Geopolitics ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fgeo20 Intimacy-Geopolitics, Remote Warfare and Domestic Violence: Disrupting Hierarchies of Violence Dana Cuomo & Natalie Dolci To cite this article: Dana Cuomo & Natalie Dolci (25 Jan 2024): Intimacy-Geopolitics, Remote Warfare and Domestic Violence: Disrupting Hierarchies of Violence, Geopolitics, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2024.2308115 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2308115 Published online: 25 Jan 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fgeo20 GEOPOLITICS https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2308115 Intimacy-Geopolitics, Remote Warfare and Domestic Violence: Disrupting Hierarchies of Violence Dana Cuomoa and Natalie Dolcib a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, USA; bSafe Campus, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA ABSTRACT Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper exam­ ines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons tech­ nologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales. Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multisited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. By remote warfare, we refer to Biegon and Watts (2020) who define the concept as ‘a strategy of security management that blends multiple “remote” modalities of military intervention to generate physical and political distance between an intervening agent and the site(s) of its use of force’ (2) The spatial dimensions of remote warfare are crucial, as its logic centres on distancing coercive violence from the actors respon­ sible for its execution, while also recognising that the socio-spatial rela­ tionship between virtual and ‘real’ space remain entwined. In other words, remote warfare does not only occur within virtual space, it may or may not incorporate conventional weaponry and the effects of its coercive violence are located ‘somewhere’ (ibid). CONTACT Dana Cuomo cuomod@lafayette.edu 119 Pardee Hall, Easton, PA 18042, USA © 2024 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Lafayette College, 2 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI In taking up the concept of remote warfare through the framework of intimacy-geopolitics, we not only situate multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven, but we also understand remote warfare at the geopolitical scale as already intimate (Pain and Staeheli 2014, 345). The latter is an important distinction of intimacy-geopolitics that understands intimacy as fundamentally ‘wrapped up in national, global and geopolitical processes’ (ibid). As intimacy-geopolitics relates specifically to violence, we build on the work of Pain (2015) who contends that ‘all forms of violent oppression work through intimate emotional and psychological registers as a means of exerting control’ (64). To establish this argument, Pain situates domestic violence and international warfare as a single complex that rejects scalar and spatial hierarchies in order to expose the shared emotional and psychological dynamics of violence (ibid). While not the only marker of intimacy, the role of emotions as inseparable from political violence is a central starting point for how the framework of intimacy-geopolitics is used to analyse violence (Barabantseva, Mhurchú, and Peterson 2021; Dowler, Christian, and Ranjbar 2014; Pain and Staeheli 2014; Smith 2012). In this paper, we extend intimacy-geopolitics to examine technologyenabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way domestic violence abusers use digital technologies – such as GPS tracking, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, spyware, artificial intelligence and drones – to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners across time and space (Cuomo and Dolci 2021; Harris 2018; Woodlock 2017). TECC builds on the work of domestic violence scholar Evan Stark (2007) who developed the conceptual framework of coercive control as a corrective to traditional notions of domestic violence that have centred on physical abuse. Rather than focusing on one-off incidents of physical abuse, coercive control underscores the ongoing and cumulative effects of abusive relationships where abusers assert control over their partner’s life by using threats of violence, dependence, isolation and intimidation. This controlling behaviour includes a broad pat­ tern of verbal, emotional, psychological, financial, sexual and/or physical abuse, which Stark suggests better explains the comprehensive harms that domestic violence causes than single episodes of physical violence, regardless the severity (Stark 2007, 12). We use TECC to signal the way domestic violence abusers use digital technologies to engage in similar patterns of coercive control (Cuomo and Dolci 2019). To date, geographers’ interest in the ‘remotification’ of political violence (Biegon and Watts 2020) is reflected through a body of critical scholarship largely focused on remote weapons technologies (Gregory 2011a; Warf 2015; Warf and Fekete 2016). This includes particular interest in the use of drone technologies in international warfare (Akhter 2019; Gregory 2011b; Shaw 2016a; Shaw and Akhter 2012), and builds on the long GEOPOLITICS 3 tradition among political geographers in analysing the spatiality of war, terrorism and global conflict (Flint 2012; Gregory and Pred 2007). Central to this scholarship is recognition that digital technologies and remote weapons serve as tools to extend both the spatiality and temporality of war, resulting in violence that can occur anywhere and with no foreseeable end. In examining the role of digital technologies in enabling these ‘new geographies of conflict’ (Warf and Fekete 2015), political geographers have also illustrated the ‘boomerang effect’ of remote weapons technologies. This boomerang effect refers to the way remote weapons technologies have ‘trickled down’ from military campaigns into everyday policing practices that surveil and control domestic populations (Shaw 2016b; Wall 2013, 2016). As Wall contends, ‘ . . . battlefronts bleed into home fronts as military technologies charged with the pacification of foreign others “out­ side” national space are tasked with the pacification of others on the “inside”’ (Wall 2013, 33), a position that reinforces the workings of state power across scale and which challenges ‘easy, simplistic binaries’ of poli­ tical violence (Wall 2016, 1123). Although political geographers have high­ lighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, the analysis of how digital technologies enable violence within this scholarship has tended to stop at the scale of the state (for a notable exception, see Jackman and Brickell 2022). We work to further disrupt spatial and scalar hierarchies of political violence by identifying overlapping tactics and modalities between TECC and international remote warfare. