Singapore stands out as a "model" of governmentality that travels across Asia, with a seductive appeal that is built on the mechanisms of authoritarian control that it consistently deploys to silence dissent.
Many of these techniques of authoritarian control, deployed in Singapore, are not the grotesque authoritarian excesses one witnessed in China three decades ago at Tiananmen Square, or ones that one witnesses now.
The authoritarian control exercised in Singapore is sophisticated, dressed up in the language of democracy. Meant to produce processes of internalization such that disciplined subjects self-censor, knowing from model performances of control the price to be paid for not towing the line.
Seemingly democratic forms of management, directed at producing supposed clean governance, are often the tools deployed to control dissent and silence alternative voices.
One such tool, dressed up as an instrument of clean governance, is the audit.
The audit is deployed in specific settings to mark and target critical voices that document the excesses of the state, its limits and failures, and the large gaps in its model of governance. In these scenarios, as a disciplinary tool, the audit is designed to invoke fear in the person targeted.
It is meant to destroy the very courage or conviction that threatens the structure.
In the very act of targeting, the audit sends out its chilling message, toe the line or else.
Irrespective then of the outcome of the audit or the veracity/ridiculousness of the allegations made, the audit is used as a tool to plant and spread disinformation, planting the seed of doubt about the person alleged to have participated in irregular behavior.
It also works to send out a message to all those around, you follow similar pathways of critiquing, you will be targeted, bullied, and maligned. Authoritarian control works perfectly in alignment with neoliberal governmentality, enabling the profit-extracting role of the state through techniques of disciplining in everyday organizational life.