Murakami Wood, D. 2017. Editorial: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After. Surveillance & Society
15(3/4): 357-370.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index| ISSN: 1477-7487
© The author(s), 2017 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons BY-NCND
4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
David Murakami Wood
Queen’s University, Canada.
dmw@queensu.ca
Abstract
This editorial introduces the special responsive issue on the global turn to authoritarianism. It points out the lack of any systematic
political theory of the way in which authority and surveillance relate within Surveillance Studies and sketches some possible outlines
for such a theory, that involves relationships between surveillance, democracy, authoritarianism, colonialism and capitalism. It
argues that the contemporary turn to authoritarianism is predominantly a Global North phenomenon, that adds to an already common
situation in the post-colonial Global South, and that the fears that drive the turn to authoritarianism in the North are rooted in fears
of the breakdown of a post-colonial global order that was so favourable to the Global North. Finally, it proposes three possible
trajectories: multiplying and deepening authoritarianism; the return of neoliberalism on a planetary scale; and new forms of platform
authoritarianism that emerging from surveillance capitalism. However, it rejects all of these in favour of the rediscovery of collective
desires.
Understanding Authoritarianism and Surveillance
“Democracy is dying” says Paul Mason (2017) in a recent op-ed for The Guardian newspaper, and
furthermore he argues, no-one seems to care. For this special responsive issue of Surveillance & Society we
present, we called for shorter, clear articles that would provide a good platform for understanding the
apparent turn to authoritarianism and its relationship to surveillance at a national and global level. We
received 45 abstracts, of which we selected 30 to go forward to a full submission. There are absences: while
there is a piece on the experience of living in the former Soviet Union, there was nothing on or from
contemporary Russia, and nothing too, on the current US regime (although we do have an article that
considers US bulk data interception in the context of a shift to authoritarianism) – perhaps it is either ‘too
soon’ after the 2016 election for any retrospective analysis, or we are already supersaturated with takes on
Trump, hot or otherwise. However, coverage is global: we travel from Angola to Venezuela, via Australia
(2 pieces), Austria, China (3 pieces), Ethiopia, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Japan, South
Korea, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Turkey (4 pieces), the United Arab Emirates,
the United Kingdom, and the USA. There are also far too many to be introduced individually within this
introduction, however I will do what I can to weave as many of them into my words.
There are several immediate problems for Surveillance Studies in dealing with authoritarianism. The first,
perhaps surprisingly, is that there has not yet developed any systematic political theory of the way in which
authority and surveillance relate. More has been written recently about surveillance within democratic
nation-states (see e.g. Haggerty and Samatas 2010), on the general basis that Anthony Giddens (1985)
Editorial The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 358
developed back in the 1980s: that all surveillance tends towards totalitarianism, in other words that state
surveillance itself is a marker for a drift to a totalitarian state. The second is the need to move almost
immediately beyond such domestic political accounts of authoritarianism and surveillance, to consider
transnational and international relationship as integral to the phenomenon, its historical roots and
contemporary manifestations. In an editorial like this, one cannot hope for a complete treatment, but I will
start with the first problem, sketching out some notes towards a political theory of surveillance and
authoritarianism, and then move to the second, the question of the globality of the claim, before considering
what happens next.
Authoritarianism, Surveillance and Democracy
Authoritarianism has multiple definitions across and within disciplinary contexts. In psychology, the
concept has been long associated with the concept of the “authoritarian personality.” Many attribute this to
Theodore Adorno et al. (1950), but the term originates with another member of the Frankfurt School,
humanist psychologist and socialist, Erich Fromm. In Fromm’s theory, there were two types of authoritarian
personality, “the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to
submit, obey, or to be humiliated.” Both, he argued, are immature personality types, who “can neither love
nor make use of reason” in contrast to “the loving and reasoning individual.” (Fromm 1957). Adorno et al.
developed this into a fully-fledged political psychological account of why Germans conformed to Nazi rule,
although in the popular imagination this is often reduced to a simplified version which merely emphasises
the force of personality of Hitler or other leaders, which then obscures the importance of the second
personality.
For Michel Foucault (1977), authority represented as a specific mode of ordering, a governmentality, that
was linked to the person and body of a ruler, often channelling the divine, and able to command and punish
those who rejected such commands in spectacular ways. He connected this governmentality specifically to
the absolute monarchs of the early modern period in Europe and, as scholars of surveillance are all well
aware, contrasted this with the approach developed by scientists and utilitarian thinkers of the mid- to late
18th
century, which emphasised the moulding of docile bodies by a combination of disciplinary training and
surveillance. Indeed, Marx had noted the supervisory relationships within the factory system as an important
element of the control and exploitation of the working class.
However, in Foucault’s work as it evolved, the different modes of ordering are almost never singular – they
rarely operate alone. Hannah Arendt’s (1973) identification of “totalitarianism” incorporated not just
arguments about authoritarian personality but also similar understandings to those later found in Foucault.
Revisiting Arendt’s work now, without the propagandist Cold War gloss that was put on it by some
American scholars of the time, and in the light of work on surveillance, one can see totalitarianism as a
mode of ordering which combines pre-modern and modern: authority with surveillance.
In liberal democratic political presentations, authoritarianism is often approached temporally. In this way of
thinking, authoritarianism is periodised as a regressive time, usually limited to the mid-20th
century, which
disrupted the smooth path to a perfect capitalist democracy. This argument reached its nadir in the justifiably
much-mocked work by Francis Fukuyama (1992), The End of History, which argued that the end of the
USSR and the Cold War marked the conclusion of a historical struggle between, on one side, capitalism,
social liberalism and democracy and, on the other side, communism, repression and authoritarianism, a
struggle in which liberal democracy had finally triumphed, leading to a new period in which the story would
be one of the spreading and deepening of liberal democracy worldwide.