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper con­ tributes to interdisciplinary geopolitical literature in two key ways. First, it illustrates the common tools and tactics that intervening agents use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. As agents of political violence have always worked to shape the narrative of what counts as violence, it is necessary to identify the common threads that link political violence to combat those narratives: that the military, police and domestic violence abusers all derive from masculinist and patriarchal power and have turned to digital technolo­ gies as tools of violence is significant for understanding evolving methods of control and domination. Thus, within this paper we do not claim that TECC and international remote warfare are equivalent. Rather, we seek to establish the overlapping logics that undergird both. Second, this paper prioritises the embodied experiences of those who are targets of remote warfare. Literature to date has offered important perspectives for how digital weapons technologies minimise negative repercussions for intervening agents engaging in remote warfare. Here we shift focus to emphasise the way survivors feel and experi­ ence TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies, including the socio-spatial security implications for survivors’ lives across ‘real’ and virtual space. We argue that 4 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales. We turn now to literature within and beyond geography that influences our arguments. Geographic Approaches to Remote Warfare Geographers’ interest in the now common use of digital weapons technologies in political conflict is reflected through a growing body of literature that emphasises the shifting spatiality of political violence beyond the conventional battlefield. Scholars have advanced a variety of terms to capture such dynamics, including, for example, cyberwar (Warf 2015), everywhere war (Gregory 2011a), iWar (Pötsch 2015) and liquid warfare (Demmers and Gould 2018). In this paper, we embrace Biegon and Watts (2020) use of ‘remote warfare’ as their conceptualisation of the term synthesises existing literature that underscores the interrelated tools (e.g.: digital weapons technol­ ogies) and tactics (e.g.: the distancing of violence) that constitute contempor­ ary political violence. As a strategy of security management that relies on the distancing effect of digital weapons technologies, Biegon and Watts explain that a key feature of remote warfare is that it minimises the negative implica­ tions of continued interventionism (ibid 11). Scholars have illustrated numerous ways in which remote warfare mini­ mises the negative implications of political conflict for the intervening agent. Here, we highlight three, all of which hinge on the increased physical distance between the intervening agent and target of violence that digital technologies afford. The first concerns the framing of remote warfare as not ‘real’ violence. While there are calls to view the impacts of digital weapons technologies as forms of war and terrorism (Gregory 2011a; Shaw 2016a; Warf and Fekete 2016), perception remains that such attacks do not reflect ‘real’ violence. Cristiano (2018) explains that this perspective centres on a traditional under­ standing of war defined by ‘the violent kinetic interaction of fighting bodies’, where the absence of these corporeal and embodied elements excludes such attacks from the realm of war (146). While there are exceptions, including drone strikes, which we discuss below, many digital weapons technologies do not result in physical injury, death or damage to property. In other words, because disinformation campaigns facilitated by artificial intelligence, cyber­ attacks that render an electrical grid defective and drones that conduct unre­ mitting surveillance from the skies do not involve direct physical injury, they are largely seen as non-violent. That many of these attacks also take place in ‘virtual’ space or thousands of feet above ground, absent any physicality between agent and target, further renders them not ‘real’ violence. Related, the second way that remote warfare minimises the negative impli­ cations of political conflict for the intervening agent concerns how remote technologies serve to sanitise war (Demmers and Gould 2018). Biegon and GEOPOLITICS 5 Watts (2020) explain that the targeted nature of attacks and supposed preci­ sion of military interventions enabled by digital weapons technologies results in an acceptance of remote warfare as ‘politically palatable’. With Western military interventions shifting away from ‘boots on the ground’ deployments to a more consistent reliance on digital weapons technologies, such as drones and artificial intelligence, these digital war operations are increasingly por­ trayed as ‘the lesser evil’ (Warf and Fekete 2016). For the intervening agent, digital weapons technologies facilitate ‘out of sight’ military interventions that replace or minimise the likelihood of injury to their soldiers, enabling a state of perpetual war that is actively supported or at least tolerated by its public, and which over time may cease to be seen as war (Shaw 2016a). The ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice furthers the sanitisation of remote warfare, as the public becomes accustomed to such ‘security’ practices in everyday life. Finally, remote warfare minimises the negative implications of political conflict for the intervening agent in that digital technologies enable the eva­ sion of accountability. With drone strikes, cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns largely originating from behind computer screens, the decreased physicality and increased distancing from the target allows the intervening agent plausible deniability. Warf and Fekete (2016) note, ‘Because the nature of cyberactivity is difficult to trace, the connections between attack and attacker are murky and frequently unsubstantiated’ (153). The resulting con­ fusion and uncertainty reduce the risk of being caught or connected to the political conflict (Wall and Monahan 2011). Related, because such digital weapons technologies are increasingly common and affordable, responsibility for attacks can shift from nation-states to individual entities or groups, further enabling a lack of accountability (Gregory 2011a). And, even when an inter­ vening agent acknowledges responsibility for attacks facilitated by digital weapons technologies, they are often not held accountable in any meaningful way for its resulting harm (Wall 2016). Remote Warfare and Intimacy Before discussing feminist geopolitical approaches to intimacy, we acknowledge that the above literature on the ‘remotification’ of political violence in the context of the state and military has engaged ‘the intimate’ and ‘intimacy’, albeit in narrow ways. We turn to drone warfare literature as example, where scholars have theorised how drone technologies result in more ‘intimate’ experiences of war, despite the increased physical and political distance between operator and target that drone technologies afford (Biegon and Watts 2020, Demmers and Gould 2020; Pötzsch 2015; Williams 2015). Within this literature, ‘inti­ macy’ tends to signal a feeling of closeness or immersion as a result of 6 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI the visibility and visual clarity that drone technologies provide, specifi­ cally high-resolution cameras that allow drone operators to identify with both targets and individual soldiers deployed on the ground (Pötzsch 2015). This is what Gregory (2011b) refers to as ‘a techno-cultural apparatus that can secure a militarized regime of hypervisibility’ (193), noting that this view overwhelmingly privileges the experiences of drone operators. As Williams (2015) reinforces, ‘this partial restoration of intimacy is asymmetric: only the drone operator gains insight into the life of his adversary, sees his face, and witnesses his pain and death’ (96). Shaw (2016b) extends discussion of drone technologies and inti­ macy to urban domestic policing through a similar framework, arguing that the use of micro and nano drones by police agencies enable a more intimate and invasive form of state power