrounds shield, conceal, and partially reveal themselves and their knowledge. Some have secrets to keep; others are more forthcoming. The ethnographer tries to uncover as full an understanding as possible. The bar to cross, basically, is whether the written representation of one’s interlocutors rings true to anyone generally familiar with the issues at hand. Does the writing convey that the ethnographer knows what s/he is talking about? Ethnographers cannot verify each other’s fieldwork as laboratory scientists verify each other’s experiments through replication in contrived conditions. In this regard, the point I wish to make with the opening vignette is that, I believe, the bond I established with the team after more than six hundred hours in direct, engaged, face-to-face contact with them (not just hanging out in the general vicinity), plus dozens more hours in various other forms of communication, was sufficiently strong for me to understand what their work is about and how they themselves approach it. I participated in scores of their surveillance runs, ate long lunches with them on a daily basis, socialized with them outside of working hours, visited some of their homes, studied their investigative tactics, interviewed and engaged others in adjacent units in the Immigration Service, and examined a dozen of their open and closed cases. I interviewed them formally and informally, and some of their wives too, and ethnographically studied with them parts of the city and surrounding country where their cases often lead.

Another question also comes up, again one that any ethnographer would have to answer: Why did these people want me around in the first place? In my case, this question was usually asked as a prelude to the question of whether these investigators hid their real dirty work or only showed me a sanitized version of what they do. Yet, while one never knows what one does not know, the question misses a more pressing point: that my continual presence posed a great risk to them. An awkward foreigner is well capable of screwing up a street operation that requires subtlety and discretion. An outsider can also, accidentally or not, go public with information that could deeply embarrass the team and land them in political or legal trouble. The associate director to whom they report, one of four in the national Immigration Service, clarified to me over a two-hour lunch that no journalist would ever get this access for fear of cherry-picked stories, unfair biases, and sensationalized headlines. While my presence was their risk, I had no material or political benefit to offer them. They had no professional interest in my research, and there is nothing I could do to advance or protect their careers. They had no reason to open their professional world to me only to conceal some other double secret component of it from my view.

Nevertheless, they had one understandable incentive, familiar to ethnographers, which convinced them to bring me on board after Brian, upon my request, suggested it to them in spring 2012. (I first met Brian in 2008, during fieldwork for The Migration Apparatus [G. Feldman 2012], and we maintained a correspondence from then on.) It was David again who captured the sentiment. When I asked during my first lunch with them why they had agreed to my project, he replied, Greg, we’re glad you’re interested. This is like therapy for us. We have no one to talk to but each other and our wives . . . and our wives are sick of hearing it! Genuine interest, however, is not flattery or callow admiration. Good ethnographers are more than passive stenographers of what they are told and what they see. On this point, Clifford Geertz argued that a compelling ethnography does not rest on its author’s ability to capture primitive facts in faraway places . . . but . . . to clarify what goes on in such places (1973: 16). He thought that the ethnographer should not copy raw social discourse, but rather only that small part of it which our informants can lead us into understanding (19–20). To get there, ethnographers must ask questions; they must present different perspectives to force their interlocutors to clarify their own. Per Umberto Eco’s point in the epigraph, I suspect that the team, like people in general, want to be challenged with tough, but fair, questions because the challenge draws more insight out of them. They risked bringing me on board because they saw just such a chance.

Such chances allow us to speak, clarify, and articulate our own views on the world, and, if we stay open-minded, then we get to enlarge those views through the glorious mess of verbal exchange. We distinguish ourselves through speech, but speaking implies an audience that listens critically. Speech becomes navel-gazing without an audience, and, without a critical one, it amounts to nothing more than an echo chamber, mere navel-gazing in a social setting. A critical audience grants the speaker a worldly reality—a presence in the company of others who are different but willing to fairly examine difference. Through our exchanges in a world of others—whom we do not Other—we obtain being, that thrill of knowing that the space we share with others depends to some extent on our own particular presence, just as our being depends on it. Without this engagement with others, we are condemned to our private lives, comfortable though they might be, but certainly isolated. Fieldwork with the team, then, consisted of an ongoing debate and discussion prompted by what Heyman (2003) calls counterpart ideals—that is, alternative moral claims in fields of structural power that undercut the position of authority that a given actor occupies. This approach pushed them to both complicate and refine the meaning they ascribe to the sovereign actions they take when imposing themselves on the lives of others, to steal the title from a film about the former East Germany’s secret police.

