The University has always been a site of protest, civil disobedience, contestation, and fight against the institutions and systems of injustice in this country and abroad. From the Vietnam War to South African Apartheid to the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Pro-Palestinian movements, college campuses are central spaces for leftist organizing. As the fight against these systems becomes increasingly noticeable to the general public, the powers that work to maintain structures of inequality work meticulously to keep the status quo.
The use of police power has often manifested this phenomenon: Police dressed in riot gear, holding batons, wielding guns, and stationed near protests, ready to inflict violence on peaceful protesters practicing their rights that this country idolizes.
In the post-2020 political landscape, however, university repression of campus dissent—especially of those actions in support of Palestinian liberation—has evolved.
Policing and Surveillance Post-2020
The 21st century has been defined by global anti-capitalist and anti-state mass protest and solidarity movements on the one hand, and the expansion of the policing and military apparatus in response to this unrest on the other. In this epoch, the increased use of artificial intelligence surveillance technology as a tool of repression is one of the most profound developments in American policing technologies. These technologies are used for facial recognition, cameras, drones, and other biometric and social media surveillance.
This expansion of surveillance is known as "e-incarceration," a play on words that refer to the expansion of "mass incarceration," which includes the carceral apparatus's use of a plethora of punitive surveillance technologies that extend the terrain of captivity beyond the typical brick-and-mortar prisons into the home and communal spaces. E-incarceration typically refers to ankle monitors, cellular tracking apps, and other house arrest technologies, but abolitionist movements have expanded it to include mass surveillance of all people, especially protestors and marginalized groups.
These strategies are believed to be quick, efficient, and more humane alternatives to traditional imprisonment, as they are sold as better methods for the maintenance and protection of society itself. However, abolitionist discourse on the matter reveals the opposite to be true. James Kilgore, author of Understanding E-Carceration, understands this phenomenon as an expansion of the surveillance state and a means to target and punish criminalized people; it is not an alternative nor does it offer any sense of freedom—rather, e-incarceration reshapes society's understanding of prison and incarceration. These technologies enhance not only the mobility and pervasiveness of surveillance but also the mobility and pervasiveness of the police.
The increased use of e-incarceration "alternatives" has major implications for both policing and the state's broader surveilling of dissent. Now, it is not solely the droves of police that suppress movements in this country. With these new, enhanced forms of surveillance in the toolbelt of the police, the carceral state wields new means to not only further incarcerate individuals who dissent, but to repress whole political and social movements. This marriage between technological innovation and policing strategies reflects the changing state of carcerality in the United States, as it demonstrates the way the condition of imprisonment—state monitoring and control over movement as a means of containment—is expanding beyond the previous limits of what is considered to be "the carceral." No longer are the "practices of incarceration" reserved for use solely within the confines of prisons or correctional facilities. And as investment is directed to the technologies of e-incarceration, their use in spaces previously deemed "non-carceral" territory will continue. In the wake of the pro-Palestinian protests across the country, one of these terrains is college campuses. Under the increasingly expanding surveillance state, we are witnessing a change in the carceral nature of the university itself.
As a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), I have seen this change myself. In late April of this year, UNC Students for Justice for Palestine (UNC SJP) created an encampment, the Triangle Gaza Solidarity Encampment, to protest the university in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and to demand it divest its endowment fund from industries that support the genocidal state. Like other universities around the country, UNC is funded by an endowment that boasts a growing pool of investments that the university manages to maintain the school's operating functions, and ensures institutional stability, among other questionable justifications for capital accumulation that universities claim. These investments from university endowment funds have been central to the divestment demands issued by the Gaza solidarity encampments nationwide —a tactic taken from a longer history of anti-apartheid, climate justice, and abolitionist movements—and other actions against genocide-complicit institutions, as they are used to funnel millions of dollars into private equity, hedge funds, corporations, development regimes and other avenues that support and profit from the genocide in Gaza.
AI Surveillance as a tool of state repression
Just as the weapons technology developed by EOTECH is used to do imperialist violence across the globe, surveillance technologies are used to suppress protest here in the so-called United States.
UNC claimed the encampment disrupted campus operations, but the interim chancellor and the administration could not have been further from the truth. The peaceful encampment was erected on the grassy lawn of the upper quad, in Polk Place, where students sat in tents, or on blankets, talking, playing music, and doing homework. Food and water, which were donated from the community, were passed out. The encampment, like the university, was a place of learning, as there were teach-ins on the injustices occurring in Gaza and on campus. It was also a place of inter-faith prayer and congregation, as Jews, Muslims, and Christians worshiped together in the space. It was a space of community, support, empathy, and care, the opposite of what UNC claimed it to be.
The otherwise peaceful encampment commune was disrupted by the constant presence of police officers and surveillance technologies, which escalated and resulted in the brutalization of students on campus grounds. During the encampment, surveillance was nonstop, as cops patrolled the encampment on foot, in nearby parked cars, and on bikes, encircling the space. The peaceful students were met with aggressive, belligerent cops, some of whom harassed students—one cop kept badgering a student by name—a show of how intimately committed police are at making students feel unsafe. UNC is a testament to how the introduction of cops in any space makes no one safe.