as their small size allows for the infiltration and ‘swarming’ of urban streets: ‘Crucially, by going smaller, the geographies of state surveillance become more inti­ mate’ (25). Feminist Geopolitics and Intimacy While we find utility in the way political geographers have theorised digital weapons technologies and intimacy to date, we also see opportunity to expand the scale, sites and subjects of this analysis. It is here that we turn to the framework of intimacy-geopolitics to consider the common threads between multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies across scale. Building from the feminist geopolitical interest in ‘imploding’ binary thinking around public/private, war/peace, soldier/civilian and global/intimate (Christian, Dowler, and Cuomo 2016), intimacy-geopolitics rejects spatial and scalar hierarchies to instead understand multi-sited violences as relational (Pain and Staeheli 2014). This relational approach recognises differences between forms of violence, but understands geopolitical violence as already intimate and intimate violence as inherently political, with emotion serving as a connecting thread between both (ibid 344). Pain (2015) offers an embodied accounting of this approach by establishing domestic violence and interna­ tional warfare as a single complex of violence, what she calls ‘intimate war’. With Pain’s ‘intimate war’ framework central to the arguments we make in this paper, we detail its features at length here: As feminists have argued for decades, war is not separate from the private realm. Nor does It simply drip down into domestic space as it impacts on the men, women and children who live there. War is both driven by intimate dynamics and, in turn, exacer­ bates their violence. This is less a two-way flow, and more a single winding complex of violence; when the shared emotional and psychological dynamics of violence are exposed, intimacy turns inside out and is seen to be already a foundational part of the geopolitical. (Pain 2015, 72) GEOPOLITICS 7 Pain then considers common military themes rooted in emotional and psy­ chological control such as ‘shock and awe’ and ‘hearts and minds’ to analyse domestic violence as warfare. By starting from the intimate – both methodo­ logically and conceptually – Pain emphasises how both military tactics and domestic violence rely on emotion as much as direct physical harm to achieve their goals (64). In positioning domestic violence – including non-violent coercive control – as warfare, Pain is not establishing violence within intimate relationships and international warfare as synonymous. Rather, this approach identifies common patterns of masculinist protection, aggression, intimida­ tion, patriarchy and control that weave through embodied experiences of violence across scales (Brickell and Cuomo 2020; Cuomo 2013; Pain 2014; Pain and Smith 2008; Sjoberg 2013; Turner and Espinoza 2021). As Pain (2015) concludes, using intimacy as a starting point has implications for how geographers study connections between seemingly differently scaled and sited violences, including a re-centring of whose experiences are the subject of analysis (Barabantseva, Mhurchú, and Peterson 2021). emphasise the implications of this approach noting how the intimate as a lens ‘helps make visible the emotional attachments, relational sites, governing modes, and the substance and qualities of complex relationships that the “private” and the structural produce through intimacy’ (345). Technology-Enabled Coercive Control We take up the conceptual and methodological approach of centring intimacy to examine TECC through the lens of remote warfare. While attention within geography has been primarily focused on military and police uses of digital technologies to engage in violence, a growing body of literature largely outside of geography is examining how these same technologies enable abuse within the context of domestic violence (Bellini 2023; Boethius, Åkerström, and Hydén 2022; Brown, Reed, and Messing 2018; Chatterjee et al. 2018; Cuomo and Dolci 2021; Freed et al. 2018; Matthews et al. 2017; Roundy et al. 2020; Woodlock 2017). This literature details specific digital technologies that domestic violence abusers (mis)use and how the abuse of technology supports patterns of coercively controlling behaviour. A common form of TECC entails using information communication tech­ nologies – such as mobile phones, smart phones, laptops, and tablets – to monitor and surveil an intimate partner (Woodlock 2017). Scholars have noted that abusers use spyware apps to gather socio-spatial information about their partners, including where they go and who they communicate with (Bellini et al. 2020). Such spyware includes keylogger technologies that continuously capture the digital activity of the survivor, including websites the survivor has visited and their passwords (Tseng et al. 2020). Chatterjee et al. (2018) explains that domestic violence abusers often use benign dual-use apps to engage in this 8 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI kind of surveillance, meaning the app has a legitimate purpose, such as family tracking or ‘Find My Friends’, that abusers repurpose for monitoring an inti­ mate partner. Monitoring technologies also include other creepware, such as physical GPS trackers that abusers attach to a car or hide in a diaper bag (e.g.: Apple AirTag or Google Tile) (Roundy et al. 2020). Abusers also engage in attacks of survivors’ online financial accounts, including locking survivors out of their banking accounts, deleting or cancel­ ling digital subscriptions, making fraudulent purchases, applying for loans in the survivor’s name, and tracking survivors’ financial activity through legit­ imate apps (Bellini 2023). As Bellini (2023) notes, these technology-enabled financial attacks rely on a combination of social engineering techniques, nonfinancial technologies and financial technologies to target survivors’ resources, assets and data, illustrating the way such financial attacks occur in both virtual and ‘real’ space. Another type of digital technology that abusers exploit are Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Tanczer, López-Neira, and Parkin (2021) describe IoT technologies as an interdependent ecosystem of intercon­ nected products and services, which allow previously analogue devices to become linked, Internet-capable and ‘smart’. This includes a range of house­ hold appliances and devices, such as televisions, cameras, doorbells, tempera­ ture control devices, speakers and doorlocks. Examples of abusers misusing IoT technologies include remotely adjusting the heat with a smart home thermostat or using “nanny cams’’ and remotely accessible baby monitors to live stream video surveillance (Cuomo and Dolci 2021; Tanczer, López-Neira, and Parkin 2021). The distribution of intimate images (DII), also referred to by scholars as image-based sexual abuse and ‘revenge pornography’, is another common form of TECC (Henry and Powell 2018; McGlynn and Rackley 2017). As Cuomo and Dolci (2019) note, for survivors who fear the repercussions of DII, the threat alone is often enough to keep a survivor in a relationship or coerce a survivor back to a relationship. Artificial intelligence has added a new dimension to DII in what is colloquially referred to as ‘deepfake pornography’, in which deep learning software is used to create high-quality, realistic porno­ graphic visuals from photos or videos of the survivor’s face that are mapped onto the face of a person in an already existing pornographic image or video (Ajder et al. 2019). While