Is the apparent rise of authoritarianism at root (just) a decline in democracy? In asking this question, the
emphasis is shifted from seeking answers in either analogues to psychological theories or from explanations
that contrast authoritarian states to liberal democratic ones, to seeking answers within ostensibly democratic
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 359
states. Paul Mason (2017) claims that democracy is dying partly because no democratic governments are
standing up to defend the principle. Yet, is this not exactly what has prompted multiple interventions by the
USA and its allies since WW2? “Defending democracy” has been the rationale for the subversion of multiple
governments and the invasion of many countries. Indeed, the legacy of that American hegemonic
interventionism in the 20th
century can be seen in the division of Korea, resulting in vicious surveillant
politics of any considered to be sympathetic to the other Korea, outlined in the case of South Korea by
Minkyu Sung in this issue, and in its near neighbour, Japan, which remains the USA’s most loyal lieutenant
in Asia, examined by Midori Ogasawara, whose Japanese book based on extensive interviews with NSA
whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has been making waves in that country.
A second problem with this argument lies with democracy itself. In his provocative recasting of global
political economy, Kojin Karatani (2014) follows Morgens Hermann Hansen in arguing that even in its
origins, the Athenian democracy which forms the basis and historical model for all western democracies,
was always an inferior form of government to earlier Greek city-states that was known as isonomia. Isonomy
was a more cooperative, egalitarian mechanism, closer to what Murray Bookchin (1991) called “libertarian
municipalism.” The biggest problem with democracy was the nature of the “demos” on which it was based.
The public that ruled in Athenian democracy was never “everybody.” In ancient Athens, the demos was
composed only of Athenian-born, free, male landowners. Women, foreigners, slaves, and other propertyless
people were excluded from membership. This principle characterised many modern western democracies
until relatively recently, the rise of mercantile capitalist states being dependent on racial difference, slavery,
strong property-rights and male dominance. And these characteristics have not vanished with more formal,
legal inclusions like the abolition of slavery and voting rights for all citizens regardless of gender and race.
Indeed, one could argue that the current paranoia over refugees and migrants highlights one of the remaining
exclusionary features of the contemporary demos – the concept of citizenship itself (see, e.g. Isin 2004).
Surveillance has been deeply implicated in all of this. Traditionally, definitions of the state have revolved
around the post-Westphalian consensus that produced modern-nation states and the theory that combined
territorial integrity, defined populations and ideas like citizenship and equality before the law, a state
monopoly on the legitimate possession and use of the means of violence, and so on. Importantly,
surveillance was an integral part of the conception of the early nation-state, particularly for Prussia where,
as Ian Hacking (1990) noted, the effort to systematise the counting and definition of populations actually
predated and provided evidence for the actual foundation of the nation-state. It was Prussia too that
developed the theory of an informed “police state”, whose agents had the power and the duty to know its
citizens1. If one is to define modern state surveillance at its most simple, it comprises two elements: first,
the definition, classification and enforcement of both a population and a territory – what Foucault (2007)
called biopolitics – and second, the previously mentioned (self-)creation of malleable citizen-subjects who
compose the members of that population and denizens of that territory, a process carried out within
institutions, which he called panopticism (Foucault 1977).
As Foucault remarked many times, the modern subjects themselves, that is, the collective “we,” rarely think
of ourselves as the products of such processes and likewise we rarely consider democracy as a management
system. Instead, even many supposedly radical thinkers seem to imagine that democracy really means rule
by everybody as opposed to rule by the demos. It is not just that the demos is being undone, as Wendy
Brown (2015) argued, although this is happening, but that there has never been a real mapping of the demos
to “everybody” in any democratic state. Indeed, most nominally democratic nation-states are in practice
more like what William Robinson (1996), adapting Robert Dahl (1971), called “polyarchy,” situations in
which a mixed form of rule occurs, somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism. There are some
democratic or quasi-democratic features, but decisions are not in practice taken by the “demos” but by
elected representatives, executives, bureaucracies, courts and any number of other agencies and institutions.
1 “Police” in this context did not refer to the uniformed police but to all the domestic regulatory functions of the state.
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 360
Japanese philosopher Azuma Hiroki (2014) claimed that the idealist argument made by Rousseau, that the
“general will” could be divined and attained in modern nation-states, was never materially possible through
all these proxies. Undoubtedly, the size and complexity of modern states and their populations has much to
do with this, but the “democratic” answer would surely be either to decrease the size and complexity of the
entities over which democracy is supposed to rule, or devise better methods that enable the will of the people
to be translated more directly to the larger scales at which democracy is current supposed to operate.
The former solution has been the domain of advocates of popular assembly and cooperative models like
Karatani, some of the Italian Autonomist Marxists, and the American anarchist and social ecologist, Murray
Bookchin, who is starting to achieve more influence post-mortem than he did in his abrasive life. This has
occurred in particular through the adoption of his ideas by the Kurdish liberation forces carving out their
own autonomous region of Rojava on the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the rapidly declining ISIS
“caliphate” (Leverink 2015). The latter has been the subject of Azuma’s General Will 2.0, which argues that
the internet, and particularly social media, provides the potential basis for a genuine translation of the
general will into politics. I will return to this question in considering the question of what comes beyond the
current turn to authoritarianism.
A Preliminary Model of State Surveillance
In conventional political theory, political orientations are generally defined by the nexus between the two
sets of relations: between state and the person, and between the state and capital (in liberal democratic
parlance, referred to more “neutrally” as “the economy”). This standard model looks something like Table
1, which is presented here as illustrative rather than definitive.
State-person
relation
State-capital
Relation
Consensual Mediated Authoritarian
Regulated Communism Socialism Fascism
Mixed Minarchy Social Democracy Polyarchy
Unregulated Anarchy Liberal Democracy Neoliberalism
Table 1: A Conventional Model of State Forms2
This produces an implicit increase in surveillance from a minimum in the bottom left corner to the top right,
but moving both up and right also produces increases in surveillance, simply for different rationales.
