Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, and encompassing anthropology, sociology and political science, Private Security in Africa offers unique insight into the lives and experiences of security providers and those affected by them, as well as into the fragile state context which has allowed them to thrive. Featuring original empirical research and case studies ranging from private policing in South Africa to the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans for private security work in Iraq, the book considers the full implications of PSPs for security and the state, not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.
Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, and encompassing anthropology, sociology and political science, Private Security in Africa offers unique insight into the lives and experiences of security providers and those affected by them, as well as into the fragile state context which has allowed them to thrive. Featuring original empirical research and case studies ranging from private policing in South Africa to the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans for private security work in Iraq, the book considers the full implications of PSPs for security and the state, not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.
Private Security in Africa: From the Global Assemblage to the Everyday
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Overview
Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, and encompassing anthropology, sociology and political science, Private Security in Africa offers unique insight into the lives and experiences of security providers and those affected by them, as well as into the fragile state context which has allowed them to thrive. Featuring original empirical research and case studies ranging from private policing in South Africa to the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans for private security work in Iraq, the book considers the full implications of PSPs for security and the state, not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786990273 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2017 |
| Series: | Africa Now |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mats Utas is a senior lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University. He is the editor of African Conflicts and Informal Power (Zed 2012).
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Private Security in Africa
From the Global Assemblage to the Everyday
By Paul Higate, Mats Utas
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Paul Higate and Mats UtasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78699-027-3
CHAPTER 1
Golden assemblages: security and development in Tanzania's gold mines
Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams
In May 2011, five young men were killed by police at African Barrick Gold's North Mara mine in Tanzania, following an intrusion by artisanal miners and local people onto the company site. The incident generated significant national and international attention and concern, placing the security practices of one of the world's major gold-mining corporations under intense scrutiny. In response to the incident, ABG increased both hard and soft security measures at all of its Tanzanian operations. A three-metre-high security wall, complete with razor wire, now surrounds many of the company's concessions, and a raft of enhanced security measures seeks to exclude the neighbouring communities as well as potential 'intruders' from the mines. Yet at the same time, ABG expanded its community development programmes, and international NGOs, community leaders and non-state policing actors are now part of a strategy that seeks to achieve security through development and community engagement.
This chapter treats ABG's evolving security strategies as a paradigmatic example of novel global security assemblages that are emerging across Africa and the developing world. The concept of the global security assemblage has emerged as a powerful image and a productive methodology for analysing contemporary security landscapes (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2009, 2011; Berndtsson and Stern 2011). In contrast to more conventional approaches, an assemblage perspective does not frame private, non-state security actors in opposition to state authority and the public provision of security. Instead it focuses on the multiplicity of actors, the different forms of power and resources available to them, and the manner in which they come together in a contingent whole to exercise powerful effects in specific sites. This makes global security assemblages a particularly useful lens for exploring security provision and governance in complex fragile environments where the centrality of the state cannot not be taken for granted, and where plurality of security actors is nothing new but where the context and conditions of their existence are changing and interacting with novel, global dynamics.
Few places evince this plurality and globality more strikingly than resource extraction sites in Africa. While frequently remote from capital cities and major urban centres, in these zones the local and the everyday are nevertheless always already global by virtue of resource extraction's relationship with assemblages that inhabit local settings but are stretched across national boundaries in terms of actors, knowledges, technologies, norms and values. Because extraction frequently takes place in conflictual and highly unequal environments, security is at a premium and a plethora of security actors come to coexist, cooperate and compete in the delivery and governance of security. Resource extraction sites are also places where multiple norms and values come to clash; profit motives exist side by side with demands for local development, security logics rub shoulders with community relations discourses. As we argue in this chapter, it is the dynamic interactions of these multiple and varied actors, norms and transformations that explain the novel global security assemblages that are emerging in contemporary resource extraction sites. As exemplified by ABG's gold mines in Tanzania, these assemblages not only incorporate the traditional security providers such as the public police, private security companies and in-house security specialists, but also a range of development specialists, human rights educators and local community leaders. They represent the coming together of a plethora of different actors, norms, agendas and interests – some local, some global, some public and some private – in close but often tension-filled relationships. They give rise to new security institutions, practices and forms of cooperation and conflict, while simultaneously serving to ensure and facilitate the continuation of resource extraction in complex fragile environments.
