Abstract:
Despite the increasingly sophisticated body of theoretical and empirical research about current surveillance issues, very few academics have provided critical accounts of the complex ways through which technologically based 'surveillance models' are becoming 'expert exemplars' for more normalized use, thus providing mobile, standardised answers to the question of how to deal with security and control issues. Within these exemplification-processes of security politics - such is my basic assumption – sport mega-events are playing a decisive part, in their quality as laboratories for increasingly complex high-tech surveillance technologies.
It is from such a standpoint that the paper engages with the European Football Championship 2008 in Switzerland/Austria (Euro 08), as a key moment, and as a key location, in the production and circulation of security/surveillance related practices and expertise on different – local, regional or global – scales. Focusing on political debates both on the Swiss national level and on the level of Swiss host-cities for the European Football Championships 2008, the paper critically examines the mediating role of the Euro 08 as test field for the installation and use of new surveillance technologies in Swiss cities more generally. At the same time, and drawing upon empirical insights in the planning of Euro 08 security operations at Geneva, the paper critically examines the resonances and dissonances between globally established security standards, surrounding sport mega-events, and locally anchored security/surveillance practices as they are negotiated in situ.