Looking at this chart it is easy to see why surveillance would be associated with a move to Fascism
(Totalitarianism). But in fact, this does not help us very much in understanding what is going on in
surveillance relationships. Another set of relations is needed and the ‘state-person’ relationship needs to be
opened up and interrogated. It is only when we add information and surveillance to the state-type that we
can do this. In the model I propose here below, state form is combined with surveillance. Surveillance is
simply an indication of how much personal information out of the total possible is systematically collected,
stored and used whether by state or other bodies.3
2 Naming some “ideal-typical” is always controversial. For example, “Neoliberalism” really occupies a larger space
that covers some of ‘Liberal Democracy” and “Polyarchy.” In addition, there is no simple moral gradient to this table,
the spacing is too even and two-dimensional, and the lines between some categories are much stronger than others.
3 I recognise that although surveillance is generally posited as relating to information, in Foucault’s analysis of the
emergence of the modern subject, there is also a strong relationship between surveillance and force. Surveillance
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 361
Table 2, below, relies on several neologisms derived from ancient Greek. Some are more familiar than
others, and most are being used in very specific ways in regards to the political theoretical points I am
making in this paper. Each therefore deserves some basic explanation.
Panoptic (lit. ‘all seeing’) is generally used in in Surveillance Studies based on the ‘Panopticon’ prison of
Jeremy Bentham, as interpreted by Michel Foucault (1975). Foucault used it in the context of specific
institutions, though he was also being clear that this was a dominant idea of power in relation to the modern
state. Here, I use it in that latter sense: of a comprehensive collection of information about people by the
state. Oligoptic (lit. ‘few seeing’) is a term introduced by Bruno Latour (2005) to describe the ‘real-world’
of sociotechnical relations, where some things, people and places are known intensely and others little
known or not known at all. I use it here to describe a situation of information flow / surveillance that is
limited in particular spatial, temporal or categorical ways. Synoptic (all ‘together seeing’) is usually used
outside of surveillance studies in the sense of ‘having a general view,’ but Thomas Mathiesen (1997)
originally coined the term in the specific sense of ‘the many watching the few’ with reference to people’s
relationships to celebrities. However, here I used it to describe the comprehensive monitoring / flow of
information of the state by the mass of people. Perioptic (lit. ‘all-around seeing’) was introduced by Michalis
Lianos (2010) to describe the post-Foucauldian, Deleuzian form of contemporary surveillance, in which
‘flow’ is prioritised. I use it very simply to describe a situation in which all information about anything
flows or can flow to people, state or any other entity. Finally, adiloptic (lit. ‘hidden [or blind] seeing’) is a
neologism of my own to describe a situation in which little or no information flows anywhere or is generally
obscured.
State
Form
Level of
Surveillance
Anarchy
(No state)
Isonomy
(Egalitarian
State)
Democracy
(Accountable
State)
Polyarchy
(Managed
State)
Autocracy
(Authoritarian
State)
High
Perioptic
Anarchy
Perioptic
Isonomy
Perioptic
Democracy
Panoptic
Polyarchy
Panoptic
Autocracy
Moderate
Synoptic
Anarchy
Synoptic
Isonomy
Synoptic
Democracy
Oligoptic
Polyarchy
Oligoptic
Autrocracy
Low
Adiloptic
Anarchy
Adiloptic
Isonomy
Adiloptic
Democracy
Adiloptic
Polyarchy
Adiloptic
Autocracy
Table 2: A Surveillance Model of State Forms
Each resulting ideal-typical form has different characteristics, which I will sketch out here.
The Panoptic Autocracy represents the dystopic scenario most familiar to Surveillance Studies scholars:
totalitarianism. In this state, there are no limits on what the state can know about the citizen, indeed, to be a
citizen of totalitarian society is by definition to be known entirely. There is no accountability or openness
from the state. Further, what constitutes “knowledge” in the totalitarian state is determined by the state itself.
Historically, it has actually been quite rare for such states to exist in the most extreme form – even the
former East German Stasi, for all its intensive surveillance effort, only had files of any level of detail on one
relationships in Foucault’s analysis of the military camp and the prison do not consist primarily of information, but
of a relationship of power wherein one party (the state), instils its objectives into another (the subject). Information
flow is contingent, even within the archetypical Panopticon: only the appearance of conformity is necessary for the
system to “work.” Thus there are two ideal-typical forms of surveillance: intimidatory surveillance and informational
surveillance.
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 362
third of the population. One of the major concerns about the contemporary turn to authoritarianism is that
readily available technologies allow far easier surveillance of greater numbers across space and time.
The Oligoptic Autocracy represents a mid-point between the informational extremes of authoritarian states,
the totalitarian and the arbitrary. Such an unregulated state may do what it wishes, but only needs to know
what is necessary or potentially useful to ensure the persistence of the state and its control. There may be a
formal constitutional-legal framework and even token elections that, amongst other things, underpin the
regular collection of information. It may even have some tolerance for resistance insofar as it does not
threaten this continuity. However it also has no interest in providing information, being open or accountable,
nor are such things provided for within the constitutional-legal framework. Traditional monarchies can often
be found in this area and in practice most regimes that aim at totalitarianism end up here because of financial,
technological and organisational limitations on information gathering and sorting.
Whereas knowledge is at the core of the rationale of the Totalitarian State, in the Adiloptic Autocracy,
government is largely arbitrary and capricious: information is irrelevant except in the most contingent way.
Rule is by terror and violence. Guilt or innocence are determined randomly or by pre-decision, not by
evidence, and will generally serve pour encourager les autres and to induce individual and collective
submission. Resistance may actually be encouraged insofar as it gives a rationale for widespread terror by
the state, and if it does not exist, it may be fabricated. States after military coups often tend in this direction.