empirical studies have yet to focus specifically on the use of deepfakes in the context of domestic violence, the targeting of celebrity and political figures with sexual deepfakes leads practitioners and legal experts to surmise that its widespread use by domestic violence abusers is imminent (Dodge and Johnstone 2022; Lucas 2022). Similarly, while one-off stories within media reporting have highlighted examples of abusers using drone technologies to stalk and surveil current and former intimate partners (see Branley and Armitage 2018; Dellinger 2019), this form of TECC has yet to feature in empirical research studies on domestic GEOPOLITICS 9 violence. Although notably, Jackman and Brickell’s (2022) ‘everyday droning’ offers an important feminist geopolitical lens for examining how non-state actors use consumer drones to engage in a variety of practices and harms within domestic spaces. Their framework emphasises the need to foreground the gendered, racialised, classed and sexualised experiences of those subject to ‘drone-home militarism’, noting that existing accounts within drone literature have largely overlooked the ‘wider power politics of the uneven distribution and effects of such aerial-techno-possibilities’ (171). Methodology To support our arguments, this paper draws on data from a long-term community-based study located in Seattle, developed in collaboration with the Technology-Enabled Coercive Control (TECC) Initiative, a multi-disciplinary group that aims to build the capacity of providers who respond to survivors of TECC through research, advocacy and training. We worked with the TECC Initiative to develop the research objectives, questions, and project design, before executing the project as the two-member research team. Since 2018, data collection has occurred through multiple phases of fieldwork and includes interviews with six survivors and fifty system professionals who work with survivors, includ­ ing victim advocates, law enforcement, prosecutors, judicial officers and civil attorneys [insert IRB information after blind review]. All interview participants agreed to audio recording. We recruited survivors through victim advocates who shared information about the study with survivors, including our contact information, and survivors who were interested in participating contacted us directly. All of the survivors who participated in interviews identified as heterosexual women and nearly all of the examples, stories and anecdotes provided by system professionals con­ cerned men engaging in TECC against women. We transcribed the audio recordings of interviews and developed inductive codes to analyse the thematic content raised in the interviews. Collectively, we have more than twenty years of experience providing advocacy services to over 5000 survivors in and beyond Seattle. As the community member of the research team, Natalie’s position working in the field of victim advocacy helped to facilitate interviews. Notably, Natalie did not recruit her clients for interviews. Before her appointment to an academic position, Dana also worked as a victim advocate in Seattle, positioning her as a community-based researcher with trusted status among research participants. A more detailed accounting of this project’s methodology, including how we navigate our insider status in relation to our field site and research participants, can be found in Cuomo and Dolci (2021). 10 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI The Common Logics of TECC and Remote Warfare A key feature of remote warfare as conceptualised by Biegon and Watts (2020) concerns the distancing effect of remote weapons technologies, the result of which is to minimise the negative implications of the intervening agent’s continued interventionism and coercive violence. As geographers have illu­ strated and which we highlighted in the literature review above, this distancing logic largely rests on three interconnected themes: 1) the framing of remote warfare as not ‘real’ violence, 2) the acceptance of remote warfare as ‘politically palatable’, and 3) the reliance on identity obfuscation to evade accountability. We begin by illustrating how abusers who engage in TECC benefit from a similar three-part distancing logic. TECC as Not “Real” Violence Survivors and practitioners who work in the field of domestic violence have always battled against hierarchies of violence, in which domestic violence has been ranked as less serious than other forms of violence, or simply not considered violence at all. For example, US law historically permitted a husband to subject his wife to corporal punishment, as long as it did not result in permanent injury (Siegel 1995). It was only in the early 1990s that the state began to criminalise – albeit inconsistently – physical assaults in the context of domestic violence (Dobash and Dobash 1992). While perception has shifted over time to now consider domestic abuse that results in bruises and broken bones as violence, a hierarchy persists within domestic violence in which non-physical coercive control continues to be minimised as less serious and not ‘real’ violence. This is reflected through both the law and public perception. Digital technologies have only compounded this perception, for reasons similar to international remote warfare: definitions of violence con­ tinue to centre on physical injury and discount emotional and psychological abuse, especially when such abuse occurs virtually and absent any physicality (Cristiano 2018; Pain 2015). While there are numerous entities that reinforce TECC as not ‘real’ vio­ lence, here we focus on how law enforcement maintains this perception, the effect of which minimises negative implications for abusers, whose abuse is largely dismissed by police. This begins with 911 calls. Survivors who called 911 to report incidents of TECC noted the difficulty in getting a patrol officer to respond, as they appeared busy prioritising imminent physical violence. One survivor explained: ‘King County is swamped. They’re like, are you bleed­ ing? Are you broken? No? Okay bye’. This survivor’s accounting reinforces a narrow understanding of violence centred on physical injury as the standard for what necessitates a police response. Yet even when patrol officers respond to incidents of TECC, research participants indicate that officers often dismiss GEOPOLITICS 11 the incident, fail to take detailed reports or secure evidence. For example, a survivor who had been experiencing TECC over the course of months described her meeting with a patrol officer as disappointing and underwhelm­ ing: “His ‘give a shit factor’ was very low. “ Research participants attribute the deficient police response to not only long-standing hierarchies of violence that position domestic violence as less serious, but also a lack of law enforcement training on TECC. The repercus­ sions of this hierarchy and inadequate training result in patrol officers who fail to identify patterns of coercively controlling behaviour involving digital tech­ nologies as abuse. Thus, even when patrol officers respond to survivors trying to report TECC, they often incorrectly code the incidents as ‘police informa­ tion’ or ‘suspicious circumstance’ rather than ‘domestic violence’, ‘stalking’ or ‘cyberstalking’. Miscoding reports serves as a distancing effect that results in a cascade of subsequent problems for survivors and benefits for abusers. For example, the specialised Domestic Violence Unit only reviews police reports correctly coded with domestic violence-related crimes. When a report is miscategorised, the survivor will