Destituent Power and the Security State

Introduction

Destituent power begins with a simple, destabilizing insight: the modern state no longer governs primarily through politics. It governs through security. Emergency becomes atmosphere. Surveillance becomes infrastructure. Democracy becomes theater performed under the unblinking eye of algorithms that decide who is risky, who is suspicious, who is disposable.

If you are organizing today, you are not confronting a parliament in the old sense. You are confronting a nervous system. Cameras bloom on street corners. Predictive software sorts populations into threat scores. Data flows to centers you will never see. The language of safety justifies everything.

The traditional revolutionary script feels inadequate here. Marches appeal to officials who claim their hands are tied by risk assessments. Petitions are filed into databases that map dissent. Even spectacular occupations are quickly reframed as security problems. The state has learned to metabolize protest by converting it into data.

So what does it mean to practice destituent power in this environment? Not to seize the state, not to reform its procedures, but to depose its logic. To expose the hidden anarchy inside security technologies. To withdraw the consent and participation that make the system function. And at the same time, to build forms of collective life that feel more alive than the regime of emergency.

The thesis is this: destituent power succeeds when movements combine visible exposure of security infrastructures with joyful collective rituals of withdrawal and self rule, carefully designed to avoid reinforcing the emergency logic they seek to dismantle.

The Security State as Permanent Emergency

The first step is clarity. You must understand the terrain.

In much of the world, governance has shifted from political deliberation to risk management. Laws are justified not by public will but by security necessity. Borders harden. Public space is saturated with sensors. Crises, whether terror, pandemic or climate, are framed as reasons to expand executive discretion. The state of exception becomes normal.

From Politics to Security

Politics, at its best, is agonistic. It is conflict staged in the open. Citizens argue, assemble, persuade. Decisions are made through visible procedures. There is a space between rulers and ruled where speech matters.

Security governance compresses that space. Decisions are made in the name of preventing hypothetical futures. The logic is preemptive. The citizen is treated as a potential risk vector. Under this paradigm, you are less a political subject than a data point in a predictive model.

This shift changes the rules of protest. When you gather in a square, the authorities do not primarily ask what you demand. They ask whether your gathering presents a risk. They analyze social media chatter. They deploy crowd control in advance. They justify repression as prevention.

Movements that fail to recognize this shift often repeat rituals that no longer disturb the system. The global anti Iraq War march in 2003 mobilized millions across hundreds of cities. It was a breathtaking display of world opinion. Yet it did not halt the invasion. The security rationale overrode the spectacle of dissent. Size alone was obsolete.

The Hidden Anarchy of Security

Security presents itself as rational and necessary. But inside its technologies lies an unstable mixture of human bias, algorithmic opacity and political interest. Facial recognition systems misidentify darker skinned faces at higher rates. Predictive policing reproduces past patterns of discrimination because it is trained on biased data. Counterterror laws are selectively enforced.

The anarchy is not absence of order. It is arbitrary power concealed behind technical language. When a movement exposes this arbitrariness, it cracks the aura of inevitability.

Destituent power begins by making visible what is designed to remain ambient. It highlights the contingency of what is presented as natural. It reveals that security is not a neutral shield but a political project with winners and losers.

To depose the security state’s logic, you must first demystify it. But exposure alone is not enough. The deeper challenge is to withdraw from its gravitational pull without triggering its reflex to escalate emergency.

Destituent Power as Exposure and Withdrawal

Revolutionary movements have traditionally aimed to seize power. Reformist movements aim to influence it. Destituent power aims to deactivate it.

This is a subtle but crucial distinction. To destitute is not to conquer. It is to render inoperative.

Visibility as Counter Spell

Security thrives on invisibility. Cameras are small. Data centers are remote. Algorithms are proprietary. The system’s power lies in its background status. It is there, but not seen.

Movements can puncture this invisibility through creative exposure. Imagine a neighborhood mapping every CCTV camera and projecting its location onto building walls at night. Imagine public readings of corporate surveillance patents in town squares. Imagine chalk outlines drawn around sensor poles with the simple question: who watches the watchers?

These gestures are not vandalism. They are pedagogy. They transform passive infrastructure into a subject of debate. They convert private technologies into public controversies.

Historical movements have understood the power of symbolic exposure. Rhodes Must Fall in 2015 targeted a statue. The bronze figure was not the entirety of colonial power. But by focusing on a visible artifact, the movement catalyzed a broader decolonial conversation across campuses. The statue became a portal.