A Panoptic Polyarchy has some democratic features, but these are controlled forms of representation. The
state is dependent on information for governing, yet at the same time makes only limited information
available and mostly in a propagandist form. Such states tend to be based in formal and often constitutional
law, but the law is skewed strongly in favour of the state’s priorities (which may come from beyond any
individual nation-state, as is the case in neoliberal capitalism). Norris and Armstrong’s The Maximum
Surveillance Society (1999) argued that the UK was moving in such a direction.
Oligoptic Polyarchy has similar features but does not rely so much on information. In this “regulated
surveillance society,” the state collects, processes, uses and disseminates information about its citizens in
ways that are determined by constitutional-legal frameworks, but has flexibility and room for manoeuver.
Whether surveillance can be considered ethically good or bad in this kind of state depends on the regulations,
the competence of any particular government, and the ability of citizens to organise and direct, moderate,
challenge or resist it. Many supposedly “democratic” nation-states will tend to be found in this category or
in that of Synoptic Democracy. Their position in the centre of the matrix means they are always subject to
multiple pressures to move one way or another.
The Adiloptic Polyarchy is a limited democratic state that is not primarily dependent on information. As
with the Oligoptic Polyarchy, this may be because of limited adoption of technologies of control or because
of legal or constitutional restraints. Such states will be prone to arbitrary actions and corruption.
A Perioptic Democracy is a state that has a strong commitment to popular control and functions through
reciprocal surveillance and information flow. The state maximises the information it can obtain, yet citizens
are equally able to have access to this information, to inspect it and hold the state to account. Like the
Panoptic Democracy, such states tend to be based in constitutional law, but it is more balanced in favour of
the citizen. They tend to be more socialist, with a strong sense of the ‘common interest’ or the ‘common
good’ and therefore coercion is less often necessary, although all of such states have police and most have
armies. Contemporary nation-states which tend in this direction include the Scandinavian countries.
The Synoptic Democracy also has a commitment to popular control but an even stronger tendency towards
citizens being able to access to information and accountability. In such states, surveillance by the state is
strongly limited by constitutional / legal frameworks which are taken seriously. There tend also to be
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 363
monitors or watchdogs specifically devoted to questions of information and privacy across government and
the private sector. Contemporary examples in this direction include Germany.
In the Adiloptic Democracy, the state is limited almost entirely or absolutely in its ability to surveil citizens,
but citizens have absolute rights to know what information the government does collect and how it is used.
This is a strongly individualistic and private society, in which systems of redress and accountability for the
state are otherwise not really necessary as the state collects so little information in the first place.
The Perioptic Isonomy is one where information is assumed to be “free” and its flow is essential to both
state and citizen. The default position is that citizens are known to the government and government is open
to the citizen. Thus it is “perioptic” rather than “panoptic” as there is no real central control from which
surveillance takes place, however the surveillance is still comprehensive and thus it is neither oligoptic nor
purely synoptic. David Brin’s Transparent Society (1999) is most like this, although it also has elements of
the contractualist version of the Synoptic Isonomy.
In the Synoptic Isonomy, more reciprocal relationships define the relationship between state, information
and citizen. In the more economistic, “contractual society” models, what information is collected by the
government is given in return for some equivalent information. As both what is public and what is private
are almost entirely contractual rather than democratic, systems of accountability and redress work on the
same basis. In this system, one gets the privacy one can negotiate. However, in more socially-oriented
egalitarian versions, like Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” (above), the minimal state collects only
what information is considered necessary to ensure equitable social outcomes by the general population.
The Adiloptic Isonomy or “Private Society” is one where the default assumption is of minimal government,
in what some on the American libertarian right, after Robert Nozick (1974) call a “minarchy” (see e.g., Long
and Machan 2012). This minimal state has no right to personal information and the citizen is almost invisible
to the state, such that the state is essentially a residual or irrelevant entity whose only function is really to
guarantee the privacy and other highly individualised rights of the citizen. In more capitalist versions of this
form, a vicious free market in personal information results, and one gets the privacy one can afford. In
others, we might see isolated solipsistic dreamworlds.
In the final column, there are few states that would be recognised today. In the Perioptic Anarchy, everything
is assumed to be known by everyone else and there is no reason to withhold information, keep secrets or
maintain privacy. This could be described as an edenic state of innocence.
A Synoptic Anarchy or Mutual Society again has no state, but information, privacy and so on are negotiated
mutually to the satisfaction of all parties. However, there are no imposed safeguards or formal ways of
checking for deception or cheating. This comes closest to the Prudhon-Kropotkin traditions of anarchism.
In an Adiloptic Anarchy or Chaos, there is no state, no information, and a general preference for extreme
privacy / secrecy, which will be defended. Deception, arbitrary violence and personal insecurity are the
norms. This is the materialisation of Hobbes’s ‘warre of all against all,’ described in Leviathan as the basic
rationale for the existence of the state, and entirely failed states would fit into this category.
Why is this preliminary move towards a more systematic description of the relationship of surveillance to
political forms useful? For one thing, it may provide a more accurate account of what is or what is not a
‘surveillance society,’ and to tease out varieties of surveillance society. It also embeds within political
analysis of surveillance the idea that ‘surveillance’ is not in itself necessarily malign in intent or bad in
outcome. It also allows us to see that the ‘-veillance’ in ‘surveillance’ is not something that is unrelated to
the ability of the citizen to see the state (what might be called ‘sousveillance’ if that term had not already
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 364
been coined for a more specific form of activity): in other words surveillance, freedom of information, and
data protection are all connected.