not receive a follow up call or be connected to an advocate for support, and multiple reports by the same survivor will not be linked as a pattern of abuse. For abusers, law enforcement’s perception of TECC as not ‘real’ violence – as exemplified through miscoded police reports – means that their behaviour is diminished as inconsequential and they are emboldened by a state agency to continue their coercive violence. TECC as Politically Palatable Akin to international remote warfare, digital technologies serve to ‘sanitise’ coercive violence within intimate relationships. That is, even when there is acknowledgement of TECC occurring, it is often viewed as ‘the lesser evil’ (to physical violence) and treated with a lack of urgency, all of which minimises the negative implications for abusers. Contributing to the toleration of TECC is the way remote surveillance has become a normalised and accepted practice in everyday life as digital technologies have ‘trickled down’ from the military to police practice to the home: the ubiquity of parents tracking their children through mobile phones, ‘Facebook stalking’ and ‘nanny cams’ to monitor babysitters often renders its misuse by abusers as banal and inconsequential. To illustrate the sanitising effects of TECC, we focus on how actors within the legal system and technology companies minimise incidents of TECC. There are numerous examples within the legal system to highlight the sanitising effect of TECC, including the role of prosecutors. Prosecutors serve a crucial function within the legal system, determining which cases move forward with charges. Research participants indicated that within the context of domestic violence, prosecutors regularly prioritise cases involving physical assaults over TECC-based crimes, even when the survivor of the 12 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI physical assault is not interested in pursuing criminal charges. We discuss below some of the investigative challenges unique to TECC cases that make prosecution difficult, however research participants spoke to a general sense that prosecutors minimised TECC as cases not worth pursuing. Yet, another contradiction emerged as research participants noted that non-violent drug crime and property crime were also prioritised over TECC. A survivor explained: It’s so frustrating. They’ll give out tickets for excessive marijuana use while there’s this guy who is terrorizing another human being. Emotional terror. And they just don’t care. While prosecutors serve an important role as gatekeepers to the legal system, judicial officers represent the court’s authority to the public. Research parti­ cipants emphasised that judicial officers reinforce TECC as politically palata­ ble by regularly dismissing and minimising cases involving TECC in open court. For example, a civil attorney representing a survivor seeking a protection order after receiving hundreds of harassing social media messages explained that the judicial officer denied the protection order, characterising the digital abuse as a ‘school yard scuffle blown way out of proportion by the use of social media’. In another case, a research participant described a judicial officer who permitted intimate images of a survivor into the court record: in this case, the abuser had filed the intimate images as ‘proof that they had a good relationship’ and when the survivor requested that the public record be sealed during the hearing, the judicial officer denied her request, effectively enabling the distribution of intimate images. When judicial officers make rulings from the bench, their decisions carry weight, signalling to the public (including abusers) what kinds of harm they deem tolerable. Technology companies also play a role in reinforcing TECC as politically palatable by failing to situate the misuse of their technologies as urgent. This lack of urgency is reflected in numerous ways, including the absence of a consultation structure and extraordinarily long wait times to process search warrants. Research participants explained that technology companies typically do not make direct contact information available to system professionals, leaving detectives and attorneys with no clear means to ask questions specific to the platform, understand a company’s standard for taking action in response to abuse, or request the take down of material on behalf of a survivor. Research participants described an inefficient trial and error process to determine who to ask for information within a technology company and that they often file numerous warrants with minor changes until landing on the specific language to access evidence-related data that a technology company requires. Research participants also identified inexcusably long wait times upwards of six to nine months to receive data requested through warrants. One prosecutor reported resorting to using LinkedIn to identify the CEO of a technology company, and then guessed an email address formula for GEOPOLITICS 13 the company combined with the executive’s name (e.g.: John. Doe@techcompany.com) in order to get a response to an outstanding warrant inquiry. The disparity in different platform responses is a natural byproduct of the regulatory paralysis regarding technology companies and consumer data in the United States, where the mere presence of a company’s privacy policy serves as consent. This as opposed to more explicit affirmative consumer consent policies, such as the European Union and United Kingdom’s General Data Protection Regulation laws. While technology companies can unaccountably mine personal data with ease, survivors and investigators face sometimes insurmountable obstacles obtaining the same data to demonstrate that TECC is occurring (Citron 2022). The lack of urgency that technology companies devote to incidents of TECC – facilitated by lax state regulation – directly influences its sanitisation within the legal system. As noted above, prosecutors rarely file charges in TECC cases, deeming the time and resources necessary to investigate TECC and hold abusers accountable not worth the effort. TECC and the Evasion of Accountability While the framing of remote warfare as not ‘real’ violence and its acceptance as ‘politically palatable’ contributes to a lack of accountability for abusers who engage in TECC, abusers also evade accountability more directly by using digital technologies to hide their identity. Similar to the challenges of accu­ rately attributing the identity of actors and/or nation-states to cyberattacks at the global scale, abusers rely on the veil of plausible deniability afforded by technology to avoid culpability. Research participants explained the many ways that abusers disguise their identity, such as blocking numbers, creating dummy accounts and using spoofing apps. The obfuscation of identity directly benefits abusers as it distances the abuser from the harm, making the success­ ful investigation and prosecution of TECC cases challenging while also insu­ lating the abuser from any reputational damage. These challenges centre on a multi-tier problem: TECC cases often require significant investigative resources, yet most TECC cases begin at the misdemeanour level, which rarely receive advanced investigative support. For example, if someone abusing technology takes even basic steps to disguise their identity, the officer assigned to the case must obtain warrants to different platforms in order to establish and authenticate identity. The lack of investigative support is of particular consequence regarding the distribution of intimate images, a misdemeanour