In a similar way, security technologies can be made into portals. The point is not to smash every camera. The point is to reveal that cameras are political.

Withdrawal as Refusal

Exposure without withdrawal risks becoming mere critique. Destituent power adds a second gesture: refusal to participate.

Security systems depend on data flows. They require your location signals, your biometric scans, your social media posts. They feed on participation.

Collective withdrawal can take many forms. Data fasts where thousands disable location tracking for a set period. Community agreements to avoid certain apps that monetize surveillance. Public events where phones are sealed in simple signal blocking pouches, creating temporary zones of opacity.

The objective is not purity. Total withdrawal from digital infrastructure is unrealistic for most people. The objective is to demonstrate that consent is active, not automatic. To show that the data stream can slow.

There is precedent for such tactics. During the Québec student protests in 2012, nightly pot and pan marches turned private kitchens into public instruments. The tactic spread block by block. It was a refusal of silence. In the case of destituent power, the refusal is different. It is a refusal of transparency to the state. A reclaiming of opacity as a civic right.

Withdrawal must be designed carefully. If framed as a paranoid retreat, it reinforces fear. If framed as a joyful experiment in self rule, it can feel like liberation.

Avoiding the Emergency Trap

The security state is primed to interpret disruption as threat. If your actions are easily framed as dangerous, you risk validating the expansion of emergency powers.

Language matters. A day of rage invites preemptive policing. A day of rest for the city’s nervous system invites curiosity.

This is not a call for timidity. It is strategic framing. By emphasizing care, restoration and collective well being, you deny the state the narrative it needs to escalate.

Destituent power is strongest when it makes repression look absurd. When authorities crack down on a potluck with phones in pouches, they reveal the insecurity of the system. When they raid a mapping workshop about cameras, they confirm the political nature of what they claim is neutral.

The art is to design actions that expose overreaction. To create situations where the state’s reflex becomes self indicting.

Ritual as Micro Republic

Exposure and withdrawal can open cracks. But cracks close if not filled with new forms of life.

The security paradigm reduces you to a risk profile. To move beyond it, you must rehearse a different subjectivity. Not the surveilled individual, but the co creator of a shared world.

Ritual is the engine of this transformation.

Designing Temporary Sovereignty

Think of each gathering as a temporary micro republic. For a few hours, the algorithm’s authority is suspended. Decisions are made face to face. Attention is reclaimed from screens.

A weekly Data Sabbath can become more than a break from devices. It can be a laboratory for alternative governance. Neighbors bring food. Children decorate blank masks that symbolize the right to opacity. Elders tell stories about earlier struggles. Coders sketch open source tools on paper rather than laptops.

Phones rest in sealed boxes not as a symbol of fear, but as a collective choice. The absence of constant notification becomes palpable. People feel their own attention returning.

In these moments, you are not primarily resisting. You are constituting a different form of life.

Occupy Wall Street in 2011 demonstrated the power of such micro republics. The encampments were messy, imperfect and ultimately evicted. Yet for weeks, thousands experienced a form of assembly that felt outside conventional politics. The euphoria mattered. It proved that political life could be improvised.

Destituent rituals need not be permanent occupations. In fact, cycling in shorter bursts can exploit the speed gap between agile communities and slower institutions. Gather intensely. Disperse before repression hardens. Reappear elsewhere. Let the movement breathe.

Joy as Strategic Armor

Fear is the security state’s currency. It justifies surveillance. It isolates individuals. It convinces communities that safety requires obedience.

Joy is the counter currency.

When a collective act of withdrawal feels festive rather than grim, participation expands. Music, shared meals, art and humor disarm anxiety. They also attract bystanders who might otherwise avoid overtly political events.

Joy does not trivialize the stakes. It signals confidence. It suggests that another way of living is not only necessary but desirable.

Psychological safety is strategic. After intense actions, build in decompression rituals. Circles where participants reflect on what surprised them, what felt empowering, what should change next time. This prevents burnout and refines tactics.

Movements that ignore emotional metabolism often oscillate between euphoria and collapse. Destituent power requires stamina. Ritualized care extends the half life of engagement.

Critical Consciousness Through Embodiment

Lectures about surveillance can inform. Rituals can transform.

When participants physically experience an evening without devices, the critique of digital capture becomes embodied. When they collectively map cameras and then walk the route, they see their neighborhood differently. Abstraction turns into sensation.

Critical awareness deepens when linked to agency. If people leave an event feeling only exposed to danger, they retreat. If they leave feeling capable of shaping their environment, they return.