Finally, it can help us see that there are several kinds of political paths out of the contemporary problematics
of both increasing surveillance and rising authoritarianism. For example, an increase in surveillance does
not necessarily mean a drift or deliberate shift to totalitarianism. “Totalitarianism” is not a direct synonym
for “authoritarianism,” indeed the difference might be clearer if we think of totalitarianism as
authoritarianism plus surveillance. One can have surveillance without authoritarianism and one can have
authoritarianism without surveillance. This does not make any claim about the desirability or legitimacy of
either. An increase in surveillance could produce a more democratic or consensual society, were it
accompanied by measures that restricted the storage and use of information and/or opened up data or its
analytical products.
Likewise, as Felix Stalder argued back in 2002, privacy may not be the antidote to surveillance. Privacy is
generally incompatible with state-person relations that are tilted towards the state, but as David Brin showed
in The Transparent Society, more privacy or more private societies are not the only way of shifting the
balance. It is perfectly possible to have a highly informed state that is also entirely open to the view of
citizens, where a citizenry with little or no privacy is balanced by a state with few or no secrets, or at least
one which is entirely accountable for all the information that it collects and what is done with it. In addition,
an extremely private society could also be an extremely anti-social and individualistic one.
The model of course represents particular relatively easy-to-define points in a matrix; it comes with all the
problems of any ideal-typical categorisation. The reality is messier and states in practice may well have
features that would appear to be contradictory, but I would argue that it nevertheless provides a useful model,
which can be used to help define and categorise contemporary states in relation to surveillance and authority.
However, it has two main inadequacies, both of which are significant for the subject of this issue. The first
is the distance from economic conceptions of state forms, hence it is not designed to replace standard models
but to supplement them. Secondly, it shares with most models of the nation-state, a foundation in the relative
immutability of the nation-state and a world of nation-states, and the very categories of western liberal
democratic politics that it simultaneously seeks to criticise. However, how one understands these concepts
must also be the unequal power relations between and across different states and peoples, in other words:
the historical and contemporary constructions of race, class and gender in particular.
Who Are You Calling Authoritarian? Surveillance, Authoritarianism and the Post-Colonial
Some papers in this issue will be particularly controversial and for different reasons. Venezuela is one such
example, considered here by José Ragas, not least because there was widespread hope from the political left
around the world for the country’s progress under charismatic former President Chavez. It us undeniable
that Chavez’s style borrowed much from the old caudillo model of South American leaders, but it would be
hard to argue, except from the most hostile political stance, that the country under Chavez was particularly
authoritarian in comparison to many other similar countries. For all his contradictions, as Alma
Guillermoprieto (2013) argued, Chavez “cared about people.” And what was more, at some level, his brand
of paternal leadership was felt by many to be necessary in the face of that hostile external pressure against
this Bolivarian socialist government. The political allegiance of his regime meant it was characterised as an
enemy by the dominant regional power, the USA, still cleaving to the Monroe Doctrine of hemispheric
hegemony. However, under Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s defiant populist style and
relatively successful range of genuinely popular social and economic programs appears to have been
replaced by a combination of economic decline, popular protest and increasingly authoritarian and violent
practice. Even loyal chavistas have been removed from prominent offices. And while it is undoubtedly the
case that there is likely to be covert American interference in Venezuela in a manner that has many historical
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 365
precedents that Noam Chomsky and others have long documented, it seems very hard to attribute the current
situation in the country in Venezuela purely to the USA. The question is now whether Maduro’s government
is losing support because of what it is doing or because of what is being done to it, or some combination of
the two.
Where it gets difficult for those who continue to support the beleaguered Venezuelan premier is that the
arguments used by Maduro are very similar in content and circumstances to those deployed by the likes of
President Recep Erdoğan of Turkey, considered in this issue by three different sets of contributors, Özgün
Topak, Bilge Yesil and Efe Kerem Sozeri, and one scholar who wished to remain anonymous, their
anonymity itself a mark of how fraught an activity is criticism of paranoid and violent regimes like
Erdoğan’s. In justifying his constitutional reforms and crackdown on critics, Erdoğan claims that his is a
legitimate and popular regime, trying to reform Turkey in a more moral Islamic direction that better reflects
the feelings of Turkish people. However, this effort is supposedly being undermined by sinister external
forces linked to the USA, in his case the Gülenist movement, led by a Muslim cleric who lives openly in
America. In his political discourse, those he arrests are not legitimate protestors and dissidents but
externally-supported terrorists and infiltrators. The major difference between Maduro and Erdoğan is that
Erdoğan is a conservative Islamist and few in the West on any part of the political spectrum have any great
sympathy for his politics.
In both cases, Turkey and Venezuela, the perspectives of both governments and critics are based in claims
about what is allowed by constitutions – which are themselves the subject of revisions that enable reform of
the state to give more direct control to their rulers – what constitutes “democracy,” and challenges to
normative ideas about human rights and state-citizen relations. The latter have been promoted by hegemonic
powers led by the USA since the end of WW2 and the creation of the United Nations, and more importantly
in the longer term, the end of colonialism. Recently, I listened to a conversation between African
acquaintances on Paul Kagame of Rwanda. Most were highly critical of white and Global North-based
critics who characterised Kagame as an authoritarian or incipient dictator, or those who they claimed
prioritised hegemonic and universalist conceptions of human rights like freedom of speech over peace,
safety and economic security in a post-genocide environment. Ironically, unlike Maduro (and increasingly
Erdoğan), Kagame is far from an international outcaste, teaching courses at Harvard, and keynoting summits
on international development; he is perhaps the ‘golden boy’ of capitalist-friendly development in Africa
and little attention is spared by the governments of major aid donors to his alleged violations of human
rights.