for the first offence in Washington state. If the abuser disguised their identity, it can be almost impossible to unmask the abuser without a warrant. While survivors explained that the criminal legal system lacked capacity to respond to TECC, law enforcement agencies across the country are being supplied with 14 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI new digital technologies to support their investigative work, yielding worrying outcomes. For example, recent studies show that facial recognition technolo­ gies increase racial disparity in arrests (Johnson et al. 2022). Meanwhile, the skills, training and resources to investigate TECC, a harm which is dispropor­ tionately (hetero)sexist, transphobic and racist (Jankowicz et al. 2021), have not kept pace with investigative technologies that reinforce inequities. Obfuscating identity also enables abusers to evade accountability because of the overwhelming confusion among detectives and prosecutors about the level of evidence necessary to file charges in TECC cases. This confusion creates a chasm between easy and low-threshold ways for abusers to engage in TECC and what has become an impossibly high-threshold for legal accountability. Research participants raised concern that the perceived challenges to authen­ ticating identity and locating the source of abuse overshadowed other creative ways to build a case. For example, an advocate cited a case that involved an abuser sending unwanted messages to the survivor from his Facebook account. Rather than building a case around the broader pattern of stalking and common verbiage that the abuser used in all of his harassing communication with the survivor, the case became about proving that it was the abuser sitting at a particular device, sending a particular message, from a particular account, in a particular moment. Further, research participants indicated that the primacy placed on authentication meant that prosecutors rarely moved for­ ward in cases when the abuser used a spoofing application. Research participants explain that a resulting consequence of identity obfuscation is that prosecutors move forward with the ‘easier’ physical ele­ ments of domestic violence cases and the TECC-related behaviours go unad­ dressed. A prosecutor explained: If we’re looking at a case and we can get a guy on assault, that’s great. The technology abuse is going to be hard to prove and time consuming and maybe we’ll get to that, but we’ll take the obvious charge. Because we don’t have all the hours of everyday to work on one case. When abusers who engage in both physical abuse and TECC are only held accountable for the physical abuse, they learn that the legal system excuses TECC and that such behaviour is defensible. A common pattern emerges in which abusers use digital technologies to evade accountability, while survivors experience negative consequences for months and even years. Survivors Intimate Experiences of TECC As the above sections highlight common tools and tactics used in both TECC and international remote warfare, we now apply an intimacy-geopolitical analytic that centres the experiences of survivors to underscore the emotional and psychological effects of TECC. GEOPOLITICS 15 We begin by drawing on survivors’ perspectives regarding distinctions between physical abuse and TECC. While TECC continues to be situated as not ‘real’ violence, centring survivors’ perspectives directly challenges this framing. Survivors who experienced both physical abuse and TECC regularly describe TECC as resulting in more damaging harm than physical abuse: People think it’s not a big deal because he didn’t hit you. I think it’s worse. I think what I experienced is worse and I’ve been in an abusive relationship before. I would take the hit over what I experienced with [abuser] any day of the week because that goes away. That hit goes away. You may flinch around someone, but you’re not constantly Googling your name saying, ‘Dear god, please don’t let anything be out there about me’. I’d been in abusive relationships prior, but just nothing this mentally intense where it was continuous all the time. While we do not intend to further entrench hierarchies of violence, survivors regularly underscore the emotional and psychological injuries that result from experiencing TECC as equal to or more damaging than the physical injuries that may result from an assault. Where the incident of physical abuse is generally bounded within a specific time and place, survivors describe TECC as constant, unremitting and inescapable, resulting in what survivors describe as psychological torture. An advocate who works with survivors of TECC explained: Their level of paranoia is way higher. It’s more of a psychological torture, a mental torture, where their fear is constantly in the backdrop. This psychological torture is in part due to digital technologies enabling abusers to create and capitalise on the perception that they are omnipresent. This omnipresence extends to the way abusers use digital technologies to suggest that they are always watching the survivor and know the survivor’s whereabouts, regardless of the abuser’s locational proximity to the survivor or whether the abuser in fact knows the survivor’s location. Abusers also use digital technologies to obscure their own location, especially post separation, suggesting that they are physically close to the survivor and that a physical threat is imminent. Research participants explained: It’s extremely unnerving because survivors are constantly kept on their toes questioning whether he’s in town or not, or whether she needs to be petrified all the time or can she go about her day thinking that he’s 2000 miles away. It’s paranoia all the time, because you don’t know when or where or through whom this person is going to reach out and touch you, physically or through cyberspace. These perspectives underscore the socio-spatial security implications of TECC for survivors’ lives across ‘real’ and virtual space. Digital technologies obscure abusers’ physical locations, allowing them to engage in coercive control from anywhere, the effect of which undermines survivors’ sense of security 16 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI everywhere and all the time. As tools of coercive violence, digital technologies are effective and efficient methods of domination and control because they facilitate the abuser invading the consciousness of the survivor, resulting in survivors living in a constant state of fear: When it feels like your world is unsafe and someone could do you harm, then it doesn’t matter if you’re seeing them or not, you still have that fear. It’s like when you can tell someone is looking at you when your back is turned. It’s like that, but amped up 100% because the technology makes it so the person is everywhere. This enduring omnipresence illustrates the way abusers benefit from the distancing effect of digital technologies that allow the abuser to exert control and domination regardless of physical proximity to the survivor. Notably, the emotional and psychological impacts of TECC are long-lasting. When reflecting on the impacts of TECC, research participants explained that survivors experienced fear over time, including long after the relationship ended. Research participants explain that this enduring fear influences survi­ vors’ daily decision-making and contributes to social isolation, learned help­ lessness and a sense of paralysis. For example, research participants described the specific impact of receiving unrelenting blocked and spoofed phone calls: some survivors