Theorizing global security assemblages
To set the scene for the ensuing analysis of ABG and the other chapters in this volume, we begin with a brief exploration of the concept of global security assemblages and of assemblage thinking more generally. This is no simple task, as there is no unified or single assemblage theory or methodology. Instead assemblage thinking is diverse and dispersed, having emerged from a range of different disciplines and scholarly traditions (see Acuto and Curtis 2014). This said, its various forms can all be said to proceed from a similar starting point, namely a dissatisfaction with the dominant ontologies that have informed social theory, including anthropology, political science, sociology and International Relations. Over time these disciplines have come to operate with more or less well-established theories that see the world as consisting of a range of discrete units or objects: the state, the nation, the city; or capitalism, religion, science, etc. When studying the global, the nationstate is generally approached as a unit that contains society, which in turn is separate from the unit of the international or the global. Assemblage thinking rejects such fixed and stable ontologies, and replaces essentialism and reification with a flat ontology. It does not, in other words, predetermine the units or categories that make up the world, but instead treats every social formation or 'unit' as consisting of complex assemblages of different elements and seeks to discover how elements of many different kinds come together to function as systems or contingent wholes.
Assemblage approaches are thus relational; the focus is on provisional and historically contingent relations between elements, both human and nonhuman, rather than totalities and reified units of analysis (Latour 2007; Bueger 2014). This entails a recognition of change and difference, as relations are not fixed and stable, nor are they always and everywhere the same. Categories like the state or society cannot therefore be defined by their substance or essential properties, but are constituted by the multiple and diverse relations that make them function together as a system or an assemblage. In this way, substantivist modes of thought give way to a relational approach, where it is the specific relations within each particular configuration that give access to and insights into the object of analysis, not any predetermined or inherent properties.
The relations and elements that make up the assemblage are not only human, but also non-human or material. In contrast to most conventional social science methods where the material world provides a passive context within which individuals and people act, here the material is seen to interact with people in producing the social world. Physical objects, cultural artifacts, technologies, ideas and so on are thus considered as active, formative parts of the assemblage. An assemblage discussion of security must therefore pay attention not only to the agency of human actors like the police, the army and the private security guards, but also the various technologies – barbed wire, fences, surveillance devices, site designs, etc. – as well as the ideas, norms and values that inform and stimulate actors and actions. The assemblage consists of the interactions and co-functioning of all these various elements.
Importantly, these interactions can be simultaneously local, national and global, and in this sense assemblage thinking is multi-scalar. Breaking with the conventional social science terminology of 'levels of analysis', the local, the national and the international are not stacked one on top of the other as discrete spheres or separate spaces, nor is the 'macro' any more important or real than the 'micro', or vice versa (see DeLanda 2006). Instead, different elements within the same assemblage can inhabit either the local or the global, or both simultaneously. The local, in other words, is multi-scalar and need not necessarily run through the national to function at the global level. By the same token, the global is not simply imposed in a top-down manner on the local, but is partly produced in articulation with local dynamics. As Sassen (2006) has observed, the global is in important ways constituted inside the national, and globalization erodes traditional spatial divisions and gives rise to new assemblages that both territorialize and deterritorialize. Thus, a resource extraction site in Tanzania, Ghana or South Africa is a local setting or entity, infused with local traditions, norms and relationships, but it is simultaneously part of global markets and global discourses and normativities. In this way, assemblages can at one and the same time mark new territories, spaces and boundaries (of, for example, security governance) and deterritorialize or rescale by eroding or destabilizing existing spaces or spheres of authority (of, for example, the nation-state or national justice). An assemblage is accordingly not wholly determined by its location within national settings but is instead indicative of the formation of new geographies of power that can only be grasped by approaching the social world as one analytical field rather than a series of neatly divided levels of analysis marked by international boundaries.
Taken together these key features have made assemblage thinking a productive technique for challenging accepted theories, categories and understandings and for capturing change, fluidity and the emergence of new institutions, practices and forms of authority. In discussions of security and security privatization, the concept of the global security assemblage has proved particularly instructive in drawing attention to the deficiencies of accounts that proceed from a strict Weberian definition of the state and highlighting instead transformations, differences and contestations in how security is delivered and governed. Two shortcomings of such accounts are worth highlighting in this context. First, most conventional analyses of contemporary security privatization depart from a conception of the state as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. While there is much to commend this starting point, it simultaneously risks blinding us to deeper structural transformations of the state and the relationship between the public and the private, the global and the local. Approached from a statist perspective, the growth of private and non-state security actors must necessarily come at the expense of the power and authority of national public actors, giving rise to two possible sets of interpretations. In the most pessimistic scenario, the state is losing its sovereignty and authority, heralding the end to any notion of public safety and the public good. This has been a particularly influential narrative in discussions of security privatization in Africa, where non-state security provision is often seen as both cause and effect of state weakness and state failure. In a more optimistic scenario, the state is not necessarily losing power, but outsourcing and sharing it with the private, be it through networked governance, multilevel governance, rule at a distance or partnerships with non-state actors. In both interpretations, however, the basic nature of the state remains unaltered – it might be weaker or stronger, it might share power and authority, but as a basic unit, category or assumption it remains unchanged or ontologically intact, as do the distinctions between the public and the private, the global and the local.