There is no article on Rwanda in this issue, however the complexities of what Kalemba Kizito, writing about
Uganda’s crackdown on homosexuality, calls the “bequeathed legacies” of colonialism and relations
between African nation-states and dominant global powers, are considered in articles on Uganda, Angola
and Ethiopia. They are also explicitly considered by Karen Dean in an article on the continued
authoritarianism of a supposedly post-authoritarian Myanmar, Alfred McCoy on the rise of Duterte in the
Philippines, and also in a powerful piece by Mahvish Ahmad and Rabia Mehmood on Pakistan which argues
that Surveillance Studies still has a long way to go in dealing with what they call “imperial effects.” In that
they are entirely correct, but hopefully theirs and the other pieces mentioned so far in this issue go some
way towards developing that conversation.
Continuities and legacies of dominance are everywhere. With the end of the colonialism, there was a fear
in liberal democracies that the capitalist world could effectively shrink now that resources could not be
plundered, slavery and exploitation enforced and new export markets guaranteed. Post-colonial territorial
arrangements were rapidly put into place that tried to map as cleanly as possible to colonial-era boundaries
where a relatively pliant local managerial-bureaucratic class (who had also composed the consumer class in
new imperial markets) existed, and where one did not, new artificial borders and territories where created
which deliberately disrupted indigenous attempts at self-definition. Movements towards genuine collective
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 366
self-determination on larger scales that did not match political ideals of the nation-state were particularly
repressed, thus popular transnational movements like Pan-Arabism and Pan-Africanism were killed before
they could grow, and transnational movements that could not be splintered because their basis was not so
clearly territorial, like Communism, were contained.
That containment was the basis of what is still the most extensive global system of surveillance: that of the
United States’ military and intelligence agencies, which also figures strongly in articles by Robbins and
Henscke on US telecommunications interception, and Midori Ogasawara on Japan, still treated by the USA
as its beachhead into Asia. These surveillance systems, as Ahmad and Mehmood highlight, are the
foundation for the ongoing drone wars targeting alleged militants and terrorists from a network that spans
secret airfields in Africa and the Middle-east to air-conditioned control rooms in Florida and Nevada. Not
only have the “bequeathed legacies” of colonialism continued to hamper efforts to move to genuine
indigenous control over supposedly independent post-colonial nation-states, but ongoing “imperial effects”
also give the lie to claims that what is being promoted in these acts of hegemonic power-projection and
naked self-interest, is “democracy.” In the Global South then, it makes little sense to talk of a “turn” to
authoritarianism, rather the situation is one in which authoritarianism is both constantly likely and often
seems necessary or more attractive that the alternatives.
Globalisation, Neoliberalism and Authoritarianism
For all that Fukuyama’s liberal democratic “end of history” was just a recasting of British “Whig history”
for an era of American triumphalism, it can still be seen as a belated and misrecognised acknowledgement
of the ascendancy of two interrelated phenomena: globalisation and neoliberalism. Globalisation was
accurately characterised by David Harvey (2001) as a “spatial fix” for crisis of accumulation within
capitalism, one which also aligned with American political objectives, in that the US acted as the military
enforcer, making the world “safe for business,” in a scaled-up version of what the British navy had done for
“free trade” in earlier centuries. The kind of capitalism that we have seen over the last 50 years has been
clearly different from what has gone before. This fundamentalist emphasis on deregulation and markets over
social goals has become known as “neoliberalism.” Ironically in many ways, this movement began as an
intellectual economic response to the rise of authoritarianism in Europe in the 1920s and 30s (Foucault
2008). The resulting global war did not lead to neoliberal priorities being adopted in its birthplace, however,
rather to a more social democratic and welfarist turn. It was only when global economic crises hit in the
1970s that neoliberalism was able to reappear, translated through US political Cold War political agendas,
now not as a response to authoritarianism but to the supposed failure of both post-WW2 social democracy
in the “First World” and post-colonial independent governments in the “Third World” as unresponsive to
economic transformations and vulnerable to falling under the influence of the “Second World” of the Soviet
Union (Murakami Wood 2012).
The contrast between social democratic and neoliberal models is instructive in terms of surveillance.
Welfarist states relied heavily on the strongly panoptic institutions of government identified by Foucault as
exemplary of the modern state. Neoliberalism rolled back the supportive and caring functions of these
institutions as it moved the economic management of the economy to a global level, but instead intensified
the security-oriented functions of the nation-state: borders, police (or increasingly private security), prisons
and so on. In other words, where surveillance in the social democratic model was designed in part to shield
citizens from the negative effects of capitalism, in neoliberalism, it was intended to protect capitalism itself
from the negative reactions of citizens. These are both strategies for management of citizens by states in a
capitalist world but their differences are material and significant.
The Cold War period also ushered in a growing concern with human rights from the “First World.” Some
of this came from genuine if paternalistic concern for the future of post-colonial peoples, perhaps best
characterised by Amnesty International. However, some had more dubious American political-economic
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 367
priorities, like Human Rights Watch. The longer-term impact of these has been to establish a language for
categorising “authoritarian” regimes and the relationship to supposedly free global trade. This is brought
out in the final piece that we’ve listed as being about Turkey, by Claire Lauterbach of Privacy International.
This is in fact a very useful reflection on where is the line that separates “acceptable” from “unacceptable”
regimes when it comes to international trade in surveillance and espionage technologies, based on a case
which turns on trade with Turkey.
The Authoritarian Turn as Reaction to Neoliberal Globalisation
Industrial activity, driven by state and capital, has accelerated to the point of significantly transforming the
earth’s climate systems, which in turn is creating feedback loops that are damaging human and non-human,
impoverishing ecosystems and already marginalised communities, generating conflict and insecurity. It is
undoubtedly the case that everyday life for many (although certainly not all) people is better that it has ever
been, however inequality has never been so extreme along with generalised economic insecurity and the
end of certainties in jobs and economic futures and the transformation towards permanent precarity.