became so frightened and fatigued by these calls that they were afraid to go outside or go to work. Survivors of TECC often limit their use of technology as part of their safety plan, including discontinuing use of Wi-Fi, repeatedly changing their phone number, and even changing the name of their business. While these technology safety planning strategies might result in some (temporary) relief, they often served to further isolate survivors from family, friends and community. In some cases, survivors could not bring themselves to answer the phone when it was an advocacy agency calling because they were concerned it was the abuser. In this example, the survivor’s strategy for avoiding her abuser (by not answering her phone) isolated her from those attempting to contact her to provide support and assistance, including advocates, detectives and attorneys. Additionally, research participants explained that survivors’ technology safety plans were often futile because of the way social networks are digitally connected allowing abusers to not only monitor and surveil the survivor, but also those close to her. For example, even when survivors implement robust personal privacy settings, abusers thwart those efforts by connecting online with survivors’ friends and family: an individual abusing technology can glean a lot from the web presence of the survivor’s social circle. Thus, feelings of the abuser’s omnipresence and uncertainty for survivors persists over time, as survivors wonder whether the abuser continues to monitor them without their knowledge through their social networks. Survivors describe feeling chronic stress long after the last contact from the abuser. An advocate explained: GEOPOLITICS 17 They feel like they have no agency and the abuser is always aware of what is happening. It seems like there’s no safe place where they can go. In addition to the way TECC impacts survivors’ daily decision-making and contributes to social isolation, survivors also experience economic repercus­ sions as a result of TECC. It is increasingly impossible to fulfil job duties without being online as communications, documents and calendaring are cloud-based. For survivors experiencing TECC, the abuse often spills into the workplace. For example, when an abuser targets a survivor’s work email, ignoring or closing that account is often not an option, thus exposing the survivor to harassing and abusive messages at work. The impact of experien­ cing TECC at work can also create negative employment consequences, including feeling distracted and having difficulty concentrating on profes­ sional tasks. The workplace is often a source of positive reinforcement, social support and economic independence for survivors. When their job environ­ ment becomes compromised, survivors lose another site of safety, illustrating another way in which the abuse of digital technologies spills into ‘real’ life. Research participants described a variety of additional deleterious profes­ sional and economic impacts as a result of TECC. Survivors expressed anxiety at the enhanced levels of web searching that employers engage in when hiring a new employee, worrying that facial recognition technologies might enable a prospective employer to find intimate images that the abuser had posted or left online without the survivor’s consent. Abusers have also sent real and fabricated intimate images directly to the workplace. Survivors reported other forms of direct interference with their work, such the abuser leaving false and defamatory reviews about the survivor’s professional performance online, and posing as potential clients and scheduling dummy appointments with the survivor’s business to clog up her calendar and prevent income generation. Research participants reported that survivors deleted public profiles needed to advertise their businesses out of fear of additional reputational harm. When survivors effectively go into professional hiding and are unable to advertise their work, it diminishes income and reputation. A survivor explained: He tried to sabotage me from every angle. Personal life. Professional Life. Work life. I had to shut down my professional Facebook page which was 20% of my business. I feel like I was cut off at the knees. As the consequences of TECC extend into all facets of survivors’ ‘real’ and virtual lives with lasting financial, economic, social and psychological con­ sequences, research participants explained that survivors are often desperate to hold the abuser accountable and stop the abuse. As discussed above, abusers benefit from using digital technologies that allow them to hide their identity and evade accountability. Survivors who participated in this project reported a sense of hopelessness and despair with the lack of accountability following reports of TECC, exasperating the emotional and psychological effects of 18 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI TECC. Because the legal system does not allocate appropriate resources to investigate TECC cases, survivors regularly become responsible for collecting their own evidence. Notably, TECC cases generate a volume of digital evidence and its documentation is labour intensive. The burden to self-collect evidence often leads to feelings of exhaustion and disillusionment, and can be retraumatising, as survivors spend significant amounts of time screen capturing harassing messages, organising the evidence into logs, searching for their intimate images on ‘revenge porn’ websites, and researching different phone anonymising apps to try to ascertain which one the abuser is using. Survivors who diligently document evidence to build their own case are often met by indifferent and ineffectual state actors, who – as noted above – minimise the abuse, fail to take a report or decline to file charges. Even in cases that escalate to an investigation by a detective or where there is a protection order in place, there is rarely accountability and the abuse often continues. An advocate explained: For victims, they feel like there’s a script of things that they are supposed to do in response to the technology abuse, but the script never really works out in their favor the way that they’re promised it will. For many of them, it’s exhausting. I’ve had more than a handful of victims who have just moved. They’ll change their number. They’ll leave the city, some of them have left the state, just because it’s easier to start over than it is to rely on a system to correct this behavior. As the advocate notes, survivor attrition with reporting mechanisms is high: survivors often give up rather than endure ongoing disappointment when formal systems fail to hold the abuser accountable. This frustration is further aggravated by prosecutors who frame decisions to decline filing in TECC cases because of ‘resources’ as opposed to victim impact. Research participants indicated that it is a dangerous precedent to establish TECC cases as too time intensive and not worth the drain on resources when the damage and impact of TECC has been so clearly established. Survivors are also keenly aware that without accountability, abusers feel entitled and emboldened to continue engaging in TECC, either against them or a new victim. Two survivors explained: The thing that frustrates me is that I tried to get justice. I tried to make sure he doesn’t do this again. I’m trying. I feel very failed by the system. When is enough enough? When do we say, ‘Alright, you’ve had 20 years to be an asshole. It’s time to stop’. How many more do they get? The emotional and psychological effects of TECC, particularly as