A focus on how security provision and governance are assembled in particular locations, however, reveals much more profound and diverse transformations that cannot be adequately captured in a vocabulary that speaks only in terms of a weaker or stronger state. Instead the multiple processes of security privatization give rise to new security relationships, institutions, practices and authority, and the construction of the state proceeds apace with – and in relationships with – a multitude of other actors within global security assemblages. These assemblages inhabit specific local and national settings but they are simultaneously stretched globally across territorial divides, and the state is being assembled, or reassembled, not from scratch, but in ways that alter and challenge many preconceived notions of the public/private and the global/local divides (see Abrahamsen and Williams 2011). In this way, the notion of the global security assemblage allows us to make visible the complexity and specificity of contemporary security provision and governance, and this in turn can allow us to theorize the state, state formation and security anew.
Second, unlike analyses that proceed from a strict Weberian conception of the state, a focus on the assembly of security acknowledges that assemblages are almost infinitely diverse. Rather that starting from the assumption that the state is always and everywhere the same, the approach opens up the possibility that the state and the security field might be differently assembled in different places, and as such it is not only more sensitive to place and specificity, but also allows for a deeper understanding of the politics of security and the forces and histories that produce different global security assemblages. In this sense assemblage thinking is associated with a critical stance regarding the social world. It embodies an ethos that is sensitive to difference and heterogeneity, and this places it in opposition to the more familiar social science methodology of comparison. Whereas comparative methodology proceeds from established categories and units of analysis, an assemblage methodology entails a more open-ended exploration or an 'experimental realism oriented towards process of composition' (Anderson et al. 2012: 171). Unlike the variables of comparative social sciences, in assemblage thinking there are no a priori claims about the order of social formations. Instead, these are to be discovered through careful tracing of the processes by which specific orders emerge and endure (ibid.). Methodologically and politically, this makes it possible to account for difference and multiplicity, while avoiding the often implicit universalism and Eurocentrism of most comparative approaches, where difference often becomes a code word for some kind of deviance from a norm (see Hagmann and Hoehne 2009).
This attention to difference and change makes global security assemblages particularly useful for examining security in so-called 'failed' or 'fragile' states and environments. While there is no denying that some states are more capable of protecting their citizens than others, approaching the issue from the prior claim of what the state is or should be may blind us to the different processes through which social and political (dis)orders are actually assembled. Such an approach is likely to find institutions and practices that fail to fit the Weberian model wanting, pathologizing them as deviant forms of an ideal, instead of focusing on the possibility that states can be differently assembled in different places and emerge from different processes at different times. An assemblage approach can also help make visible the global processes that shape seemingly discrete national and local institutions, capturing the specificity of states by 'de-abstracting' them and theorizing from the ground up, without a prior, implied standard or norm. In this sense, assemblage thinking allows us to escape the comparative trap and sustain a more open, experimental and yet concrete and detailed orientation towards the social world.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Introduction - Paul Higate1. Golden Assemblages: Security and Development in Tanzania's Gold Mines - Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams
2. Failed, Fake or Weak State: The Role of Private Security in Somalia - William Reno
3. Private Security Beyond the Private Sector: Community Policing and Secret Societies in Sierra Leone - Peter Albrecht
4. The Underbelly of Global Security: Sierra Leoneans in Iraq - Maya Mynster Christensen
5. Who do you Call? Private Security Policing in Durban, South Africa - Tessa Diphoorn
6. Security Sector Reform as Trojan Horse? New Security Assemblages of Privatised Military Training in Liberia - Marcus Mohlin
7. Political Becoming and Non-State Emergence in Kenya's Security Sector: Mungiki as Security Operator - Jacob Rasmussen
8. Parapluies Politiques: The Everyday Politics of Private Security in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - Peer Schouten
Epilogue: African Assemblages of private security - Mats Utas