This is the alchemy of destituent practice. Exposure without despair. Withdrawal without isolation. Joy without naivety.

Beyond Resistance: Reimagining Political Life

Destituent power is not an endpoint. It is a clearing. Once the spell of security inevitability weakens, what emerges?

If movements stop at critique and symbolic withdrawal, the vacuum will be filled by the same logics under new names. The deeper ambition is to cultivate forms of sovereignty that do not depend on the state’s emergency apparatus.

From Petition to Parallel Authority

Traditional activism often petitions authority. It demands reforms. It asks the security apparatus to regulate itself.

Destituent strategy shifts the metric. Instead of counting signatures or followers, count degrees of self rule gained. Has the community established its own conflict mediation processes? Has it created local data commons governed by transparent rules? Has it developed mutual aid networks that reduce dependence on securitized welfare systems?

History offers glimpses of such parallel authority. The maroon communities of Palmares in Brazil built fugitive republics that resisted Portuguese control for decades. They did not simply protest slavery. They enacted an alternative sovereignty in the forest.

Contemporary movements can learn from this ethos without romanticizing its conditions. The goal is not secession but experimentation. Micro institutions that demonstrate different logics.

Fusing Lenses for Resilience

Most movements default to voluntarism. They believe that if enough people act together, change will follow. In a security paradigm, numbers alone rarely compel.

Structural awareness matters. Monitor when crises of legitimacy spike. Economic downturns, technological scandals or high profile data breaches can create openings where critique resonates more widely.

Subjective shifts matter too. Art, memes and shared narratives can alter how communities feel about surveillance. When opacity becomes cool rather than suspicious, the cultural terrain shifts.

Even ritual elements that border on the sacred can have strategic value. Ceremonies that honor privacy as a communal good elevate the struggle beyond technical policy debates. They invite deeper identification.

Lasting victories fuse these lenses. Action, timing, story and even the intangible force of collective belief combine into a chemistry experiment. Get the mixture wrong and the reaction fizzles. Get it right and power’s molecules begin to split.

Innovate or Evaporate

Security institutions learn quickly. Once they understand your tactic, they adapt. Movements have half lives. Repetition breeds predictability. Predictability invites suppression.

Destituent practice must therefore guard creativity. Change the ritual before it becomes stale. Rotate locations. Introduce new sensory elements. Retire tactics once they feel routine.

The aim is not constant novelty for its own sake. It is strategic unpredictability. Authority finds it harder to coordinate against actions that mutate.

At the same time, maintain a slow storyline that anchors these bursts. A clear articulation of why you withdraw, what you are building and how others can join. Fast protests need slow narratives.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To translate destituent power into sustained movement strategy, consider the following steps:

• Map and demystify local security infrastructure. Organize public workshops to identify cameras, data centers and surveillance contracts in your area. Present findings through art installations or projections that invite community dialogue rather than alarm.

• Design periodic collective withdrawals. Establish recurring Data Sabbaths or device free assemblies framed as celebrations of attention and community. Keep them time limited to exploit institutional lag and reduce repression risk.

• Embed mutual aid into every action. Provide legal education, emotional support spaces and practical care at gatherings. Ensure participants feel held, not exposed.

• Prototype parallel governance. Use micro republic gatherings to test neighborhood charters, conflict mediation circles or data commons agreements. Measure success by degrees of autonomy achieved.

• Iterate and evolve. After each cycle, hold brief debrief sessions. Ask what felt empowering, what attracted newcomers and what risks emerged. Retire tactics that have become predictable.

These steps are not a rigid formula. They are elements in a larger experiment. Your context will determine the precise mixture.

Conclusion

The security state thrives on permanence. Permanent emergency. Permanent surveillance. Permanent suspicion. Destituent power interrupts that permanence.

By exposing the hidden operations of security technologies, you crack their aura of inevitability. By withdrawing consent in joyful, collective ways, you demonstrate that participation is not compulsory. By building micro republics that rehearse political life beyond risk management, you seed the conditions for a different epoch.

This is not a call to retreat from struggle. It is a call to redefine it. To stop measuring success by crowd size alone and start counting sovereignty gained. To treat protest not as a plea but as applied chemistry, mixing action, timing and belief until a new compound forms.

The challenge is delicate. Push too aggressively and you feed the emergency narrative. Move too timidly and you fade into irrelevance. The path of destituent power requires imagination, discipline and joy.

So ask yourself: what small act of collective withdrawal could your community enact this month that would feel less like resistance and more like the first rehearsal of a freer political life?