Description
Moves towards responsibilizing civil society for security have been well analysed in recent years, but the place of the public inquiry in generating bodily-and-spatial affects has been significantly unacknowledged. This article demonstrates how the Inquiry into the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing operates as a site of affective productivity, making recommendations to inform UK Government consultations about the forthcoming Protect Duty. Once formalized, this Duty will situate venue workers as protagonists within localized counter-terrorism battlespace. The article investigates how body-and-space are discursively reconstituted in the Inquiry’s report: staff are remade from ‘anxiously-watchful’ to ‘watchfully-anxious’ workers; their bodies moved around creating new conflict zones with their every step and perception; their confessions (scrutinized under oath) situating them within national priorities. Drawing from interviews with Inquiry stakeholders and emergency planning experts, as well as close analysis of the Inquiry’s reports, the discussion reveals how the Manchester Arena Inquiry remakes the bodies of venue security staff and local stakeholders (and the space through which their bodies traverse), into crucial sites of counter-terrorism. Through its forensic analysis of the local body-and-space, the public inquiry is revealed as an important technology in the production of localized forms of security knowledge, which in turn delegitimizes knowledge of disaster as structural or political.
