Negotiating Counterterrorism at NATO: Constructive Ambiguities, Surveillance and Collective Defence in the Mediterranean Sea

In 2001, in reaction to the 9/11 attacks, NATO activated the collective defence principle (article 5), and launched the Operation Active Endeavour (OAE) in the Mediterranean Sea. Its objective was to “prevent and disrupt terrorist activities” by tracking the trajectory of civil ships navigating in the area. In time, OAE evolved and turned into an extended aero-naval surveillance mission characterized by a military/police rationality. It became a massive intelligence gathering network aimed at detecting and controlling “suspect” maritime activities in the Mediterranean. For the 15 years of its existence, Active Endeavour was characterized by a paradox: while the surveillance was constantly extended both in the name of the fight against terrorism and of collective defense, evidences of “terrorist-related activities” in the framework of OAE were never found. The proposed paper questions this paradox and enquires the uses of counterterrorism in the transnational production of security knowledge. Building on a seven-months fieldwork at NATO HQ and over thirty interviews, it shows that counterterrorism is a “constructive ambiguity”, an evasive discursive category strategically mobilized by NATO actors (diplomats, military planners, operational navy personnel and private companies providing data to the mission). This discourse meant to produce vague and unstable, but sufficient compromises about the means and objectives of OAE, as well as about the multiple sorts of “terrorist” threats. By reconstituting the complex and plural contingency through which counterterrorism structures professional spaces, the paper goes beyond the two forms of polarized critical arguments that see counterterrorism as an integrated professional habitus or an instrumental narrative serving interests and carriers. The analysis shows that security-surveillance knowledge emanates from flexible collective (dis)agreements, on which security professionals rely to legitimize their savoir-faire and social status. Ultimately, this centripetal/centrifugal dynamic feeds a self-perpetrating transnational war-police apparatus by constantly entertaining a horizon of risks to prevent.