To create a situation in which one’s interlocutors do not feel threatened by the exchange, but rather come to thrive on it, the ethnographer must be willing to learn what they do and to hear why they choose to do it the way that they do. The ethnographer must not sacrifice his/her ethical judgment, but neither should s/he rush to judgment about theirs. If the interlocutors are confident that the ethnographer’s judgments are reached in measured steps, then they will enjoy the differences of opinion that emerge. To be sure, had it just been the flattery of my attention, then the team would have grown bored with me before long. The callow admirer has nothing to offer on his own and ultimately cannot stand eye-to-eye with the admired. Had I been unreflectively antagonistic like an overeager journalist, then they would have grown defensive and dismissive. Had I mirrored them and simply tried to be like them to win their acceptance, they would have disparaged me as a pretender. Instead, just as they expect from each other, they expected me to be myself and to ask anything I wished as long as I was willing to listen and watch before I judged. In turn, I had to answer their questions and accept their challenges too. Most of these involved their critiques of North American political correctness, which they perceived to inform my own outlook. It must certainly sound like a cliché to hear that I grew tremendously with this project. Yet I did. I do not agree with many opinions the team members expressed, and I question the ethics of several actions they took. However, it is no exaggeration to report that their flexibility of mind, allowing them to comprehend the plurality of standpoints tied to a common situation, like a crime, exceeds that of anyone I have known.

NOTE

1. Stephen Moss, Umberto Eco: The G2 Interview, Guardian (UK), November 27, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/27/umberto-eco-people-tired-simple-things. Last accessed May 25, 2016.

The Argument

People desire to constitute sovereign spaces through which they come to life as particular persons. However, such spaces, identified here as the second sovereign form, appear in the shadows of the nation-state, identified as the first sovereign form. These sovereign forms are qualitatively different even if not fully disentangled. The first sovereign form depends upon a vertical arrangement that atomizes and abstracts subjects into equal, homogeneous entities. It thus silences the particular subject by emphasizing a capacity of the mind that operates generically in everyone: the capacity to make abstract, technical judgments through the mind’s faculty of cognition. The second sovereign form depends upon a horizontal arrangement in which people appear as different but equal subjects. It empowers the particular person as it requires ethical judgments based on a different capacity of the mind stimulated by the actor’s unique standpoint with respect to others. Through the faculty of thinking, we judge situations by examining others’ standpoints to decide upon joint actions, which satisfy our consciences. Particular subjects mutually constitute each other, and the sovereign space between them, through those joint actions.

Each form differently conditions how sovereign agents will conduct themselves in gray zones, for better or worse, where law and custom dissipate and opportunities arise to act without precedent. As the first sovereign form is premised upon people as atomized, abstract objects, those agents are more likely to treat Others as stereotyped, voiceless objects. As the second sovereign form is premised upon people as mutually constituting subjects, sovereign agents are more likely to treat others as full persons, even when acting against their interests. This argument is demonstrated through an ethnography of an undercover police investigative team in a southern, maritime European Union member state. This team focuses on transnational crime, primarily human trafficking and smuggling. They occupy a peculiar place in the larger security apparatus from which they can escape the top-down vertical imperatives of first sovereign form and, however fleetingly, conduct action in line with the second sovereign form.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the active support and interest of the members of the undercover investigative team themselves. My thanks and gratitude go directly to them. I hope they find the book a thoughtful and thought-provoking assessment of what they do. I also thank Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council for funding the project through their Insight Grant program. Much of Chapter 1 draws on material published as G. Feldman (2016), ‘With My Head on the Pillow’: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Evil among Undercover Police Investigators, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (2), 491–518, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.

Several students of international studies provided invaluable research assistance throughout the course of the project. I am grateful to Melissa Gregg, Jenna Dixon, Nick Palaj, Sara Sim, and Ogake Angwenyi for their time and capability. Julia Edwards was especially helpful in proofreading drafts of the chapters, combing through various literatures, and ferreting out information from obscure sources. Several colleagues offered important insights that helped me develop, clarify, and refine the book’s empirical and theoretical arguments. They include Samir Gandesha, Elizabeth Cooper, John Harriss, Alec Dawson, Joe Heyman, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Michael Herzfeld, Andrew Shryock, Manuela Bojadzijev, and William Walters. I thank Merje Kuus for her help with the logistical responsibilities of conducting fieldwork abroad.

The ideas conveyed in this book were developed and refined through several invited lectures, workshops, and conference presentations. I am grateful to Manuela Bojadzijev for her invitation to present at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2015. The same gratitude goes to Samir Gandesha’s invitation to present at the Institute for Humanities at Simon Fraser University shortly thereafter. I thank Keally McBride for her 2016 invitation to speak at the University of San Francisco. Rohit Jain’s invitation to deliver the keynote address at the 2016 annual conference of Switzerland’s National Center of Competence in Research—The Migration-Mobility Nexus at the University of Neuchâtel came as a great honor. I benefitted tremendously from the side conversations during my stay. I am similarly grateful to Thomas Bellinck, theater director and documentarian, for his use of my first book, The Migration Apparatus, in his musical production Simple as ABC #2: Keep Calm & Validate, and for his invitation to speak at the 2017 Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. The Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the University of Windsor, Ontario, provided me with a rich forum to present this research toward the final days of fieldwork. I thank Nick Harney and Tanya Basok, in particular, for their engagement and interest. I also thank Maria Stoilkova and Esther Romeyn for bringing me to the University of Florida’s Center for European Studies’s mini-conference The Provocations of Contemporary Refugee Migration in 2017. Thanks to Maria, Esther, and the other participants, this event left me with an overload of issues to consider when working out this book’s argument.