Before police raided the encampment, the use of surveillance tech on campus was not widely known. This obscurity permitted a previously unprecedented culture of surveilling students to proliferate on campus. AI surveillance technology was notably used against the Silent Sam action, a Confederate monument successfully toppled by student protesters in 2018. The tactic continued beyond the Silent Sam moment, as the university joined the state and its other institutions in increasing surveillance on protestors following the 2020 BLM uprisings. The use of technological surveillance on UNC's encampment is therefore consistent with a new paradigm of policing, and not an exception, given the heightened stakes of the anti-genocide movement.
UNC claimed in its response to destroying the encampment, that it must consider the physical safety of all students, as it chose to brutalize its dissenting students simultaneously. Cops came from all over the state, and included university police officers from Appalachian State and East Carolina University, dressed in militarized gear, guns strapped and ready to arrest students who were peacefully practicing their basic right to protest.
Increased surveillance following the encampments
After the destruction of the encampment, in further retaliation, UNC increased surveillance on campus. There are new cameras inside and outside buildings, with some placed and colored to camouflage into their surroundings. Cameras have been strategically placed to watch the quad, where the encampment was viscerally destroyed, and mobile surveillance cameras have replaced the tents once scattered across the lawn. While the full extent of these surveillance technologies upgrades remains unknown, a member of UNC SJP said, "There is so much we can't say for certain because the university is a black box—the tech and its software and storage are wholly unknown."
Alongside the surveillance cameras, what truly cemented the striking change in the Polk Place atmosphere was the installation of a tall metal fence around the quad, preventing students from being on the grass. Before the spring encampment, Polk Place was a warm place that hummed with student life, as the quad was where student organizations table, sit on blankets, rest, talk, play games, and be a student. It is a critical and special part of UNC's university culture, yet the increased securitization held its magic under siege, transforming the place into a space as bleak as a prison yard. This transformation lasted for around a week, as the fences were taken down right before graduation.
What these cameras have captured may not have not been publicly released, the repressive policing landscape on campus favors a strong hypothesis that the footage captured from the encampment was put through facial recognition software to capture protesters. A quick search online about facial recognition technology will tell you —it is rapidly advancing. Leading surveillance tech companies such as LVT, iPRO, and Panopto—all of which are companies that provided UNC's newly installed cameras—construct state-of-the-art AI software engines, equipped to analyze footage in environments across numerous settings.
Research on these companies and the technologies they develop also reveals that its increased usage is directly connected to policing agencies across the country's increased reliance on artificial intelligence to do their work for them. As the police hand the reins of investigation and patrol over to surveillance technologies, AI is quickly becoming indispensable in their aim to capture those they deem as trouble. In the post-2020 period marked by unceasing anti-state resistance, protestors rank high on the list of troublesome populations engaged in activities that must be monitored. Considering AI's use to surveil Black Lives Matter protesters, the drones and cameras that now loom over pro-Palestinian protests across the country in 2024—and their facial recognition capabilities—should not be surprising.
UNC, like many universities across this country, is a testament to the ongoing expansion of the American police state and carceral apparatus. The socio-spatial nature of the university is changing. The university, whose inherent purpose is to be a place for learning, creation, and connection among peers and faculty, is a place further entrenched in heightened surveillance. The evidence is staring right at us, as Polk Place, once a bustling and vibrant space for students, quickly transformed into a pitiful shell of what it once was. It is here, that the boundaries between the carceral and what was "non-carceral" are blurred and no longer defined.
UNC carceral geographies and organized abandonment
Like all universities, UNC is supposed to be a safe space for students to learn, be in community, share, and practice their right to protest. Surveillance intentionally disrupts these practices. Despite the particularities of its repressive campaign against student dissent, UNC is only a fragment of the real issue—a growing crisis of state legitimacy that warrants former public havens be transformed into carceral terrains to contain those who resist.
UNC's intense and brutal response is indicative of how surveillance and policing have been deployed as a solution to this crisis of legitimacy that has conscripted all state institutions into the carceral apparatus to fortify American hegemony against its perceived loss of order and prestige. This crisis is so formidable and influential that it has great potential to destabilize the foundational pillars the United States rests on.
I use the Gramscian term elaborated by Stuart Hall "crisis of legitimacy," taken from its extension by the abolitionist geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her seminal text Golden Gulag. In it, she describes this hegemonic legitimacy crisis through an analysis of the 1980s conservative response to the capital crises of the 1970s. This historic conjuncture was one that adequately demonstrates how increased state violence and the shrinking of state social provisions fed the expansion of the prison-industrial complex as the solution for surplus capital flows stalled by a crisis of capital, where in the ebb and flow contractions in the market cycles upon which capitalism relies to function reached a production point in which it lacked sufficient outlets for its surplus accumulation.
