Sociologist Andrés Guerrero famously examined how nineteenth-century liberal legislation in Ecuador created a “ventriloquist’s voice” that mediated Indigenous expressions of resistance to exclusionary governing structures. The assumption is that intermediaries purportedly spoke out in defense of subaltern rights but in reality only desired to advance their own interests. Intermediaries allegedly added another layer of exploitation to an already marginalized and silenced population. Careful studies, however, reveal that Indigenous activists did advance their own agendas, both alone and in collaboration with sympathetic urban allies. Recovering subaltern voices, nevertheless, is complicated by a lack of the written archival documentation that typically forms the basis for scholarly examinations. This lack of sources is not the fault of local organic intellectuals, but rather a result of the racist attitudes of a dominant class who did not find the thoughts and actions of Indigenous people worthy of preservation. This essay examines the gap between the perception of both domestic and international surveillance operations and the realities of rural mobilizations.

This chapter analyses the development of transnational policing as a crucial element of the federal–transnational security regime of the German Confederation, which the Congress of Vienna had established in 1815 to maintain external and internal security. Narratives of cross-border political subversion and crime triggered new modes of political and transnational policing in nineteenth-century Europe, resulting in both formal police cooperation as well as in various actors and techniques of transnational policing and securitisation. Through the ‘commission-mode’ and the ‘conference-mode’, policing agencies aimed at intelligence, surveillance and suppression, and contributed to the production and dissemination of a systematic knowledge base on political subversion and international crime. In the process, they influenced the development of security narratives and logics and practices of securitisation, and constituted important elements of the emerging European security culture.

In recent historiography, the fear of a coordinated international conspiracy threatening the regimes established in the Vienna Settlement is depicted as a form of political paranoia, evoked to create an all-powerful police state. Instead, it is argued here that these fears were a rational response to an actual wave of revolutionary activity across Europe, but that there was widespread disagreement about the extent of international concertation of these various movements. In the attempts to corroborate suspicions of an international revolutionary conspiracy against the Restoration order, a variety of epistemic operations, practical routines and institutional forms of police cooperation were developed, which all contributed to the emergence of a European security culture. However, this culture was riddled with political tensions as a result of competing political interests in the fight against threats to the Restoration order.