I also benefitted from colleagues on panels at conferences of the American Anthropological Association, the European Association of Social Anthropologist, and Peace and Conflict Studies in Anthropology. I would like to thank several organizers for their administrative and intellectual input of various kinds. They include Monika Weissensteiner, Nils Zurawski, Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, Erella Grassiani, Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, Joshua Clark, Winnie Lem, Pauline Gardiner Barber, Anja Kublitz, Lotte Buch Segal, Jeffrey Martin, Heath Cabot, and Sara Shneiderman.

As ever, the editorial team at Stanford University Press have been both professional and personable while keeping the publication process on track. I extend particular thanks to Michelle Lipinski. My deep appreciation also goes to Cris Shore and Susan Wright, Anthropology of Policy series editors, and longtime friends and colleagues, who know how to constructively read other people’s drafts. I am grateful to Daniel Sentance and Brian Ostrander for their sharp and thoughtful copyediting. Finally, thank you to Rachel Moxham for meandering conversations and the possibilities that come with them.

Introduction

Sovereignties and Their Gray Zones

To be or not to be. That is the question. We will be.

Syrian refugee walking with thousands of other refugees from Budapest to the Austrian border, autumn 2015¹

Have you seen what they do? Go to their offices and see their forms. It changes you. It’s so boring. Legal shit and bureaucracy.

Vincent

Two Forms of Sovereignty in Contrast

States don’t do things; people do. There are no such things as states, only actions conducted in their name by particular people. This book follows from that premise to better comprehend sovereign action and how it conditions our being in the world with others. The above two epigraphs showcase the very beginnings of two radically different sovereign forms that frame this book’s analysis of action and being human. For the refugee quoting Shakespeare, along with thousands more, the only way to be after Syria and the European Union marginalized them out of political space, for much different reasons, was to constitute a world for themselves through their own initiative. They acted in concert against the police authorities in Budapest’s Keleti train station by marching directly to the Austrian border. In so doing, they entered a gray zone when they stepped outside of Hungarian law to constitute their own sovereign space. The fleeting quality of their actions offers no counterpoint. True, they hardly destabilized the Hungarian state, and their joint action dissipated when they arrived in Austria, where they would be processed objectively through its asylum application system. Moreover, the Hungarian authorities ultimately provided buses to take them to Austria—it solved their problem and the refugees’ problem. Nevertheless, the point remains that politics and action came down to a single and highly personal question expressed through Shakespeare’s famous line: to be or not to be. That question can only be resolved in favor of the former option through joint action. The particular person can only be in a world that is constituted with other particular persons. Since their actions transpired outside the scope of law—in a gray zone—it signified a foundational sovereign act, the birth of a new polity, issuing from their own thinking, judging, and action, that is, from their own partial and worldly positions. It neither descended upon them from an ideology’s transcendent heights nor was imposed on them by revolutionary elites or state bureaucrats.

For Vincent, one of the seven investigative team members who operate on the street, the work of the office bureaucrat signifies a living death. He sees that figure personified in the desk investigators seated in the adjacent third floor office with whom his team must collaborate. The desk investigators’ job revolves around paperwork, process, and procedures all scripted in advance. While the state does not marginalize Vincent in nearly the same way as it does the Syrian refugees, his fear of the desk investigator’s life is that it will not allow him to be. The sovereign state reproduces itself, both through and despite the agents operating in its name. It carries on regardless of whether any given agent lives or dies. In contrast, the sovereign polity formed by the refugees lasted as long as they could act jointly to keep it alive. The result, however momentary, is the isomorphic appearance of sovereignty, personhood, and action. Vincent’s team contrasts their work against their counterparts in desk investigation because they seek the same experience of being as the Syrian refugees.

Sovereign action is not abstract, though it is difficult to imagine a sovereign acting. At best, we can picture an agent of the sovereign, such as a police officer, tax collector, or passport control officer. Yet, if we can pinpoint only the sovereign’s agents, but not the sovereign itself, then we can ask—just as the team ask themselves—if those agents exist in the world as their own particular persons or as empty conduits for the implementation of sovereign authority. If the former, then the agents conscientiously agree with the sovereign; if the latter, then they lack a conscience insofar as they cannot distinguish their own viewpoint from the policy measures they must implement. If the agents disagree with the sovereign and still carry out the action, then they suffer from a crisis of conscience. In any case, the agents can only appear as themselves when in agreement with the sovereign; such agreement cannot happen in every instance if we acknowledge that each person occupies a subjective standpoint. Yet the sovereign itself cannot be identified, much like the shadowy court that employed two nondescript agents to summon Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial. As in real life, the sovereign seems to be an intangible prime mover operating behind agents’ backs. However, reality is far more superficial or, at least, surficial. Rather than steering those agents from behind, the sovereign only emerges as the effect, not the cause, of what they do in its name. Overall, then, state sovereignty makes a strange demand on its agents: it asks them to deny themselves as a plurality of speaking subjects in order to create the illusion of its existence as a transcendent authority.