they relate to how digital technologies support abusers in evading accountability are also evident in the way experiencing TECC diminishes survivor credibility. When survivors lack digital literacy regarding how to operate compromised technol­ ogies, the survivor may not be able to articulate to providers – such as police GEOPOLITICS 19 and the courts – their rationale for believing a security breach has occurred. Survivors then find themselves describing experiences of TECC that sound outlandish and impossible. For example, research participants cited instances of abusers creating fake ads on Craigslist with the survivor’s contact informa­ tion, making it look like the survivor was advertising for sex work. In other instances, abusers used survivors’ public profile photos to generate fake rape fantasy ads. These tactics facilitated secondary victimisation when the survi­ vors were contacted by prospective buyers. Research participants also described incidents where abusers created spoofed accounts impersonating the survivor, and then sent themselves hundreds of text messages from the spoofed account suggesting the messages were sent from the survivor. In all of these examples, abusers used digital technologies to hide their identity and evade accountability, and the survivor could not explain how the technology was misused. These TECC tactics serve to sow doubt when survi­ vors seek formal assistance from reporting mechanisms. This can be especially problematic if the system professional lacks training in TECC. Research participants repeatedly mentioned instances of providers responding to survi­ vors who described the extent of the abuse as though they were ‘crazy’. A advocate explained: And this is the thing. Survivors, especially of tech abuse, end up looking nuts. When they come to providers and they say things like, ‘I was at the library and got an email and now he knows where I am’. That makes a person look crazy. That’s been something that tech abuse has taught me. I always had empathy for survivors, but now, when someone tells me something that seems ‘out there’, I don’t think they’re crazy because the likelihood is, that’s exactly what’s happening. Digital technologies not only allow abusers to evade accountability, they deepen abusers’ control and domination by reinforcing a gendered trope that survivors are ‘crazy’ ‘hysterical’, ‘liars’. The long tradition of victim blaming and doubting survivors of domestic violence plays into the effective­ ness of this particular tactic: abusers need to do very little to create an environment of suspicion that questions survivors’ credibility and digital technologies serve as their defence. Conclusion This paper brought together the analytical framework of intimacy-geopolitics and the concept of remote warfare to examine technology-enabled coercive control in the context of domestic violence. As Biegon and Watts (2020) explain, remote warfare emphasises how intervening agents use multiple remote modalities, including digital weapons technologies, to distance them­ selves from their coercive violence. As we have sought to show, abusers who use digital technologies to facilitate coercive control benefit from a similar 20 D. CUOMO AND N. DOLCI distancing logic as those who engage in remote warfare at international and state scales. Akin to the way feminist geographers have approached under­ standing multi-sited violence as relational, we do not claim that TECC and international remote warfare are equivalent. Rather, we have worked to iden­ tify the common logics that weave through TECC and international remote warfare, illustrating how the military, police and domestic violence abusers use similar digital weapons technologies and distancing tactics to control, moni­ tor, surveil and terrorise their targets. By focusing on the emotional and psychological dynamics of violence enabled by digital technologies, this paper illustrates the specific terrorising effects of digital technologies, including the lasting impacts on all aspects of survivors ‘real’ and virtual lives. Building on Pain and Staeheli (2014) and a recognition that all forms of violent oppression utilise emotion to exert control, it is the centring of intimacy that we suggest helps us better under­ stand why remote warfare is so effective and efficient at controlling and dominating its intended targets. The power of remote warfare and its ability for control and domination have much to do with ongoing hierarchies of violence. As feminist geographers have shown, violence that is deemed global/ public/physical is given primacy over violence deemed intimate/private/vir­ tual. Violence that results in physical injury is constructed as more significant than that which results in psychological injury. The role of patriarchy in propping up the former and the feminisation of emotions in minimising the latter cannot be disentangled from this hierarchy of violence. As this paper alludes, identifying the common logics and threads that link political violence across scale also raises new tensions. It is not only that digital technologies are increasingly normalised within everyday life in a way that results in their minimisation as tools of violence, but also that such technol­ ogies are now foundational to the work of the state institutions that survivors of TECC turn to for formal accountability and justice. Digital technologies, such as facial recognition software, body worn cameras, drones and other surveillance tactics are now ordinary tools for policing. Survivors have longstruggled to attain accountability and justice from state institutions that were not originally designed to respond to domestic violence. Now, with the normalisation of digital weapons technologies, survivors must also convince law enforcement that the very tools and tactics defensibly used by police in their everyday work are violence when used by abusers. That law enforcement officers are disproportionately domestic violence abusers adds to this tension (Roslin 2016). Importantly, perceptions of violence are not static. Domestic violence is but one example. How physical abuse is perceived within the context of an intimate relationship has shifted across time and place, even as coercive control continues to be minimised. Of course, that change in perception was not passive or happenstance, but rather the long-time GEOPOLITICS 21 work of feminists, advocates and survivors who disrupted the public/ private binary, asserted that the ‘personal is political’ and positioned the home and body as sites of political violence. Contesting what counts as violence is an ongoing and necessary project, which reflects a strategic move of visibility as it challenges binary epistemologies that underpin such hierarchies (Christina and Dowler 2019). We join this project by working to further disrupt hierarchies of political violence by identifying not only the overlapping tactics and modalities between TECC and international remote warfare, but also the underlying motivations between actors who use digital technologies to engage in coercive violence. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). References Ajder, H., G. Patrini, F. Cavalli, and L. Cullen. 2019. The state of deepfakes: Landscape, threats and impact. Accessed July 22, 2023. https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/10/08/deepfake_report.pdf. Akhter, M. 2019. The proliferation of peripheries: Militarized drones and the reconfiguration of global space. Progress in Human Geography 43 (1):64–80. doi:10.1177/0309132517735697. 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