To remedy this crisis, she explains, states often deploy austerity tactics—a governance strategy of organized abandonment and organized state violence—as the balm to ease the pains of market transition. Throughout her extensive work on the abolition of the carceral apparatus and its ever-expanding geographies of containment, Gilmore identifies austerity-as-organized abandonment and state violence as a phenomenon that creates the conditions for unrest as it simultaneously invents more advanced repressive technologies to ensure any counter-movements waged by the masses who suffer under this restructuring program—against the "necessary" disinvestment in public infrastructure to redirect capital and restore the state's legitimacy do not proliferate nor flourish.
The 2020s, like the late 20th century conjuncture Gilmore centers in her study, is one in which events like the COVID-19 pandemic, making of new billionaires, waging of imperial proxy wars, and unceasing anti-state protest movements are evidence of the state's mass "abandonment of the weakest numbers of society." In lieu of care, we have witnessed this "anti-state state" intentionally divest its capital from the community, which has resulted in the loss of social safety nets, and limited access to housing, food, and other necessities, and invest in policing and other carceral endeavors, privatization, and profit-making opportunities for as a means to fix the issues caused by prior divestment.
Everyday organized abandonment in our current conjuncture includes an ongoing housing crisis and war on homelessness, increased capitalist accumulation at the detriment of marginalized groups, the rise of Cop Cities—in Atlanta and beyond—a deepening climate crisis, and xenophobia against migrant populations ignored and vilified by the state. The United States providing military and financial support to Israel, and its willful complicity in genocide is too a manifestation of state abandonment, as its actively choosing to fund policing and surveillance infrastructure domestically and abroad, contributes to the killing, terrorizing, and injuring of thousands of Palestinians, as it, at the same time, ignores the demands of millions of Americans who do not want their tax dollars to fund genocide. This deadly exchange arrangement between the US and Israel harms the most vulnerable here in the United States. And transnational partnerships between US police and Israeli defense and police forces allow the US to borrow surveillance and policing tactics from the apartheid settler state–tactics that are financially supported by the US to use against its own citizens, particularly Black and Brown Americans.
At the university campus scale, this intentional abandonment looks like using student tuition to fund a genocide and shortly thereafter, increasing surveillance on campus. After the encampment, the UNC Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees decided to get rid of DEI initiatives and funneled those funds into expanding the campus policing and security apparatus and ensuring compliance with new policies intended to protect the expression of "an equality of viewpoints," which is what the conservative state deems protects free speech on campus and ensures "public safety." Anyone with any sense knows that this will result in more policing and surveillance across North Carolina's universities. It is in this way that UNC actively abandons its students, the people it is supposed to listen to, provide for, and protect.
The UNC SJP member I spoke with said, "The University administration—Chancellor Roberts, Provost Clemens, and the Board of Trustees—would rather brutalize and surveil us, trampling upon our rights to speech, assembly, and protest, than disclose the university's investment and divest from mass slaughter, mass starvation, torture, the attempted obliteration of the Palestinian people genocide. It is as simple as that. The administration may try to obscure this fact and deflect by attacking our work and demands—but this is what they are fighting for: maintaining the genocidal status quo which serves to materially invest and benefit from mass slaughter abroad while spitting in the faces of Palestinian students, staff, and faculty here at the university."
Policing Student Protests and the Imperial Feedback Loop
Informed by colonialism, police repression as seen in the student protests, while seemingly unique, is part of a continuum of "management" tactics against threats to the state.
Legitimacy is the "ability to be defended with logic or justification." State abandonment is in a variety of ways the root cause of student protest, and other expressions of their discontent with the establishment. The contestation to these protests against the US and Israel—in the university and beyond—signals that the growing solidarity networks forming against the state creates a powerful force, one that debilitates the justification of the genocidal arrangement, its validity for which the existence of the United States stands. The people are realizing that the systems foundational to our everyday lives do not benefit us but oppress us. This mass awakening of consciousness, these "aha" moments call for a second look at the United States and require questioning the integrity of its actions, and by extension, its legitimacy. This crisis of the state and its power, threatens its standing, placing the empire itself at stake.
The crisis of legitimacy pushes the state to oftentimes take extreme measures to maintain its status quo—a white supremacist and capitalist system where the conditions of society are structured to prioritize the corporate and elites' interests. Therefore, the expanded use of surveillance technology and increased policing, by the federal government, and on UNC campuses should be understood as attempts to re-legitimize the state. In other words, increased surveillance across all spaces—especially protests—is the state getting its lick back for our unrest destabilizing it.
The growth of carcerality at UNC and on university campuses across the country following the spring solidarity encampments is only a piece of the puzzle at the beginning of a new surveillance policing paradigm to repress people and ideals that do not align with the United States.
Despite the malignant growth of this paradigm, however, the powerful force of opposition posed by UNC SJP and other organizations like it brings hope for transformational change in our future. It is up to the people, and the power we hold to, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore challenges us, to change everything about our fascist reality.