The “authoritarian turn” has taken place within and as a result of this transformation to the rescaling of the
economy towards a “global” remote from popular and even nation-state control, and a “neoliberal”
governmentality that mystifies this global capitalism as necessary and inevitable. This has resulted in huge
material and psychic insecurity. This insecurity has taken many forms. These have included the rise of
political Islam and its extreme manifestation in terrorist movements like Al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Another
is the “neurotic citizenship” (Isin 2004) of the Global North, that imagines an existential threat from
outsiders, immigrants and refugees, many of whom, ironically, are fleeing from the successive effects of
colonialism, globalisation, war and terrorism, and who are seeking security in the nation-states that have
most benefitted from these processes. Many citizens of wealthier nation-states have welcomed these
migrants, but an increasing number seek to keep them out. Border control is one of the few areas over which
nation-states still have significant control (Brown 2010), so nationalist politicians are all too pleased to
respond to such demands. In this issue, we have examples from Poland (Klaus), Greece (Loukinas) and
Hungary (Nagy).
This neurosis is very strongly connected to the end of global white supremacy. This can also be seen in the
panic over the rise of China (emerging as the leader of the so-called BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, China) as
the most likely successor to the USA as global hegemon. In this context, it is particularly worth considering
how China’s surveillance state operates, and this is considered in this issue by Cassiano on ID systems, Hou
on political opinion surveillance, and Hargreaves on the China’s recovered territory of Hong Kong.
After Authoritarianism
The most recent turn to authoritarianism is a retreat. Instead of confronting new realities with new
categories, many people are seeking the certainty of the familiar and the familial. They seek patriarchs and
father-figures, leaders who will promise them greatness in language they understand. They seek scapegoats;
conspirators, terrorists and enemies within and without from whom these populist leaders will protect them.
They seek the glowing half-remembered past; the authoritarian turn is profoundly nostalgic. The nostalgia
is not even necessarily for anything that was once real. Authoritarian nostalgias are constructed and
mediated.
The key question is what comes next. Having argued that the contemporary ‘turn’ to authoritarianism is not
a singular thing, but a convergence of several different historical trajectories, one can also see there is
unlikely to be a singular immediate answer or likely outcome. Here I identify four broad emerging
trajectories forward for consideration: the continuation of this messy, particularist world of divergent
authoritarianisms; a reassertion of neoliberalism at a more genuinely global (or planetary scale); various
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 368
kinds of technological ‘solutions’; and finally, the emergence of a more obvious horizon of possibility in
opposition to authoritarianism, surveillance and capitalism.
Multiplying Authoritarianisms
There are several ways in which we are now ‘after globalisation.’ If the authoritarian turn is a nostalgic and
populist reaction to globalisation then there is every reason to suppose that it could continue even, or
especially, as the planetary scale of contemporary problems, particularly climate change and mass
migration, becomes clearer. Neither is going to end soon, and we have every reason to believe that we have
not even begun to experience more than the beginning. Pessimist versions of environmental thinking could
even combine with these authoritarianisms to produce deadening but environmentally sustainable
movements, although it seems more likely at the moment that denial of environmental realities is
characteristic of most contemporary authoritarianisms.
Global Authoritarianism: Neoliberalism Strikes Back
On the other hand, it seems hard to imagine that capital will tolerate more than a period of ‘resetting’ of a
global economy that has generated unparalleled profits. If, as I have argued previously (Murakami Wood
2013), neoliberalism has successfully recast the global scale as its ‘natural’ scale of operations, partly
through global surveillance, then it would be a significant and costly step backwards to abandon this already
mostly completed project of globalisation. It may well be that those planetary concerns, climate change,
migration and security, are further co-opted to serve a new set of justification for revitalisation of projects
for global government, whereby neoliberalism reappears institutionally at a planetary level. If the USA has
failed in achieving this itself, it is more likely that a “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” will take
its place, based not on the combination of “free trade” and military power projection and surveillance in a
world of nation-states, but on free trade within a more effectively authoritarian global state.4 Many less
powerful nation-states, particularly in Africa, and large transnational corporations are already betting on this
option.
Deus ex Machina: Will Technology Save Us?
McKenzie Wark (2016) has been arguing for some time that the era we are entering may not actually be a
capitalist one at all, and he does not mean that the revolution is finally upon us, rather he means that
information has already changed the rules, creating new emerging classes. “Something else” is definitely
happening. From out of neoliberal capitalism has emerged a technologically-enabled, Big Data-driven
“surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2015) of corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook and Tesla, which is
now also in the process of transforming the practices of corporations from older economic sectors. If
surveillance is now the basis of both government and economy, how are we to think about the now globally
foundational markets in surveillance technologies and services? Perhaps the most insightful articulation of
this transformation has been produced by Benjamin Bratton (2014, 2016), who argues that we are seeing
not simply a new economic system but a combination of factors that signal the emergence of a new form of
social, economic, political and ecological life based on planetary computing. Corporations in this
revisioning are neither the joint-stock companies that capitalism at the dawn of the 20th century, nor the
fluid, financialised transnational entities of the dawn of the 21’s neoliberal capitalism. Instead they are
primarily vehicles for the emergence of platforms, that are “[n]ext to states and markets […] a third form,
coordinating through fixed protocols while scattering free-range Users watched over in loving, if also
disconcertingly omniscient, grace” (Bratton 2014).
We can already see how these corporations have begun to take the place of centrist liberal party political
formations. One example is the emergence of Apple as the darling of pro-net neutrality, pro-privacy, pro-
4 David Harvey (2005) identifies several forms of neoliberalism and argues that China was characteristic of an overtly
authoritarian form that was first publicly articulated in 1980 when Deng Xiaoping stated that “to be rich is glorious”
and which has since then successfully combined economic liberalisation with political repression.
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 369
encryption online libertarian progressives. Another is Facebook. In early 2017, founder, Mark Zuckerberg,
released an open letter to the 2 billion Facebook users worldwide, laying out a vision of Facebook replacing
both states and societies with a networked communitarianism that seemed to be placed in overt opposition
to Trump’s populist authoritarianism. At the same time he began touring the USA almost continuously to
establish his populist credentials. Whether those credentials are tested first in conventional electoral politics
or in driving forward his version of Azuma’s “General Will 2.0” remains to be seen.
Another emerging possibility is the spectre of a machine take-over, the almost literal deus ex machina, of
Artificial Intelligence becoming a reality and instituting some kind of rule on human beings. It’s notable
that most of those warning of such things, most notably recently Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, seem to
understand the ‘motivations’ of AI as remarkably human and Machiavellian, in other words their vision of
AI seems to emerge from a fear of the dominant personality type in Silicon Valley, perhaps even his own
personality, without limits. It’s notable that the newly “woke” tech bro, Mark Zuckerberg, has dismissed
Musk’s fears, clearly also seeing in AI, himself and his brand (Bogost 2017).
Neither possibility provokes great joy, and both, of course are fundamentally based on massively intensified
surveillance, “for our own good.” It may be that Zuckerberg’s world is one that is less nominally
authoritarian than current trends, but it will not be less surveillant, but as Bratton identifies, quite the
contrary. The particular danger is that this vision starts to seem comparatively attractive when posited as the
only viable alternative to either violent authoritarian nationalism or resurgent global neoliberalism.5
Against Authority, Against Surveillance: The Horizon of Possibility
We need not be taken in by any of these visions. Whether one’s horizon is communist (cf. Dean 2012),
anarchist, socialist, social democratic or some combination or novel variation, ultimately the only way to
avoid falling into traps of either nostalgic nationalism, global authoritarianism, or technocommunitarianism,
is to raise our eyes and realise that there is such a horizon and that our politics must be
defined by a rediscovery of collective desires, the bringing together of multiple fractured movements to
recast a planetary future for humanity based on equality and ecology. But this rediscovery first of all needs
to be based in the recognition of both shared and differing contemporary material conditions. This, then, is
the ultimate purpose of this issue.
References
Adorno, Theodore W., Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and Nevitt Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New
York: Harper.
Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Azuma, Hiroki. 2014. General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google. New York: Vertical.
Bogost, Ian. 2017. “Why Zuckerberg and Musk Are Fighting About the Robot Future.” 27 July. The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/musk-vs-zuck/535077/.
Bookchin, Murray. 1991. “Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview.” Green Perspectives. October 1991. Reprinted at:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview.
Bratton, Benjamin. 2016. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bratton, Benjamin. 2014. “The Black Stack.” e-flux 53. March 2014. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/53/59883/the-black-stack/.
Brin, David. 1999. The Transparent Society. New York: Perseus.
Brown, Wendy. 2015 Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books.
Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books.
Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press
Dean, Jodi. 2012. The Communist Horizon. New York: Verso.
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
5 Karina Rider and I explore Zuckerberg’s vision more fully elsewhere (Rider and Murakami Wood, forthcoming).
Murakami Wood: The Global Turn to Authoritarianism and After
Surveillance & Society 15(3/4) 370
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Fromm, Erich. 1957. “The Authoritarian Personality.” Deutsche Universitätszeitung 12 (9): 3-4. Translated by Florian Nadge
(2011) and reprinted at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1957/authoritarian.htm.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Guillermoprieto, Alma. 2013. “The Last Caudillo.” New York Review of Books. March 6.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/03/06/hugo-chavez-last-caudillo/.
Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haggerty, Kevin and Minas Samatas. eds. 2010. Surveillance and Democracy. London / New York: RoutledgeCavendish.
Harvey, David. 2005. Neoliberalism: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David. 2001. “Globalization and the spatial fix.” Geographische Revue 2(3): 23-31.
Karatani, Kojin. 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Chapel Hill: Duke
University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lianos, Michalis. 2010. Lianos, Michalis. 2010. Periopticon: Control Beyond Freedom and Coercion - and Two Possible
Advancements in the Social Sciences. In Kevin D. Haggerty, and Minas Samatas. eds.
Leverink, Josh. 2015. “Murray Bookchin and the Kurdish resistance.” Roar Magazine. 9 August.
https://roarmag.org/essays/bookchin-kurdish-struggle-ocalan-rojava/.
Long, Roderick T. and Tibor R. Machan. eds. 2012. Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate.
Haggerty, Kevin D. and Minas Samatas. eds. 2010. Surveillance and Democracy. London: Routledge.
Isin, Engin F. 2004. “The neurotic citizen.” Citizenship Studies 8(3): 217-235.
Mason, Paul. 2017. Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried. The Guardian. 31 July.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/31/democracy-dying-people-worried-putin-erdogan-trump-world.
Mathiesen, Thomas. 1997. “The viewer society: Michel Foucault's Panopticon revisited.” Theoretical Criminology 1(2): 215-234.
Murakami Wood, David. 2013. “What is Global Surveillance? Towards a Relational Political Economy of the Global Surveillant
Assemblage.” Geoforum 49: 317–326.
Murakami Wood, David. 2012 “Surveillance and Globalization.” In Kirstie S. Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon. eds.
International Handbook of Surveillance Studies. London / New York: Routledge.
Norris, Clive, and Gary Armstrong. 1999 The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. London: Berg.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Rider, Karina and David Murakami Wood. Forthcoming. “Mark Zuckerberg’s techno-communitarianism.”
Robinson, William I. 1996. Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stalder, Felix. 2002. “Privacy is not the answer to surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 1(1): 120-124.
Wark, McKenzie. 2016. “The Sublime Language of My Century.” Public Seminar. 14 May.
http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/05/the-sublime-language-of-my-century/.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of
Information Technology 30(1): 75-89.
Zuckerberg, Mark. 2017. “Building Global Community.” Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-
global-community/10154544292806634/.
Copyright of Surveillance & Society is the property of Surveillance Studies Network (SSN)
and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without
the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or
email articles for individual use.